“I’ll buy it all,” Virgil said. “You’re right about all of it. I need to talk to our hooker. I’ll call Trane and see if we can get together.”

* * *

—

Shrake headed back to St. Paul.

Virgil called Trane, filled her in on the McDonald interview, and asked about a new interview with Cohen. The trial that Trane was attending was right across the street from the jail where Cohen was being held.

“How long would you need to talk with her?” Trane asked.

“If she cooperates, ten minutes.”

“I’ll be out of here later this afternoon. I’m not sure about the time. What if we pick a time—like, five o’clock? I’ll be out of here for sure by then. We’d have to call Hardy, tell him what we want to do,” Trane said.

“I’m parked right behind him,” Virgil said. “I’ll grab him when he leaves McDonald’s.”

“Worth a try,” Trane said. “I want to talk to her about the cocaine at Quill’s house, too.”

As she said that, Hardy and Jones walked out of McDonald’s house and started down the front walk to their cars. Virgil said to Trane, “Here’s Hardy. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

He got Hardy and made the offer. “There’s some possibility that Abby Cohen killed Quill, but I also have some reasons to think that she didn’t. What we need from her is ten minutes of honesty. I don’t care about the prostitution charge, and neither does Trane. If she cooperates, I can talk Trane, and whatever county attorney’s involved, into cutting her loose. She might have to testify in a trial, but we wouldn’t necessarily want to hit her with all the other stuff . . . If she cooperates.”

“If you can do that, I’ll recommend that she goes along,” Hardy said. “How long before you know?”

“Trane would have to make some phone calls.”

“We’d want some paper on it,” Hardy said.

“That’s why she’d make some phone calls. We’d like to get it done as soon as we can.”

“I’ve got a thing I’ve got to do early this evening, I can’t get out of it, but I’m good any time before six,” Hardy said.

Virgil called Trane, and Trane said, “All right. Let’s say we meet in my office at five o’clock and walk over to the jail.”

Virgil passed the word to Hardy, who agreed to meet them at the Homicide office unless Virgil or Trane called it off.

* * *

—

Virgil had three hours before he had to be in Minneapolis, so he fought the afternoon traffic across the Cities to St. Paul, to Regions Hospital, where he found Terry Foster trying to read a newspaper.

“This is awful,” Foster said from his bed. “I’m developing a deep sympathy for the physically handicapped.” He dropped the paper, which landed out of reach on his stomach, and asked, “What’s up?”

“Who in the hell beat you up?”

They spent forty-five minutes digging around the problem. Foster swore that he was not involved in anything that could get him attacked. “I have nothing to do here but think about it,” he said. “I’m not dumb, but I can’t get anywhere. You’d know better than me, but I’d think if somebody gets murdered, it has to be for some big, important reason, right?”

“Most of the time, yes. But, you know, you get these little ratshit murders where somebody didn’t respect somebody else or somebody tried to rip off somebody’s else’s weed,” Virgil said. “Murders for a dollar forty-two.”

“I didn’t do any of that. The guy had to be after me, it wasn’t random. I’m sure of that now after thinking about it for two hundred hours. He must’ve known where my parking place was . . . I keep thinking it had to be because I was poking around, but I’ve been over every possibility. Every word. I get nothing. Except . . .”

“What?”

“That computer. Somebody kills Barthelemy Quill, it’s a big deal. I keep thinking about that computer. There had to be something on it. That was a thing in Iraq and Syria—you had guys running around with laptops, and some of them had really heavy shit on them. Top secret shit. Maybe that was the deal here. Maybe . . . Maybe if you went to his lab and looked at the computers there you could find some talk back and forth with the library computer that would give you a hint.”

“Not bad,” Virgil said. “The Minneapolis Crime Scene guys have his home computer. I’ll spend some time with it.”

“Gotta be the laptop. That’s all I can see as a motive . . . This woman he was with, it couldn’t be jealousy . . .”

Virgil shook his head. “She was for sale, and Quill knew it. It wasn’t jealousy. We were thinking that maybe she let somebody in to take pictures for blackmail reasons . . . Or maybe a robbery . . . Except he had a lot of cash on him and it wasn’t touched . . .”

“Well, why couldn’t it still be that? Didn’t mean to kill him but did, and ran in a panic?”

Virgil grimaced. “It could be. But it doesn’t feel right . . . Just doesn’t feel right . . .”

Before he left, Virgil picked up the newspaper lying on Foster’s stomach and helped him pinch it between his suspended hands. “How much longer?”

“Don’t know, exactly. Less than a week, I hope. They’re telling me six to eight weeks before the bones completely knit . . . I’m a fuckin’ mess,” Foster said. “If that asshole comes back, if he gets in here, I’m helpless.”

“You could call for help,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, there’s that,” Foster said. “And I will. I do already.”

* * *

—

Outside in the Tahoe, Virgil checked his watch: he still had almost two hours before the meeting at Trane’s office and he was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the university. He could make a quick stop at Quill’s lab to ask a couple of questions.

He left the Tahoe in a university parking structure and walked over to the lab; there were only three people inside: two women researchers and the lab director, Carl Anderson. He got them together, and said to Anderson, “The last time I talked to you, you convinced me that Quill couldn’t be doing something on the sly because there are too many people involved.”

“That’s correct,” Anderson said, and the two women nodded in agreement.

“But that’s with the surgical procedures. Here’s the thing: he was over at the library in a secret space that even the authorities—university authorities, cops, whoever—would have a hard time spotting. The library knew he was there, and some of you folks knew, but it was not obvious. If the FBI had raided him, they could miss it. Or if they found it, it might take a while. Everybody agree?”