Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(87)

“I’ll call my legal guys tonight, we’ll all be there tomorrow,” Booker said. “Anytime you say. I’ll lock this place down before you leave. I’ll call the security company and have them send some guys over here to patrol the parking lot.”

As they were leaving, Virgil asked Booker, “How’d he get into your computers? Don’t you have them protected?”

“That’s one thing we need to find out right away,” Booker said. “They all have passwords, of course, that are supposed to be restricted to the engineers. The one he was on wasn’t assigned to one guy; it’s used by people like me who come through here but don’t actually work in this office. While we change the passwords every month, several people have the password for that particular computer.”

“Then you might have another leak. Besides the guard.”

Booker thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “Probably not. If it was an engineer, he could have worked a little late—which is common enough—loaded all the information onto one flash drive, and carried it out. Since Nash had to be here, I suspect somebody like Allen was standing in the corner with his cell phone in his hand, set to video, recording keystrokes when somebody signed on to the computer.”

“I will check with Allen,” Virgil said. “About that thumb drive thing: that sounds a lot easier than taking pictures of a video screen with a camera. Why didn’t Nash do that?”

“Because when you plug a thumb drive in, there’s an on-screen prompt that asks for some ID information, which is different for each engineer. Couldn’t make movies of that unless you were standing right behind the guy who was inputting.”



* * *



—

Virgil and Jenkins drove back to Nash’s, parked in the driveway, leaned on the doorbell. No answer.

Virgil called the Edina police, asked for help. The duty officer said they could cruise the house every half hour or so, but they were working a bad pedestrian accident and didn’t have a lot of flexibility. Virgil told them there’d be two cars in the driveway and maybe somebody asleep on the front porch.

“Who’s going to sleep on the front porch?” Jenkins asked when Virgil was off the phone.

“One of us,” Virgil said. “We can’t let this get away. I’m going to slap crime scene tape on all the doors, then you can have a sleeping bag and air mattress and sleep on the porch or a yoga mat and Army blanket and sleep in the back of my truck. Your choice.”



* * *



—

Jenkins took the sleeping bag and air mattress and porch. Virgil slapped crime scene tape on the doors and crawled into the back of the truck, got a solid four hours, before his phone/alarm rang at seven-thirty. He called Trane.

“Gimme a break, I don’t wake up for a half hour,” Trane said. Then: “Something happen?”

He told her about the arrest from the night before and that he’d been sleeping in the driveway at Nash’s house. “We need a search warrant quick as we can get it, I mean, like, right now. You’d know better how to get one fast outta Hennepin County. I’ll give you the details.”

As he was doing that, Jenkins walked up, yawning, said, “I’m going to a Starbucks. Coffee?”

“Hot chocolate and a couple of bagels.”

“My breath could slay a dragon,” Jenkins said, as he wandered away to his car.



* * *



—

Virgil called the Dakota County Attorney’s Office at eight o’clock, talked to the chief assistant county attorney, whose name was Don Wright, and explained the situation. “This sounds heavy,” Wright said when Virgil had finished. “I’ll call Mr. Booker now. Let’s tentatively plan to meet at ten o’clock. This is the Stuart Booker from Sunfish Lake, right? Stuart and Andi?”

“Yes. You know them?”

“I know of them,” Wright said. “The Bookers are well known in, uh, what you might call political donation circles.”

“Sounds like Boyd Nash might have stepped in it,” Virgil said.

“If he goes to trial anywhere in Minnesota, he has. In it up to his chin.”



* * *



—

Jenkins came back with hot chocolate, bagels and cream cheese; he’d stopped at a drugstore, where he got two toothbrush-and-paste travel sets for three dollars each. They got water from an exterior faucet and brushed their teeth, and Jenkins said, “Now, if the cheeks of my ass weren’t stuck together, I’d feel almost human.”



* * *



—

They had the search warrant by a few minutes after eight-thirty, Trane and a computer tech from the Minneapolis crime lab turning up in separate cars, along with two cops who specialized in searches. Jenkins forced the front door, and, inside, they found three computers: a desktop and two laptops. Both the laptops were ThinkPads, nothing like the one stolen from Quill’s carrel. All were password-protected. The technician took all three computers out to his car for transport back to Minneapolis.

“This is your first priority,” Trane told the technician. “Don’t let anyone bother you about other jobs. If they do, call me. Be best if you could crack these by, say, noon.”