“Fingerprints on the pill bottle?”

“Only Mr. McDonald’s. Frankly, if I was facing what he was facing, the inability to move anything but his head and with partial use of one arm, I’d do the same thing,” Parker said. “I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the poor man.”

Virgil picked up the autopsy photos. One of them showed McDonald’s mouth stretched open, with a couple of tiny flecks of white plastic between his teeth.

“So he chewed through the bottle.”

“Right. Mrs. McDonald had left it on a tray attached to the bed. She had no idea he could move his arm enough to reach the pills. But he did. We think he managed to bump the tray with his shoulder hard enough that the bottle fell over. Then he bumped the tray until the bottle fell off the tray and onto his arm. He grabbed it with the fingers of the other hand and pinned it to his chest, where he could reach it with his mouth. He still had good motion in his upper neck and head—he could turn it—and we think he managed to get the bottle in his mouth. He then chewed the cap until it came off, and, holding the bottle in his teeth, tipped his head back far enough to get the pills to fall into his mouth. Then he swallowed them. We also found fragments of the plastic cap in his gut.”

Virgil had a lot of sympathy for McDonald, too, but the police world didn’t run on sympathy, it ran on checks. He left the Medical Examiner’s Office and drove to a Walgreens drugstore, where he showed his ID to a pharmacist and was given four empty amber pill bottles with white plastic caps identical to the ones in the evidence box.

Then he sat in his truck and chewed one of them. And called Trane, who’d not yet gotten on the witness stand. “Complete clusterfuck in there,” she said. “What happened with you?”

Virgil told her about his visit to the medical examiner and about the bits of white plastic in McDonald’s mouth and stomach. “I went over to a Walgreens—that’s where his prescription had been filled—and got some of those pill bottles and tried to chew one of them open. I stopped because I was afraid I’d break my teeth. I did get the cap ragged enough that I cut my lip twice, and probably jabbed it three or four more times, but I had a hell of a time chewing that cap without dropping it, which I did. I kept having to pick it up and put it back in my mouth, and McDonald couldn’t do that.”

“And . . .”

“As far as I could tell from the photos, McDonald hadn’t done any damage at all to his lip. Pieces of plastic in his mouth, but no physical damage, and I don’t see how that would be avoidable. Also, the bottle had only his fingerprints on it. It should have had a lot of Mrs. McDonald’s prints because she was supposedly dispensing his medicine. It’s almost like somebody wiped the bottle clean of hers and then printed it with his.”

“Picture me weeping,” Trane said. “Are you telling me that McDonald was murdered?”

“I think assisted suicide is a possibility.”

“Connecting the dots, then, McDonald was either murdered by his wife or helped along to kill himself, and she then hired the Hardy firm to represent her in a lawsuit, where they learn about Quill’s financial status and realize that if he were killed and were then unable to defend himself—”

“They could make a lot of money,” Virgil said. “A tub of money.”

“To get him in a private place where they could do the deed, they got Hardy’s other client, Cohen, to set him up. I talked to Cohen long enough to know that this was her third trip to the library. If she was familiar with the routine, she could probably have done something to the door to keep it open after Quill used his key.”

“We should at least keep all that in mind,” Virgil said.

“At least,” Trane said. “What’s your next step?”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. McDonald. See if she’s strong enough to lift a laptop over her head. If she killed once—”

“You, of course, see the fly in that particular ointment.”

“Maybe not.”

“The man who attacked your Mr. Foster: Foster says it definitely was a man, and a fairly large one. Not tall, but heavy.”

“We’ll call it a mugging,” Virgil said.

“That’s not what you were calling it before,” Trane said.

“That’s when I thought I had a lead,” Virgil said. “Now things have gotten funkier. I will call you as soon as I know something.”

“Wish I was there.”

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

   Trane had spoken to Brennan, the university’s lawyer, about the lawsuit, but had never talked to McDonald. Virgil found McDonald’s first name—Ruth—in the lawsuit, ran her full name through the DMV, found three Ruth McDonalds in Minneapolis and St. Paul, cross-referenced it with Frank McDonald, found three Franks, but only one common address among the six.

Virgil needed to get a sandwich before he went hunting for McDonald. He thought for a moment, then called BCA headquarters and asked for Jenkins or Shrake, the BCA’s resident thugs. Shrake was there, picked up a phone, and asked, “What do you want? Wait. I know. You want me to drive to some godforsaken shithole on the edge of SoDak where somebody will shoot me in the eye with a BB gun—”

Virgil interrupted. “St. Louis Park.”

“St. Louis Park?” He sounded nonplussed. St. Louis Park was an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. “What do I have to do?”

“Scare the shit out of a middle-class woman,” Virgil said.

“Huh. Sounds like fun. What else do I get out of it?”

“I’m driving over to the Red Cow Uptown before I go find her,” Virgil said. “I’ll buy.”

“See you there in twenty,” Shrake said.

“Sounds unlikely, but I’ll wait.”

* * *

—

Virgil was sitting on the street down from the Red Cow Uptown, chatting with Frankie on his cell phone, when Shrake pulled up beside him, held up a wrist with a Rolex on it, tapped the watch face twice, and went up the street and around a corner. He was walking back a minute later, debonair in a summer-weight gray wool suit, white shirt, and shiny blue silk tie. Virgil caught him at the door of the Red Cow.

“I didn’t understand the watch signal,” Virgil said.

“Twenty minutes on the dot,” Shrake explained. “I had to do a little shake ’n’ bake on 94. There might be an eighteen-wheeler up in the weeds.”

Shrake was a large man with a complicated nose set over too-white implanted teeth—replacements for teeth he’d broken or had knocked out over the years. The last time he’d worked a major case with Virgil, he’d been grazed with a broadhead arrow. The arrow left a foot-long scar between his shoulder blades that Shrake claimed had tightened up his golf swing and cut three strokes off his handicap.