Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(53)

O’Hara came back, and Virgil reached to the highest shelf and took down a thick, battered copy of The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and handed it to her. “Lift this over your head and swing it at my face.”

She tried and failed. She got the book up above her hair, but that was it, and then fumbled it. Virgil grabbed the dictionary, said, “Thanks,” and put it back on the shelf.

“That was a test,” she said. “Of what?”

“We think Professor Quill was killed when somebody lifted his laptop overhead and hit the back of his skull, then his neck, and hard. Anyway, the laptop was high-tech, expensive, and heavy—more than twelve pounds. That dictionary probably didn’t weight more than seven or eight.”

“Then you know—”

“Yes. You didn’t kill Quill.”

“Of course I didn’t,” she said. “The very thought is absurd.”

Virgil smiled. “How about the maps?”

She looked at him, her face grave, and said, “I had nothing to do with the maps. I work and I take care of mother, and that’s all I do. If I stole those maps, they’d fire me and I’d lose my pension. Thirty-five years and I’d lose my pension. The medical care in this country . . . Mother couldn’t afford extended care, she just couldn’t . . .”

Tears poked out at the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with the backs of her hands. Virgil said, “I believe you. I’d bet those maps are lost somewhere in the library.”

“Exactly,” she said with a hint of defiance.



* * *



—

Virgil gave her his card, said good-bye, and left. As he was walking away, he knew for certain that O’Hara, by her telltale eyes and body language giveaways, had stolen the maps and that she’d done it to finance her mother’s health care.

Basically, he thought, fuck a bunch of maps.



* * *



—

He called Trane. After the phone rang five times, she finally answered, and said, “You got me out of a conference. Thank you.”

“O’Hara didn’t kill Quill. She couldn’t lift a seven-pound dictionary more than a couple inches over her head, and then it almost pulled her over backwards. She’s about five-two.”

“Okay. I didn’t think there was anything there. Did you ask her about the maps?”

“Yeah. She says she didn’t do it. I’m willing to let it go. I’m not interested in the maps.”

“I’m with you. What’s next?”

“Where’s the CD with the cowboy songs?”

“In the evidence locker. You need it?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“I made a recording of it. If you tell me where you’re at, we’ve got a gofer, I can send him there with the recorder and some headphones,” Trane said.

“I’m going over to Quill’s lab. I’ll meet him on the front steps in half an hour.”

Virgil stopped at a Holiday store for gas and a Diet Coke, made it to Moos Tower a few minutes later. A cop car was sitting out front, its blinkers flashing out into the afternoon. Virgil knocked on the passenger-side window, and when the window dropped, the cop asked, “You Flowers?”

“Yes.”

He handed over a compact recorder with two microphones shaped like extra-large thimbles—or extra-short condoms—and a pair of microphones. He said, “To play it, just push the green button. To rewind, push the rewind button. If you push the red button for any reason, you’ll record over it. That’s what Trane said.”

“How come you didn’t ask for ID?” Virgil said, as he took the recorder.

“Trane told me about the shirt. And the boots. I figured there couldn’t be two of you.”

“Well, you’re right. But pop the door, I need to sit down for a minute.”

In the cop car, Virgil played the recording once to get a feel for the machine, then rewound the tape, recorded its message to his iPhone, and gave the recorder back to the cop.



* * *



—

At Quill’s lab, the same woman who’d directed him back to the lab manager’s office on his first visit was sitting at her countertop inside the door, poking at a laptop. She looked up when Virgil walked in, and said, “You’re back.”

“Yes. I want you to listen—”

She interrupted. “You know they call you ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’? It’s on the internet.”

“What? The internet?”

“Yes. After you were here, we looked you up. There was a story in a Rochester newspaper that said you were widely known as ‘that fuckin’ Flowers,’ but they put in asterisks in the ‘fuckin’.”

“I get tired of it,” Virgil said. “It started in St. Paul, when I was a cop over there, followed me over to the BCA, and it got out of hand.”

“Actually, the story was complimentary. You recovered some precious artifact from Israel.”

“A complete nightmare, believe me,” Virgil said. “My garage almost got burned down with my boat inside of it.”

“Your boat? The horror!”