Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(37)

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May was beginning to seem unlikely as a suspect. Virgil couldn’t even think of a reason why Quill would be in a carrel with him, and, if he was, why Quill would turn his back on him. And May seemed to be considerably less than the Cultural Science warrior Virgil had imagined, more interested in getting into the professor’s shorts than actually becoming a cultural scientist.

Which Virgil could understand.

He asked May about the bow.

“Japanese,” May said. “I like it because it’s hard and weird.”

“I read a Zen archery book when I was going to school . . .”

“Zen in the Art of Archery. Eugen Herrigel. You must have been a hippie—all the hippies read that. It’s mostly bullshit,” May said. “This Japanese guy told me that Herrigel didn’t know enough Japanese to understand what his teacher was talking about, and his teacher wasn’t a Zen guy anyway. In fact, he was sort of a crank. This archery I’m doing isn’t kyūdō—that’s what Herrigel was writing about. Mine is the Japanese combat form, kyūjutsu.”

“You’re teaching yourself to kill people?”

May snorted. “If I was gonna kill somebody, I’d use a fuckin’ gun. If I had a gun.”

“Okay. I’m told you study Zen.”

“I do. That’s another thing women kinda like, you know? Seems all mystical and so on, like you’re spiritual. What I picked up in Japan was, Zen is about as mystical as dirt. But, it’s still cool.”

“‘Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills,’” Virgil said, quoting Napoleon Dynamite.

“That movie was about my life: guys with skills,” May said. “I got skills, but no girls—not right now anyway.”

“How about ever?” Virgil asked.

May scratched his neck. “Oh, yeah. They come, but then they go. Know what I mean? One day they’re sitting on your couch, the next day the couch is empty.”

He made Virgil laugh.



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Virgil asked May if he might have any idea of who had killed Quill. He didn’t, and he didn’t think it would be anyone in Cultural Science. “The people in the department would talk about it for eight years before they could do anything like that. They’re not people who act on impulse. If they saw somebody coming after them with an ax, they’d try to get the guy to discuss it rationally instead of running away.”

He didn’t have a suspect, but he did have a thought.

“It was a big deal when Quill got killed, even around Cultural Science,” May said. “We wondered if the cops would come after us. A couple days later, Sergeant Trane showed up. After she talked to me, I got to thinking. Why did Quill have a carrel at the Wilson Library, on the west bank, and why did he keep a huge, heavy computer there?”

“I’m listening,” Virgil said. “Why did he?”

May said, “I don’t know, but it might help if you figured it out. Listen, he’s a medical guy. We have a medical library here on the east bank. As far as I know, there are no medical books in the Wilson Library. He supposedly did some engineering work, too, in robotics, and the engineering library is over here. The university hospitals are here on the east bank, and he probably had an office there. I’m sure he had a private office at his lab—all those guys do. I understand his house is on the east bank. He has all kinds of private places and study possibilities over here, why did he go over there? You ever walk across the Mississippi footbridge in the winter? You can freeze your nuts off. Why did he have a little tiny carrel?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll think about it.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking. He went there because it was quiet and he was away from everybody else. Like, you know, where you want to think. This little Zen space is not your house. It’s not your lab, you don’t need to talk to anybody, you’ve got no TV to interrupt you. You want a clear, calm mind to digest it all. Then somebody . . . I’m thinking Russians or Chinese . . . Could be a big American corporation . . .”

Virgil: “Russians? Or Chinese?”

“Sure. You must have read about it. They’ve got all these guys out there stealing American technology, and what’s more high-tech than medicine? Especially the kind that Quill was doing? Quill’s over there generating ideas, and tech, and somebody finds out about it, Russians or Chinese, computer experts. They start going over there to monitor that computer—maybe they have the computer secretly spooling up all of Quill’s input. Now he finds out that somebody is messing with his computer and knows they do it late at night because they need to do it when nobody’s there. He thinks it’s somebody from his lab, or a student, and he goes over to surprise the guy. And he gets the surprise instead.”

“That does sort of hold together,” Virgil admitted.

“Yeah, it does,” May said. “It has the massive disadvantage of being too complicated. It fucks over Occam and his razor. It’s possible that Quill was doing something online that he didn’t want to risk any chance of being traced to him. You know, watching porn and yanking the crank. Maybe buying dope on the dark net. Here’s a big question: was the guy who killed him in on whatever he was doing?”