Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(92)

Virgil said, “We need to talk with Megan.”

Bryan: “I’m with you.” Trane nodded, and Bryan added, “I’m bringing in Crime Scene.”



* * *



—

Renborne had the only rented room in the house. The rest of it was occupied by the owner, an older woman, who agreed to let them use a bedroom down the hall from Renborne’s to interview Quill.

As they took her in, she said, “I’ve never seen a dead person before. Not a real one. When my dad was killed, his wife had him cremated, so there was nothing at the funeral except this vase. But I knew Brett was dead when I went in and saw him.”

“Did you touch the body?” Bryan asked. “We need to know if we wind up doing DNA tests.”

She jerked her head up and down, sobbed again, caught herself, and said, “I touched his shoulder, his shirt. I kinda poked him. He was like wood. I knew he was dead.”

“All right.”

Virgil said, “Give me a minute. I need to look at something.”

While Bryan was asking Quill about her time line that day—what she’d done, where she’d gone, who she’d seen, and when—Virgil left and walked down to the room where Marshall and the cop were waiting for a Crime Scene crew.

“I need to look at something: his desk.”

He got a single bootie from Marshall, scanned the room carefully, then looked at the top of the desk, which held Renborne’s laptop, a stack of spiral notebooks—all used—and a tall, gray marmalade jar that looked old, possibly a real antique, which held a variety of pens and pencils. He put the bootie on his right hand and used it to open the desk drawers. He looked inside, then closed the drawers, stepped back to the door, gave Marshall the bootie, and walked back to the bedroom where Quill was still talking about what she did that day.

When she finished, Virgil asked, “Where’s your friend Jerry?”

“He went home to Faribault last night.”

Byran: “Who’s Jerry?”

Quill said, “Jerry Krause. He’s a friend. He and another guy—Butch-something—went down to Faribault last night.”

“Does he go down there a lot?” Virgil asked.

“When he starts running low on cash. He gets an allowance from his dad and sometimes he spends it too fast,” Quill said. “His parents are divorced, and he goes down when he runs out of clothes and washes them all at his mom’s house. She usually slips him some money. He’s probably down there every three weeks or month.”

Trane asked, “Was Brett unhappy about something? Depressed?”

She shook her head. “Not that I noticed. And I think I would have noticed. I didn’t want him fuckin’ around with those drugs, I kept telling him that. He was a happy guy, really. If he overdosed, it was an accident.”

“What about the message?” Bryan asked.

She shook her head again. “What message?”

“You didn’t see the message?” Trane asked.

“No, no note. There’s nothing.”

Virgil: “There’s a message written on his stomach.” He turned to Trane and Bryan. “I’m pretty sure you guys spotted this detail, but the note was written so it could read right side up. But from his perspective, he’d have had to have written it upside down and backwards. Upside down and backwards, and he was stoned.”

“I wondered about that,” Trane said, and Bryan said, “Yeah.”

“I looked around the room,” Virgil said. “Unless there are some Sharpies under the bed, where I couldn’t see them, or in the closet, there aren’t any others. Only the one on the floor.”

Bryan said, “That worries me.”

Quill: “Somebody murdered him?”

“We have to think about it,” Bryan said. “And the note . . . Let me ask you this: how well did Brett know your father?”

“I mean, he was with us a couple of times when we went over there. Dad didn’t like him because he thought Brett was a slacker. And Brett couldn’t help himself, he’d get sarcastic. But not mean sarcastic. He’d sort of tweak Dad. One time, he was looking around the music room—the Steinway and the stereos and all—and he said something like, ‘Man, the shit you can get when you inherit money.’ Dad got pissed, went on about hard work and millennials not knowing hard work if it bit them on the ass.”

Bryan: “Do you think Brett could have killed him? Even if it was, you know, by accident?”

Quill: “My father wasn’t killed by accident . . .”

“You know what he means,” Trane said. “They don’t like each other. They run into each other up there in the library. Your father thinks Brett is stealing something, like his computer, and Brett hits him with it. Doesn’t mean to kill him, but there’s a struggle.”

“You told me there wasn’t a struggle,” Quill said to Trane.

“Well, a tussle. An argument. Your father turns away, and Brett hits him.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Brett didn’t want to have anything to do with violence.”

Virgil: “You said he experimented with cocaine. When was that? How long ago?”

“A while ago. During the summer. I don’t know exactly.”