Shrake: “Wait. Mr. Jones was here?”
They all looked at Jones. Jones shook his head, and said, “I left well before Mrs. McDonald left for the store.”
“How do you know when she left for the store?” Virgil asked.
“Because we talked about it,” Jones snapped.
“Did you have a key to the house?”
“No, of course not. I’m her lawyer, not a close personal friend. I didn’t have any need for a key.”
Virgil said, “Huh.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, it just keeps getting more interesting,” Virgil said.
Shrake said, “I’m with you, big boy. This is getting fascinating.” To Jones: “Exactly what percentage do you get if you win this lawsuit? Thirty?”
“Completely irrelevant,” Jones said.
Shrake asked Hardy, “What do you think? Was the question ‘completely irrelevant’?”
Hardy’s eyebrows went up, the corners of his mouth went down. “Maybe not completely irrelevant, but if you’re suggesting that Robin came back here and . . . attacked . . . Mr. McDonald, then you’re way out of line. The question may not have been irrelevant, but the answer is clear: he, or our firm, would get paid whether or not Frank died. Look, Frank could talk perfectly well. If we wanted to get a big award, we would want nothing more than to be able to wheel Frank into the courtroom to testify. To talk about his pain and the promises that Quill made. We certainly wouldn’t want anything to happen to him. His death by suicide weakened our case, it didn’t make it stronger.”
“But the death of Dr. Quill did,” Virgil said.
* * *
—
They argued about that for a few minutes, then Hardy said, “Believe what you want to believe, but I’ll tell you—and this is the truth—I represent Abby Cohen and Mrs. McDonald, and they were both involved with Dr. Quill, in vastly different ways, in what is a gigantic, pluperfect coincidence.”
“It never occurred to you last night?”
“Of course it did, but not before then,” Hardy said. “Abby never told me that she’d been with Quill. I had no idea. Now things are fucked up. I dunno. I’d already decided I’d have to sign off as counsel to Abby. I was planning to talk to another guy this morning about taking over the case—not somebody at my firm—and I’m probably going to wind up paying him out of my own pocket.”
* * *
—
When they finished working through it all, Virgil said to McDonald, “We’re not going to take you in to question you. Somebody from the BCA or the St. Louis Park Police Department will want to have further conversations with you. Please don’t leave town, go on vacation, without telling Agent Shrake. He will give you a business card—”
“I’m not going anyplace anytime soon,” she said.
“Good. But should your plans change, notify Agent Shrake,” Virgil said. “We’ll leave it to you to further notify Mr. Hardy or Mr. Jones should we need to continue our interviews.”
“I don’t see,” Jones began, “what you could possibly hope to achieve—”
“Shut up, Robin,” Hardy said. And to Virgil: “We’re good with that. Frank McDonald committed suicide. Remember this: there is a huge coincidence here and it’s meaningless. If you want to find out who killed Quill, you’d do well to keep that in mind.”
* * *
—
Virgil followed Shrake out the door but hesitated before closing it, and he heard Jones say to Hardy, “I resent that ‘Shut up, Robin’ shit, by the way.”
Hardy said, “Something for you to think about, Robin. You’re a civil lawyer, you’re not a criminal lawyer. Those guys are cops. They know what they’re doing and you don’t. So please, shut the fuck up . . . Ruth, sorry about the language.”
Virgil went on down the steps behind Shrake.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Before they went to their separate vehicles, Shrake said, “I dunno, I might have taken her in, to ramp up the stress. To see what would come out of that.”
“I thought about it, but the lawyers are all over us—they won’t let her say a thing. And the chances of a conviction are zilch unless she admits it,” Virgil said. “We’d be wasting our time. I’d like a good close look at Jones, though. I expect your thirty percent guess was close to the mark.”
“Or more. This guy who attacked your Army guy, Foster . . . Would Jones fit?”
“Not real well. Foster’s not tall, and he said the attacker was his height, but stocky,” Virgil said. “Jones might be too tall, and he’s not especially stocky.”
“Okay. You want my opinion, I’ve got a couple,” Shrake said.
“Shoot.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if McDonald killed her husband, or at least helped him kill himself. In fact, I’d say it’s likely. One thing I’ve noticed about nurses is, they see so much death that it no longer affects them much. It’s not that they’re hard. It’s that death comes to seem like a natural, ordinary thing. She could very well have thought that she was doing him a favor. A loving favor. No thought of money, which might have come later. But—and it’s a big ‘but’—I doubt that she would have anything to do with the murder of Quill. If Jones killed Quill, he never would have told McDonald what he was going to do. There wouldn’t be a conspiracy that you could break down.”
“I agree,” Virgil said. “Next opinion.”
“About Quill. If the killer was planning to murder Quill, why didn’t he have a better weapon? You think he might have been hit with his own computer? Why? Why would anyone do that? It couldn’t have been planned that way. So either he wasn’t hit with a computer or the whole encounter was an accident. From what you told me, I think you have more to learn from the hooker. The small details. Like, the exact circumstances of the attack. Was Quill ambushed, was it planned? Or did he and the killer stumble onto each other? The killer couldn’t have known about the hooker because he never looked for her.”
“Anything else?”
“What do you think about Foster? Was it a mugging? Or was the attack involved with the Quill murder?”
“Don’t think it was a mugging.”
“If it wasn’t a mugging, then either it was involved with the Quill murder or he’s involved in something else dangerous that he’s not telling you about. That seems unlikely, a grad student. Maybe you should check his Army record, see what kind of a discharge he got. But probably that attack is somehow related to Quill. In my humble opinion.”