Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(52)

“You have a minute?”

“Sure. I’m sitting here in the county attorney’s office like a dummy. Want to know something? Alternative newspapers suck. Especially after you’ve read them the third time.”

“Yeah, but they’re free.”

“True . . . What’s up?”

“Did you ever talk to the woman who might be a suspect in those map thefts?”

“I never got to her,” Trane said. “That didn’t seem like a major priority.”

“I agree. But . . .” He told her about the list and his idea of knocking down the items one at a time. “I thought I might be able to take care of her with one stop. Then I got a guy from the BCA I want to bring in on the China White thing.”

They discussed tactics for a few minutes. Trane gave him the suspected thief’s address, and said, “She works from seven to three—she should be headed home.” They ended the call after a few more words. Virgil put on his boots and got back on the phone to a BCA agent named Del Capslock.

“How you doin’, Virgie?” Capslock asked when he picked up. “I heard you’re on the Quill thing.”

“Yeah. Listen, Del, you know a place called the Territorial Lounge? Or where I might find a woman named China White?”

“The Territorial’s over by KSTP,” Capslock said. “Stay away from the Philly cheesesteak unless you want to spend the rest of the week on the can.”

Virgil told him about the China White tip. “If you have any sources in the area . . .”

“Let me call around,” Capslock said. “You know what China White is, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Seems like a strange name for a dealer,” Capslock said. “It’s like having a sign on your chest that says ‘Buy Your Smack Here.’ It sounds made up by somebody who looked up ‘heroin’ in the dictionary.”

“I know, but it is what it is.”

“Long as you know,” Capslock said. “I’ll get back to you.”



* * *



—

The suspected map thief, Genevieve O’Hara, lived in the small town of Lauderdale, not far from the university, in what looked like a postwar GI house, painted a faded yellow with white trim. An aging Nissan was parked in the badly cracked driveway, with cantaloupe-sized dents on both ends of the back bumper.

Virgil walked up to the front door and knocked. A moment later, a woman, perhaps sixty, wearing narrow rectangular glasses, opened the door and peeked out. Virgil identified himself and showed her his ID, and she asked, “Is this about the maps?”

“Not directly,” Virgil said. “I’m investigating the death of Professor Quill.”

“Oh . . .” She had been willing to attack, he thought, in her robin-like way, but now she deflated. “You better come in. The campus police asked me about the maps, and I had nothing to do with all of that. I don’t work at the Andersen anymore, and I didn’t steal a key. I turned them all in when I transferred to the Wilson. Every last one of them. The very idea!”

“Do you know how many maps they’re missing?”

“According to rumors from friends, at this point, sixteen. But they never keep a good inventory over there—it could be sixteen maps over ten years, even twenty. And some might be misfiled. So, who knows?”

Virgil stepped inside the house and was hit by the smell of death. His nose wrinkled involuntarily, and O’Hara spotted it.

“My mother’s dying in the back bedroom,” she said. “Pancreatic cancer finally got her . . . It’s been four years, and she has no more than a few days left, if that. God bless her, I hope she goes sooner. Now she’s still with us, I roll her and wash her, I give her morphine under the tongue once every two hours, she no longer has control of her bowels. I have to buy diapers for her. She hates being alive.”

“Do you have help?”

She snorted. “Barely. You know how much that costs? Mother had no home care insurance. I pay a service when I’m working; a nurse comes every two hours to check on her. Sticks her nose in the door and that’s about it. A neighbor keeps an eye out her window in case the house catches fire while I’m gone. It’s a disaster.”

She pointed Virgil to a chair in the living room, and said, “Now, about Dr. Quill . . .”

She had seen Quill in the library from time to time, she said, usually working on his laptop in the carrel or reading. “He brought in his own chair, an expensive one, leather and all that.”

He was not there often. “A lot of people want those carrels, and I don’t think he was using his even once a week. It was a shame. But I never said anything to him about it.”

She’d never witnessed any arguments, any conflicts, involving Quill. “He came and he went. By himself. I can’t remember seeing him talk to anybody.”

O’Hara’s living room was tiny, perhaps twelve by twelve, smelled lightly of pasta, and had two walls taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The shelves were packed. When O’Hara’s cell phone chirped, she said, “Time for the morphine, back in a minute,” pushed herself out of her chair, and disappeared into the back of the house. Virgil stood to take a look at the books. Mostly novels, and mostly seventeenth-and eighteenth-century British.