Page 124 of Bloody Genius

Krause, he said, had been misunderstood by Megan Quill: he’d never told her that he’d killed Renborne, she had imagined it in her fear. The kidnapping, he said, had essentially been a domestic fight between friends.

None of it would wash, Trane told Virgil in a phone call, but he might evade doing a full thirty years in prison, without parole, the minimum sentence for a first degree murder charge in Minnesota. “If the state takes the second degree plea and kidnapping, served concurrently, he could get thirty years, but without doing themandatory full term of a first degree conviction. He could be out in twenty or so.”

“What’s the county attorney thinking?”

“I think they’re thinking they’ll drag along for a while. After the press gets back to worrying about movie stars and their love lives, they’ll try to sneak through the deal. His public defender is a good one: he knows every rope there is.”

“Well, at least the asshole got shot and stabbed in the eye,” Virgil said.

“There you are, brother.”

—

Katherine Green called, and asked Virgil if he thought Trane might participate in a longitudinal study of policewomen who have shot criminal suspects. Virgil said he had no idea. “Give her a call. Who knows? Could be interesting.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Green said. “Interesting.”

—

Virgil made it out of Minneapolis late Sunday night, arriving at the farm at eleven o’clock. Sam got out of bed to meet him, and Virgil and Sam and Frankie had warm rhubarb pie and vanilla ice cream in the kitchen.

When Sam was back in bed, and Virgil’s clothes were in the wash, he and Frankie went up to the bedroom. They lay awake in the dark for a while, talking about the case, and then Frankie said, “So, I needed to get a yellow highlighter pen. I couldn’t find one downstairs, but you’ve always got a bunch of them. I stuck my nose in your desk—honest, I was looking for a highlighter—and I found the novel.”

Virgil didn’t know exactly what to say. “An experiment,” he said finally. “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I’m trying some things out.”

“It’s good,” she said. “I’m not lying. It pulled me right in. Virgil, you’ve got to run with this. You’ve got to.”

“You think so?”

She rolled over so she was hovering over his face. “It could be a whole new chapter, sweetie.”

He nodded in the dark. “Okay, then. That’s what I’ll do, Frank. I’ll run with it.”