Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(9)

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Trane had gone to Verizon, Quill’s phone service provider, and had extracted a record of where the phone had been. The phone had been turned off around six o’clock on Friday night, but Verizon’s automated system had continued to track it until midnight. Quill had been around his house and neighborhood until about nine-thirty, when he’d driven to an area known as Dinkytown. He’d left his car in a private parking lot and never gone back to it.

After leaving the car, he’d wandered around on foot, with no protracted stops. Then the phone traced a walk across the campus and then across a footbridge over the Mississippi.

At midnight, the phone had been turned back on, in the library—but then, ten minutes later, again outside the library, it had disappeared altogether. At six o’clock the next morning, it popped up again, on the footbridge between the east and west banks of the river. A Google search had been made of Starbucks, perhaps to check opening times. The phone then was carried to the library, which didn’t open until eight, had been turned off again there, was tracked for a few more minutes, then disappeared again. It hadn’t yet reappeared on Verizon’s records. Or been found.

“You’re telling me that he was killed Saturday morning, before the library opened. He must’ve had a key to an outside door to get up to his carrel,” Virgil said to Trane.

She turned from her computer. “He had a key, no question about that,” Trane said. “We don’t know who gave it to him. Of course, it’s possible that somebody with a key let him in. I talked to an assistant at the library, who said she saw him once very shortly after the library opened coming out of his carrel. Not to say that he couldn’t have been waiting outside and got in the minute it opened, but she had the impression that he might have slept in the library. Doesn’t know for sure. I originally thought he must’ve been killed after six-fifteen, the last time we can locate his phone, but now . . .”

She pressed a hand to the side of her face, thinking about it, and Vigil asked, “What?”

“I keep reminding myself, I know where the cell phone was,” Trane said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure where Quill was—that he was with the phone. The cell wasn’t with the body, and neither were the computer nor his keys. We know he kept his house and office keys on his car fob. He was driving a BMW that night—the BMW that we found in the parking lot.”

“If Verizon can track phones when they’re turned off—”

“They can, if the battery isn’t pulled.”

“—then what happened when it disappeared? He took the battery out?”

“That would be one way, but there are a couple of others. You can buy cases that shield phones from electromagnetic radiation. Maybe he had one.”

“Or the killer did,” Virgil said.

“Yup—or the killer did. It’s possible he was killed at midnight, and the subsequent tracks were the killer’s. It’s also possible that Quill had a phone shield case. Met somebody at the library, dropped his phone in the case so he couldn’t be tracked, spent the night somewhere—maybe with a woman?—then went back to the library the next morning and was killed there. None of his lab associates ever saw such a case. If he was deliberately blocking his phone at times, he might have kept it a secret. The Verizon records don’t show any previous instances, though.”

“Then if the phone was shielded, it was most likely the killer who did it,” Virgil said.

“You could make that argument. If that’s right, Quill was most likely killed at midnight. But then the killer would have to have had Quill’s access code, because it popped up again the next morning.”

“All this only applies if Quill’s phone had a keypad code. Or maybe a fingerprint code . . .”

“He did have a code and he kept it secret,” Trane said. “We know that from his wives . . . And he hadn’t changed phones since the second divorce.”

“If he kept it secret from his wives, is it possible he was having affairs?” Virgil asked. “Patronizing hookers?”

“It’s possible, and I’ve already asked that question,” Trane said. “Nobody knows of such a history. He apparently was sexually straight, his wives agreed that he was always sexually active, and even a little rough, but he wasn’t driven by sex. He was driven by his research.”

“Rough? How rough?” Virgil asked. “Violent?”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Muscly. He manipulated them enough that they sometimes had bruises, but none of them said they didn’t like it.”

“He was a strong guy, then?”

“Not a bodybuilder or a weight lifter, but three times a week at the gym, doing a full circuit, working hard at it. He owned a Peloton bike, it’s at his house, and Peloton records show he worked out almost every day, for exactly half an hour, but heavily. He was in good shape. No, he was in great shape.”

“Yet no signs that he resisted the killer?”

“The killer hit him from behind,” Trane said. “He never saw it coming.”



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—

The murder weapon was unknown. People who’d spoken to Quill at his library carrel said Quill kept a large and powerful laptop computer there. The computer was missing, but Trane had learned from credit card records that Quill had spent more than twelve thousand dollars on a high-end laptop, a DreamBook Power P87, the year before.