Escape Clause by John Sandford
23
During the hunt for the tigers, every day had been hotter than the next. Temperatures climbed toward the hundred-degree mark as Virgil sat in his 4Runner, engine running to keep the air conditioner on, barely around the corner from Peck’s house. He’d positioned himself so he could see the front of Peck’s garage, his front door, and the whole stretch of street in front of Peck’s house.
He was there, he thought, due to a failure of imagination. He was waiting for a call from the BCA’s duty officer. Every police department in the metro area, plus the highway patrol, was looking for Peck’s Tahoe.
That kind of a net could work with a Ferrari, Virgil thought, because everybody looks at Ferraris. But who looks at a Tahoe? And how often do you look in your rearview mirror and find a cop behind you, where he could read the license plate? Not very often, so the possibilities seemed thin, and even thinner if Peck was deliberately hiding.
The fact that he had to keep the truck’s engine running was also annoying, because it was a waste of money and gasoline. He read a book as he waited, called Too Big to Fail, about the financial crisis the decade before, and which was rapidly making him even more irritable: not the book itself, which was fascinating, but the stories of the enormous collection of assholes who created and profited from the disaster.
He’d been waiting for three hours when he saw Peck’s Tahoe turn the corner three blocks away and, a moment later, pull into the garage. Virgil pulled up directly behind Peck’s Tahoe as the garage door was coming down. He got out and walked up the steps to the front door, started banging on the door and pushing the doorbell.
“Dr. Peck,” Virgil called.
Peck came to the door, left the screen door closed, and scowled at him. He was red-faced and harried. “I am very busy right now.”
Virgil moved up and squared off against the other man. “I need to talk to you about the Simonians.”
“The who?”
Virgil thought that Peck had almost pulled it off: he sounded right, but there was a flash of alarm in his eyes. He knew the dead men all right.
“The Simonians. The guys who helped you steal the tigers. Their mother had two names written down, in case something bad happened to them: Barry King’s and yours.”
“That’s absurd. I don’t know anybody by that name,” Peck said. “Never heard of them, or of Larry King.”
“Barry King,” Virgil said. “He worked at the zoo and provided the key that gave the thieves access to the tiger cages.”
“Well, I don’t know him, whoever he is,” Peck said. He shook a finger at Virgil. “You know what? You can take a hike. I’m going to talk to my lawyer about you. If you want to talk to me again, you’re going to have to do it with my lawyer sitting in, and at his convenience, not yours.”
“That’s not the way it works,” Virgil said. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll haul your butt downtown and you can call your lawyer from the BCA offices.”
“Then fuck you. Haul me down. I want a lawyer and I’m not saying another word to you,” Peck said. “I have nothing to do with any tigers and I never heard of these Somalia people or Barry King. So—are we going downtown? If we’re not, I’ve got work to do.”
“How about Zhang Min? Do you know Zhang Min, from Los Angeles? Owns a red Ferrari . . .”
Peck started to turn away, but stopped. “I shouldn’t say another word to you, but what does Mr. Zhang have to do with this?”
“What is he to you?” Virgil asked.
“A patient. He also will occasionally refer one of his friends to me,” Peck said. “I spoke to his son a couple of days ago and provided some herbal medications for Mr. Zhang’s rheumatism. And I believe the Ferrari belongs to his son, not to Mr. Zhang.”
“No, it actually belongs to Mr. Zhang. Have you spoken to Mr. Zhang in the past few days?”
“To his son, but Mr. Zhang lives in Los Angeles. I believe the last time I saw him was at the Traditional Medicine Expo in San Pedro, almost a year ago.”
“You didn’t know he was in Minneapolis?”
Peck shook his head and said, “No, and I’m surprised that you say he is—he would have called me, but he hasn’t.”
“Would you mind if I look at your phone?”
