“Wrong about what?” Virgil asked.
“Timothy died in a strange way, falling off a balcony,” Baer said.He was wearing a blue LA Dodgers ball cap, a blue lightweight Orvis outdoor shirt, and jeans.
“His death was investigated by the medical examiner’s office and found to be an accident,” Virgil said.
Baer had a bow case laying on the ground behind him. He picked it up, slid the bow inside, and said, “C’mon in the house. Let me get my arrows.”
Virgil waited, studying the small lake as Baer pulled a half-dozen arrows out of the plastic deer’s target zone and put them in a pocket in the bow case.
“Nice lake,” Virgil said, as Baer finished packing up the arrows.
“It’s exorheic, so we get a regular turnover in the water,” Baer said. “I pee in it from time to time. I like to think I’m contributing to the biological complexity of the Gulf of Mexico.”
They walked together through a back porch and into the house. Inside, he yelled, “Edna, me and the cop are in the library.”
She yelled back, “Okay.”
“She’s in her studio,” Baer said. “She’s a potter.”
“Yeah, I talked to her at the front door. She was a little muddy,” Virgil said.
“She often is,” Baer said.
The library was a large room with a wall of books of all kinds, set on built-in steel shelves that Virgil would have stolen if he could have gotten away with it.
“Great library,” he said, looking around.
“Should be,” Baer grunted. He was a compact man in the way bears are compact, medium height, thinning reddish hair and freckles, rimless glasses. He pointed at an easy chair and took another one that faced it. “Goddamn thing cost an arm and a leg.”
“Worth it,” Virgil said. “Good reading lights.”
“I spend a lot of time here,” Baer said. “So: you have questions about Timothy?”
“About Timothy and a nurse named Tina Locklin.”
Baer was surprised by that, and it showed on his round face: “Tina? What does she have to do with anything?”
“You knew her?”
“I still know her. She works over at Abbott Northwestern in Minneapolis. I was on staff there before I retired. Timothy wasn’t. He was focused in St. Paul.”
“Amanda Fisk told me that there was an episode a long time ago, twenty years or so, when Tina was somewhat…romantically obsessed with Timothy. She was fired because of it, left your clinic or partnership or whatever it was.”
“That’s more or less true, but she wasn’t fired. She was encouraged to move along, and she did, with a very good severance from us,” Baer said. “Exceptional nurse, one of the best. I’d still see her over at Abbott and we’d chat. She was more embarrassed by what happened, than angry or upset.”
What had happened, Baer said, was that Carlson had gotten divorced, and had worked closely with Locklin for several years before that. Locklin may have been in love with him for a while. She was about his age, or a year or two younger or older, was divorced and had hopes…
“Timothy wasn’t interested. He was looking for something younger and sexier, and said so, to us guys anyway. His first wife was an engineer he met in college,” Baer said. “She was at least as smart as Tim, and more creative. She was always getting patents on one thingor another, and never hid her light under a bushel. There was this competitive tension between them, and they got tired of each other—and the tension.”
“I spent an hour or so with Amanda Fisk, and she didn’t strike me as a low-stress, walk-in-the-park-type,” Virgil said. “I mean, if Timothy was looking for a caregiver.”
Baer nodded, a jerk of the head. “You got that right. When you showed up and said you were BCA, the first thing that popped into my head was that you were looking at Amanda and theaccident.” He put some oral italics on the wordaccident.
Virgil leaned toward him: “Wait. You don’t think Timothy’s death was an accident?”
“Oh, I think it probably was,” Baer said. “I do have some respect for the ME’s investigators. I have a Fourth of July party here, and was hanging out with Timothy…”
“Miz Fisk told me about it…”
