Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(91)

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know, but I . . . Wait a minute.” She pulled a cell phone from her back pocket, clicked it on, thumbed it a couple of times, then said, “At four twenty-three and at four forty-one. I tried to call him twice. I don’t live far from here. I checked my email, and after a while I decided to just walk over here and knock, to see if he was sleeping or something. His door was unlocked, and I peeked in and . . . I knew he was dead. He looked like a dead person in a movie. I went in. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to scream, or something, but couldn’t. I had this police card from Mr. Virgil in my purse, so I called. And then I could scream . . .”

“Do you know what time that was? When you found him?”

“About one minute before I called Mr. Virgil . . . Wait. That’s not right, is it, Mr. Virgil?”

“Close enough,” Virgil said. He checked his phone. “Virgil’s my first name . . . And you called me at five fifty-one.”

“That’s when I found him,” she said.

She said that Renborne had experimented, in serial fashion rather than simultaneously, with marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and opium, because he said the drugs loosened up his mind. The heroin was more recent, Quill said. She’d argued against it, but he said that he wouldn’t get addicted because he was careful and only did it once a week and would quit in a month or two.

“I believed him. He was good with drugs,” Quill said. “He’d try them and then he’d quit. Except for weed. But, I mean, who doesn’t do weed?”

A dingy-looking sedan pulled to the curb, and Roger Bryan got out, looked at them, and said, “Oh, shit.”

Virgil said, “Hey, Rog. This is Megan Quill, Dr. Quill’s daughter. She found the victim.”

“Oh . . .”

“You don’t have to repeat yourself,” Trane said. “We’ve already said it a few times.”

Another car pulled in, and a thin black woman got out, grabbed a briefcase. She looked past Bryan, and said, “Virgil Fuckin’ Flowers. I’m living the nightmare.”

“How are you, Honey?”

“Where’ve you been, man? Somebody said you went out for coffee ten years ago and never came back.” Honey Marshall was a longtime medical examiner’s investigator who’d look at the body before it was moved. As she walked up, she eye-checked Bryan and Trane, and said, “What’ve we got here? Some kind of multi-agency cop convention?”

“It’s complicated,” Trane said. She tipped her head toward Quill. “This young lady is the daughter of Dr. Quill, the professor who was murdered at the university a couple of weeks ago. She found the body of a friend of hers. She thinks it might be an overdose. And it might be . . . A deliberate overdose.”

“What makes you think it was an overdose, Miz Quill?” Marshall asked.

“I knew he was messing around with heroin . . . And there’s a syringe on the floor . . .”

“Ah. Well, let’s go take a look.”

Bryan said, “Let’s go take a careful look. It could be a crime scene.”

Marshall popped open her briefcase and took out a pack of plastic booties, handed pairs to Bryan, Trane, and Virgil, took a pair for herself. They filed up the stairs, and Bryan asked one of the cops to stay with Quill. “You don’t want to go in there anymore anyway,” Bryan told her.

She hugged herself and shook her head, said, “No.”

Marshall and the three cops put on their booties and went into Renborne’s room. Marshall scanned the body, bent over to look at Renborne’s arms, said, “Huh.” She read the message on the dead man’s stomach, scanned the body again, spent some time looking at the area behind Renborne’s left knee, stood up, and said, “Give me a minute.”

She went to the door, stuck her head out, and called to Quill, who was waiting down the hallway. “Do you know if your friend was left-or right-handed?”

Quill called back, “Right-handed, I think. Yeah, right-handed.”

“Thanks.”

Marshall stepped back into the room, put her hands on her hips, gazing at the body, then turned to Bryan, and said, “You need to be careful here, Rog. He has what looks like a regular injection site behind his left knee, including a fresh one. He has another fresh one on the inside of his right elbow. But only one there, no signs of more on either arm.”

“Why would he change regular injection sites?” Trane asked.

Marshall said, “That happens. Can’t tell what junkies are going to do, especially if they’re already high when they do that second hit. But, it’s a little unusual to inject into your dominant arm. Most junkies inject into their nondominant one. Also, that injection in the left leg would be typical of a right-handed guy using that hand to hold the syringe. To inject his right arm, he would have had to use his left hand.”

She went back to the door and called out to Quill. “Did your friend wear a lot of short-sleeved shirts?”

Quill called back, “Yes. All the time.”

Marshall turned to Bryan, and said, “Which makes it even less likely that he’d inject in his arm, where it’d be visible. So, we gotta let the docs take a look at this. But I’m tentatively calling the manner of death undetermined. From the writing on his stomach, it was not an accident. Could be suicide, but it also could be that somebody murdered him. Gave him a hot shot while he was sleeping off the first injection. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy to be sure, but I think the cause of death is clear enough.”