Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(67)

Virgil stared for a minute. “He committed suicide? And Quill’s team is being sued for malpractice?”

“Yes. McDonald’s wife claims the operation was a failure and even created new pain—that’s the malpractice part—and that Quill and his team should have known that McDonald would require extensive psychological counseling in the wake of the failure. She claims that Quill told them that McDonald would make a substantial recovery. When I asked him, Quill denied saying that, and his team backs him up: they say he never said such a thing.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, we have a bereaved wife suing a big, rich university and a big, rich doctor, and the decision will be made by a jury that—”

“Isn’t big and rich. Got it,” Virgil said. “You haven’t said so, but the wife, and Hardy’s firm, may stand to benefit from Quill’s murder.”

“I probably wouldn’t actually say that out loud myself,” Brennan said with a grin. “But if somebody else suggested that, I wouldn’t object.”

“I gotta talk to Margaret,” Virgil said, looking at his watch, “right now. We don’t want to make any deals with Hardy’s client. Not yet.”

“Feel free,” Brennan said. He pointed to a door in the side wall. “If you would like some privacy, that goes into my personal bathroom.”



* * *



—

Virgil stepped into the bathroom—a wood-lined cubicle that included a steam shower—wondered, in a brief fit of paranoia, if the room was bugged, and called Trane. She was in an interview room with Cohen and Hardy and stepped out to take his call. Virgil told her about his conversation with Brennan, that Hardy might benefit, possibly in a significant way, from Quill’s murder.

“What are you telling me? You think Cohen might have done it?”

“I doubt that, but she could have told somebody about hooking up with Quill at midnight in the library,” Virgil said. “I was told Nancy Quill could get fifteen million from the estate. Even if they peeled off only two or three, it’d certainly be worth doing.”

“No kidding . . . Oh, God, I got no time. I gotta be in court. I gotta call off this negotiation and send Cohen back to jail. I gotta make sure we hold her for the full forty-eight before the bond hearing. I gotta lot of shit to do.”

“You do that. And I’ll go talk to McDonald’s wife about the lawsuit.”

“Stay in touch, Virgil. We’re moving.”



* * *



—

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office was located in another fundamentally unimaginative, dirt-colored, ugly building in downtown Minneapolis, which didn’t bother Virgil because he didn’t have to look at it very often. He’d spoken to an assistant medical examiner on the ten-mile trip to Minneapolis from St. Paul, and the AME had promised to have the residue of the suicide ready to view.

The AME’s name was Julia Parker, and she met him in her modest cubicle, dumped an evidence box on the desk. The evidence included an amber pill bottle that had once contained thirty oxycodones; the bottle’s white plastic cap, which was well chewed; photos of the deathbed and the deceased in it; and autopsy photos. Parker hadn’t done the autopsy itself, which had been done by another AME who was now on a fishing trip in the Boundary Waters. “He told us if we had to reach him, we couldn’t.”

“How dead was he?” Virgil asked. “McDonald.”

“Completely,” Parker said with a hint of a smile. “The prescription had just been refilled, and they still had a few pills from the previous one. Mrs. McDonald said she’d consolidated them in the single bottle. As a matter of neatness, I guess.”

“And he was full of this stuff?”

“Yup. At least twenty-eight or twenty-nine, maybe as many as thirty to thirty-two. That’ll do it. Eighty milligrams can kill you, and he probably swallowed more than three hundred.”

“Fingerprints on the pill bottle?”

“Only Mr. McDonald’s. Frankly, if I was facing what he was facing, the inability to move anything but his head and with partial use of one arm, I’d do the same thing,” Parker said. “I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the poor man.”

Virgil picked up the autopsy photos. One of them showed McDonald’s mouth stretched open, with a couple of tiny flecks of white plastic between his teeth.

“So he chewed through the bottle.”

“Right. Mrs. McDonald had left it on a tray attached to the bed. She had no idea he could move his arm enough to reach the pills. But he did. We think he managed to bump the tray with his shoulder hard enough that the bottle fell over. Then he bumped the tray until the bottle fell off the tray and onto his arm. He grabbed it with the fingers of the other hand and pinned it to his chest, where he could reach it with his mouth. He still had good motion in his upper neck and head—he could turn it—and we think he managed to get the bottle in his mouth. He then chewed the cap until it came off, and, holding the bottle in his teeth, tipped his head back far enough to get the pills to fall into his mouth. Then he swallowed them. We also found fragments of the plastic cap in his gut.”

Virgil had a lot of sympathy for McDonald, too, but the police world didn’t run on sympathy, it ran on checks. He left the Medical Examiner’s Office and drove to a Walgreens drugstore, where he showed his ID to a pharmacist and was given four empty amber pill bottles with white plastic caps identical to the ones in the evidence box.