“I believed him. He was good with drugs,” Quill said. “He’d try them and then he’d quit. Except for weed. But, I mean, who doesn’t do weed?”

A dingy-looking sedan pulled to the curb, and Roger Bryan got out, looked at them, and said, “Oh, shit.”

Virgil said, “Hey, Rog. This is Megan Quill, Dr. Quill’s daughter. She found the victim.”

“Oh . . .”

“You don’t have to repeat yourself,” Trane said. “We’ve already said it a few times.”

Another car pulled in, and a thin black woman got out, grabbed a briefcase. She looked past Bryan, and said, “Virgil Fuckin’ Flowers. I’m living the nightmare.”

“How are you, Honey?”

“Where’ve you been, man? Somebody said you went out for coffee ten years ago and never came back.” Honey Marshall was a longtime medical examiner’s investigator who’d look at the body before it was moved. As she walked up, she eye-checked Bryan and Trane, and said, “What’ve we got here? Some kind of multi-agency cop convention?”

“It’s complicated,” Trane said. She tipped her head toward Quill. “This young lady is the daughter of Dr. Quill, the professor who was murdered at the university a couple of weeks ago. She found the body of a friend of hers. She thinks it might be an overdose. And it might be . . . A deliberate overdose.”

“What makes you think it was an overdose, Miz Quill?” Marshall asked.

“I knew he was messing around with heroin . . . And there’s a syringe on the floor . . .”

“Ah. Well, let’s go take a look.”

Bryan said, “Let’s go take a careful look. It could be a crime scene.”

Marshall popped open her briefcase and took out a pack of plastic booties, handed pairs to Bryan, Trane, and Virgil, took a pair for herself. They filed up the stairs, and Bryan asked one of the cops to stay with Quill. “You don’t want to go in there anymore anyway,” Bryan told her.

She hugged herself and shook her head, said, “No.”

Marshall and the three cops put on their booties and went into Renborne’s room. Marshall scanned the body, bent over to look at Renborne’s arms, said, “Huh.” She read the message on the dead man’s stomach, scanned the body again, spent some time looking at the area behind Renborne’s left knee, stood up, and said, “Give me a minute.”

She went to the door, stuck her head out, and called to Quill, who was waiting down the hallway. “Do you know if your friend was left- or right-handed?”

Quill called back, “Right-handed, I think. Yeah, right-handed.”

“Thanks.”

Marshall stepped back into the room, put her hands on her hips, gazing at the body, then turned to Bryan, and said, “You need to be careful here, Rog. He has what looks like a regular injection site behind his left knee, including a fresh one. He has another fresh one on the inside of his right elbow. But only one there, no signs of more on either arm.”

“Why would he change regular injection sites?” Trane asked.

Marshall said, “That happens. Can’t tell what junkies are going to do, especially if they’re already high when they do that second hit. But, it’s a little unusual to inject into your dominant arm. Most junkies inject into their nondominant one. Also, that injection in the left leg would be typical of a right-handed guy using that hand to hold the syringe. To inject his right arm, he would have had to use his left hand.”

She went back to the door and called out to Quill. “Did your friend wear a lot of short-sleeved shirts?”

Quill called back, “Yes. All the time.”

Marshall turned to Bryan, and said, “Which makes it even less likely that he’d inject in his arm, where it’d be visible. So, we gotta let the docs take a look at this. But I’m tentatively calling the manner of death undetermined. From the writing on his stomach, it was not an accident. Could be suicide, but it also could be that somebody murdered him. Gave him a hot shot while he was sleeping off the first injection. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy to be sure, but I think the cause of death is clear enough.”

Virgil said, “We need to talk with Megan.”

Bryan: “I’m with you.” Trane nodded, and Bryan added, “I’m bringing in Crime Scene.”

* * *

—

Renborne had the only rented room in the house. The rest of it was occupied by the owner, an older woman, who agreed to let them use a bedroom down the hall from Renborne’s to interview Quill.

As they took her in, she said, “I’ve never seen a dead person before. Not a real one. When my dad was killed, his wife had him cremated, so there was nothing at the funeral except this vase. But I knew Brett was dead when I went in and saw him.”

“Did you touch the body?” Bryan asked. “We need to know if we wind up doing DNA tests.”

She jerked her head up and down, sobbed again, caught herself, and said, “I touched his shoulder, his shirt. I kinda poked him. He was like wood. I knew he was dead.”

“All right.”

Virgil said, “Give me a minute. I need to look at something.”

While Bryan was asking Quill about her time line that day—what she’d done, where she’d gone, who she’d seen, and when—Virgil left and walked down to the room where Marshall and the cop were waiting for a Crime Scene crew.

“I need to look at something: his desk.”

He got a single bootie from Marshall, scanned the room carefully, then looked at the top of the desk, which held Renborne’s laptop, a stack of spiral notebooks—all used—and a tall, gray marmalade jar that looked old, possibly a real antique, which held a variety of pens and pencils. He put the bootie on his right hand and used it to open the desk drawers. He looked inside, then closed the drawers, stepped back to the door, gave Marshall the bootie, and walked back to the bedroom where Quill was still talking about what she did that day.

When she finished, Virgil asked, “Where’s your friend Jerry?”

“He went home to Faribault last night.”

Byran: “Who’s Jerry?”

Quill said, “Jerry Krause. He’s a friend. He and another guy—Butch-something—went down to Faribault last night.”

“Does he go down there a lot?” Virgil asked.

“When he starts running low on cash. He gets an allowance from his dad and sometimes he spends it too fast,” Quill said. “His parents are divorced, and he goes down when he runs out of clothes and washes them all at his mom’s house. She usually slips him some money. He’s probably down there every three weeks or month.”