But Russians and Chinese? Unlikely.
* * *
—
Terry Foster lived in a tiny, stuccoed rental house in the area of St. Paul called Frogtown. A couple of aging birch trees shaded the neatly kept front yard, where a sidewalk of cracked concrete blocks led to an enclosed front porch. Virgil parked, knocked on the front door. There was no reaction from inside, but, as he was standing there, a man came out on the porch of the house next door, and said, “There’s nobody home.”
“Do you know when Mr. Foster will be back?”
The man said, “No. He’s in the hospital.”
Virgil walked over—a matter of twenty feet—identified himself, and asked, “He’s sick?”
“He got mugged, right in our own alley,” the man said. “Somebody beat the sweet livin’ bejesus out of him the night before last.”
According to the neighbor, Foster’s house had a single-car garage in the back, which wasn’t part of his rental deal. He had, instead, a parking space in the yard next to the garage. “When he got out of his car, some guy was waiting for him. Jumped out from behind the garage and beat him up. Terry was yelling for help, and the neighbor in back, Joe Lee, heard him and ran out and started yelling at the guy, who run off. Joe run out there and found Terry and called the cops. I didn’t hear him yelling, but I heard the ambulance, and I run out there and saw them put him in the ambulance. And he was a mess. He looked like he’d been blown up.”
“How do you know that part about the guy jumping out from behind the garage?”
“It was in the Pioneer Press. I guess they got it from the cops,” the man said.
Foster had been taken to Regions Hospital, the neighbor said. When Virgil asked, he said that Foster lived alone, as far as he knew. “He did drink a little. There’s a street guy who goes around and takes aluminum cans out of the garbage and he told me once that Terry’s was good for thirty or forty cans. I guess he was drinking a six-pack a day.”
When the neighbor ran out of information, Virgil walked around behind the house to look at the garage. The thing had probably been designed and built before World War II and would be a tight fit for any modern car. There was an overhead door facing the alley and a door on the end closest to the house for access, with a graveled parking spot to one side. Two tall, aging arborvitae stood on either side of the access door, a good spot to hide if you were planning to ambush whoever parked on the graveled spot.
But no self-respecting mugger would have done that. If you got behind or between the arborvitae, you wouldn’t be seen from anywhere but the back window of the house. But if anyone saw you sneak in there, there’d be no excuse, either. And if they called the cops, you’d never see them coming.
As Virgil was walking around the garage, a man came out on the back porch of the house across the alley, and called, “Who are you?”
Virgil called back, “State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Are you Joe Lee?”
“That’s me.” Lee came down from his porch and across the alley. “Have you found out anything?”
Virgil shook his head. “I haven’t started looking yet. It’s a St. Paul case, I’m looking to see if it ties into something else I’m investigating.”
“Really.” Lee was a brawny, sunburned man who might have been a heavy-equipment operator, probably in his late fifties or early sixties. “I figured there had to be something else going on. The guy had him on the ground, never did try for his billfold. He just kept pounding him—Terry.”
“You ever see anyone who looked like they were scouting the alley? Somebody who shouldn’t have been here?”
“No . . . nobody but Terry’s girlfriend. I saw her a couple times, in the mornings—I guess she stayed over.”
Virgil thought: Katherine Green? He asked, “What’d the girlfriend look like?”
“Like, I don’t know, a woodpecker.”
“A woodpecker?”
“Tall, thin, red hair—she wore it up in a thing, a peak, on top of her head. Like a pileated woodpecker.”
“Good description,” Virgil said. It couldn’t be Green. “The attack . . . You don’t have any idea of what that might have been about?”
“Nope. I talked to Terry once in a while, when we were taking out the garbage at the same time. Seemed like a nice enough guy. I didn’t really know him, though.”
Lee had nothing more to say, and Virgil walked back around the house. The next-door neighbor was still standing there, keeping an eye out for Virgil. He asked, “Do I have to worry about it?”
Virgil said, “I don’t think so. Looks to me like whoever did it was targeting Mr. Foster.”
* * *
—
Virgil gave the neighbor a card and drove five minutes over to Regions Hospital, where he’d spent a few hundred hours as a St. Paul cop, both as an investigator and as a patient.
When he asked at the emergency room desk, he was told that Foster had been moved to a regular room; he was conscious and expected to recover. Virgil got the room number, and as he went up in the elevator, it occurred to him to wonder why neither Katherine Green nor Clete May had mentioned the attack on Foster.
The easy answer was: they didn’t know about it. But he’d ask.
* * *
—
Foster was a mess.
He might have been a good-looking guy, perhaps an inch under six feet tall and in good shape, but now he had bandages wrapped around his head, completely covering one eye and one ear, and what Virgil could see of his face, as he lay propped up in the hospital bed, was heavily bruised and abraded; he also had a plastic brace covering his nose. Both of his arms, which were in casts that left nothing exposed except his fingertips, were tethered to an overhead rack and suspended.
The one eye that was visible turned toward Virgil, and Foster croaked, “Who are you?”
Virgil told him, and then said, “I was looking for you over at your house. I wanted to talk to you about the Quill murder. Now I’m wondering if what happened to you had anything to do with that?”
“Don’t know,” Foster croaked. “Could you hold that water bottle so I could get a drink?”
There was a plastic cup on the bed tray with a bent plastic straw sticking out of it, and Virgil held it while Foster drank. When he’d had enough, his tongue flicked out to wet his lips, and he said, “Thanks. Least that asshole didn’t bust my teeth . . . I don’t know why this happened. I did three tours in Iraq and Syria, I even got wounded, but I wasn’t hurt this bad.”