“Won’t last,” Duncan said.
“No, but we’ll get some slack,” Virgil said. “Right now, we’re gonna go jack up Klink the Shrink.”
“Talk to me,” Duncan said, urgently. “Call me.”
—
Another nice summerday, though with a thunderhead forming its anvil off in the distance; the niceness was something they were having a hard time appreciating inside a Tahoe. They motored back across the Mississippi after calling Klink’s office to make sure he was there. Virgil identified himself as a member of the American Psychiatric Association, and the woman who answered the phone said, “One moment please, I’ll see if Dr. Klink is with a patient.”
She put them on hold and Virgil hung up. “We’re on.”
—
The trip toMinneapolis took twenty minutes. They drove around for a while, circling Klink’s office but unable to find a parking spot, until finally they left the truck in a no-parking zone. Virgil put a BCA placard—Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Official Business—on the dashboard where a meter reader might see it.
Klink’s building was one of the older ones in downtown Minneapolis, dating to pre–World War II, reinforced concrete and bland as a boiled potato. They rode up six floors in a rickety elevator and walked down the hall to Klink’s office; the hallway smelled faintly of mold and carpet cleaner, though it was neat enough.
Klink’s office door was both anonymous and locked—a brass plaque said only “621.” An LED doorbell light glowed discreetly below the plaque. They pressed the button and a woman’s voice, the same one who’d put them on hold, asked, “Who is it?”
Virgil had called, so Lucas responded: “U.S. Marshals Service. Official business. Open up.”
The door buzzed, and they pushed through.
On the other side, they found themselves in a small, square room with a desk on one side and four chairs, facing each other, on the other. The room had plastic wallpaper of the kind used in hospitals to make it easier to clean up blood and other fluids. A woman in a purplish patterned dress was retreating down a hallway in front of them, then stopping at an open door. They couldn’t hear what she said, but she was apparently talking with Klink. The man himself stepped into the doorway, and gestured them forward with his fingers.
“Can I help you? I’m recording a blog entry…”
“We need to talk privately,” Lucas said. “Shouldn’t take too long.”
Klink was a tall man, thin, balding, with warm brown eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. The glasses were perched on a nose the size of a hot dog bun. His hair was receding and he wore a spade beard, the image of a psychiatrist, although he wasn’t one. He appeared to be about fifty. He had a deep voice with a flat Great Lakes accent. “Can you tell me what this is about?”
“Yes, in private,” Lucas said.
Klink regarded them warily, tipped his head toward the back of the office space: “We have a consultation room. That should be comfortable.”
They followed him down the hallway past a compact recording studio, where another woman, much younger, dressed all in black, was fussing with a video setup and microphone. “What’s going on?”
“We have a delay—an urgent consultation requested by the police. We’ll be in the consult room. I’m told it shouldn’t be long.”
“We’re running a little tight,” the woman said. “We need another six minutes outside the ads…”
“I understand. I’ll be back,” Klink said.
As they continued down the hall, Klink looked over his shoulder and said, “We have a radio deal where the blog entry is first broadcast before we put it up on the ’net. We need to be on time with it. Exactly on time.”
“Okay,” Virgil said.
The consult room was soft, quiet, a circle of comfortable leather chairs facing each other, with beige-pink walls to soothe the troubled mind. Klink waved them into two of the chairs, sat himself, crossed his legs, and asked, “What’s this all about?”
Virgil: “Twenty-three years ago, you were a customer of a woman,Doris Grandfelt, who sold sex to customers who she met on the Minneapolis club scene. She was murdered, which you must know, and we have some questions for you.”
Klink slapped the arm of his chair, half rose, sank back and said, “That is slander, sir! That is slander!”
Virgil: “We have a witness who knows you, and says that you were one of Doris’s…”
Now Klink stood up: “If you wish to question me, you’ll do it in the presence of my lawyer. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Neither Virgil nor Lucas moved, and Virgil looked up at Klink and said, “That’s certainly your right. But one way or another, we’re going to get some questions answered—or, maybe we won’t, depending on how smart your lawyer is, and how guilty you are. We will get a search warrant for a DNA specimen from you, unless you give us one voluntarily. A search warrant, once filed, is a public record…”
