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Jon Duncan caught Virgil and Lucas inside the BCA’s back door, pulled them into his office, took possession of Brady’s camera and promised to get a DNA scrub from O’Brien, told them that the Johannsons were being interviewed, and, finally, said, “Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

During Lucas’s time with the BCA, which had ended several years earlier, he’d been more or less the boss of both Duncan and Virgil. As agents, Duncan had persistence, Virgil had talent. Both characteristics were valuable, and a lot of cops would argue that persistence is more important. Lucas generally agreed with that, except on the hard cases, where talent was essential. Virgil sometimes made arrests that, in terms of procedure, baffled his fellow agents.

To say nothing of the fact that he sometimes slept with suspects…which was how he wound up as the father of twins.

—

Since they trusted Duncan as much as they trusted anyone at the BCA, they told him what they’d found.

Duncan: “You’re about three laps ahead of everyone else.”

“If you tell everyone else what we’ve told you, we’ll be tripping over each other,” Lucas said. “Polluting the possibilities. We’ve already got enough problems with the crowd of true crime people.”

“Tell everybody that we’re focusing on clues from the true-crimers,” Virgil suggested. “Which is almost accurate. Keep them off our backs for a few days and maybe we’ll come up with something decent.”

“The guys are all gonna know what the Johannsons are saying…”

“That’s great,” Lucas said. “Tell everybody that we sent the Johannsons over here, and they’ll all assume that we’re one big happy family.”

“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 summer day, 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 to Minneapolis 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…”

Klink snatched off his glasses, ran a hand through his remaining hair. “This is a police-state tactic, making threats, knowing that I’m screwed no matter what I do. Even if I talk to an attorney, he’ll tell his wife…”

Virgil: “And you being a celebrity…”

“There’s no way out,” Lucas said.

“Well, unless you answer some questions privately and do a voluntary DNA scrub,” Virgil added. “All that would be confidential…as long as you’re not the one who murdered Doris.”

“I am not!” Klink screeched. He turned away from them, toward a window covered with venetian blinds. He reached out, pulled a cord to open the blinds, looked out at the city, his face gone haggard.

“Ask a question. I can’t promise to answer,” he said.

“You did know Doris?”

“I knew her, yes. Oh, and I will do the DNA sample if that can be handled discreetly. I am not the man who slept with her the night she was murdered.”

“We can have a tech do the DNA right here in your office, or at your home, after hours if you prefer,” Lucas said. “She’ll keep her mouth shut, you know, because she likes her job.”

“And it sounds like you know some of the details of the case,” Virgil said.

Klink circled back around his chair, dropped back into it. “I am aware of the renewed media interest in the case, of course. I even looked at some of the files that have been posted online. I was horrified by the photos. As a psychologist, I can tell you that the killer is a very troubled human being…”

“We know that,” Lucas said dryly. “We need to catch him…”

“Or her…” Klink said.

“You think the killer could be a woman?” Virgil asked, clearly curious.

“Possibly. If you read the ME’s report carefully, you’ll see they checked if she was pregnant when she died. She wasn’t, but she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before she was murdered.”

“Yes, we know all that,” Virgil said. “There’s an argument about whether the sex was rape or consensual.”

“It seems unlikely to me that she was raped, but what I think is neither here nor there. The details of the report say that semen was found in her vagina and cervix, but not in her uterus or fallopian tubes. After ejaculation, the semen passes through the uterus and into the fallopian tubes in a matter of minutes—fifteen minutes in some cases. It never got there. She must have been murdered immediately after having sex. I mean within minutes. Looking at the photos, I thought, this is a crime of passion. Either passion on the part of the male who ejaculated into her, or someone who passionately objected to that.”

“An act of jealousy,” Lucas said.

“It could be,” Klink said.

“This is very interesting, Doc,” Virgil said. “How do you know all that stuff about fallopian tubes and so on?”

“Much of my…practice, such as it is, involves questions of sexuality. I need to know how the parts work.”

Lucas: “Are you married?”

“No. Never.”

“Do you still see escorts? Are you out on Tinder?”

“I do not patronize prostitutes, and never have. I have used Internet dating services,” Klink said.

“But you did patronize Doris,” Virgil said.

“I did, but when we met, when we first slept together, I didn’t realize that…she would ask for a gift.” Lucas glanced at Virgil, who nodded: Klink wasn’t being entirely truthful—they already knew he’d been introduced to Doris with sex in the offing.

“A gift. Okay. I’ll let that go,” Virgil said. “Did you give her gifts more than once?”

“Yes, several times,” Klink said. “At the time of her death, I hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks.”

“And you had no further contact with her?”

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 nothing more, 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 a good 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 went someplace 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 the Tahoe, 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.”

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 anything about 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, Weather gave 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 Virgil talked 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.

Virgil: “I don’t think so. I didn’t smell even a hint of guilt.”

“He’d be a psycho, so he might not feel a hint of guilt,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but if he’s negative, and I’ll bet he is…”

“Then he’s out of it.”

—

Going on the conversation with Klink, they’d convinced themselves that anyone whose DNA didn’t match the DNA taken from Doris Grandfelt’s body, probably wasn’t the killer—because the timing was so critical, with the fallopian tube clock. The owner of the DNA was either the killer or had been very physically close to the killer at the time of the crime—possibly in the same room, or at least nearby.

“The true-crimers know about Jepson and they might be able to jump from him to Stanley O’Brien. But O’Brien almost certainly won’t talk, so they won’t get to Klink. What we need to do is to track down anyone in the photos who is in the medical field, or to talk to the guys in the photos who can point us to someone who is.”

—

Lucas called Dahlia Blair. “How many of the photos have you identified?”

“Four, now, we think. We got Johannson and Roger Jepson gave us Stanley O’Brien, but O’Brien’s not in any of the photos. There are a couple of people over trying to interview him but he’s being stubborn.”

“Because you’re trying to ruin his life,” Virgil said. “Anyway, who are the others in the photos?”

Blair read off three names: one was a government employee, one a banker, another one an architect.

“Much more white-collar than I would have expected,” Blair said. “It seems like either Roger Jepson or Doris was very selective. Haven’t had one truck driver.”

“Tom, Dick, and Harry?”

“Not so far,” Blair said. “But it’s like that.”

“A BCA agent will call you for the names,” Lucas said. “We’ll give him your phone number. If this turns into something, we’ll see that you’re considered for the reward.”

“Thank you. I will talk with him. Or her.”

They rang off, called Jon Duncan, told him about three new names, and Blair’s phone number. “I’ll pass them along,” Duncan said. “Why aren’t you looking at them?”

“Too many names all at once,” Lucas said. “We’ll need a team to get to them before they get a crowd of true-crimers outside their doors.”

“I almost believe that,” Duncan said. “I’ll get some people on the way.”

“What about the film I gave you?” Virgil asked.

“Hey. That’s something. Rolvaag got right on it, already has some images. He made a set for you, and a set for the team here. You can pick them up…”

“Give us the address,” Virgil said.

Duncan did that, and Lucas wrote it in his notebook.

Virgil: “And Jon? When you send your guys out, to the people in the photos, consider the possibility that they might be thinking about suicide.”

“Ah, jeez…”