Bloody Genius (24 page)

“Because I’m looking at him,” Quill shouted into her phone. “And he’s dead.”

“You’re looking . . . Did you call the cops?”

“You’re a cop,” she said. “I got your card.”

“Yeah, but . . . Where are you?”

“In Brett’s room.”

“Do you have an address?”

He heard running footsteps, then heard her: “What’s the address? What’s the fuckin’ address here? Hey, you . . .”

There was more shouting in the distance, and then she came back with a St. Paul address not far from the University of St. Thomas.

“Stay where are, don’t touch a thing. And leave the room,” Virgil said. “I’ll call the St. Paul cops, they should be there in five minutes. I’ll be there in ten. Stay right there.”

“It looks like he . . . I think he OD’d. There’s a syringe on the floor. He’s all white-and-gray-looking.”

“What—”

“Heroin. Sometimes he did heroin. He said it made him dreamy.” She started to sob.

“Stay there,” Virgil repeated.

“Jesus Christ, he’s really dead!” she screamed.

Virgil again told her to leave the room, and she did, and he said, “Go someplace and sit down with your back against the wall. You don’t want to faint and hurt yourself. Don’t let anybody go in the room. Sit, and the cops will be there in a couple.”

He clicked off, dialed 911, identified himself, explained the situation, gave the operator the address Megan Quill was calling from. “I’ll be there myself in a few minutes. Tell the responding guys that this could be part of another murder investigation and to be careful with the scene. Tell them to freeze it, nothing more, and call Ryan at St. Paul Homicide.”

When he got off the call to 911, he called Trane. “Megan Quill found her friend dead about two minutes ago,” he said. “She thinks it might be an overdose. St. Paul cops are on the way. I’m going over.”

“Give me an address. I’m sitting in my car at the office. I’ll be right behind you.”

As Virgil walked out of the elevator, he almost ran over Harry, who was headed for the bar.

Harry said, “You finally get a clue? You look like it.”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “Can’t talk.”

“It’s a kid, isn’t it?” Harry called after him, as he went out the door.

A dead kid, Virgil thought, as he jogged out to his truck.

From the University of Minnesota to St. Thomas normally would have been a ten-minute run, but Virgil had grille lights and a siren and he punched them up and made it in eight. He found two St. Paul cop cars at the curb outside an old, decrepit house.

Virgil talked to the first cop he came to, who said another cop was on the second-floor landing of the house with Megan Quill. “We stuck our head inside the room to see if the victim could be resuscitated, but he appears to have been dead for a while.”

“Okay, I’m going up,” Virgil said.

The cop touched his arm. “We didn’t mess with the body, but we looked at it to make sure he was cold and not breathing. Check his stomach.”

“What?”

“Check his stomach.”

As Virgil walked toward the house, another car pulled to the curb down the street and honked once. He turned and saw Trane getting out.

Trane flashed her badge at the St. Paul cops and hurried up to Virgil.

“Have you been inside?”

“No. And the cops are being mysterious.”

“What?”

“Let’s go up. I’ve been told to look at the dead kid’s stomach.”

“What?”

They went up to the second floor of the house, where the other cop was standing next to Quill, who was sitting on the hallway floor.

Trane identified herself and Virgil to the second cop, said hello to Quill, who was stricken, red-faced and sporadically weeping, and the cop said, “We’ve got an investigator coming, he’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

“The victim . . .” Virgil began.

“Has been dead for a while,” the cop said. “He’s on his back. We’re seeing some rigor in the eyelids, and the blood’s already settled in his back and legs. There was no hope of resuscitation.”

Trane said, “Would you mind if we took the witness outside?
We know her, we’ve dealt with her, it might be better . . . We’ll wait for your investigator by the front door.”

The cop nodded. “Sure. She’s shook up.”

Virgil: “We need to take a quick look at the victim. Your partner outside . . .”

The cop nodded again. “Yeah. Take a look.”

Quill said in a choked voice, “His name is Brett Renborne. Somebody’s got to call his parents.” And she began weeping again.

“Hate this shit, when it’s a kid,” Trane said, as they walked down the hall to the room—it was a single room, perhaps fifteen by twenty feet, walls painted a medium blue, with a bed, an Apple laptop on a small wooden desk with the printer on the floor next to the desk, a shelf with a microwave on it, and there was a closet. But no bathroom. Virgil asked, and the cop at the door said, “Down the hall.”

Virgil led the way inside Renborne’s apartment, both he and Trane stepping carefully. Virgil pointed silently at the syringe on the floor.

Renborne was sprawled on the bed, on top of a sheet, mostly on his right side, with his right arm extended out from beneath his body. He was wearing a white T-shirt, which was pulled up to expose most of his stomach, and a pair of Jockey briefs. The shorts were soiled, and there was the distinct odor of fecal matter in the air.

Virgil bent over the body to look at the stomach. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“What?”

“Look.”

Trane bent over the body. “Do you think . . . ?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Seven words were scrawled in black ink in a wobbly hand on Renborne’s stomach: “I did it. I can’t stand it.”

Virgil looked around, saw a black Sharpie pen poking out from under the other sheet. He pointed at it. “Pen.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Trane said.

Back out in the hallway, Trane said to Quill, “Come on, honey,” and held Quill’s hand and led her down the stairs. Outside, a woman who lived on the lower floor brought a chair out, and Quill sat down.

“Tell us about your day,” Trane said. “When did you last hear from your friend?”

“His name is Brett Renborne. I called him last night to see if he was going to be around this afternoon, but he said he had a class at one o’clock, and I had one from two to four, so I tried calling him after class.”

“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.”

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.”