Bloody Genius Read online

  Jewel Blue, the voice of scorn: “Dream on, Poindexter.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil scratched his chin, momentarily at a loss. He was a tall, thin, blue-eyed man, with blond hair curling well down over his ears. He was wearing a canvas sport coat over a “Moon Taxi” T-shirt and jeans, with cowboy boots and a blue ball cap. As an official law enforcement officer of the state of Minnesota—L’Étoile du Nord—he thought he should do something about an alien invasion but didn’t know exactly what. Call it in maybe?

  He watched the thing for another moment, the flickering light, then walked over to his truck and dug out a pair of Canon 10-power image-stabilizing binoculars for a closer look. He saw a teardrop-shaped research balloon, several stories high, probably made of translucent polyethylene film. The low-angle sunlight was refracting through it. Most likely flown out of Iowa State University in Ames, he thought, which was more or less directly to the south.

  “What do you see?” asked the woman with the dreadlocks.

  “Weather balloon,” Virgil said.

  “That’s what they always call it. A weather balloon. Next thing you know, you got an alien probe up your ass,” somebody said.

  Virgil passed the binoculars around, and they all looked. And then they all went home, disappointed. A UFO invasion would have been a hell of a lot more interesting than Spam ’n’ Eggs for dinner. He took the binoculars back to his truck, noticed that he hadn’t pulled the plug out of the boat, pulled it, and water started running down into the parking lot.

  On his way out of Blue Earth, Virgil saw more groups of people standing in parking lots, watching the UFO. If he wasn’t careful, he could wind up investigating a balloon.

  * * *

  —

  Jon Duncan, a supervising agent at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, called as Virgil crossed I-90, heading north on Highway 169. “We need you to investigate a murder.”

  “Where at?”

  “University of Minnesota,” Duncan said.

  “What happened?” Virgil asked. “And why me?”

  “A professor got murdered. Head bashed in,” Duncan said.

  “Again?”

  “What?”

  “A professor got murdered there two weeks ago,” Virgil said. “Is this another one?”

  “No, no. Same one,” Duncan said. “Minneapolis Homicide is working it, but they got nothing. Turns out the professor was the brother of this rich woman—Boopsie, or Bunny, or Biffy, something like that, last name Quill—who gave a lot of money to the governor’s campaign. And you know what the governor thinks of you . . .”

  “Ah, Jesus, I hate that guy,” Virgil said. “Why doesn’t he leave me alone?”

  “Because you’re good at doing favors for people like him and he’s good at doing favors for rich people,” Duncan said. “You brought it on yourself, with that school board thing.”

  With Virgil investigating, the state attorney general (at the time) had managed to send most of a school board to prison for murder; the attorney general, who’d actually done nothing but look good on TV, had taken full credit for the investigation and subsequent prosecution and was now the governor. He did have broad shoulders, a baritone voice, and extra-white teeth.

  “You know it’ll piss off the Minneapolis cops,” Virgil said.

  “Does that bother you?”

  Virgil said, “Well, yeah, it does, as a matter of fact.”

  “Huh. Too bad. Doesn’t bother me at all, since I won’t be there,” Duncan said. “Anyway, I have a name for you: Margaret Trane. A sergeant with Minneapolis Homicide. Known as Maggie. She’s leading the investigation, coordinating with the campus cops.”

  “Don’t know her,” Virgil said. “She any good?”

  “Can’t say,” Duncan said. “I judge women by their looks and the size of their breasts, not whether they’re competent detectives.” After a moment of empty air, Duncan blurted, “For Christ’s sakes, don’t tell anybody I said that. I mean, I was joking, okay? Big joke. Maybe a little insensitive . . .”

  “I’m not recording you,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, but somebody might be, you never know,” Duncan said. Virgil could imagine him looking over his shoulder. “We have the most amazing surveillance stuff now, right here at BCA. I’ve been messing with it all week. Anyway, get your ass up here tomorrow. The governor would like to see this solved by the end of the week.”

