Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(24)

“Suppose we have somebody in the department who’s a little crazy who has some kind of hidden emotional situation.”

“Like what?” Green demanded.

“Okay. This is hypothetical. Say they have an emotional attachment to you. They see you attacked, they see you called names that carry an emotional load—”

“Like ‘twat’?”

“Exactly. They decide to attack your attacker.”

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “There’s nobody that attached to me, I promise you. Not enough to kill. I would feel it.”

“We have at least two Ph.D. candidates who are close to getting their degrees. If something happened—”

“Oh, c’mon,” she said. “It could be a setback. But a reason for murder? No.”

“I’d disagree with you,” the man said, “except that I know the two people and they didn’t kill anybody.”

“Have you talked to them?”

“Chatting. You know, bull sessions.” He smiled. “As soon as I told them my alibi, they told me theirs. Theirs were better.”

“Alibis . . . If you were planning to kill Quill, you’d figure out an alibi. A good one, unless you were an idiot. If you weren’t planning to kill him and it was a random act, and the police didn’t catch you in the first few hours, and you didn’t leave behind specific kinds of incriminating evidence, then you won’t need an alibi because they’ll never identify you and won’t be asking for one. In fact, you could probably tell the police that you didn’t know where you were that night. Who remembers where they were on a Friday night two weeks ago? You could say you were at home, in bed, reading a book. How do they break that?”

“You don’t think they’ll get the guy?”

“I have my doubts. I even have my doubts about it being a guy.” She looked at him for a moment, then lowered her voice. “I don’t want you talking to anyone about this conversation.”

“I won’t. Scout’s Honor.” He held up the three fingers in the Boy Scout salute.

She smiled at that, then said, “You know what I think? I think he was in the library with a woman. Maybe a paid woman, for sex. And she killed him. Maybe not even on purpose. He did something she didn’t like and she struck out at him.”

“A prostitute?” His eyebrows went up. “That would explain a few things. Like why he snuck into the library after hours.”

“A man like that wouldn’t want a prostitute in his house,” Green said. “He probably wouldn’t want her to know where he lives . . . or even his real name.”

“I don’t think . . .”

“Where else could he go where he could be sure he wouldn’t be seen?” Green asked. “Not a hotel, not around here. His face was too well known. He was hidden there in the library—they didn’t even find him after he was murdered, not for days.”

“A prostitute. An interesting idea,” the man said. “I wonder if the police are looking into it? Maybe you should be a cop.”

She pointed a finger at him. “It occurred to me once that Cultural Science would be an excellent background for a police officer. The life experience, the research we do . . . You begin to understand the fabric of a culture.”



* * *



—

Clete May was sitting barefoot on his couch watching a snooker tournament from England, swilling Dr Pepper and eating Fritos, when the doorbell rang. “Ah, shit,” he muttered, and got to his feet and opened the door.

The guy there said, “Hey, man. You busy?”

“Watching a snooker tournament. If I only understood it, it’d probably be entertaining. What’s up?”

“I was walking by and wondered if you’d heard anything new about the Quill thing?”

“Come on in.” The guy stepped inside, and May led him to the couch facing the TV. They sat down, and May said, “Everybody’s still talking. That detective chick—uh, Trane—is flying around like a rabid bat. I don’t think she’s getting anywhere . . . Want some Fritos?”

“Yeah, thanks.” The guy took a half handful, crunched them. “Anybody got any new ideas?”

“Not that I’ve heard. I did hear that Trane told somebody that Quill hadn’t been in a fight, looked like he was jumped by surprise.”

“Huh.”

May turned toward him, hands cupped, intent. “Listen. I’m thinking Quill had that computer up there. The big one. I’m wondering if it was hooked into his lab? Maybe somebody was going up there, in the middle of the night, and using it to get into the lab’s files and download his research. That medical research can be worth a bundle. Or it could be the Russians or Chinese. Quill figures it out, see, and maybe, just maybe, there are logs, and he sees that library computer coming online and knows it’s his, but he wasn’t doing it. He sneaks into the library to see who’s doing it, but the guy gets the jump on him somehow and kills him and then has to take the computer to hide what was going on.”

“International spies. Russian or Chinese.”

“I know it sounds wild,” May said. “We know the Russians and Chinese do that stuff, though, steal tech, and they sure as shit wouldn’t want to be caught at it again.”