* * *
—
Quill had an office and lab in Moos Tower, a research center on campus. He would spend mornings there, arriving around eight o’clock after a stop at a Starbucks, where he picked up coffee and a slice of banana or pumpkin bread, which he ate at his desk.
The next few hours were spent conferring with his senior lab assistants and reviewing ongoing work. In the afternoons, he often left the lab to walk and think, sometimes returning to work on into the evening on scientific papers. The lab’s work had been published in all the major medical journals concerned with spinal injuries.
Trane noted that Quill’s assistants called him either Barth—not Bart—or Dr. Quill. He had a medical degree, but had never used it to practice; he also had a Ph.D. in biomedicine and had done advanced work in biorobotics.
After leaving the lab on Friday, Quill had met with a professor of microsurgery and a professor of radiology at the university medical center. That meeting had lasted until about three o’clock.
He’d been sighted by two medical students at Coffman Memorial Union around three o’clock, at the coffee bar; and may have been sighted by two neighbors, walking near his home, around five o’clock, but that was uncertain.
According to Trane’s reports, Quill lived alone in a large redbrick house on East River Parkway, within long walking distance of his lab. In good weather, he often walked, and occasionally biked, to the university. If he’d actually been spotted by the neighbors, that was the last time he’d been seen alive by any witnesses Trane had been able to locate.
* * *
—
Quill’s estranged wife lived in a condo, owned by Quill, east of the university. At the time of his death, they were negotiating the terms of a divorce. There was a severe prenuptial agreement. Interestingly, the estranged wife would get little of Quill’s money, and no alimony at all, if they divorced while he was alive, but would inherit a substantial fortune if he “predeceased” her.
Virgil said, “Huh,” but noted that the wife had an ironclad alibi—she was also an academic and had been in Cleveland attending a conference on the structure of natural languages. That didn’t mean she couldn’t have had an accomplice to do the killing.
The will—actually, a revocable trust—dictated precisely what would happen with Quill’s estate when he died. Other than his estranged wife, nobody would get more or less if Quill were killed yesterday or thirty years later; but most would get it sooner if he were killed yesterday.
His daughter was an exception. Under the terms of the trust, she was to be paid sixty thousand dollars a year until she was thirty, the money intended to cover her education. After age thirty, she wouldn’t get another nickel—ever. Since she was already getting the payments from the trust, it made no financial difference to her when or whether Quill died.
* * *
—
Trane had gone to Verizon, Quill’s phone service provider, and had extracted a record of where the phone had been. The phone had been turned off around six o’clock on Friday night, but Verizon’s automated system had continued to track it until midnight. Quill had been around his house and neighborhood until about nine-thirty, when he’d driven to an area known as Dinkytown. He’d left his car in a private parking lot and never gone back to it.
After leaving the car, he’d wandered around on foot, with no protracted stops. Then the phone traced a walk across the campus and then across a footbridge over the Mississippi.
At midnight, the phone had been turned back on, in the library—but then, ten minutes later, again outside the library, it had disappeared altogether. At six o’clock the next morning, it popped up again, on the footbridge between the east and west banks of the river. A Google search had been made of Starbucks, perhaps to check opening times. The phone then was carried to the library, which didn’t open until eight, had been turned off again there, was tracked for a few more minutes, then disappeared again. It hadn’t yet reappeared on Verizon’s records. Or been found.
“You’re telling me that he was killed Saturday morning, before the library opened. He must’ve had a key to an outside door to get up to his carrel,” Virgil said to Trane.
She turned from her computer. “He had a key, no question about that,” Trane said. “We don’t know who gave it to him. Of course, it’s possible that somebody with a key let him in. I talked to an assistant at the library, who said she saw him once very shortly after the library opened coming out of his carrel. Not to say that he couldn’t have been waiting outside and got in the minute it opened, but she had the impression that he might have slept in the library. Doesn’t know for sure. I originally thought he must’ve been killed after six-fifteen, the last time we can locate his phone, but now . . .”
She pressed a hand to the side of her face, thinking about it, and Vigil asked, “What?”
“I keep reminding myself, I know where the cell phone was,” Trane said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure where Quill was—that he was with the phone. The cell wasn’t with the body, and neither were the computer nor his keys. We know he kept his house and office keys on his car fob. He was driving a BMW that night—the BMW that we found in the parking lot.”
“If Verizon can track phones when they’re turned off—”
“They can, if the battery isn’t pulled.”
“—then what happened when it disappeared? He took the battery out?”
“That would be one way, but there are a couple of others. You can buy cases that shield phones from electromagnetic radiation. Maybe he had one.”
“Or the killer did,” Virgil said.
“Yup—or the killer did. It’s possible he was killed at midnight, and the subsequent tracks were the killer’s. It’s also possible that Quill had a phone shield case. Met somebody at the library, dropped his phone in the case so he couldn’t be tracked, spent the night somewhere—maybe with a woman?—then went back to the library the next morning and was killed there. None of his lab associates ever saw such a case. If he was deliberately blocking his phone at times, he might have kept it a secret. The Verizon records don’t show any previous instances, though.”
“Then if the phone was shielded, it was most likely the killer who did it,” Virgil said.
“You could make that argument. If that’s right, Quill was most likely killed at midnight. But then the killer would have to have had Quill’s access code, because it popped up again the next morning.”
“All this only applies if Quill’s phone had a keypad code. Or maybe a fingerprint code . . .”
“He did have a code and he kept it secret,” Trane said. “We know that from his wives . . . And he hadn’t changed phones since the second divorce.”