  “It’s already Thursday,” Virgil said.

  “Better get moving, then,” Duncan said.

  Virgil didn’t want to go to the Twin Cities to mess around in a Minneapolis murder investigation. The cops there handled more murders in a year than the BCA did. And they were good at it.

  Virgil tried to tap-dance. “You know, I’m supposed to be working that thing in Fulda . . . There are some pretty influential religious groups—”

  Duncan interrupted. “Are you towing a boat?”

  “A boat?” Virgil could see the Ranger Angler, riding high and still damp, in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Virgie. That thing in Fulda is weird, but it’s basically chasing chickens. And you’re towing your boat, which means you don’t care about Fulda any more than I do. Get your ass to Minneapolis. I got you a room at the Graduate, by the U. It’s your dream hotel—it’s got a beer joint, a Starbucks, and, the pièce de résistance, an Applebee’s. Mmm-mmm.”

  “Does sound good,” Virgil admitted.

  “The kind of place I’d stay. Any questions?”

  “All kinds of them, but you won’t have the answers,” Virgil said. “Talk to Trane before I get up there so she’ll know I’m coming and it’s not my fault.”

  “I can do that,” Duncan said. “I’ll blame it on the governor. Anything else I should know?”

  “There’s a UFO hovering over Iowa, due south of Blue Earth,” Virgil said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Duncan said. “So, I’ll email the media coverage of this killing. You’ll have it before you get home.”

  “I’ll be home in about five minutes.”

  “No you won’t—you just crossed I-90 heading north. We got a new toy, and I’m tracking your cell phone. Have been ever since you pulled your goddamn boat off the goddamn Mississippi.”

  * * *

  —

  The Fulda incident.

  A minister with the Universal Life Church—“Get Ordained Today!”—had married six people, three men and three women, to one another as a group, and they’d sent a nude photo off to The New York Times, which of course had published it on their “Vows” page, with the appropriate black rectangles covering the naughty bits, along with a narrative about the ceremony.

  “We believe there should be no barrier whatsoever to personal sexual expression, in whatever combination the voluntary participants feel to be genuinely authentic,” blah, blah, blah.

  If the group wedding had actually taken place, it violated Minnesota law. Various conservative ministerial associations had demanded action. Action required investigation to make sure that nobody in officialdom was getting his or her weenie pulled.

  Virgil was the designated hitter, but when he got the assignment, his eyes had rolled so far up into his head that he could see his scalp. He had not yet begun to investigate, despite increasing pressure. When asked why, by an attractive, if somewhat hefty, Rochester television reporter with whom he was sharing a bag of donuts in the Mankato Dunkin’ Donuts, he’d unwisely replied, “I had to wash my hair.”

  * * *

  —

  He took the opportunity to negotiate with Jon Duncan. “If I investigate up in Minneapolis, I won’t have time for Fulda.”

  “I understand that. If you’re out of pocket, I’ll pass the word to our new attorney general and get him to send one of his own dimwitted investigators out t
here.”

  “Man, you’re developing the righteous bureaucratic chops,” Virgil said, impressed.

  “I am, it’s true,” Duncan said. He’d once been a competent investigator. “I’ll call Trane and tell her you’ll be there by noon tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil pulled into the farm an hour later, backed the boat into the barn next to the new used compact John Deere tractor they’d bought the previous autumn. They’d rigged it for plowing snow, as well as general farm utility use, and a good thing, too: the past winter had started off easy, but turned ugly in late January and stayed that way. By early March, they’d had a snowdrift in the side yard that reached up to the lowest wire on the clothesline. Then came April and thundersnow. Now, in early September, the snow was gone, barely, and the tractor was hooked up to an aging hay baler.

  The farm belonged to Virgil’s pregnant girlfriend, Frankie, who was expecting twins sometime in the next couple of months. An ultrasound said they were getting one of each. Frankie, her blond hair done in a pigtail, waddled across the barnyard to meet him.

