“Wait a minute! Hardy’s involved in this?”
Brennan’s heavy white eyebrows arched. “Shouldn’t he be?”
“I talked to him last night,” Virgil said. “We—Sergeant Trane and I—arrested one of his clients on prostitution charges. She’s directly connected to the Quill murder. A witness. We talked to them for half an hour, and Hardy never said a thing about this lawsuit.”
Brennan leaned back in his chair, and said, “That is extremely interesting. Extremely. The suit was filed against the university and not Dr. Quill directly, but I’ve had some rumblings from Jones about amending the suit to go after Quill’s estate. Which I understand is quite large.”
“It is,” Virgil said. “Many millions.” He drew his hand down over his eyes, thinking, and finally added, “It’s interesting, but I don’t see how it would tie to the murder.”
Brennan: “The plaintiff, in the original suit, made a series of statements about assurances she got from Quill before she and her husband agreed to the operation that led, indirectly, to her husband’s death. With Quill dead, he’s not available to counter those claims. Which is why I suspect that Jones is talking about amending the suit. It wasn’t likely to be especially successful against the university, which also indemnified Dr. Quill on charges of malpractice. But now if the plaintiff should claim that Quill personally made fraudulent promises about the success of the operation, then they might be able to split the estate away from the university. A successful suit against Quill’s estate could be lucrative.”
“I don’t know enough about the suit . . .”
“Then here it is in a nutshell,” Brennan said, making a steeple with his fingers. “Carl McDonald was quadriplegic. He’d been an electrician with a company called The Brothers Electric. One day he fell off a ladder, landed on the back of his head, and pinched off the spinal cord at the neck. He still had some mobility in his left arm, hand, and fingers, but little control. And that was all he had. Quill agreed to take him as a patient, and after some time an operation was done by a team of surgeons under Quill’s direction.”
“I understand that Quill doesn’t operate himself,” Virgil said.
“That’s correct. Anyway, after the operation, McDonald did in fact recover further use of his left arm, hand, and fingers. He went through a period of physical therapy in an effort to maximize the use of all three. He also used pills, administered by his wife, to control pain in his neck, as well as elsewhere—new pain, his wife says, the result of the operation. When he got home, after the main round of physical therapy, his wife left the pain pills on a bedside table, and, while she was out shopping for groceries, McDonald managed to get ahold of the bottle and remove the lid with his teeth. He swallowed all the pills and was dead by the time his wife got back.”
Virgil stared for a minute. “He committed suicide? And Quill’s team is being sued for malpractice?”
“Yes. McDonald’s wife claims the operation was a failure and even created new pain—that’s the malpractice part—and that Quill and his team should have known that McDonald would require extensive psychological counseling in the wake of the failure. She claims that Quill told them that McDonald would make a substantial recovery. When I asked him, Quill denied saying that, and his team backs him up: they say he never said such a thing.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, we have a bereaved wife suing a big, rich university and a big, rich doctor, and the decision will be made by a jury that—”
“Isn’t big and rich. Got it,” Virgil said. “You haven’t said so, but the wife, and Hardy’s firm, may stand to benefit from Quill’s murder.”
“I probably wouldn’t actually say that out loud myself,” Brennan said with a grin. “But if somebody else suggested that, I wouldn’t object.”
“I gotta talk to Margaret,” Virgil said, looking at his watch, “right now. We don’t want to make any deals with Hardy’s client. Not yet.”
“Feel free,” Brennan said. He pointed to a door in the side wall. “If you would like some privacy, that goes into my personal bathroom.”
* * *
—
Virgil stepped into the bathroom—a wood-lined cubicle that included a steam shower—wondered, in a brief fit of paranoia, if the room was bugged, and called Trane. She was in an interview room with Cohen and Hardy and stepped out to take his call. Virgil told her about his conversation with Brennan, that Hardy might benefit, possibly in a significant way, from Quill’s murder.
“What are you telling me? You think Cohen might have done it?”
“I doubt that, but she could have told somebody about hooking up with Quill at midnight in the library,” Virgil said. “I was told Nancy Quill could get fifteen million from the estate. Even if they peeled off only two or three, it’d certainly be worth doing.”
“No kidding . . . Oh, God, I got no time. I gotta be in court. I gotta call off this negotiation and send Cohen back to jail. I gotta make sure we hold her for the full forty-eight before the bond hearing. I gotta lot of shit to do.”
“You do that. And I’ll go talk to McDonald’s wife about the lawsuit.”
“Stay in touch, Virgil. We’re moving.”
* * *
—
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office was located in another fundamentally unimaginative, dirt-colored, ugly building in downtown Minneapolis, which didn’t bother Virgil because he didn’t have to look at it very often. He’d spoken to an assistant medical examiner on the ten-mile trip to Minneapolis from St. Paul, and the AME had promised to have the residue of the suicide ready to view.
The AME’s name was Julia Parker, and she met him in her modest cubicle, dumped an evidence box on the desk. The evidence included an amber pill bottle that had once contained thirty oxycodones; the bottle’s white plastic cap, which was well chewed; photos of the deathbed and the deceased in it; and autopsy photos. Parker hadn’t done the autopsy itself, which had been done by another AME who was now on a fishing trip in the Boundary Waters. “He told us if we had to reach him, we couldn’t.”
“How dead was he?” Virgil asked. “McDonald.”
“Completely,” Parker said with a hint of a smile. “The prescription had just been refilled, and they still had a few pills from the previous one. Mrs. McDonald said she’d consolidated them in the single bottle. As a matter of neatness, I guess.”
“And he was full of this stuff?”
“Yup. At least twenty-eight or twenty-nine, maybe as many as thirty to thirty-two. That’ll do it. Eighty milligrams can kill you, and he probably swallowed more than three hundred.”