Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(56)

“When I’m drinking wine, I can do all of ‘Gunga Din,’” Harry said. After a moment, he added, “And that’s about it. ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ and ‘Gunga Din.’”

Virgil took a swallow of beer, leaned back in his chair, burped, and recited,

    “There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee . . .”



Alice crossed herself, and Harry gawked at him. “You know it all?”

“Maybe after four beers. I memorized the whole thing for tenth-grade English,” Virgil said.

Virgil wound up drinking three beers, one over his limit, and was a little tipsy when he decided to head up to his room. As he got off his stool, Harry clapped him on the back, and said, “You’re all right, Virgie. But you gotta remember that one thing.”

“What’s that?” Virgil asked.

“You’ve met the killer. Who’s a kid.”



* * *



—

Virgil took a hot shower, read the James Lee Burke book until one o’clock in the morning, and bagged out.

He slept in the next morning, and when he did get up, he put on a fresh Cage the Elephant T-shirt, got out of the hotel at nine o’clock. He walked across the street for a bagel and a cup of coffee, taking a half hour with it; truth be told, he was loitering, checking out the coeds in their summer dresses—and a fine, sturdy bunch they were, in his opinion.

At nine forty-five, he dumped the truck in a downtown Minneapolis parking structure and walked through the warm morning to the offices of DC&H, Jared Miles’s law firm.

He was five minutes early for the appointment. The receptionist asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee or tea, but he declined, and the receptionist said, “I saw Cage the Elephant last year . . . in London.”

“Must have been great.”

“It was great . . . And we saw a bunch of shows. I’d like to go back, but it’s so expensive. British hotels.”

And so on until her phone beeped and she picked it up, listened for three seconds, put it down, and said, “They’re ready for you.”



* * *



—

She led the way to a conference room. Nancy Quill sat on the far side of a dark wooden table from the door, while Jared Miles sat at the end of the table, looking at a pad of yellow legal paper with a few notes scrawled on it.

He stood when Virgil stepped in; he was on the short side, and slightly balding, his remaining light brown hair showing touches of gray. He was about fifty, Virgil thought, and well dressed in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. He smiled as they shook hands. “I’ve read a couple of your fishing stories in Gray’s. And the funny one about equipment. You should quit being a cop and write full-time.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Virgil said. He liked the guy already. “The gear story . . . I mean, a nine-thousand-dollar fly rod? For what?”

“You don’t want to insult the trout,” Miles said, laughing. He added, “Sit down. I think we can be done with this in five minutes.”

Quill hadn’t said anything. When Virgil said, “Morning, Nancy,” she nodded, then looked at Miles.

Miles huffed once, shuffled the legal pad, and said, “Nancy may have, hmm, been misunderstood when she was interviewed by Officer Trane. She didn’t flatly deny that her late husband was on the recording; she was uncertain about the voices.”

Virgil could feel the story coming, and he said, “Okay.”

Miles continued. “You see, the situation is, she didn’t want to be on the record saying that the voice she heard was her late husband. If she agreed that it was, without the advice of counsel, that could have ramifications further downstream.”

Virgil looked at Quill, and asked, “Like what?”

Quill looked at Miles, then said, “I am not especially affluent. When Barth and I began discussing divorce, he held our prenuptial agreement over my head and essentially told me I would get nothing from him if I insisted on taking it to court. Rather than go through a public divorce, he wanted a private settlement—a small one.”

“A very small one,” Miles said. “One might say miserly. Cheese-paring, even. Tight-assed.”

“I pushed back, but I didn’t have much to push with, given the prenuptial agreement,” Quill said. “Then he was killed and that changed everything. Frankly, I began to think of myself as wealthy.”

“Or at least rich,” Miles chipped in. “The will hasn’t been thoroughly worked through as of yet, but Nancy appears to be in line for something approaching fifteen million dollars, and possibly more, depending on some real estate valuations.”

“I also knew I was a suspect in the murder,” Quill said. “Margaret Trane made that abundantly clear. When she played the recording for me, two things immediately popped into my head. First, that she might think that I was the one who sent the recording to Barth, as leverage in the divorce.”