Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(73)

“It never occurred to you last night?”

“Of course it did, but not before then,” Hardy said. “Abby never told me that she’d been with Quill. I had no idea. Now things are fucked up. I dunno. I’d already decided I’d have to sign off as counsel to Abby. I was planning to talk to another guy this morning about taking over the case—not somebody at my firm—and I’m probably going to wind up paying him out of my own pocket.”



* * *



—

When they finished working through it all, Virgil said to McDonald, “We’re not going to take you in to question you. Somebody from the BCA or the St. Louis Park Police Department will want to have further conversations with you. Please don’t leave town, go on vacation, without telling Agent Shrake. He will give you a business card—”

“I’m not going anyplace anytime soon,” she said.

“Good. But should your plans change, notify Agent Shrake,” Virgil said. “We’ll leave it to you to further notify Mr. Hardy or Mr. Jones should we need to continue our interviews.”

“I don’t see,” Jones began, “what you could possibly hope to achieve—”

“Shut up, Robin,” Hardy said. And to Virgil: “We’re good with that. Frank McDonald committed suicide. Remember this: there is a huge coincidence here and it’s meaningless. If you want to find out who killed Quill, you’d do well to keep that in mind.”



* * *



—

Virgil followed Shrake out the door but hesitated before closing it, and he heard Jones say to Hardy, “I resent that ‘Shut up, Robin’ shit, by the way.”

Hardy said, “Something for you to think about, Robin. You’re a civil lawyer, you’re not a criminal lawyer. Those guys are cops. They know what they’re doing and you don’t. So please, shut the fuck up . . . Ruth, sorry about the language.”

Virgil went on down the steps behind Shrake.





CHAPTER





EIGHTEEN



Before they went to their separate vehicles, Shrake said, “I dunno, I might have taken her in, to ramp up the stress. To see what would come out of that.”

“I thought about it, but the lawyers are all over us—they won’t let her say a thing. And the chances of a conviction are zilch unless she admits it,” Virgil said. “We’d be wasting our time. I’d like a good close look at Jones, though. I expect your thirty percent guess was close to the mark.”

“Or more. This guy who attacked your Army guy, Foster . . . Would Jones fit?”

“Not real well. Foster’s not tall, and he said the attacker was his height, but stocky,” Virgil said. “Jones might be too tall, and he’s not especially stocky.”

“Okay. You want my opinion, I’ve got a couple,” Shrake said.

“Shoot.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if McDonald killed her husband, or at least helped him kill himself. In fact, I’d say it’s likely. One thing I’ve noticed about nurses is, they see so much death that it no longer affects them much. It’s not that they’re hard. It’s that death comes to seem like a natural, ordinary thing. She could very well have thought that she was doing him a favor. A loving favor. No thought of money, which might have come later. But—and it’s a big ‘but’—I doubt that she would have anything to do with the murder of Quill. If Jones killed Quill, he never would have told McDonald what he was going to do. There wouldn’t be a conspiracy that you could break down.”

“I agree,” Virgil said. “Next opinion.”

“About Quill. If the killer was planning to murder Quill, why didn’t he have a better weapon? You think he might have been hit with his own computer? Why? Why would anyone do that? It couldn’t have been planned that way. So either he wasn’t hit with a computer or the whole encounter was an accident. From what you told me, I think you have more to learn from the hooker. The small details. Like, the exact circumstances of the attack. Was Quill ambushed, was it planned? Or did he and the killer stumble onto each other? The killer couldn’t have known about the hooker because he never looked for her.”

“Anything else?”

“What do you think about Foster? Was it a mugging? Or was the attack involved with the Quill murder?”

“Don’t think it was a mugging.”

“If it wasn’t a mugging, then either it was involved with the Quill murder or he’s involved in something else dangerous that he’s not telling you about. That seems unlikely, a grad student. Maybe you should check his Army record, see what kind of a discharge he got. But probably that attack is somehow related to Quill. In my humble opinion.”

“I’ll buy it all,” Virgil said. “You’re right about all of it. I need to talk to our hooker. I’ll call Trane and see if we can get together.”



* * *



—

Shrake headed back to St. Paul.

Virgil called Trane, filled her in on the McDonald interview, and asked about a new interview with Cohen. The trial that Trane was attending was right across the street from the jail where Cohen was being held.