“Okay.”

“The autopsy gave me nothing more than the cause of death. He had no alcohol or any trace of drugs in his system. Nothing under the fingernails or on his clothes—and no reason there should be, he obviously didn’t resist—and no DNA.”

* * *

—

“Okay.” Virgil scrolled down the computer screen, tapped the screen. “You’ve got all these NCIC files on a guy named Boyd Nash. What’s that about?”

“Nash is a . . . I guess a scientist would say he’s a dirtbag. I don’t understand all the details, but he’s some kind of scientific predator and he had some contact with Quill.”

“Predator?”

“Yeah. He looks for new research that he can get some details on, then he goes to this law firm that cooperates with him . . . Conspires with him, I’d say . . . Anyway, give me some rope here because I don’t entirely understand it . . . They find a graduate student or low-level technician who knows something about the field that the research involves and they write up a description of the work and then they file for a patent. When the original company or laboratory tries to use their own research, the law firm files for a patent violation. It’s technical and complicated enough that the courts don’t usually understand what’s going on. Sometimes Nash wins, sometimes he loses, but if he wins, he can get a substantial settlement because fighting the court’s judgment can cost more than the settlement. The law firm gets a third, of course, but Nash can still get out with tens of thousands of dollars.”

“In other words, he steals research, pretends it’s his, or belongs to somebody he’s working with, and uses a court decision to extort a settlement from the good guys.”

“That’s about it,” Trane said.

“You eliminated Nash as a suspect?”

“Not completely, but there seemed to be better leads,” Trane said. “The night that Quill disappeared, Nash was in Rochester. He checked into the DoubleTree hotel for a convention . . . It’s in the notes, something like the American Institute for Medical Technology. I talked to him, he gave me names of people he spoke to there, both that night and on Saturday, and on Sunday, when the convention ended. I called those people and it all checked out. He had American Express receipts for the hotel for both nights, Friday and Saturday.”

“It’s only about an hour and a half each way. He could have been down there until ten o’clock . . .”

“I know. I worked through all that,” Trane said. “It seems unlikely—it’s the kind of convention he’d go to, for the contacts he needs, and why would he think he’d need an elaborate alibi? He couldn’t have known Quill would be at the library at midnight. And how would he have gotten in the library? Lot of moving parts there.”

“All right. Now, tell me about this big feud that Quill was involved in.”

“Oh my God,” Trane said. “You ever get in one of those situations where somebody’s yelling at you and you feel like your sinuses are getting jammed up by the sheer bullshit?”

“All the time. That’s my life story,” Virgil said. “What’s going on?”

* * *

—

A woman named Katherine Green, Trane said, a newly tenured professor in the university’s Department of Cultural Science, had written a well-received book entitled Cultural Medicine, which argued that medicine which worked well in the West might not work so well in other cultures, or what she called microcultures.

In a particularly controversial passage, she’d suggested that families in Marin County, California, and Clark County, Washington, had developed their own microcultures that rejected the Western imperative of childhood vaccination. The Marin and Clark microcultures’ emphasis on a naturally robust lifestyle would likely prove as effective as vaccination, Green said, possibly more so.

“That started people screaming,” Trane said. “Because it seemed to offer support for the anti-vaccination movement, which mostly consists of uncertified crazies.”

The book made it onto The New York Times’s bestseller list, and Green, after making a three-week tour in support of sales, returned to home ground at the university, where she was invited to give a lecture at the Coffman Memorial Union.

“I’ve seen a video,” Trane said. “About halfway through, several people started booing. That started a bunch of arguments, and people in the audience started pushing one another around. There were a couple of campus cops there and they got everybody back in their seats, and Green managed to finish the lecture.

“Then Quill got up and said her book was ignorant, unscholarly, uninformed, and a bunch of other stuff. Green has a reputation herself—she likes to fight. It seems like she lives for controversy. She called him rude, culturally illiterate, a racist, and a few other things, and he called her a silly twat. Yelled it, actually,” Trane said. “That set things off again, and they had to call more cops because it got out of hand—a small riot. A graduate student got hauled off to jail and was charged with assault because he hit another guy with a chair.”

“Did it break like they do on TV?” Virgil asked.

“No,” Trane said, a trifle impatiently. “Anyway, Green tried to get Quill fired for sexism, filed against him with the Title IX committee—the word ‘twat.’ Quill insisted that he’d called her a silly twit, not twat. He was lying because he did call her a twat. It was plain as day on the video, but there was no way the U was going to fire or even censure Quill. He was way too important.”

A week or so after Green’s lecture, Quill and three professors from the medical school held an open seminar at the Mayo Auditorium to discuss the wrong-headedness of Green’s book and to question the very existence of the Department of Cultural Science, which, according to flyers posted in the medical school, advocated “Witchcraft vs. Medicine.”

“Well, you can guess what happened. Green showed up with staff and students from Cultural Science, and they had another riot on their hands,” Trane said. “It’s been pretty much open warfare since then. Quill proposed eliminating the Cultural Science Department entirely—it’s hard to get rid of tenured professors, but if their department is abolished, well, they don’t have jobs.”

“Then everybody in Cultural Science is a suspect.”

“Yeah,” Trane said. “That would be eighteen faculty and graduate assistants and support staff, and a large but unknown number of students.”

“Sounds like you’ve come down on Quill’s side of this thing,” Virgil ventured. “You know, intellectually.”

“Of course I have,” Trane said. “I wouldn’t say it on television, but the Green people, the Cultural Science people, are a bunch of Froot Loops.”