CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

   Virgil and Trane drove over to Megan Quill’s apartment, but she wasn’t there. Virgil called her a half dozen times, walking up and down the sidewalk outside her apartment. Each time, the phone went to voice mail. But, in Virgil’s experience, people Quill’s age tended to walk around with their cell phone in their hands, and his persistence eventually paid off. On the sixth call, she answered, with a weak, tremulous, “Who is this?”

“Virgil Flowers. We need to talk to you. It’s pretty urgent. Where are you?”

“Student center. What do you want to talk to me about?”

“Best to do it face-to-face,” Virgil said. “We’re at your apartment. Do you want us to come over there or do you want to come here?”

“I’m with a girlfriend.”

“This talk has to be a private. So, whatever you think, but it has to be private.”

After a moment, she said, “I’ll walk home. It’s five to ten minutes.”

“We could pick you up.”

“No, I’ll walk.”

She took longer than five to ten, long enough that Virgil started to worry, but Trane said, “Girls that age don’t always have a tight grip on the passage of time. Give her a few more minutes.”

And, a few minutes later, they saw her coming down the sidewalk, head down, hair loose and frizzy, carrying a backpack by a single strap over her shoulder.

Virgil said, “She looks like she’s been hit hard.”

Trane agreed. “She has been. Death of a lover, first dead man she’s ever seen, and she found him. She’ll remember this all of her days. She’ll be sad all of her days.”

* * *

—

When Quill came up, she raised her head and looked at them, and asked, “Is somebody else dead?”

“No, nothing like that,” Virgil said.

Trane said, “Why don’t we go up and talk in your room . . . Where it’s cool.”

In Quill’s room, Virgil and Trane took the two kitchen table chairs, and Quill perched on the corner of the bed, which she hadn’t folded back into a couch that morning. Quill put her backpack aside, and said, “What’s up?”

Trane looked at Virgil, who said, “Megan, we think we figured out who may have killed your father.”

She looked from Virgil to Trane and back to Virgil, and said, “Jerry.”

Trane: “Why would you say that?”

‘I’m triangulating. Dad’s dead, Brett’s dead, you’re talking to me about figuring it out. The only other one you and I know who knew Dad and Brett is Jerry. Why do you think Jerry did it? Do you think he killed Brett, too?”

“We think it’s a real possibility,” Virgil said.

“Then it’s my fault, isn’t it?” She dropped her head again and looked down at the floor between her legs. “I led him on with all that pussy thing, letting him look but not touch, and sleeping with his best friend. He got back at me by killing my dad and his friend.”

Trane said, “No. That’s an amazing thought, but that’s not it. We think he went to your father’s library carrel at midnight and, purely by accident, bumped into your father.”

Now Quill looked up with a sudden light in her eye. “That fuckin’ computer . . .”

Virgil said, “Yes. We think he went there to steal the computer. One of the best gaming computers you could hope to get, and he ran into your father who was there for another reason. There may have been some pushing. And the woman who was there with your dad thought she heard him say something about calling the police. Jerry may have had the laptop in his hand and struck him with it.”

Now Quill straightened, and said, “I totally believe that. Totally. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it.”

Virgil and Trane laid out the other thoughts they had that pointed at Krause, and Quill confirmed that they’d been in her father’s house several times when he was out of town. “We joked about stealing stuff that he wouldn’t miss, but Brett wouldn’t actually let us do that. We watched movies on Netflix. Dad left his Z8 in the garage, and we talked about driving around like Brett and me once saw in some old movie.”

“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Trane said, “Only, I think it was a Ferrari.”

“That’s the one,” Quill said.

“You went in while he was gone . . . Did you ever run into a housekeeper or anyone?” It would be nice, Virgil thought, if a housekeeper had seen Krause.

“No, but Jen—she’s the housekeeper—only comes in the mornings. We knew that. Brett and I would go up and fuck on Dad’s bed. We made Jerry stay outside the bedroom but told him he could listen. We were such assholes.”

Trane made the pitch. “We want you to help catch Jerry. We’re not there yet.”

She explained that the information they had wasn’t enough for a search warrant and that the best confirming evidence they could possibly find would be the laptop. “We thought that if we could get Jerry up here—”

“He’s coming over this afternoon,” Quill said.

“Okay. We wanted to bring some technical people over here to put in some listening and recording equipment.”

“Bug the apartment?”

“Yes. We’ll be down the hall, in the next apartment—that’s a fellow named Dick, correct?”

“Correct.”

“We’d want you to ask Jerry if he had anything to do with Brett’s death.”

“He was down in Faribault.”

“Somebody, we don’t know who, walked up to Brett’s room before six in the morning. Could have been Brett, but we think Brett may have been unconscious by then. We think Brett may have had a fairly late night, went back to his apartment with some heroin, shot up. We think he was probably asleep, dreaming, when Jerry arrived. He may even have told Jerry what he was planning to do.”

“They did talk about it,” Quill said.

“Faribault’s less than an hour from here,” Virgil said. “Jerry would have had access to his mother’s car. He could have left there at five o’clock before she got up and been back before seven.”

“What exactly would I say to him? Jerry. That’s not something you’d blurt out: ‘Did you kill Brett?’”

“I don’t know, maybe you could,” Virgil said. “What time is he coming over?”