They all agreed, and one of the women, whose name was Ann-something, said, “I work here, and I didn’t know about it.”
“Okay. What I’m asking is, what could he do with an extraordinarily fast laptop that he would want to keep in a secret place and that would have something on it that would be worth killing for? That has to do with his research?”
The three looked at one another and simultaneously shrugged.
Virgil: “Goddamnit, people, I’m asking for speculation here, not evidence, not proof.”
The second woman, who was named Rosalind-something, said, “Okay. Suppose he detected something in our lab results that the rest of us haven’t seen. We’ve been working on microinsertion of adipose-tissue-derived stem cells into traumatically damaged spinal cords. Now, if he spotted something significant, that could be valuable to a biology-based medical company.”
Anderson said, “But then you have to ask, what would Barth have gotten out of it? A, money. But he already had more money than he needed and gave a lot of it away. B, anonymity for an important scientific discovery. But one thing Barth was known for, that pissed off a lot of people, was that he always wanted credit. He wanted the full credit for what came out of the lab. His name always came first on the papers.”
Rosalind leaned back into the conversation. “How about this? What if he was using the machine to review the work of other teams and he didn’t want anyone to know about it? He’s always said there was a lot of bad science going on. What if he found a whopper in our area? A paper that got something wrong, maybe committed outright fraud, and he was using his machine to work through the numbers and demonstrate that? That might be worth killing for.”
Ann nodded. “Never thought of that. You know, with these new online papers, the open publication business, there’s a lot of bad science. If he found something and was going back and forth with that person, you might have somebody who needed to both get rid of Dr. Quill and get ahold of the laptop.”
“How would they even know about the laptop?” Virgil asked. “Or where it was?”
“We’re not computer people, but I think a real hacker could do that,” Ann said.
Rosalind said, “How about this? He found something bad and got some hacker at the university to access that lab’s computer system. Once he knew how to get in, he could get in anytime. That’s just typing. So he’s sneaking around in there, pulling out stuff, and the other lab spots him and calls in some security service to find out who’s hacking them. They find out where the computer is and go after it.”
They all looked at one another, and then Ann said, “I see one big problem with that, from your perspective.”
“Tell me,” Virgil said.
“If the computer’s in the river, and Dr. Quill is dead, and you don’t have any other evidence, DNA, fingerprints—any of that—how would you ever find out what was going on and who was involved? I think you’d be, you know, screwed.”
“Wish you hadn’t said that,” Virgil said. Then, “A woman who works in the library told me she’d seen a man hanging around Dr. Quill’s carrel last winter. Had kind of brownish red hair, a little porky, a ponytail . . .”
Rosalind put her fingers to her lips, turned to Anderson, and said, “Boyd Nash.”
Anderson leaned back in his chair as if slapped. “Oh . . . Let’s . . . Ah, Jesus . . .”
Virgil registered the name but couldn’t remember exactly where he’d seen it. “Who’s Boyd Nash?”
“He’s this guy. You know, those guys who drive around the country looking for antiques they can buy cheap? They’re called pickers?”
“Antiques?” Virgil said. “I don’t—”
“Nash is like a picker, but he doesn’t pick antiques, he picks scientific ideas. He’s a giant asshole.”
“And a creep,” Rosalind said. “He dyes his hair so it’s auburn, but he’s got all this furry white hair coming out of his ears.”
Virgil: “Wait a minute. He does something with patents? Did you guys tell Sergeant Trane about him?”
“I might have mentioned him in passing,” Anderson said. “I don’t have any good reason to think he’d hurt Barth, but he’s such a greedy, criminal pissant.”
Rosalind: “He did patent trolling. The most unethical . . . I don’t think he still does it, he got in some kind of trouble.”
“Tell me about patent trolling. Sergeant Trane mentioned it, but I don’t remember the details,” Virgil said.
“Nash has some kind of technical or scientific background. He’d look for companies or labs that were doing research toward a certain product. Something that can be monetized. What he did was, he’d figure out what must be part of that product when it’s finally produced.”
“Give me an example,” Virgil said.
Ann jumped in. “Supposed you knew Apple was doing research on cell phones, so you draw up plans for a tiny microphone, or speaker, because you know the phone will have to have those things. Then you say your tiny speakers are to be used in cell phones and you patent them without any research at all,” she said. “When the iPhone comes out, you sue, claiming it infringes on your crappy patent. Usually, it’s a bunch of unethical lawyers, and all they have going for themselves is the willingness to sue forever and be a nuisance until the company they’re suing finally buys them off.”
“Okay. Trane told me about this guy. But you don’t think he’s still doing that?”
Anderson said, “I heard—I don’t know where—that he moved over to industrial spying. Instead of faking patents, he’s looking for people willing to sell out original research. Real research. Go to Motorola and figure out what they were doing with phones and then try to peddle that information to Apple.”
Ann said, “I heard—I don’t know if it’s true—that some witness got caught lying in court about one of his patent trolls, and it looked like he could be in serious trouble, and so could the law firm he was working with. Subornation of perjury or something.”
“I heard that he and the law firm broke up, and that’s when he went to industrial spying,” Anderson added.
“And he might have approached somebody at this lab?”
“Not Barth, but a couple of surgeons over at the med school who worked with us. They told him to take a hike and reported Nash to the university,” Anderson said. “The guy lives here in the Minneapolis area, and he’s been known to snoop around Medtronic, Boston Scientific, 3M, St. Jude, and a whole bunch of hearing aid companies. Either Medtronic or Boston Scientific actually got a restraining order against him, is what I hear.”