  “Catch anything good?”

  “Walleyes. Johnson Johnson’s going to clean and freeze them; we’ll have a fish fry the next time we go over.”

  “Good. Listen, Rolf is baling tomorrow—it looks like it could rain Monday, so we got to get it in,” she said, squinting up into the UFO-free sky.

  She was talking about hay, which was already cut and laying in windrows in the alfalfa field. Rolf was the oldest of her five sons.

  “Aw, jeez, honey, Jon Duncan called—”

  Fists on her hips. “You’re trying to slide out of it again?”

  “Hey, c’mon, it’s work. That professor who got killed up in Minneapolis. Jon wants me up there by noon tomorrow . . .” He was tap-dancing like crazy.

  “If you leave here at ten o’clock, you’ll get there in plenty of time. And if you get up at five, you could throw for four hours before you have to clean up.”

  “Five o’clock? Mother of God, Frankie . . .”

  “Well, I can’t do it. Goodyear called and offered me a hundred dollars to paint their logo on my stomach.” She was blimp-like. She’d started out short, slender, and busty but now sometimes seemed to Virgil to be wider than she was tall.

  “Ah, well. Another couple of months, babe.”

  She rubbed her stomach. “I don’t know. I’ve been through this a few times and I think it could be sooner. Hope so. This is getting to be a load.”

  * * *

  —

  Virgil rolled out the driveway the next morning at ten-fifteen, having kissed both Frankie and his yellow dog, Honus, good-bye. He took two days’ worth of clothes, figuring he wouldn’t be working on Sunday and would be back home. On the way out the door, Frankie called, “You wanna know what was the last thing Honus licked before he kissed you good-bye?”

  Well, no, he didn’t, but he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, thinking, Probably his balls. I hope his balls.

  Though the morning had been cool, Virgil’s aching arms and neck were covered with thin red scratches from the bales of dried alfalfa he’d been throwing; it would have been much worse if it’d been hot and he’d had to work in a T-shirt. They still hadn’t gotten in more than half the field, but Frankie’s second- and third-oldest boys, Tall Bear and Moses, would be throwing that afternoon.

  * * *

  —

  Virgil liked all the aspects of living on a farm, except for the farmwork. His parents always had a garden, and the teenage Virgil was expected to put in time picking and pulling and shucking, not because they needed the food, but because it was good for him. Later, as a teenager, he’d detassled corn in the summer to make money.

  He hated it all. He was a rocker, not a horticulturalist.

  Frankie kept an oversized vegetable garden—potatoes, tomatoes, sweet corn, squash, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, green beans, like that—out behind the barn in what had been, decades earlier, a pigsty. A variety of annual flower and herb beds sprawled along the driveway and the front of the house, and all had to be prepped, planted, watered, and harvested.

  A month earlier, Virgil had yanked a stunted orange, dirt-smelling carrot out of the ground, had flicked an earthworm off it, and said, “All of that fuckin’ work for this? Are you kiddin’ me?”

  Frankie’d laughed. She’d thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

  And she had that clothesline in the side yard, left over from the seventeenth century or something. She had a perfectly good clothes dryer, but she made Virgil tote the wet bedsheets and blankets out to the line in the summer because, she said, they smelled like sunshine when they were dry. Virgil had to admit she was right about that.

  But carrots? You could get a perfectly good bag of peeled carrots at the supermarket for, what, a couple of bucks?

  And that was more carrots than he’d eat in a month . . .

  * * *

  —

  He cut 169 at St. Peter, headed north, rolled past the farm fields and suburbs and then up the interstate highway, I-35W, toward the glass towers of downtown Minneapolis, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore on the satellite radio singing “Downey to Lubbock.” If he could play guitar like Alvin, or the harp like Gilmore, he’d now be famous in Texas, Virgil thought. Part of Texas anyway. Okay, maybe only in Cut and Shoot, but somewhere in Texas.

