Virgil said, “I appreciate it. While you’re doing that, if you could point me to a men’s room . . .”

“I’ll show you,” the other cop said. “I’ll walk you across the street to the cafeteria, give you the lay of the land.” To Trane he said, “We’ll be a few minutes. You should go lie down in the ladies’ room and put a cool, damp hankie on your forehead.”

“Fuck you,” Trane said, but not in the mean voice she’d used on Virgil. She was already settling back in front of her computer.

* * *

—

Virgil had been to the Minneapolis cop shop a few times, but the man, whose name was Ansel Neumann and who was a detective sergeant, gave him the full two-dollar tour. They wound up in a cafeteria in the government building across the street from City Hall. The two buildings were connected by an underground tunnel, the government center tall and now, after a few decades of being modern, a little shabby; the City Hall was old and squat and ugly, with dim, empty hallways with ranks of closed doors and stone floors that kicked echoes out from your feet when you walked across them.

They ordered some kind of pie, which was yellow and might have been custard, or possibly banana, and Neumann briefed Virgil on the computer system, and what he could expect in Trane’s files, as well as a review of what the media was doing.

“They’ve been all over Trane’s ass—a Channel Three crew ambushed her out at her house during dinner and they spent some time yelling at each other. She’s got a problem.”

“Why take it out on me? I understand not wanting an outsider, but . . .”

Neumann: “Because it suggests she can’t handle the case?”

“I’m not doing that.”

“No, but guess what happens when the governor’s fair-haired boy shows up here and the case gets solved? Who gets the credit? Who’s the village idiot? Trane figures she’s going to wind up sitting in the corner with a pointy hat on her head.”

“Ah, shit.”

* * *

—

When Virgil and Neumann got back to the Homicide office, another cop had shown up and was eating a tuna salad sandwich at the desk on the other side of the cubicle wall from Trane. Trane was again nearsightedly peering at her computer screen. Virgil said, “Margaret?”

“What?”

He tipped his head toward the interview room. “Step in here for a minute. We need to talk.”

She launched herself from her chair, followed Virgil into the room, closed the door, and crossed her arms. “What?”

Virgil held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I don’t think you need my help. I’m not here voluntarily. I’d be pissed if I were in your shoes, and I told Ansel that. I understand. But we’re stuck with it. If we figure this thing out, I’ll disappear. Nobody from the media will ever hear my name. And if anybody asks me, I’ll tell them you ran the show. Because, honest to God, I don’t need this.”

She unfolded her arms. “It’s just . . . insulting, you know?”

“I know how you feel about it. You know Lucas Davenport, right? You must have overlapped.” Davenport had been a Minneapolis Homicide cop before he’d gone on to the BCA, and then to the U.S. Marshals Service.

“Yeah, he’s a friend,” she said.

“He’s a friend of mine, too. We’re almost best friends, in an odd way,” Virgil said. “Give him a call. See what he thinks.”

She agreed, if still a bit grudgingly. “Okay. Let me open the files for you. And I will give Lucas a ring.”

CHAPTER

THREE

   Virgil spent the afternoon reviewing Trane’s work; the room was cool and damp and smelled like paper and floor wax. He got up a few times, to walk and think, wandering over to the government building. A few people stopped to peer into the office, checking the guy with the blues T-shirt.

Trane asked, “How are you doing?” a couple of times, and he said, “Good. You’re a good reporter,” and she was, and she went away, possibly mollified, possibly to pee.

Her reports were chronological, rather than ordered by subject matter, so Virgil made notes on a yellow legal pad, organized by subject.

* * *

—

There was one picture of the murder victim, Professor Barthelemy Quill, when he was alive, an informal portrait in his laboratory that looked like it might have been taken by a newspaper reporter—it had a newsy look.

Judging from a door behind Quill’s shoulder, he was a tall man, over six feet. He had neatly trimmed hair—originally light brown or blond, now shot through with gray—and a full head of it. The short hair framed a sober oval face punctuated with thin blond eyebrows and sharp blue-gray eyes that said “I went to a private boys’ school and then off to the Ivy League”—the face of a high-level federal prosecutor or Naval officer.

The file also included a couple of dozen digital prints of the body as it was found, as well as close-ups of the entire carrel and the area around it.

The blood from the head wound appeared black against the fair hair both at the site and where it trickled down Quill’s skull and left a stain on the stone-tiled floor beneath his chin. He was wearing gray slacks, a gray shirt, and a black sport coat. The ensemble lent him the aspect of a vampire, especially since his lips were pulled back in a death grimace, revealing a long eyetooth.

Trane had interviewed more than fifty persons who’d known Quill, including his estranged current wife, two ex-wives, two ex-lovers, all the lab employees, colleagues at the university and the neighbors, and a group of academics with whom he was feuding. She’d extracted from them narratives of their relationships to the dead man and accountings of their whereabouts on Friday and Saturday.

The academic feud had taken quite a bit of Trane’s time: she’d conducted interviews with both Quill supporters and Quill haters, and there had been some violence involved.

Trane had had trouble determining the victim’s exact time of death because he’d been known to take solitary walks around campus. Quill left his lab, alone, at one o’clock Friday afternoon, and hadn’t returned. He hadn’t shown up on Monday, either, which was unusual but not unprecedented. His laboratory director had tried to call him twice on Monday, but Quill’s phone had apparently been turned off. That also was not unusual—famously, he hated being interrupted “by any idiot who can poke a number into a keypad.”

Because Trane hadn’t a time of death—the medical examiner pegged it as being between Friday evening and noon Saturday—she’d been unable to eliminate alibis of the people closest to Quill or those who’d been involved with Quill in the feud, a vicious campus controversy concerning the relationship of medicine to culture.