Peck put his hand in his pocket, started to pull his phone out, then frowned, put it back and said, “I really don’t, but you’ve pissed me off—so you can look at my phone when you get a warrant. I want to see the warrant and I want my lawyer to see it as well. When you do that, I’ll hand it over.”
Virgil peered at him for a long moment, then said, “I believe that you know where the tigers are. I think you know who killed the Simonians. I’m going to prove it, and you’re going to prison. Don’t leave the area, Dr. Peck. We will be talking again. Frequently.”
“I’ll tell my lawyer you said so,” Peck said, and he turned and started into the house.
Virgil said to his back, “You know there’s a whole pack of Simonians in town? Cut from the same cloth as Hamlet and Hayk, and they’re looking for you. I’d walk very carefully, Dr. Peck. I warned them off, but they’re looking for the man who dismembered their brothers, and they won’t go away. They told me that when they find you, they expect to keep you alive . . . for several days.”
Peck looked over his shoulder, and now the fear was alive in his face. He shook his finger at Virgil and said, “If you set me up . . . if you . . . I’m calling my lawyer.”
—
Virgil went back to his truck, sweating in the late afternoon sun. He called Duncan and said, “I braced Peck. He’s in on it, but he’s got a mile of excuses. I may want a warrant to look at his phone, but I’ve got no cause.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not yet. But I will have. Could we get Jenkins and Shrake to do some surveillance overnight? Maybe hang a GPS tracker on Peck’s Tahoe?”
“I’ll have to talk to legal about that. I’ll get back to you. What are you doing next?”
“I’ll tell you, Jon, I’m running out of rope. I know goddamn well that Peck is involved, and also a couple of West Coast Chinese who are staying over at the Loews in Minneapolis, and a zoo worker named Barry King who nobody can find. But I’ve got nothing to hang it on.”
“You think King . . . ?”
“He may have run for it—unless Peck or these Chinese guys killed him. Since we’ve got two murders already, that looks like cleanup. It’s possible that King is dead, too. I’ve got his tag number out there, but haven’t heard anything. And I’ve got his girlfriend working with me, but she hasn’t seen him. I had Sandy check and he hasn’t been using his credit cards, either.”
“I can send Jenkins and Shrake over. What’s your next move?”
“Don’t have one. We could put both Jenkins and Shrake on Peck full-time, right in his face, to see if we can shake him up, or we could put Jenkins over here, at Peck’s place, and send Shrake over to the Loews to keep an eye on the Chinese. What do you think?”
“Well, since you braced Peck, he knows you’re looking at him, so he probably won’t go driving out to wherever the tigers are,” Duncan said. “Maybe split between Peck and the Chinese.”
“That’s good,” Virgil said. “I need to get some sleep. I dunno. We’ll get Peck sooner or later, but I think we might have lost the tigers.”
“Ah, man. Really?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve got an idea to break Peck out, but it’s not something you want to hear about. I’ll let it go at that.”
“Okay. Keep pushing, pal,” Duncan send. “I’ll get Jenkins and Shrake wound up.”
“How are things over at the state fair?”
“Clusterfuck. Gonna be a cop every two feet,” Duncan said.
“Lucas tells me there was a cop every two feet down in Iowa, and the Purdys still touched off the bomb.”
“Not here. Not he
“Good luck with that,” Virgil said.
—
On the way to Mankato, Virgil called Daisy Jones, the TV reporter. “I owe you so much now, I might have to resort to sex to pay you back,” she said.
“Hold that thought. Right now I’m in a pretty intense relationship,” Virgil said.
“I was in a pretty intense relationship the last time the possibility arose, and you weren’t. I often wondered about how you worked that out,” Jones said.
“Don’t think about it. And don’t give up hope,” Virgil said. “Anyhoo . . . I want to be up-front with you and I’ve got something to say, but I cannot have this come back to me. I would maybe get fired.”
“I’d get fired myself before I’d give you up,” she said. “You know I’m telling the truth.”
