Off the phone, and back in traffic, Virgil said, “I gotta say, I was impressed by Klink. I thought the guy was a charlatan, you know, from his radio rep.”
“He had some interesting ideas,” Lucas said. “But that doctor stuff? That woman killer stuff? We’re a long way down the road from anything you might call a fact.”
“True, but we’re also into new territory. Nobody was ever talking seriously about what we’re looking at,” Virgil said. “A woman as the killer? A sixty-year-old doctor? Fallopian tubes? I didn’t even know you could set a time of death by fallopian tubes.”
“That wasn’t emphasized in the ME’s report,” Lucas said. “I remember the word, so it was mentioned. They didn’t say anythingabout the timing, but that now seems critical. We need to check with somebody who’d know for sure.”
“Call Weather. She’d know somebody who could tell us.”
—
Lucas called, Weathergave him the name and phone number of a University of Minnesota fertility doctor named Bridget Kenyon. They called Kenyon, and after speaking with her secretary, were put through. They didn’t talk long, but Kenyon confirmed what Klink had said about the timing.
Virgil to Lucas: “A doctor has sex with Doris, but he’s married, and Doris tells him she’s going to talk to his old lady about it. For the doc, it’s a fling. For Doris, it’s the road to riches. They argue. He has a knife…”
“Where are they? If it’s a fling, he’d want it to be secret. In his office, maybe, but most doctors’ offices have security, and he’d be hauling around a body and there’d be a lot of blood to clean up. A hotel or motel always has people around, you couldn’t carry a body out…”
“He’s a rich doctor and has a cabin on the St. Croix,” Virgil said.
“And instead of taking her deeper into the woods, he hauls her back into town to hide the body?”
“All right, that’s a weak spot.”
After a while, Lucas said, “She was killed in a restroom at Bee. No carpets, easy to clean up the mess. Late at night: the ME thought she’d been dead for eighteen to twenty-four hours when she was found, and she was found at seven o’clock. So, sometime after seven o’clock at Bee. They get it on, she goes into the restroom to clean up, you know…”
“Yeah, I know. To avoid the wet spot in her underpants.”
“And no little spermies have time to make it up to her tubes because the doc…okay, wait. They’re on the same floor as the cafeteria. They have their fight about his old lady, the doc goes into the cafeteria and gets a knife, spends a couple minutes honing it on the red brick…waits for her to come out of the toilet stall to wash her hands, comes up behind her like he’s going to wrap his arms around her, and he sticks her. Because he’s got one arm around her, his knife hand is low, and it goes straight into her back, instead of slashing down.”
“That’s a good story,” Virgil admitted. “But you were saying something about being a long road away from a fact.”
More silence, listening to the tires. Then, “We do have something like a fact. That she was seeing somebody in the medical field.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. And, “Let me make a call.”
“Who to?”
“Klink the Shrink.”
Klink had finished the last blog segment, came to the phone and said, “I was about to call your man Duncan.”
“Great, do that, he’s waiting,” Virgil said. “I have another question. When you said that Doris was dating somebody in the medical field, was it you saying, ‘medical field,’ or was that Doris? Did she say ‘medical field’ or did she say ‘doctor’?”
Klink said, “Oh, boy. ‘Medical field’ sounds like something I’d say or think. If she said ‘doctor,’ I might have remembered that as being in the ‘medical field,’ because all kinds of people are calling themselves doctors now. But if she’d said ‘doctor,’ I would have assumed the person was in the medical field, and not some other kind of doctor. I can’t answer your question. It could go either way. Memory is a very fluid thing. As you should know.”
“Why should I know that?” Virgil asked.
“Because police officers have to talk to people about what they remember about a traumatic event. Quite often, I have read, what they think they saw often doesn’t stack up with what actually happened. Even though they’re sincere about what they think they saw.”
“Fair enough,” Virgil said. “Thanks, Doc.”
—
Lucas and Virgiltalked about that, then Lucas recapitulated what they’d learned from witnesses and photos: Roger Jepson, the auto mechanic and ex-bartender, had given them Stanley O’Brien, the lobbyist and former legislator. O’Brien had given them Klink the Shrink.
The Johannsons had—most likely—given them only one useful thing: their cop instincts told them that Elias Johannson probably wasn’t the killer.
“He’s a pharmacist. That would be considered being in the medical field. If he has a PhD, he might be called doctor,” Lucas said.
