Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(75)

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Outside in the Tahoe, Virgil checked his watch: he still had almost two hours before the meeting at Trane’s office and he was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the university. He could make a quick stop at Quill’s lab to ask a couple of questions.

He left the Tahoe in a university parking structure and walked over to the lab; there were only three people inside: two women researchers and the lab director, Carl Anderson. He got them together, and said to Anderson, “The last time I talked to you, you convinced me that Quill couldn’t be doing something on the sly because there are too many people involved.”

“That’s correct,” Anderson said, and the two women nodded in agreement.

“But that’s with the surgical procedures. Here’s the thing: he was over at the library in a secret space that even the authorities—university authorities, cops, whoever—would have a hard time spotting. The library knew he was there, and some of you folks knew, but it was not obvious. If the FBI had raided him, they could miss it. Or if they found it, it might take a while. Everybody agree?”

They all agreed, and one of the women, whose name was Ann-something, said, “I work here, and I didn’t know about it.”

“Okay. What I’m asking is, what could he do with an extraordinarily fast laptop that he would want to keep in a secret place and that would have something on it that would be worth killing for? That has to do with his research?”

The three looked at one another and simultaneously shrugged.

Virgil: “Goddamnit, people, I’m asking for speculation here, not evidence, not proof.”

The second woman, who was named Rosalind-something, said, “Okay. Suppose he detected something in our lab results that the rest of us haven’t seen. We’ve been working on microinsertion of adipose-tissue-derived stem cells into traumatically damaged spinal cords. Now, if he spotted something significant, that could be valuable to a biology-based medical company.”

Anderson said, “But then you have to ask, what would Barth have gotten out of it? A, money. But he already had more money than he needed and gave a lot of it away. B, anonymity for an important scientific discovery. But one thing Barth was known for, that pissed off a lot of people, was that he always wanted credit. He wanted the full credit for what came out of the lab. His name always came first on the papers.”

Rosalind leaned back into the conversation. “How about this? What if he was using the machine to review the work of other teams and he didn’t want anyone to know about it? He’s always said there was a lot of bad science going on. What if he found a whopper in our area? A paper that got something wrong, maybe committed outright fraud, and he was using his machine to work through the numbers and demonstrate that? That might be worth killing for.”

Ann nodded. “Never thought of that. You know, with these new online papers, the open publication business, there’s a lot of bad science. If he found something and was going back and forth with that person, you might have somebody who needed to both get rid of Dr. Quill and get ahold of the laptop.”

“How would they even know about the laptop?” Virgil asked. “Or where it was?”

“We’re not computer people, but I think a real hacker could do that,” Ann said.

Rosalind said, “How about this? He found something bad and got some hacker at the university to access that lab’s computer system. Once he knew how to get in, he could get in anytime. That’s just typing. So he’s sneaking around in there, pulling out stuff, and the other lab spots him and calls in some security service to find out who’s hacking them. They find out where the computer is and go after it.”

They all looked at one another, and then Ann said, “I see one big problem with that, from your perspective.”

“Tell me,” Virgil said.

“If the computer’s in the river, and Dr. Quill is dead, and you don’t have any other evidence, DNA, fingerprints—any of that—how would you ever find out what was going on and who was involved? I think you’d be, you know, screwed.”

“Wish you hadn’t said that,” Virgil said. Then, “A woman who works in the library told me she’d seen a man hanging around Dr. Quill’s carrel last winter. Had kind of brownish red hair, a little porky, a ponytail . . .”

Rosalind put her fingers to her lips, turned to Anderson, and said, “Boyd Nash.”

Anderson leaned back in his chair as if slapped. “Oh . . . Let’s . . . Ah, Jesus . . .”

Virgil registered the name but couldn’t remember exactly where he’d seen it. “Who’s Boyd Nash?”

“He’s this guy. You know, those guys who drive around the country looking for antiques they can buy cheap? They’re called pickers?”

“Antiques?” Virgil said. “I don’t—”

“Nash is like a picker, but he doesn’t pick antiques, he picks scientific ideas. He’s a giant asshole.”

“And a creep,” Rosalind said. “He dyes his hair so it’s auburn, but he’s got all this furry white hair coming out of his ears.”

Virgil: “Wait a minute. He does something with patents? Did you guys tell Sergeant Trane about him?”

“I might have mentioned him in passing,” Anderson said. “I don’t have any good reason to think he’d hurt Barth, but he’s such a greedy, criminal pissant.”