“We don’t know,” Virgil conceded. “Anyway, is it possible that he was putting together another team that might not be so reluctant to go for the Hail Mary operation? The rest of you guys—the current team—could push back, right? What if he had a bunch of, say, younger, more obscure guys?”

“Nope. Agent Flowers, this is not work you’d do with a bunch of residents,” Harris said. “I spent four years in med school and then eight years doing plastic and microsurgery residencies before I felt I could lead a complicated operation. Even then, I had to be careful. I mean, I was thirty-seven or thirty-eight before I felt I was hitting it out of the park. He wouldn’t do something like nerve splicing with a pickup team.”

“You’re sure about that.”

“I am. Listen, Flowers. Barth was a concepts guy, an intellectual. The way the thinking goes in medicine, you’ve got your really, really smart guys like Barth who think up all kinds of things, who know all kinds of stuff, but can’t do anything. They’re lab people. Chin-scratchers. Thumb-suckers. Then you’ve got surgeons, who are looked on as the dumb guys in the profession but dumb guys who’ll try just about anything. ‘We wanna cut. We like it. Get in there and fix it. If the patient dies, we did our best.’ If anything, that recording is backwards: Barth was the conservative guy. The ‘Let’s do it’ guys would be the surgeons. If that’s who he was talking to.”

“Damnit,” Virgil said.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

   Virgil called Trane and told her what he’d found.

“Virgil, this recording is tied into the murder. I don’t care what these doctors are telling you. It’s tied.”

“Figure it out tomorrow. Where are you on the trial?”

“I’ll be going on the stand tomorrow afternoon. The judge is going to make a bunch of rulings in the morning, but he’s told the jury they have to be back at one o’clock.”

“There won’t be something weird, like a mistrial? And you’ll have to do it all over?”

“No, no. The lead defense attorney is, like, about fourteen. I think he got out of law school on Monday morning, and he’s filed so many motions that they contradict each other. I think it’s possible that he’s looking to wear down the prosecution and get a deal. Because his motherfucker is a guilty motherfucker.”

“All right. I may stop by tomorrow to watch you do your act. Maybe we can have a séance after you’re done.”

“Talk to ya.”

* * *

—

   Virgil was headed back to the hotel when Del Capslock, the BCA agent, called. “You free?”

“Yup. As the breeze.”

“Meet me over at the Territorial,” Capslock said. “I’m there now, back by the foosball table.”

“The sun’s not down yet.”

“Fuck the sun. The place opened at six. Don’t see any sun in here.”

Virgil got directions; the bar was ten minutes away. He found a spot on the street, walked a half block to the theater-type marquee that said “Drinks.” And, under that, “Ladies Nite E ery Nite.” Virgil spent the next few seconds of his life wondering if the “v” had fallen off, been stolen for some reason, or was simply a scarce letter that the bar hadn’t happened to have on hand.

Calling the bar shabby was an insult to the word. Some dive bars had peanut shells on the floor; the Territorial made do with ordinary dirt, apparently ground in over several decades of near failure. Virgil made his way past the long, shabby bar, and its equally shabby bartender, to the broken foosball machine, and Capslock, who was sitting in a booth and facing a thin, shabby criminal whose narrow face was framed by brown, greasy hair pulled back in a pigtail.

Virgil flicked his fingers at Capslock, gesturing him to move over—he wasn’t going to sit next to Pigtail—and Capslock slid over, and asked, “You want a beer?”

“No, I’m on duty.”

Capslock laughed, finished his PBR, and waved at the bartender. “Hey, Rick, two more.”

He turned back to Virgil, and said, “This is Long Wayne Gibbs, aka Long Doyle Gill, aka Long Bob Greer. Part of him used to make pornos.”

Virgil said to the criminal, “Should I just call you Long for short?”

“Call him Wayne. That might be his real name,” Capslock said.

Reacting to Virgil’s “Long/short” comment, Wayne was giving him his version of the prison death stare, which was interrupted by the arrival of two more PBRs. When the bartender had gone, Capslock said, “Wayne, tell Virgil about China White.”

“There isn’t one,” Wayne grunted.

Capslock said to Virgil, “There you go . . .”

“You mean, no one anywhere?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe in California—I wouldn’t know about that—but not in Minneapolis or St. Paul. Nobody would call themselves that. It’s too stupid.”

“I’m not sure how many bright drug dealers I’ve known,” Virgil said. “I could probably count them on the fingers of one finger.”

“Still too stupid,” Wayne said. “Even a dumb guy wouldn’t call himself that.”

“Or woman.”

That caused Wayne to pause halfway through a swallow of beer, his Adam’s apple stuck briefly under his chin. When he took the bottle down, he said, “You know, China White would be a good name for a porn star. One of them chink half-breeds, looks kinda white but with slanty eyes?”

Virgil: “So, you know any porn stars named China White?”

“Not yet,” Wayne said.

Capslock: “Wayne’s getting out of the art side of porn, going into production work.”

Wayne: “That’s where the money is.”

Virgil said to Capslock, “Well, I appreciate meeting this gentleman. Now, I think I’ll head over to my hotel—”

“Virgil, Virgil. Listen to the man,” Capslock said.

“He said there’s no China White.”

“But that’s not the only question you’re asking, is it? Wayne’s connections in the sex business are extensive . . . You tell him, Wayne.”

Wayne leaned forward, dropped his voice: just us boys here. “I was, uh, auditioning this chick for a role in one of my upcoming productions, and we got to talking and she mentioned that this girl she knew was fucking a famous professor.”