“All right. There’s a guy in town named Winston Peck. Actually, Winston Peck the Sixth, MD. There’s a lot of stuff about him on the ’net. I’m sure he’s involved with the tiger theft and that automatically means that he’s probably involved with two murders. I don’t know if he did them himself, but he’s involved. I can give you his address in St. Paul . . .”
He did, and she took it down and asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to show up with a TV truck and a microphone and ask him if he stole the tigers. I want him on TV, denying it. I want his neighbors to know . . . I want him to crack, I want him to make a run for it.”
“Huh. So I would actually be functioning as a cop.”
“No. You have no arrest powers. You got a tip from a friendly cop and you’re just chasing it down like any reporter would. If you shared this with somebody from another station, that would be fine with me, as long as my name didn’t come up. I know you guys sometimes cover each other’s butts, no matter what anybody says about competition.”
After a moment’s silence, she said, “If I do this, I think I’ll owe you less, not more.”
“Let’s be adults for a minute,” Virgil said. “You don’t really owe me a fuckin’ thing, and you know it. We talk because we like each other and help each other out.”
“That’s true, but it’s fun to pretend. Okay, Virgie . . . Video at ten. Oh, I might call you for a comment.”
—
Frankie was in bed, propped up on a bunch of pillows, watching a movie on her old MacBook Pro.
“How are the ribs?” Virgil asked.
“Hurts when I torque them, cough, or laugh, so I try not to do that.”
“I’ve got a sleeping bag and an air mattress,” he said. “If you need me to sleep on the floor, I can.”
“We should be okay; you don’t usually flop around much,” she said. “Besides, this new mattress . . . why did we wait this long? This thing is wonderful, it’s like a cloud.”
Virgil sat on it, careful not to rock her, and told her about the day. When he finished, she asked, “What happens if this Peck sits on his ass? If there’s somebody else helping him besides the Simonians, they could be cleaning up while Peck has your attention. He does nothing. Then what?”
“That’s the worst case,” Virgil said. “I don’t need him to have a backup guy; I need him out in the open, shit-faced panicked.”
—
Virgil got his own laptop and checked on a couple of outdoors forums that he hadn’t had time to read in a couple of days, wrote a couple of quick notes, then went into the living room to watch the ten o’clock news. Channel Three led with the Peck story—Jones tried to interview him through the screen door. Peck’s face was barely visible, other than as a vaguely white oval, and he threatened to sue the TV station if they mentioned his name or used the video.
Jones mentioned Peck’s name about twenty times and even asked why he couldn’t practice medicine, and Peck slammed the door and Jones said, with one of her patented gotcha smiles, “Dr. Peck refused to answer any further questions about whether he was involved with the theft of the Amur tigers. . . .”
Frankie had eased into the living room to watch over Virgil’s shoulders, and she said, “Man, she really screwed him, didn’t she?”
“Well, he’s a killer and a tiger snatcher,” Virgil said.
“Wonder where she got his name?”
“She’s got good sources,” Virgil said. “Lot of cops kinda like her looks.”
“And that BCA leaks like a sieve,” Frankie said, giving him a cuff on the head. She’d heard Jones mentioned before, and not in a critical way. “If you ever get appointed director, you have to stop that.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on it, the day the promotion comes through,” Virgil said.
24
After Flowers left, Peck popped a couple of Xanax and sat on his couch and tried to think it over, although the drug fogged him up for a while—enough that he later realized that he’d lost some time. He came back when the doorbell rang. Thinking it might be Flowers again and feeling simultaneously angry and chemically mellow, a confusing combination, he went to the front door and yanked it open.
An attractive thirtysomething woman was standing there, a smile on her face. He didn’t immediately pick up the microphone in her hand or the cameraman standing off at an angle. What he felt first was the heat coming through the screen door; it was like opening an oven.
The woman said something and he frowned and asked, “What?”
She repeated herself: “Dr. Peck, we’ve heard from a number of law enforcement officials that you are suspected of being involved in the theft of the tigers from the Minnesota Zoo.”
