“I don’t mean to be harsh about what I’m going to ask…”
She showed a short, curt smile, almost a grimace, and said, “Virgil, I’ve spent my life listening to what various dirtbags did towomen—rape, child molesting, ag assault, murder. Nothing you could possibly ask me would be shocking…although I have to say, I’d be shocked if Timothy turns out to be a match for the Doris Grandfelt DNA.”
“You don’t think Timothy might have paid Doris for sex?”
She looked at the floor, three fingers pressed against a cheek, and looked back up and said, “You know, if a friend had taken Timothy by the hand and led him to Doris and said, ‘If you pay this woman five hundred dollars, she will have sex with you,’ then I think it’s possible he might have done it, at least at the time, a year after a divorce. I don’t really remember her from Bee—I mentioned that I worked at Bee at the time of the killing…”
Virgil nodded, and said, “Yes.”
“…but I’ve seen photos of her, and she was quite attractive in a farm-girl way. Blonde, big tits. What I have a hard time imagining is how they might have hooked up. At Bee? That seems impossible, frankly. How would the subject of sex ever come up? She was a clerk, for God’s sake, she wasn’t in any of the accounting conferences, as I heard it. Timothy was a shy man, but arrogant, and status-conscious. He was hardly the type to be hitting on a clerk, no matter what her tits were like.”
“We don’t know if Timothy was involved at all,” Virgil said. “We’re just running down various threads that we’ve encountered, hoping something will come up.”
“Then I may have a thread for you,” Fisk said. “Tina Locklin.”
Virgil sat up: “I haven’t heard that name.”
“She was a nurse in Timothy’s practice…he was in a joint practice with three other surgeons. There were several nurses working with them, uh, and surgical techs, they had their own little crews. Iheard way back when that Tina Locklin was somewhat obsessed with Timothy. In love. Eventually…what I’m telling you is mostly third-hand, Timothy really wasn’t interested in talking about it…eventually, she had to be let go. One of the other docs, George Baer, did the deed. Fired her. You should talk to him.”
Virgil had his notebook out, and took down the spellings of the two names, Locklin and Baer.
“George Baer is still around?”
“Yes, retired. He’s here in the summer, though, he has a place up on Turtle Lake,” Fisk said. “Has a Fourth of July party every year, and Timothy and I would go. He was here for Timothy’s memorial.”
“Thank you,” Virgil said. “This is the kind of thing we always look for, maybe it leads to something. I hope Tina Locklin is still around.”
“She should be alive, even if she’s not around here. She was a year or two younger than Timothy.”
“Blonde?”
She hesitated and showed the short curt smile again. “I see where you’re going with that. Blonde, big tits? I don’t know, I never saw her. Like I said, Timothy didn’t want to talk about it.”
They chatted for a while, and Fisk told him that she was doing the prep for a murder trial expected to start in a month or so, in September. “It’s not much. Three-way argument. A domestic, really, about who was sleeping with who and when, and one guy shot the other one and regretted it about one bullet too late. The interesting part, for me, is that they both had guns. The killer said it was self-defense, the other man pulled first. The only witness, who was sleeping with both of them, has changed her story a few times, so we’ll see. He’s got a public defender who knows what she’s doing.”
“You think you’ll get him?”
She considered the question, then said, “Yeah, probably. Both men, and the woman, too, were basically white trash, and a jury won’t see much downside to putting him away, no matter who pulled first.”
“It’s an odd business we’re in,” Virgil said. “There was a public defender down in Watonwan County, good guy, basically, I think he’s working up here, now, Eddy something…”
“Eddy Webster? He was a PD outstate somewhere.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I busted a guy, mmm, Donny Herbin was his name. He went after a former friend with a shovel, for no good reason, hurt him bad. He was charged with ag assault and Eddy got it knocked down to simple assault. Herbin’s problem was that he was basically nuts. The judge put him in jail for thirty days, and two days after he got out, he shot and killed a grocery clerk over in Faribault because the clerk wouldn’t double-bag him.”
“I remember that story, the double-bagging thing—didn’t know you were involved,” Fisk said.
“I wasn’t, with that part. I only did the shovel part and told the judge that Herbin ought to get some treatment. The Jackson cops and the highway patrol ran him down after the shooting,” Virgil said. “Still. A strange business.”
They talked about the strangeness of what they did for another ten minutes, trading stories, and Virgil did a couple of soft probes about Timothy, and Fisk asked about how they’d gotten Timothy’s name, which Virgil fended off, and then Carl Smith, carrying his gear bag, stuck his head into the bedroom and said, “I’m good. Got some hair out of the trap in Dr. Carlson’s sink. Linda should be finishing up.”
And she was.
She had scrubbed all of Carlson’s jewelry and bagged the swabs. “If that doesn’t do it, nothing will,” she said. She asked Fisk for a gum scrub, to separate her DNA from Timothy’s, and Fisk agreed.
“I’m a DNA virgin,” Fisk told Esselton. “This is my first time.”
“I’ll be gentle,” Esselton said with a smile.
