Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(38)

They spent a couple of minutes speculating, came up with nothing solid. Virgil thanked him, gave him a card, walked back to his car, and then called Trane to tell her about May’s thought—not about the Russians and Chinese, or Quill yanking his crank, but the question of why he’d even have an office at the Wilson Library.

“A good question,” she conceded. “I wondered about that, too, but he was such a hotshot that I figured he could get an office anywhere he wanted one. So he got one there, maybe on a whim. Maybe his work took him across the river sometimes and he wanted a private place to rest his feet. I dunno.”



* * *



—

Virgil rang off and went to find Terry Foster, the military veteran. Foster lived across the city line in St. Paul.

As he drove, he thought about what both May and Trane had said and decided that Trane’s assumption was weak. If it was simply the casual exercise of academic power by Quill to get an extra office, what about the fact he probably had a library key? That would have taken more than clout: he’d have to have an illegal source for it. He’d probably have to evade janitors and other night workers if he didn’t want to be seen. There was more to the carrel than met the eye . . .

But Russians and Chinese? Unlikely.



* * *



—

Terry Foster lived in a tiny, stuccoed rental house in the area of St. Paul called Frogtown. A couple of aging birch trees shaded the neatly kept front yard, where a sidewalk of cracked concrete blocks led to an enclosed front porch. Virgil parked, knocked on the front door. There was no reaction from inside, but, as he was standing there, a man came out on the porch of the house next door, and said, “There’s nobody home.”

“Do you know when Mr. Foster will be back?”

The man said, “No. He’s in the hospital.”

Virgil walked over—a matter of twenty feet—identified himself, and asked, “He’s sick?”

“He got mugged, right in our own alley,” the man said. “Somebody beat the sweet livin’ bejesus out of him the night before last.”

According to the neighbor, Foster’s house had a single-car garage in the back, which wasn’t part of his rental deal. He had, instead, a parking space in the yard next to the garage. “When he got out of his car, some guy was waiting for him. Jumped out from behind the garage and beat him up. Terry was yelling for help, and the neighbor in back, Joe Lee, heard him and ran out and started yelling at the guy, who run off. Joe run out there and found Terry and called the cops. I didn’t hear him yelling, but I heard the ambulance, and I run out there and saw them put him in the ambulance. And he was a mess. He looked like he’d been blown up.”

“How do you know that part about the guy jumping out from behind the garage?”

“It was in the Pioneer Press. I guess they got it from the cops,” the man said.

Foster had been taken to Regions Hospital, the neighbor said. When Virgil asked, he said that Foster lived alone, as far as he knew. “He did drink a little. There’s a street guy who goes around and takes aluminum cans out of the garbage and he told me once that Terry’s was good for thirty or forty cans. I guess he was drinking a six-pack a day.”

When the neighbor ran out of information, Virgil walked around behind the house to look at the garage. The thing had probably been designed and built before World War II and would be a tight fit for any modern car. There was an overhead door facing the alley and a door on the end closest to the house for access, with a graveled parking spot to one side. Two tall, aging arborvitae stood on either side of the access door, a good spot to hide if you were planning to ambush whoever parked on the graveled spot.

But no self-respecting mugger would have done that. If you got behind or between the arborvitae, you wouldn’t be seen from anywhere but the back window of the house. But if anyone saw you sneak in there, there’d be no excuse, either. And if they called the cops, you’d never see them coming.

As Virgil was walking around the garage, a man came out on the back porch of the house across the alley, and called, “Who are you?”

Virgil called back, “State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Are you Joe Lee?”

“That’s me.” Lee came down from his porch and across the alley. “Have you found out anything?”

Virgil shook his head. “I haven’t started looking yet. It’s a St. Paul case, I’m looking to see if it ties into something else I’m investigating.”

“Really.” Lee was a brawny, sunburned man who might have been a heavy-equipment operator, probably in his late fifties or early sixties. “I figured there had to be something else going on. The guy had him on the ground, never did try for his billfold. He just kept pounding him—Terry.”

“You ever see anyone who looked like they were scouting the alley? Somebody who shouldn’t have been here?”

“No . . . nobody but Terry’s girlfriend. I saw her a couple times, in the mornings—I guess she stayed over.”

Virgil thought: Katherine Green? He asked, “What’d the girlfriend look like?”

“Like, I don’t know, a woodpecker.”

“A woodpecker?”

“Tall, thin, red hair—she wore it up in a thing, a peak, on top of her head. Like a pileated woodpecker.”