Anderson was waiting, offered Virgil a cup of coffee, which Virgil declined, and they went back to his office, and Virgil shut the door. “I want to play a recording for you. I would have played it before, but I didn’t. Anyway, listen to this.”
Virgil played the recording, and Anderson frowned. “That’s appalling. And it sounds like Barth.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Well, it sounds like Barth, but, no, I’m not sure.”
“His wife thinks it’s probably him,” Virgil said. “Another member of the lab staff is sure it is.”
“Okay, it probably is,” Anderson said, frowning, bewildered. “Who are the other people?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” Virgil said.
“I have no idea. I know all the people who are closely involved with Barth’s work and I didn’t recognize any of their voices. You could ask some of them. The way they were talking, they must have been close to Barth.”
“Give me some names.”
Anderson said, “These guys would be over at university hospitals . . . Let me see, I’ll give you four guys . . . No, five guys . . .” He wrote the names on a scratch pad, checked a computer contact list, added their cell phone numbers, and pushed the paper across the desk to Virgil.
“You don’t think these guys were the ones talking to Dr. Quill?” Virgil asked.
“No. But maybe they’d have some ideas who they might be. If they’re real.”
“If they’re real? They sound pretty real to me.”
Anderson shook his head. “Listen, Virgil, I need to explain something to you. Okay? Listen carefully.”
“I’m listening carefully,” Virgil said.
Anderson leaned back in his desk chair, looked briefly at the ceiling as he gathered his thoughts. “What we do here uses multiple disciplines—chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, brain science, surgery—and we pull in all kinds of scientists and doctors. What that recording refers to, apparently, was a proposed unethical operation on somebody suffering from a spinal injury. That’s not something you pull out of your butt. That’s not something you can hide. When we do an op, there are usually a couple of dozen people directly involved, everybody from scientists and surgeons to accountants. The surgical team alone would probably have a lead surgeon plus one or two assistant surgeons. Even the assistants would be big shots on their own. Barth would be in the room probably with one of our techs, or even two. There might be residents coming and going, and for sure several nurses, surgical techs, anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists, imaging people, radiologists, and maybe some specialists in other fields—engineering, for instance. There’s no Weird Science stuff going on, surgeries in the middle of the night by a couple of guys using lightning bolts for power. If a little cabal of doctors tried to pull off an unethical operation in Barth’s field, they’d be immediately ratted out and challenged and hanged by their nuts the next day.”
“Then what the hell is happening there?” Virgil demanded.
“I don’t know. That sounded like Barth on the recording, but I don’t know. I mean, it’s like movie dialogue where they have to make things simple. The reality isn’t simple. In Barth’s field, it takes weeks or months to get an op together. Hours of talk and work. Whole seminars. It’s all very public.”
Virgil: “What if they had a guy they hadn’t started on yet, all very preliminary, even before the guy was in your system? Quill knew he couldn’t get past these other people without talking to them. I mean, they hadn’t even talked to the human experimentation committee—or whatever it’s called—yet.”
Anderson chewed on his lip for a few seconds, then looked up. “Yeah. It could work that way. In fact, that’s about the only way it makes sense.”
* * *
—
Down in his truck again, Virgil sat and rubbed his eyes, then got on the phone to Trane.
“Where are you?”
“Courthouse,” Trane said. “Might not be able to talk. They could call me this morning. On the other hand, they might not. There’re rumors that the defendant’s attorneys might make a bunch of motions about evidentiary custody this afternoon.”
“I talked to Anderson, Quill’s lab manager.”
“What’d he say?”
Virgil told her about the conversation and Anderson’s conclusion. “He thinks it’s possible that this was a preliminary, very secret talk, so it’s possible. Barely possible. He thinks it was Quill on the recording, but he’s not absolutely sure.”
Silence. Then, “You need to jack up some doctors.”
“I got a list of names from Anderson, people who worked with Quill. He thinks that if the recording is real, some of them might be able to tell us who the other voices belong to. He doesn’t think they belong to any of them.”
“We need to jump all over that, get those guys on the list, see what they think. We need to follow through. Nancy now says it was Quill?”
“Sorta. But she’s like Anderson: she says she can’t swear to it,” Virgil said. “She thinks the people on the tape sound odd. She might have a point.”
“Listen, you’ve got that list of doctors. There’s a decent chance that those guys know the people on the recording. And maybe even the killer,” Trane said. “Why in the hell am I sitting here on my ass? I need to be out there. You, go jack up those doctors.”
* * *
—
Because it was summer and the new semester was barely underway, two of the five doctors were out of town at their northern Minnesota fishing cabins. The other three, though, were in town, just scattered around. Because he wanted to talk to them face-to-face, it took Virgil the rest of the day to track them down.
Robert Harris, a microsurgeon and the last of the three that Virgil interviewed, said the same things the other two did. “I don’t know those voices, I really don’t. Not except for Barth’s, of course—if that is Barth. Must have been a long time ago or very recent, nothing in the middle. We’ve got a solid team, and have had for five or six years now. Nobody wants to leave. We get our names in the journals, we make the big bucks. Barth could be a prick, but he was our prick. And, frankly, pricks are not unknown among the surgical fraternity. Not only can we handle it, it’s a fact of life.”
“If it’s recent—and I have to think it’s recent—he was listening to the recording shortly before he was killed,” Virgil said.
“How shortly?”