Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(46)

The woman, turning to Virgil, asked, “Can I help you?”

Virgil identified himself.

“Barth’s death was a complete shock,” she said. “I can’t help you with anything. You probably want to talk to Carl.”

“Carl?”

“Anderson. He’s the lab director, if we still have a lab. His office is back that way.”

She pointed, and Virgil followed the direction of her finger, around a corner and into a second, larger room, where he found his forest of glassware and another woman who was using a multichannel pipette to transfer a liquid that looked like watery blood into multiwell microtiter plates. She looked up, and Virgil said, “Carl Anderson’s office?”

She said, “Keep going. I’m not sure if he’s still here.”

The glassware room was the same size as the computer area, rows of easy-clean gray cabinets topped with a black rubberized work surface with shelves above. The shelves held bottles and hardware and boxes of vinyl gloves. A computer-linked sound system pumped quiet Adult Alternative music into the room, tempting Virgil to pluck out his earballs.

But he kept going and found a chubby, balding man sitting in an office with an identifying plaque beside the door that said “Carl Anderson, Staff Director.” He was working at a computer on a separate table that right-angled his desk.

The door was open, and Virgil stuck his head in. “Mr. Anderson?”

Anderson, startled, jumped, turned, and asked, “Who are you?”

Virgil identified himself and his mission, and Anderson swiveled to his desk and pointed Virgil at a visitor’s chair. “What a fucking mess,” he said, running both hands through his nonexistent hair, leaving behind white lines on his sunburnt scalp. “You have any news?”

“No, not really. A few things have popped up—I can’t talk about them—but there’s nothing solid.”

“How is it possible, in this day and age, that somebody could commit a murder, a beating murder, that didn’t leave behind DNA? I’d think that would be almost impossible.”

“There usually is a little DNA around, when you have a body,” Virgil said. “In this case, there was apparently no physical contact between Dr. Quill and the killer.”

Anderson wiped a hand across his mouth, said, “Unbelievable.”

Virgil asked Anderson a half dozen questions, including about his alibi, which turned out to be the typical mishmash of times, places, and people that made it believable but not perfect.

“If you want my best reason for not killing the man, it’s this: I’m making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and now I might be out of work. I have a master’s degree in organic chemistry, but I’m basically a bureaucrat. I do paperwork, I supervise grant applications, I make sure everybody gets paid, and I decide who gets routine raises and who doesn’t. I tried to keep Barth inside his budget and that wasn’t easy. Every big shot scientist has somebody like me, but there aren’t a hell of a lot of openings. I may be comprehensively fucked.”

He didn’t know Katherine Green, Clete May, or Terry Foster. “I wasn’t involved in that whole pissing match between us and Cultural Science. Seemed a little dumb, though Barth wasn’t dumb. Those people should be ignored. Flame wars encourage them, because that’s about all they got going for themselves.”

“It was only a pissing match?”

“Academic feuds are endemic but don’t usually end in murder. Honestly? I don’t think those people are involved. I mean, they’re crazy but not insane, if you see what I mean,” Anderson said. “I’d be willing to bet that somebody was inside the library when they shouldn’t have been. A street guy, looking for something to steal. He bumps into Barth and panics and grabs the computer and Bang! Barth’s dead.”

“You knew we were looking at the computer as the murder weapon?”

“Yeah. Sergeant Trane asked me about it, why he’d have it, what he was doing with it. I didn’t know, but I asked her what the big deal was, we’re not doing anything secret here. She said it was possible that the laptop was the murder weapon.”

“Can you think of anything somebody could do with that computer, something that he might have on it, that would get him killed?” Virgil asked. “I understand it was a heavy-duty machine.”

“Sergeant Trane asked me the same question. I couldn’t think of anything. But I’m not sure the power of the computer was significant. Barth was a gear freak. If he bought a set of golf clubs, he’d get the best ones anybody ever heard of; if he bought a shotgun, it’d be a great shotgun—y’know, from Italy or something. If he bought a laptop, he’d get the fastest, most powerful he could find. He was rich. When it came to gear, he routinely bought the best. He had a Leica camera and a bunch of lenses he used for snapshots, the same stuff the rest of us use our iPhones for.”

Quill wasn’t sleeping with anybody in the lab, Anderson said, and none of the women there seemed like they’d be much interested in him. He had that three-wife history and was curt, at best, with all the lab people, even those he liked.

“Any possibility that he might get together with women online?” Virgil asked.

Anderson thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know. Frankly, it wouldn’t astonish me. The efficiency of it would appeal to him. Sex on demand, without commitment. I understand that there’s often a money exchange involved in the hookups.”