“Right,” I said. “Is there anyone else, any other relatives that you know of, who might be able to help us locate her?”
Debi shrugged. “His mother, maybe.”
“His mother? What’s her name?”
“Dorothy, I believe that’s her first name. She always called herself Mrs. Nielsen whenever she called here and talked to me.”
“And where does she live?”
“With Dr. Fred. She’s lived with them for several years now.”
“What’s the address?”
“Green Lake Way North, 6610. It’s one of those big old houses facing the lake.”
“You haven’t made any effort to contact her, have you?”
“No,” Debi answered.
“Do you think she’d be at home?”
Debi shook her head. “Maybe. I haven’t tried to call. One of the officers told me not to, not until someone had notified her in person.”
“Right,” I said. “Detective Lindstrom and I will be taking care of that just as soon as we finish here. Now, let’s go back to Saturday morning for a minute. What happened after the last patient left?” I glanced at my list. “Reece Bowers, I think his name was. Cleaning only.”
For some reason Debi Rush looked down at her hands and smoothed the front of her skirt. “Nothing,” she said. “Like I told you, after he left, we just waited for the installer to get here.”
“We. You mean you and Dr. Fred. Did you talk while you were waiting?”
She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, “but I don’t remember what about.”
There it was again, some tiny alarm inside me, sounding a warning, telling me that Debi Rush was lying through her teeth. But why? What was she covering up? Who was she protecting?
“Where did you wait?” I insisted, pressing for more detail. “In here? Out by your desk?”
“Here,” she answered quickly, nodding toward a short couch that sat opposite the desk. “I remember now. He dictated a couple of letters, and then we talked.”
“About?”
“Things,” she answered evasively. “He wanted to know how Tom was doing in school, stuff like that. But then as it got later and the installer still wasn’t here, he started getting more and more upset.”
“Did that seem unusual to you, for him to be disturbed because someone was late?”
“That’s just the way he was,” she said.
“Was anything out of place at the time you left? For instance, what about the plant in that one examining room. Was it broken?“
“No. It was fine. I put it up on the counter just before I left to keep it out of the installer’s way, but it wasn’t broken.”
“What about this morning when you came into the office. Was there anything out of place when you came to work?”
“No,” she replied. “Not out here. Everything seemed to be fine until I went down the hall.”
“What about the door from outside, was it still locked?”
“As far as I know, both of them were.”
“Both?”
“There’s another door that you may not have seen. It leads from the second examining room and goes directly out into the parking garage. That’s the way Dr. Fred usually came into the office.”
“But you didn’t use that door?”
She shook her head. “I ride the bus, so I don’t use the garage. My key is to the front door.”
“When you came in this morning, didn’t you notice the smell?” Al asked. There was a thinly veiled tone of sarcasm in his voice. I noticed it. Debi Rush didn’t. She shook her head.
“My allergies have been acting up for the last two months. I haven’t been able to smell anything for days.”
“All right,” I said. “One more time. Tell us once more what you did when you got here today.”
“Like I said before, I called today’s list of patients to confirm their appointments, then I came in here and dusted, the way I always do. I always tried to have the dusting done before Dr. Fred got here. And I put the schedule and today’s files on his desk. Dr. Fred liked everything orderly.”
“You dusted?” I focused on that. In this day and age dusting didn’t sound like something that would still be in any self-respecting dental assistant’s job description.
Debi continued. “Every morning. In here, at least. And I polished his desk, too. The whole thing. That’s one of the reasons I got along so well with Dr. Fred. I was always on time, and I was willing to do whatever he wanted.”
“So much for fingerprints,” Big Al grunted under his breath, but I went on with the questions.
“What about the patient files from Saturday?”
“What about them?”
“Shouldn’t they have been refiled? They’re still here in the out basket.”
“I was going to put them away just as soon as I set up Dr. Fred’s tray. That’s when I found him, and I-” She broke off suddenly, too overcome by emotion to continue.
I glanced at Big Al, who looked disgusted. He doesn’t have a very high tolerance for tears. “Anything else you want to know at the moment?” I asked him.
Al shook his head. “Not that I can think of right now. Maybe later.”
“All right then, Debi,” I said. “You can go for the time being, but will you be home in case we need to get back in touch with you?”
She nodded slowly. “Sure, I’ll be there,” she said. “There’s no sense in staying here.”
We found Bill Foster on his hands and knees in the gore-spattered examination room, cutting out the section of blood-soaked carpeting from beneath the examining chair. Big squares where the footprints had been were already missing.
“Finding anything?” I asked, walking up behind him.
Foster looked up at me and shrugged. “Who knows? We’ve raised latent prints all over the place, but I’d lay odds none of them are going to belong to the killer.”
“Why not?”
He nodded in the direction of a Formica counter next to the chair. On it sat an open cardboard dispenser of disposable rubber gloves.
“With that sitting right there? I’d bet money he put on gloves. I sure as hell would.”
“If he had time,” I said.
“Doc Baker and I got talking after you left. He thinks somebody coldcocked the sucker, hit him over the head with something, then finished him off while he was out cold.”
“Hit him with something, like that carpet kicker for instance?” I asked. “It looked like blood on those teeth to me.”
He shrugged. “You’re right about the blood, Beau, but that’s not what clobbered the dentist, at least not the sharp part. There’s no matching wound. Somebody else must be wearing the bite from that set of teeth. In the meantime, I think we may have found the murder weapon.”
“What? Where?”
“A single dental pick. It was in the autoclave.”
“Sterilized?” I asked.
“You bet.”
“What makes you think that? This is a dentist’s office for Christ’s sake! The place must be crawling with dental picks.”
“Maybe so, but what dental assistant in her right mind would sterilize only one dental pick at a time?”
“A dental pick!” Big Al repeated the words, shaking his head. “Come on now, Bill, you’d have to be at pretty close quarters to use one of those things, wouldn’t you? And who’s going to take time to clean it afterward?”
Bill Foster nodded. “You’d have to be a cool customer, all right, but according to Doc Baker, the killer wasn’t