  He parked outside the Minneapolis City Hall in one of the spots reserved for cops, put a BCA card on the dashboard, sighed, and went inside.

  * * *

  —

  The Minneapolis City Hall was not a pretty place, inside or out, and was the most barren public building Virgil had ever been in. Narrow, empty hallways were punctured by closed doors that rarely seemed to open at all. Hard benches that resembled church pews were spotted along the hallways, but he’d never seen anyone sitting on one. Strange things were undoubtedly happening behind all those doors, but he couldn’t imagine what they might be.

  * * *

  —

  Minneapolis Homicide was part of a broader department that included other violent-crime units. Entry was through a tiny, dark anteroom, where a young woman sat behind a window through which she could check visitors. She looked at Virgil’s ID, said, “Let me get somebody.”

  The door to the interior popped open a minute later, and a balding cop with a smile and a coffee cup said, “C’mon . . . I’m gonna want to listen to this.”

  Virgil said, “Aw, man . . .”

  The office consisted of an L-shaped room, its two long, narrow wings wrapping around the corner of an exterior wall of the building. Working cubicles were backed up against the wall, each with two desks on opposite sides. Large windows let light into the space.

  The cubicles were not overly tidy; sport coats and jackets were hung over partition walls and paper was everywhere. The cop led Virgil down the hall past a half dozen cubicles, most empty, others with cops looking at computers. He stopped halfway down the left wing of the office, pointed at a cubicle two down from where they were standing, and half whispered, “She’s in there,” as if she were a dragon.

  * * *

  —

  Margaret Trane was a sturdy, fortyish cop with twenty years on the force. She had short brown hair, brown eyes, and was dressed in blue nylon slacks with leg pockets, a white shirt, and a blue jacket. Virgil peeked into her cubicle, where she was peering nearsightedly at a computer screen. She became aware of his presence, turned, frowned, checked his cowboy boots and T-shirt, and asked, “Yes?”

  “Okay. I’m Virgil Flowers . . . I was—”

  “I know who you are, Flowers,” she snapped, leaning back in her chair, not bothering to hide her anger. “What do you want from me?”

  “A little less hostility would help,” Virgil said. “I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here.
If I can figure a way to get out of this job, I’ll be gone.”

  “You’re pals with the governor.”

  “No. I don’t like the governor. He’s a weasel,” Virgil said. “I once did something that helped him get elected—”

  “I know about the school board thing,” Trane said. Her voice was still cold, her eyes as frosty as her voice, and skeptical. “What do you want?”

  Virgil shrugged. “Here I am. I thought if I could review what you’ve already done—”

  “Everything we’ve done so far has been useless, so there’s not much point,” she said.

  Virgil took a breath. “Look. I can start all over, by myself, get everybody confused about who’s doing what, and you won’t see me again. Be a big waste of my time, probably irritate the hell out of a lot of people, including you, but I can do it. Or, I could look at your reports and start from there.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but before she got a word out, a man who’d walked up behind Virgil said, “Margaret, could I speak to you for a moment?”

  Trane said, “I’m—”

  “I know what you’re doing, Margaret. Step in here.” He pointed to an interview room across the hall. “Right now.”

  The man was tall, thin, balding, and black; he wore rumpled gray suit pants, a white shirt, and gold-rimmed glasses. He had an empty holster on one hip. He was a cop who could have done advertisements for an accounting firm. He nodded at Virgil as Trane got up and brushed by him into the interview room. He said, “We’ll be just a moment,” and closed the door.

  * * *

  —

  The cop who’d pointed out Trane had been eavesdropping from the next cubicle. He stepped out with a grin, and said, “That’s Lieutenant Knox. Nothing like getting off on the right foot, huh? Trane’s now getting her ass handed to her by the lieutenant, which will make her even happier than she already is.”