Krause screamed and grabbed the shaft of the knife. Quill fell back, and the truck went right, Krause heavy on the brakes, down into the ditch, sideways for a few dozen yards, up the other side, where it crashed into a chain-link fence and stopped. When it hit the fence, the driver’s side air bags blew into Krause’s face, knocking him back.

Virgil had caught the Mercedes, as it had slowed in the chain of side-by-side collisions, and he pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, as the Mercedes went into the ditch, and braked hard. Then both he and Trane were out and running, Trane shouting into her cell phone, a gun in her free hand. Virgil got to the Mercedes first, the passenger side. He yanked open the door, saw Quill on the floor, and grabbed her by the shoulders, and pulled her out of the truck.

Trane ran around to the driver’s side as Krause lurched out of the truck, clutching the X-Acto. Trane shouted, “Drop the knife, drop the knife,” and Krause, bleeding heavily from his eye, took a step toward her, lifting the knife, and Trane shot him.

Virgil jumped at the gunshot, then shouted at Trane, “What happened?”

“Krause is down,” she shouted back.

Virgil: “Megan’s bleeding, I gotta get my kit . . .”

He ran up the bank, popped the door, and got his medical kit, pressure bandages, ran back down, ripping the covers off the bandages, knelt beside Quill, and pressed one of the bandages hard to her face. He said, “You’re gonna be all right, honey.”

The highway patrolman, who had stopped forty or fifty yards up the road, now ran down the bank, gun in hand, covering Krause, who lay on the far side of the Mercedes, weeping and bleeding. Trane had shot him in the hip.

The highway patrolman said, in a calm, conversational voice as he holstered his pistol, “Ambulances on the way. Have been for a while. I figured it’d end in a ditch.”

Trane, out of breath, told herself to be cool. She began to slow down, watching over Krause, noticed only one queer thing about the scene that would stick in her mind forever: the highway patrolman was smiling, and, after a few seconds, began quietly laughing, then he turned away, seemingly unable to stop. She thought later it might have been stress, and even later, that he might have simply been happy.

Crazy motherfucker.

The first ambulance arrived three minutes later with the paramedics.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

   The ambulances took both of the wounded to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, not the closest facility but the closest Level 1 trauma center. Virgil and Trane followed, after Virgil called the BCA Crime Scene people and talked them through the three crime scenes that they knew about: the Maplewood Mall, the park, and the final crash. The Maplewood cops had frozen all three and would hold them tight for the Crime Scene crews.

By the time they got to the hospital, both Krause and Quill were in surgery. Krause was in the hospital’s main trauma OR, suffering from the wound to his right eye—that would be permanently blinded, the eyeball having been destroyed by the X-Acto knife—and from the hip wound. Trane’s bullet had destroyed the ball joint, and he would need hip replacement. He had taken two units of blood by the time Virgil and Trane arrived.

“I’m glad I didn’t kill him,” Trane said, as they drove into St. Paul. The paramedics had told her when they picked up Krause that’d he’d mostly likely survive. “I didn’t even want to shoot, but he looked like a zombie and he had that knife, I simply reacted . . . I dunno . . .”

“No cop in the state of Minnesota would say you overreacted,” Virgil said. “A guy that close to you, with a razor knife, who’d already slashed open another victim? No problem. I’m amazed that you didn’t give him three Speer Gold Dots in the breadbasket, as another young woman suggested she’d do if attacked.”

“I don’t use Speer Gold Dots,” Trane mumbled, looking out the window. “I hope I didn’t hit him in the Oompa Loompas.”

She hadn’t, but she was still shocked by the shooting. When she was talking to one of the docs at Regions, Virgil called Minneapolis Homicide, got Trane’s husband’s cell phone number, then called him and explained the situation. “She’s okay, but she might need a little tender loving care over the next few days,” Virgil said.

“Thanks for calling . . . fuckin’ Flowers.”

* * *

—

Quill had been taken to another surgical suite, where a plastic surgeon spent three hours closing her wound, as her mother waited, often crying, outside. When the surgeon came out, she told Quill’s mother that “this won’t look good when you see it, it’s still too raw. But the cut was very clean, even though it was fairly deep. In a couple of years, you won’t be able to see the scar unless you stand right next to her and look for it. If she uses any makeup at all, it’ll be invisible. It’ll be no worse than the scars left by face-lifts.”

* * *

—

Virgil called Frankie, and told her that he wouldn’t be home that night and would probably have to work through Sunday. “We’ve got him, but we’ve got a lot of details to lock down. A lot of details.”

He told her about the chase and shooting.

“We’re fine here,” Frankie said. “I don’t want you taking any more assignments up there, though. Those Cities are a dangerous place.”

“Probably less dangerous than driving our tractor around,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you late tonight, and we’ll talk.”

* * *

—

Later that evening, Trane got a search warrant, and, with a Crime Scene crew, they broke into Krause’s off-campus apartment, which was in an aging brick apartment building a mile or so from St. Thomas. They found Barth Quill’s laptop computer hidden under a board in a closet with old shoes piled on top. One of the Crime Scene people looked at a sharp corner of the laptop with a Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass, and said, “I don’t think he got all the blood out of the seam.”

They also found a box of blank CDs and a CD recorder that could be attached to Krause’s Mac laptop. The blanks were identical to the one found in Barth Quill’s CD player.

“We should have suspected that all those clues we were getting were phony,” Virgil said. “Everybody said that Quill never used cocaine. He led us around by our noses. That China White bullshit, I’m sure he planted the CD. He took Quill’s keys when he killed him. Probably threw the car’s keys in the river but kept the house’s. After that, he had access to this house.”

In addition to the laptop, they found a coin collector’s book filled with gold American coins going back to the nineteenth century. “Darian Seebold Quill” was written on the cover flap.