Virgil showed her his ID, and asked, “Have you talked to Terry Foster in the past couple of days?”
She frowned. “Well, no . . .”
“Terry was mugged—or beaten anyway—out behind his house,” Virgil said. “He’s over at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. He’s in pretty rough shape.”
She touched her lips with her fingers, and said, “Oh my God, he’s not going to—”
“He’s not going to die, but he’s pretty busted up and not in much condition to talk,” Virgil lied. “I’d like to ask you a few questions that might help us out.”
“Sure. Let’s go out in the hall, there are benches . . . When did this happen?” she asked.
“A couple of nights ago,” Virgil said.
“Okay, I haven’t seen him in a week. I’ll go over there tonight if they’ll let me see him.”
“Tomorrow might be better,” Virgil said. He didn’t want her getting there before he did. “Like I said, he’s hurting and a little drugged up.”
“I wonder why he didn’t call me?”
Virgil said, “For one thing, he can’t use a telephone—both of his arms are broken and in casts.”
“Oh, jeez.”
They found a bench under a big red “M,” and Virgil said, “Everybody says Terry’s a quiet guy and friendly. Would you know of anything at all that might have led to his being attacked? No matter how unlikely it might be?”
She looked at him for a long time, and Virgil thought, Ah—she does, and then she said, “Terry is a nice guy, and I wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.”
“Are you saying there is something?”
She looked down at her shoes for a moment, then said, “You know that there was a professor who was murdered here a couple of weeks ago? Over in the Wilson Library?”
Virgil tap-danced. “Oh, yeah. That doctor, right?”
She nodded. “Dr. Quill. Terry’s in the Cultural Science Department—so am I, that’s how we met—and we’ve had this feud with Dr. Quill’s department. Dr. Quill and Dr. Green—she’s the head of our department—were feuding. Last time I was over at Terry’s, he told me he was going to look into it. The murder. He wanted to see if he could clear the department.”
“Look into it? How was he going to do that?” Virgil asked.
“He said . . . Well, he said he was going to check some people out. I asked him how, and he said on the internet. He knows a lot of computer stuff from when he was in the Army. He was an intelligence officer.”
“You wouldn’t know any names of who he was checking on?”
“No, but I was curious and might have nagged him a little. He said he’d gotten all the names of the people involved from the newspapers and from talking to people around Cultural Science. He said he’d run them through the mill—through the net. Including Dr. Green,” Thomas said. Then, “Oh, wait! I do know one other person. He was going to check Dr. Quill’s daughter because people were wondering if she was going to be the big financial winner from Dr. Quill being murdered. The newspapers said he was rich.”
That was all she had, but Virgil had now connected Foster to the Quill murder. There could be two reasons for Foster’s investigation: he was trying to clear Green and her department or he was monitoring the investigation to see if the cops were getting close to somebody. Or both.
* * *
—
One way to find out.
Fifteen minutes after he left Thomas, Virgil pulled into the parking lot at Regions Hospital and took the elevator up to Foster’s floor, walking through a hospital smell that might be alcohol that was the same in every hospital. When he looked into Foster’s room, he found a nurse hand-feeding him. Foster said, “You’re back . . . I’ll be a couple more minutes here . . .”
“Take your time,” Virgil said. He asked the nurse, “What causes the hospital smell? That makes all hospitals smell alike?”
“They don’t all smell like that anymore. It was caused by disinfectants, maybe urine. A combination. I don’t even smell it anymore.”
“Huh.”
When Foster had finished the last of the lime Jell-O and the nurse had gone, Foster said, “Thanks for the visit. It’s nice of you, but it’s not necessary.”
“This is not exactly a social visit.”
“I figured that out about three seconds after you came through the door, the look on your face,” Foster said. “What happened?”
“One of my sources told me that you’re conducting your own private investigation into the Quill murder,” Virgil said. “Since you got jumped, you might have touched a live wire. I want to know what it is. I’d like to know why you didn’t mention this the first time I was here.”
Foster closed his eyes and blew out air. Then, “That fuckin’ Sandy. I told her not to talk to anyone about it. I wouldn’t have talked to her, except I had one beer too many. I gotta quit drinking.”
“Not a bad idea, but Sandy who?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Virgil. I know and you know that Sandy and I are in bed sometimes, and you already talked to her,” Foster said. “She’s the only one who knew about me poking around.”
“I can’t—”
“I’m sore enough without getting a headache because you’re bullshitting me,” Foster said. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it since I got beat up and I don’t know what live wire I might have touched. I really don’t.”
“Who all did you talk to?”
“A few people in Cultural Science, the ones who seemed most outraged by the feud. Also, Megan Quill, because I thought she had the most to gain,” Foster said. “Her father had a house that’s got to be worth a million, plus a family fortune that’s worth way more than the house. After I talked to Megan, I, mmm, saw a copy of Quill’s will and according to its terms Megan gets exactly what she’s already getting, for the same amount of time. In other words, her trust fund continues until she’s thirty, and that’s it. She gets it whether or not Quill lives or dies.”
“I knew that. What else?”
“I was doing, uh, some research into his wife, who would have gotten hurt if the divorce had gone through. There was a tough prenup. His wife would get a hundred thousand dollars for each year they were married. There were smaller amounts for his first and second wives, and all the rest would have gone to a Quill Foundation, which would provide grants for medical research. Now with him dead while they were still married, the wife will most likely get half. I’m not exactly sure how much that would be, but I’d guess between fifteen and twenty million.”