“Okay, eleven. Even if it’s one of them, the other ten are innocent.”
“Paying money for sex is a crime…” Lucas said.
“Give me a fuckin’ break.”
—
They all satin silence for a few seconds, then Virgil said, “Give us the name. We’ll call you a confidential informant and we won’t give you up.”
More silence, then, “Lawrence Klink, PhD.”
Virgil and Lucas looked at each other, and then back at O’Brien.
Lucas: “Klink the Shrink?”
“Yeah. Klink the Shrink.”
Lawrence Klink had had a long-running call-in show on a public radio network, then, after a while, when the ratings got high enough, he’d moved to a commercial station. He also had a popular blog. He didn’t call himself Klink the Shrink, but everybody else did. He liked attention, and every couple of weeks would show up in aStar-Tribunegossip column. The columns, as far as Lucas and Virgil knew, were never about his love life, they mostly concerned his discussions of the effects of social media on children; and about his real estate holdings, which included condos in Manhattan, San Diego, Austin, Vail, and Fort Lauderdale.
Klink famously believed that you could determine where investors could make large gains in real estate values through psychological analysis of public comments by artists and the female nouveau riche. His view was encapsulated in a bestselling book calledPaint Me aRiche Bitche.
“How’d you know Klink?” Virgil asked.
“This was way back when—twenty years ago. We hung out in the same kinda political, academic, media circles. I’d see him in clubs checking out the good-looking women, but never saw him walk out with one. You know about Klink’s nose?”
“Yeah, it’s somewhat famous,” Virgil said.
“The fact is, his nose looks like the fuckin’ Hindenburg. This meant that, uh, Lawrence did not do well with certain kinds of women. I was dating Doris at the time, and I mentioned her name and…status…to him. He picked up on that. We never talked aboutit, but I saw him with Doris one night and he nodded to me, so I knew. Like he was saying thanks.”
“So he had a somewhatstressedattitude toward women?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, but he didn’t kill Doris. He…you gotta know him. I don’t think he’d ever do anything that was physically risky. I believe if he’d attacked Doris, she would have beaten the shit out him.”
More silence, then Virgil said, “You’ll take the DNA test? We’ll send a technician around and she’ll do a little gum scrub, in your office, privately. Nobody will know.”
O’Brien put up his hands, as if in surrender. “Okay. Bring her on. I gotta tell you, though, I don’t believe you. Somebody will leak my name. I don’t think the association will fire me, but they might. I’ll tell them that I was a kid in an unhappy marriage, that I was drinking, that I met her in a bar, blah blah blah. Maybe they’ll let me hang on. But some of these other guys…the ones they’re hunting down, they’re fucked. Am I right? Am I right?”
—
Back in thetruck, Lucas said, “He’s right. Some of those guys are about to get their lives wrecked, if the true-crimers find them.”
“They’ll find them,” Virgil said. “That’s one thing they can do. We made it possible.”
“Yeah, well, we’re trying to catch a killer,” Lucas said. Then: “You ever nail a hooker?”
“No. How about you?”
“Nope. They kinda scare me,” Lucas said. “They are the world’s natural nihilists. A lot of them don’t believe in anything. Given the way they try to get through life…”
“I didn’t exactly come close…” Virgil started, then stopped.
“C’mon, let it out.”
“I was working a guy who did strong-arm robberies,” Virgil said, looking through the windshield, remembering. “Good planner. Never carried a gun. Giant guy, spent all day lifting weight out in the barn. Carried a sap, and he’d use it, if he had to. Anyway, he was hard to catch at it. His girlfriend was doing two years in the women’s prison at the time, and I drove up to talk to her. See if she could give me something. The place was more like a dormitory than a prison, at least for her…”
“I’ve been there,” Lucas said.
“Anyway, there was a woman there, she used to run a high-end brothel down in Rochester, mostly, you know, for the Mayo Clinic docs. She was doing a year and a day inside. So I was talking to the asshole’s girlfriend, and this brothel madam came over and asked, like, ‘What’s up?’ She was friends with the girlfriend. I was trying to get the girlfriend warmed up enough that she’d give me something, so I pulled this chick into the conversation, introduced myself. I gotta say, she was very good-looking. Very.”
