“Did you check on janitors and maintenance guys? Maybe there’s somebody around after closing who stays into the night.”

“Trane did all of that and came up empty.”

“Anyway, he was in there, hiding, when Quill came in. Quill opened the door, picked up his computer, and then saw the guy. There’s some pushing but no injuries, and Quill says he’s calling the cops, and the guy gets the computer away from him and hits him with it.”

“Quill didn’t open the door,” Virgil said. “Our hooker said he saw the guy way before Quill got to the carrel and jumped him. Quill wouldn’t have had time to use his key.”

“But you think the key was used, that the door was opened, the computer was taken out and used as a weapon?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was hit with something else, and the killer used Quill’s keys to open the door. Quill may have had them in his hand because he’d opened the outside library door with them and was planning to open the carrel’s door. The killer needed to hide the body, so he opened the door—the carrel’s—dragged the body inside, saw the computer, knew he could hock it for something, maybe a lot . . .”

They hashed that theory over for a while, came to no conclusions. Quill may have known the killer, but it could just as well have been a stranger.

* * *

—

“The other weird thing about the whole case is the number of possibilities that seem to pop up in our faces,” Virgil said. “They keep coming in and they keep going nowhere.”

Frankie lay back on the couch and slipped her toes under Virgil’s thigh. “My toes are cold. So, like, what possibilities?”

“We had Quill and Katherine Green, the head of the Cultural Science Department, in a bitter feud that actually involved a little violence. An assault. We got a CD that looked like blackmail, but it never panned out. We found a twist of cocaine in Quill’s desk and a note that said he bought it from a dealer named China White, but there apparently is no China White—not a person named that anyway, it’s slang for ‘heroin.’ Quill might have had a girlfriend, but we couldn’t find her; she supposedly wore English riding clothes, had a black German shepherd called Blackie, and hung out at Starbucks. We couldn’t find her, but we were told that a black woman in English-style riding clothes hung out at that same Starbucks and that there was a handicapped guy with a German shepherd, but not a black one, just a regular one . . . It’s all very weird . . . Then we have Terry Foster . . .”

Virgil went on for a while, and, when he was done, Frankie asked to hear his rerecording of the CD. He played it for her, from his cell phone, and she said, “It sounds like blackmail all right. If that was on a CD that he was listening to right before he was killed.”

“It was. It was in his CD player, in his office.”

They both thought about that for a while, and then Frankie said, “That CD was sure to be found with a detailed search.”

“Not a sure thing,” Virgil said.

“But it was found,” she said. “Just like the cocaine.”

“You think the recording was faked?”

“It is odd.”

Virgil rubbed his chin, played the recording again. “It’s even a little tortured. That line about Quill strutting around like a peacock.”

Frankie yanked her toes out from under Virgil’s leg and sat up. “Virgil! A woman in English riding clothes . . . a guy who’s a peacock . . . a woman named Green . . . a person named China White . . . a dog named Blackie . . .” She was excited.

Virgil was puzzled. “Yeah?”

Frankie: “They’re all names from the game of Clue. Green. White. Peacock. I’m pretty sure there’s a Mr. Black who’s the murdered guy. Wait, I’ve got Clue somewhere in the closet.”

“I’ve never played it,” Virgil said. She went to get the game, and Virgil called after her, “Megan Quill had Clue in her closet.”

She came back, said, “We’re missing some pieces, but here’s the whole thing about ‘Mr. Peacock killed him with a candlestick in the library.’ You know that bit?”

“I’ve heard something like that.”

She told him about the game, showed him the pieces, the clues, the rooms . . .

“So Mrs. Green killed Dr. Quill in the library with the computer.”

Virgil lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Yeah. But it wasn’t Mrs. Green.” Then, after a moment, he said, “I gotta go online and look at Wikipedia. Back in a minute.”

In a minute, he was back. “There’s nobody named Black in the American version. Clue was originally called Cluedo and was invented by an English guy. The victim was named Black, but in the American version that was changed to Mr. Boddy.”

“I knew about Boddy,” Frankie said. “I thought that was pretty clever. Not.”

“All those clues,” Virgil said. “From an Anglophile game freak who was dragging us all over the goddamn Cities with fake clues. From a freakin’ board game.”

* * *

—

Virgil called Trane. She answered with, “Flowers, you figured it out?”

“Yeah, we did, me and Frankie—mostly Frankie. I know who killed Quill and probably Brett Renborne.”

Trane crunched on something, maybe an apple. She paused. “Okay. Well, don’t keep me waiting. Who was it?”

“Jerry Krause. Who, twenty-four hours ago, was crying his lyin’ eyes out about his dead buddy Brett.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

   Virgil met with Trane and Lieutenant Carl Knox in Knox’s office the next morning so Virgil could lay out the argument for Knox. “It’s gonna sound weird. It is weird. This whole case is weird,” Virgil said.

He and Frankie had diagrammed the arguments on a yellow legal pad the night before with a variety of arrows demonstrating how one thought led to another and eventually to the conclusion about Jerry Krause. Knox took in the mess of notes—annotations in the margins, inserts, underlines, yet more arrows—and said, “Tell me one thing to start with. Why’d he do it? This Krause kid.”

“It’s so basic that we didn’t see it. He simply wanted the computer,” Virgil said. “He didn’t want anything in the computer. He didn’t want data or software or any of that. It had nothing to do with the feud between Cultural Science and the medical guys. He wanted the fuckin’ computer because it was the fastest thing he’d ever seen and he’s a crazy gamer. He’s obsessed with games. I actually saw him slap his Mac laptop because it was too slow. Slapped it. Called it a piece of shit. I’d bet my left nut that he’s still got Quill’s machine.”