Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(96)

“He didn’t break in,” Frankie said.

“Right, didn’t break in. Okay, that’s a problem, because then there had to be a key.”

“It’s like this: there was somebody lurking in the library, looking for something to steal . . .”

“But, like you said, there’s no sign of a break-in,” Virgil said. “He would have had to hide himself in the library and then come out after everybody was gone. Why’d he wait so long? Why’d he wait until midnight if he could have done it at ten o’clock?”

“Too many people around,” Frankie said. “You said there were dorms all around the library, and it was a Friday night.”

Virgil nodded. “I’ll give you that one. He didn’t move until there was nobody to see him coming out. Seems weird. But, okay . . .”

“Did you check on janitors and maintenance guys? Maybe there’s somebody around after closing who stays into the night.”

“Trane did all of that and came up empty.”

“Anyway, he was in there, hiding, when Quill came in. Quill opened the door, picked up his computer, and then saw the guy. There’s some pushing but no injuries, and Quill says he’s calling the cops, and the guy gets the computer away from him and hits him with it.”

“Quill didn’t open the door,” Virgil said. “Our hooker said he saw the guy way before Quill got to the carrel and jumped him. Quill wouldn’t have had time to use his key.”

“But you think the key was used, that the door was opened, the computer was taken out and used as a weapon?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was hit with something else, and the killer used Quill’s keys to open the door. Quill may have had them in his hand because he’d opened the outside library door with them and was planning to open the carrel’s door. The killer needed to hide the body, so he opened the door—the carrel’s—dragged the body inside, saw the computer, knew he could hock it for something, maybe a lot . . .”

They hashed that theory over for a while, came to no conclusions. Quill may have known the killer, but it could just as well have been a stranger.



* * *



—

“The other weird thing about the whole case is the number of possibilities that seem to pop up in our faces,” Virgil said. “They keep coming in and they keep going nowhere.”

Frankie lay back on the couch and slipped her toes under Virgil’s thigh. “My toes are cold. So, like, what possibilities?”

“We had Quill and Katherine Green, the head of the Cultural Science Department, in a bitter feud that actually involved a little violence. An assault. We got a CD that looked like blackmail, but it never panned out. We found a twist of cocaine in Quill’s desk and a note that said he bought it from a dealer named China White, but there apparently is no China White—not a person named that anyway, it’s slang for ‘heroin.’ Quill might have had a girlfriend, but we couldn’t find her; she supposedly wore English riding clothes, had a black German shepherd called Blackie, and hung out at Starbucks. We couldn’t find her, but we were told that a black woman in English-style riding clothes hung out at that same Starbucks and that there was a handicapped guy with a German shepherd, but not a black one, just a regular one . . . It’s all very weird . . . Then we have Terry Foster . . .”

Virgil went on for a while, and, when he was done, Frankie asked to hear his rerecording of the CD. He played it for her, from his cell phone, and she said, “It sounds like blackmail all right. If that was on a CD that he was listening to right before he was killed.”

“It was. It was in his CD player, in his office.”

They both thought about that for a while, and then Frankie said, “That CD was sure to be found with a detailed search.”

“Not a sure thing,” Virgil said.

“But it was found,” she said. “Just like the cocaine.”

“You think the recording was faked?”

“It is odd.”

Virgil rubbed his chin, played the recording again. “It’s even a little tortured. That line about Quill strutting around like a peacock.”

Frankie yanked her toes out from under Virgil’s leg and sat up. “Virgil! A woman in English riding clothes . . . a guy who’s a peacock . . . a woman named Green . . . a person named China White . . . a dog named Blackie . . .” She was excited.

Virgil was puzzled. “Yeah?”

Frankie: “They’re all names from the game of Clue. Green. White. Peacock. I’m pretty sure there’s a Mr. Black who’s the murdered guy. Wait, I’ve got Clue somewhere in the closet.”

“I’ve never played it,” Virgil said. She went to get the game, and Virgil called after her, “Megan Quill had Clue in her closet.”

She came back, said, “We’re missing some pieces, but here’s the whole thing about ‘Mr. Peacock killed him with a candlestick in the library.’ You know that bit?”

“I’ve heard something like that.”

She told him about the game, showed him the pieces, the clues, the rooms . . .

“So Mrs. Green killed Dr. Quill in the library with the computer.”

Virgil lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Yeah. But it wasn’t Mrs. Green.” Then, after a moment, he said, “I gotta go online and look at Wikipedia. Back in a minute.”