Klink had two fingers pressed against his lips, and then he said, “This, as you say, is confidential.”
Lucas nodded, “Yes…Unless you admit to participating in some way…”
“No, no, no…but I have a small piece of information that you may find interesting. A week before her death, perhaps ten days, I called her to see if we might get together again. She said she probably wouldn’t be dating for a while. She said she’d met somebody in the medical field and they were very drawn to each other.”
“Jesus! Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Lucas asked. “Back at the time?”
“Why do you think?” They sat and looked at each other, then Klink added, “I know I should have.”
—
Klink had nothingmore, though they talked until there was a knock on the door. When Klink said, “Come,” the door popped open on the young woman in black. “Dr. Klink, we’re getting pressured here…”
Lucas said, “One more minute. Close the door.”
The woman, a worried look on her face, closed the door and Lucas said, “We’ll want a gum scrub. When would that be convenient, like, today?”
“Later. I’ll come to your office. Who should I talk to?”
They gave him Jon Duncan’s phone number. Virgil asked, “You don’t have any more information about the medical guy?”
“No. Well…” He scratched his bald spot. “This is supposition…”
“I like what you had to say about fallopian tubes. Go ahead and suppose,” Virgil said.
“Before I went into showbiz, I was actually a decent psychologist, especially in relational matters. I found Doris interesting, and not just sexually. She was very clear about what she wanted. She wanted agood time, and whatever it took to have a good time. She liked parties. She liked getting dressed up. She liked alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. She would have fit perfectly in a place like Hollywood, or at least, the idea of Hollywood. And she wanted it right now, before she got old. For her, old was thirty.”
Lucas: “Okay. So what?”
Virgil answered him: “This medical guy, whoever it was, wasn’t just a medical student. He was already making the bucks she needed.”
“Exactly,” Klink said, jabbing a finger at Virgil. “You’re looking for a doctor. A successful doctor. Follow along here: if a student makes it through college in four years, starting at eighteen, and then immediately follows that with med school and goes straight through, then he’s twenty-six. Most people can’t do that—they’re twenty-seven or twenty-eight when they get out. Then, he’s got a few years’ post-grad training, in some specialty or another…I mean, a plastic surgeon, for example, is rarely fully out on his own before he’s in his mid-thirties. Then he still has to build a practice.”
“You’re saying, we’re looking for an old guy,” Lucas said. “Not an old guy back then, but an old guy now.”
“Depends on what you call old, but Doris was killed twenty-one years ago? I’d say you’re looking for a doctor in at least his midfifties, to maybe sixties. Could be seventy. And I’d give you two-to-one that he drives a Porsche 911 or a Jaguar. Possibly a Mercedes-Benz, but nothing Japanese. A convertible. He might possibly fly his own private plane. That would pull Doris right in, get her excited. And you know what? I’d bet that he’s still here in the Twin Cities.”
“Help me with that,” Virgil said.
Klink shrugged: “Because he was established. If he wentsomeplace else, he’d have to start all over. I’d bet he’s still here. Especially if he’s innocent of the murder.”
Lucas: “We’ll get Jon Duncan to set up the scrub.”
Virgil: “Thank you, Dr. Klink.”
—
Back in theTahoe, they called Duncan and told him to expect a call from Klink. Duncan said, “You asked for a list of people who had access to the Bee Accounting executive dining room. I’ve got that.”
“Email it to me,” Virgil said. “I’ll pull it up on my iPad.”
“It’s on the way,” Duncan said. “I’m pushing the button now.”
“We need something else from Bee—we need a list of their clients who were in the medical field when Doris was killed.”
“More than twenty years ago, man. I don’t know what they’ll have, but I’ll ask.”
“They’re accountants, Jon,” Lucas said. “They’ll have it.”
