“Uh-oh. Did you screw something up?”
“Not exactly. I talked to one of the women in the lab about the recording. It scared her. She said that the bad guy was definitely Quill, which is too bad because I was beginning to like him. She seemed sure of it, but Nancy Quill said it wasn’t him.”
“Goddamnit. They’ve been rehearsing me all afternoon, treating me like a moron, and I was so frustrated and pissed that I was going to go home and eat an entire pie, but now I have to meet up with you and push Nancy Quill up against a wall.”
“You wanna be the bad cop?”
“If she lied to me, I’ll be the bad cop whether I want to be or not because I’ll be mondo pisso,” Trane said. “I’ll meet you there. Like, right now.”
* * *
—
Virgil found his way back to Nancy Quill’s condo, spotted Trane parked on the street in a no-parking zone. Virgil rolled up behind her, put his BCA sign in the window, and got out.
“One good thing about this: if she lied, we might be onto something,” Virgil said, as Trane got out of her car.
“I realized that on the way over,” Trane said. “It eased the pain. But I’m still going to eat that pie.”
“What kind?”
“Apple. I’ll warm it up.”
“Vanilla ice cream?”
“It ain’t warm apple pie if there’s no vanilla ice cream.”
* * *
—
Quill buzzed them through the entry door. They took the elevator up and found Quill waiting in the hall outside her condo.
“What’s going on?” Quill asked. “Did you get him?”
“No,” Trane said. “Let’s sit down.”
“What?” Quill asked, as she backed into her front room. Virgil pulled the door closed, and they sat in separate easy chairs facing one another.
Trane said, “Agent Flowers believes there’s a problem with the statement you gave to me about the recording I played for you.”
Quill had been lying all right, Virgil thought. When Trane made the comment, he could see the pupils of Quill’s eyes contract, the way they do when somebody’s lying to your face. Trane saw it, too.
Virgil said, “Several people who knew your husband quite well said there’s no doubt that it’s his voice on the recording. We’re wondering why you said it wasn’t.”
Quill recoiled, said, “I did not—”
Trane said, “Nancy, you can tell us you want a lawyer and kick us out or you can tell us the truth, but you can’t lie to us without serious consequences. You’re about to lie to us. Don’t lie. We can both see it because you’re no good at it.”
After a moment, and with considerable frost in her voice, Quill said, “I have to make a phone call.”
Virgil: “Go ahead.”
* * *
—
Quill went back to a bedroom and shut the door. After a moment of silence, Trane said, “If we hear a gunshot, I’m making a run for it.”
“You know her better than I do. She’s smart, right?”
“Yes. She’s an associate professor of linguistics.”
“When you played the recording for her, I’ll bet it meant something more than Barth Quill’s voice. Either she knew the other people on the recording or she knows the case they were talking about . . . or . . . something else that I can’t think of.”
They speculated for a few minutes, then Quill reappeared, and said, “I talked to my attorney. He said I shouldn’t talk to you without him present, but he can’t come here tonight. He said we could talk tomorrow.”
“What time?” Trane asked.
“Ten o’clock, at his office in Minneapolis.”
Trane looked at Virgil. “Can you make that?”
“Sure. Will you be there?”
“If I can. But this trial . . . I might not be able to make it.”
* * *
—
Back outside, Trane asked, “You okay with handling this?”
“I’m fine. And I’ve got some other running around I want to do.”
“I was mostly interested in seeing Nancy’s first reaction,” Trane said. “We know she lied to me, but we don’t know why. If her attorney shuts her down tomorrow without any explanation, then we’ll have something to work with. Something on the Quill murder. On the other hand, maybe it’s just something embarrassing . . . Something sleazy.”
“You could be right,” Virgil said. “I’ll push her about the recording. I’d like to know how old it is, who else is on it, if she has any idea about who they’re talking about, the guy Quill wanted to operate on. I’ll try to open her up. The woman I talked to in the lab said the recording would be important enough to kill for, if it’s recent. Although . . .”
“What?”
“If the recording was important enough to kill for, wouldn’t it be Quill who would have done the killing? Killing a blackmailer? The other guys on the recording were trying to talk him out of what he wanted to do.”
“We don’t know what we’re talking about, Virgil. If the other men talked him out of the operation, refused to go along, then the recording’s not so important,” Trane said. “But if they did do it and the patient died, that’s something entirely different. You could argue that it was murder. The fact that Quill had apparently listened to the recording recently, or maybe even had just gotten it in the mail or something, suggests that the threat was active. Was real. Right now.”
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Virgil went back to the hotel, hit Applebee’s—Bourbon Street Steak, fries, lemonade—got a brew at the beer joint, where he found Harry sitting on a barstool talking to Alice, the barmaid.
Virgil climbed up on the next stool, said, “Harry, Alice.”
Harry said, “Another bottle of cow piss?”
Virgil said, “Yep,” and Alice went away to get it.
“Catch the kid yet?” Harry asked.
“I investigated every one of them that I know about and they’re all clearly innocent,” Virgil lied. “Your theory sucks a hot desert wind.”
“Haven’t found the right kid yet, that’s all,” Harry said. “Let me make another observation—also from the files of NCIS.”