As she said that, a light came on to his left, blinding him, and he realized that he was talking to a reporter.
“That’s ridiculous! Who are you? If you make this ridiculous charge public in any way, you’d better have a very good lawyer because I will sue you for every dime you have. . . .”
He went on for a while and then slammed the door.
—
Outside the house, Daisy Jones said to her cameraman, “That’s about it; there ain’t gonna be no more.”
“Sounded pretty fucked up, man. That was drugs talking,” said the cameraman, who’d know.
They got back in their van and started away from Peck’s house, and a block and a half down the street, she noticed a familiar Crown Vic parked at the curb.
“Pull over next to that car,” she told the cameraman, who was driving.
The cameraman pulled over next to the apparently empty Crown Vic, and Jones hopped out and walked around the back of the van and knocked on the driver’s-side window. Jenkins had slumped over onto the passenger seat, trying to hide, but now he sat up and rolled down the window and Jones said, “You can’t do surveillance from a Crown Vic, Jenkins. You need a Camry or something.”
“Don’t fit in a Camry,” Jenkins said. “You get anything hot from Peck?”
“Yeah. A hot threat to sue us.”
“You going with it?”
“Well, he didn’t exactly deny taking the tigers; he said the charge is ridiculous and threatened to sue,” Jones said. “So—yeah, we’ll probably go with it. You and Virgie are using me to break him out, right?”
“We wouldn’t do that, honeybun,” Jenkins said.
“You call me ‘honeybun’ again, I’m going to jerk your tongue out of your mouth,” Jones said.
“Honeybun, honeybun,” Jenkins said. “You are a honeybun, Daisy. Anyway, why don’t you go away so I can go back to being alert?”
“Right. America needs more lerts,” Jones said. She looked down the street toward Peck’s house and said, “If we put it on the air that he’s under surveillance . . . could make him more nervous.”
“Yeah, but it’d embarrass me with my boss,” Jenkins said.
“Tough. I’ll let my editor make the call on that one. Anyway, give me a ring the next time you’re gonna beat up somebody. If it bleeds, it
“I’ll do that, if you don’t say that thing about Peck being under surveillance,” Jenkins said. “Now go away.”
—
When the TV reporter left, Peck staggered into the bathroom and took down the tube of Xanax and looked into it. There were only seven little blue pills left and in one clear corner of his brain he thought, “My God, there were sixteen pills in here yesterday.”
He put the tube in his pocket and tried to remember what he’d said to the TV reporter, but none of it was too clear. He went back to his reading chair and turned on the television, which was showing some horseshit cop show.
Another blank space went by, maybe an hour, and he came back when he saw his own face on the television, standing behind his own screen door. He sounded guilty in his own ears, and a little nuts, too: “I’ll put some sue on your shirt. . . .”
“What?”
The woman said he was under surveillance. Really? He went to the front door and stepped out on the porch and looked both ways up and down the street. There were a few cars around, but he didn’t see anybody lurking. The clear spot in his brain, which had grown a bit larger, said to him, “You won’t see them, dummy. They’re hiding.”
He went back inside and sat in his reading chair. The weather report had come up on whatever TV channel he was on, and the weatherman, who looked like he’d been waxed, said it was hot outside. How hot was it? So hot that the hookers outside the Target Center were sucking on snow cones . . .
What? The weatherman hadn’t really said that. . . .
—
Jenkins and Virgil were talking and Virgil, who’d seen the news broadcast after refusing to give a comment to Jones, said, “I don’t know—he sounded like a chipmunk. I think he’s been pounding his own medication or something. Then she went and said he was under surveillance. Thank you very much.”
“Well, he was watching Jones, because right about the time the news came on, he came out on the porch and looked both ways. We got him on edge, that’s for sure. I was thinking, maybe we ought to call Shrake and put him out behind the house, in case he tries to sneak out and make a run for it.”