Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(88)

Nash also had three two-drawer file cabinets in his home office, filled with papers, apparently going back several years, in not very neat file folders, and envelopes. Among the files, Virgil found a bound copy of Nash’s most recent income tax returns and, among them, 1099s from five separate companies, none of which Virgil had ever heard of.

He called Booker, who picked up instantly. “Virgil. We’re meeting at ten.”

“You sound a little wired,” Virgil said.

“No, I’m a lot wired. I’m sitting here with my attorneys. We’re going to nail this asshole to the cross.”

Virgil said, “I’m going to read you five names . . .”

He did, and with the fourth Booker shouted, “Wait. Boardman? B-o-a-r-d-m-a-n?”

“Boardman Chemicals.”

“That’s the one, those fuckers,” Booker shouted. “They’re going down! They’re going down!”



* * *



—

At nine o’clock, a young woman in a suit and carrying a briefcase turned up at the door. She represented Nash, she said. Trane gave her a copy of the search warrant, which the young woman said was illegally broad and not soundly based.

Trane smiled at her, and said, “Your client was caught red-handed inside the Surface Research building at two-thirty this morning accessing confidential files and photographing them. He’s toast. If you would like to sit and watch the search, you’re welcome to. But we’re allowed to look anywhere there might be computer files hidden, and, as you know, they can be hidden on a thumb drive. We’re going to take the house down to the studs.”

At nine-thirty, Jenkins went home to sleep. And as the search continued, Trane took Virgil aside and told him that nothing she’d found in her further research into Robin Jones suggested that he might have killed Quill. “That’s not going anywhere. I’d give you an in-depth explanation, if you want it, but it’s not going anywhere. He didn’t do it.”

“Alibi?”

“Yeah, he’s got an alibi, and a witness—a woman he’s seeing. She spent the night. She’s a law clerk, smart enough to know not to lie, at least for Jones’s sake.”

“All right. Let’s keep him in mind, but . . . All right,” Virgil said. “I’m telling you, we haven’t seen one fuckin’ thing here that points at Quill or the university. We know Nash made some moves, and was even in the library, but I can’t find anything to back it up. No references to any medical companies, nothing on the tax returns.”

“If he killed Quill, there’s a good chance that he’d have wiped away any evidence of it. Stopped what he was doing and walked away,” Trane said.

“True. Probably have to take a deeper look at his client list, see who he might have been talking to, who’d be interested in stuff coming out of Quill’s lab.” Virgil looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run down to Dakota County for this meeting. I’ll see if I can get with Nash, see what he has to say for himself.”

“He’s pretty lawyered up . . .”

“He won’t deal anyway,” Virgil said. “Trying to get a break on Surface Research in exchange for taking the bullet for a murder? No way. I’ll talk to him, see if we can eliminate him. Or not. Not would be interesting.”



* * *



—

The meeting with the prosecutors didn’t take long. Stuart Booker was treated with deference, but it stopped well short of actual slobbering. They knew who he was and who his friends were, but it wasn’t that huge a deal, just huge enough to ensure that both Boyd Nash and Allen Young were denied immediate bail on grounds that they might destroy evidence in the computer files.

Virgil asked to interview Nash but Nash refused to budge, instead referring Virgil to his attorney, a man named George Wesley. Wesley, as it happened, had visited Nash in the fortress-like Dakota County Jail. He was on the way back to his office in the Twin Cities when Virgil called him with the interview request.

“I won’t let him do it today, not until he’s out on bail and back at his house,” Wesley told Virgil. “If you want to submit written questions, I’ll consider them.”

“There’s something going on here that you don’t know about. What if I came by your office for an off-the-record chat?”

After a moment, Wesley, who was still in his car, said, “I could do that. You won’t get much from me, but I could do that.”



* * *



—

Virgil said good-bye to Booker and headed back north to Edina, where Wesley had his office in a neatly kept brick building that was full of law offices. A secretary emailed Wesley that Virgil was in the office; Wesley, who was apparently no more than twenty feet away through a couple of walls, came out and waved Virgil into his office.

“I can’t imagine why we need this conference,” he said with a friendly smile as they shook hands, “since I’m not going to give you anything.”

Virgil took a chair as Wesley, a thin, pale man with a shock of blond hair, sat behind his desk.

“Here’s the thing. What your client was doing to Mr. Booker was rotten, and I don’t care about it. Or I do a little bit, enough to send Mr. Nash to prison for a while. What I care about is another case I’m working on, the murder of professor Barthelemy Quill at the University of Minnesota.”