“Give me an address. I’m sitting in my car at the office. I’ll be right behind you.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

   As Virgil walked out of the elevator, he almost ran over Harry, who was headed for the bar.

Harry said, “You finally get a clue? You look like it.”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “Can’t talk.”

“It’s a kid, isn’t it?” Harry called after him, as he went out the door.

A dead kid, Virgil thought, as he jogged out to his truck.

* * *

—

From the University of Minnesota to St. Thomas normally would have been a ten-minute run, but Virgil had grille lights and a siren and he punched them up and made it in eight. He found two St. Paul cop cars at the curb outside an old, decrepit house.

Virgil talked to the first cop he came to, who said another cop was on the second-floor landing of the house with Megan Quill. “We stuck our head inside the room to see if the victim could be resuscitated, but he appears to have been dead for a while.”

“Okay, I’m going up,” Virgil said.

The cop touched his arm. “We didn’t mess with the body, but we looked at it to make sure he was cold and not breathing. Check his stomach.”

“What?”

“Check his stomach.”

As Virgil walked toward the house, another car pulled to the curb down the street and honked once. He turned and saw Trane getting out.

Trane flashed her badge at the St. Paul cops and hurried up to Virgil.

“Have you been inside?”

“No. And the cops are being mysterious.”

“What?”

“Let’s go up. I’ve been told to look at the dead kid’s stomach.”

“What?”

* * *

—

They went up to the second floor of the house, where the other cop was standing next to Quill, who was sitting on the hallway floor.

Trane identified herself and Virgil to the second cop, said hello to Quill, who was stricken, red-faced and sporadically weeping, and the cop said, “We’ve got an investigator coming, he’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

“The victim . . .” Virgil began.

“Has been dead for a while,” the cop said. “He’s on his back. We’re seeing some rigor in the eyelids, and the blood’s already settled in his back and legs. There was no hope of resuscitation.”

Trane said, “Would you mind if we took the witness outside? We know her, we’ve dealt with her, it might be better . . . We’ll wait for your investigator by the front door.”

The cop nodded. “Sure. She’s shook up.”

Virgil: “We need to take a quick look at the victim. Your partner outside . . .”

The cop nodded again. “Yeah. Take a look.”

Quill said in a choked voice, “His name is Brett Renborne. Somebody’s got to call his parents.” And she began weeping again.

“Hate this shit, when it’s a kid,” Trane said, as they walked down the hall to the room—it was a single room, perhaps fifteen by twenty feet, walls painted a medium blue, with a bed, an Apple laptop on a small wooden desk with the printer on the floor next to the desk, a shelf with a microwave on it, and there was a closet. But no bathroom. Virgil asked, and the cop at the door said, “Down the hall.”

* * *

—

Virgil led the way inside Renborne’s apartment, both he and Trane stepping carefully. Virgil pointed silently at the syringe on the floor.

Renborne was sprawled on the bed, on top of a sheet, mostly on his right side, with his right arm extended out from beneath his body. He was wearing a white T-shirt, which was pulled up to expose most of his stomach, and a pair of Jockey briefs. The shorts were soiled, and there was the distinct odor of fecal matter in the air.

Virgil bent over the body to look at the stomach. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“What?”

“Look.”

Trane bent over the body. “Do you think . . . ?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Seven words were scrawled in black ink in a wobbly hand on Renborne’s stomach: “I did it. I can’t stand it.”

Virgil looked around, saw a black Sharpie pen poking out from under the other sheet. He pointed at it. “Pen.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Trane said.

* * *

—

Back out in the hallway, Trane said to Quill, “Come on, honey,” and held Quill’s hand and led her down the stairs. Outside, a woman who lived on the lower floor brought a chair out, and Quill sat down.

“Tell us about your day,” Trane said. “When did you last hear from your friend?”

“His name is Brett Renborne. I called him last night to see if he was going to be around this afternoon, but he said he had a class at one o’clock, and I had one from two to four, so I tried calling him after class.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know, but I . . . Wait a minute.” She pulled a cell phone from her back pocket, clicked it on, thumbed it a couple of times, then said, “At four twenty-three and at four forty-one. I tried to call him twice. I don’t live far from here. I checked my email, and after a while I decided to just walk over here and knock, to see if he was sleeping or something. His door was unlocked, and I peeked in and . . . I knew he was dead. He looked like a dead person in a movie. I went in. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to scream, or something, but couldn’t. I had this police card from Mr. Virgil in my purse, so I called. And then I could scream . . .”

“Do you know what time that was? When you found him?”

“About one minute before I called Mr. Virgil . . . Wait. That’s not right, is it, Mr. Virgil?”

“Close enough,” Virgil said. He checked his phone. “Virgil’s my first name . . . And you called me at five fifty-one.”

“That’s when I found him,” she said.

She said that Renborne had experimented, in serial fashion rather than simultaneously, with marijuana, cocaine, LSD, and opium, because he said the drugs loosened up his mind. The heroin was more recent, Quill said. She’d argued against it, but he said that he wouldn’t get addicted because he was careful and only did it once a week and would quit in a month or two.