Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(59)

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—

Because it was summer and the new semester was barely underway, two of the five doctors were out of town at their northern Minnesota fishing cabins. The other three, though, were in town, just scattered around. Because he wanted to talk to them face-to-face, it took Virgil the rest of the day to track them down.

Robert Harris, a microsurgeon and the last of the three that Virgil interviewed, said the same things the other two did. “I don’t know those voices, I really don’t. Not except for Barth’s, of course—if that is Barth. Must have been a long time ago or very recent, nothing in the middle. We’ve got a solid team, and have had for five or six years now. Nobody wants to leave. We get our names in the journals, we make the big bucks. Barth could be a prick, but he was our prick. And, frankly, pricks are not unknown among the surgical fraternity. Not only can we handle it, it’s a fact of life.”

“If it’s recent—and I have to think it’s recent—he was listening to the recording shortly before he was killed,” Virgil said.

“How shortly?”

“We don’t know,” Virgil conceded. “Anyway, is it possible that he was putting together another team that might not be so reluctant to go for the Hail Mary operation? The rest of you guys—the current team—could push back, right? What if he had a bunch of, say, younger, more obscure guys?”

“Nope. Agent Flowers, this is not work you’d do with a bunch of residents,” Harris said. “I spent four years in med school and then eight years doing plastic and microsurgery residencies before I felt I could lead a complicated operation. Even then, I had to be careful. I mean, I was thirty-seven or thirty-eight before I felt I was hitting it out of the park. He wouldn’t do something like nerve splicing with a pickup team.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“I am. Listen, Flowers. Barth was a concepts guy, an intellectual. The way the thinking goes in medicine, you’ve got your really, really smart guys like Barth who think up all kinds of things, who know all kinds of stuff, but can’t do anything. They’re lab people. Chin-scratchers. Thumb-suckers. Then you’ve got surgeons, who are looked on as the dumb guys in the profession but dumb guys who’ll try just about anything. ‘We wanna cut. We like it. Get in there and fix it. If the patient dies, we did our best.’ If anything, that recording is backwards: Barth was the conservative guy. The ‘Let’s do it’ guys would be the surgeons. If that’s who he was talking to.”

“Damnit,” Virgil said.





CHAPTER





FIFTEEN



Virgil called Trane and told her what he’d found.

“Virgil, this recording is tied into the murder. I don’t care what these doctors are telling you. It’s tied.”

“Figure it out tomorrow. Where are you on the trial?”

“I’ll be going on the stand tomorrow afternoon. The judge is going to make a bunch of rulings in the morning, but he’s told the jury they have to be back at one o’clock.”

“There won’t be something weird, like a mistrial? And you’ll have to do it all over?”

“No, no. The lead defense attorney is, like, about fourteen. I think he got out of law school on Monday morning, and he’s filed so many motions that they contradict each other. I think it’s possible that he’s looking to wear down the prosecution and get a deal. Because his motherfucker is a guilty motherfucker.”

“All right. I may stop by tomorrow to watch you do your act. Maybe we can have a séance after you’re done.”

“Talk to ya.”



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—

Virgil was headed back to the hotel when Del Capslock, the BCA agent, called. “You free?”

“Yup. As the breeze.”

“Meet me over at the Territorial,” Capslock said. “I’m there now, back by the foosball table.”

“The sun’s not down yet.”

“Fuck the sun. The place opened at six. Don’t see any sun in here.”

Virgil got directions; the bar was ten minutes away. He found a spot on the street, walked a half block to the theater-type marquee that said “Drinks.” And, under that, “Ladies Nite E ery Nite.” Virgil spent the next few seconds of his life wondering if the “v” had fallen off, been stolen for some reason, or was simply a scarce letter that the bar hadn’t happened to have on hand.

Calling the bar shabby was an insult to the word. Some dive bars had peanut shells on the floor; the Territorial made do with ordinary dirt, apparently ground in over several decades of near failure. Virgil made his way past the long, shabby bar, and its equally shabby bartender, to the broken foosball machine, and Capslock, who was sitting in a booth and facing a thin, shabby criminal whose narrow face was framed by brown, greasy hair pulled back in a pigtail.

Virgil flicked his fingers at Capslock, gesturing him to move over—he wasn’t going to sit next to Pigtail—and Capslock slid over, and asked, “You want a beer?”

“No, I’m on duty.”

Capslock laughed, finished his PBR, and waved at the bartender. “Hey, Rick, two more.”

He turned back to Virgil, and said, “This is Long Wayne Gibbs, aka Long Doyle Gill, aka Long Bob Greer. Part of him used to make pornos.”