Escape Clause by John Sandford
Virgil considered that for a moment, then said, “You’d need a distribution network.”
“Not just a distribution network,” she said. “An illegal distribution network. As illegal as a Mexican drug cartel. Everybody involved would be committing a felony.”
“Hadn’t thought about that part,” Virgil said. “Where would I find a network like that?”
“Ask your drug people,” she said. “I suppose it’d be out on the West Coast, where you’ve got a lot of older Asian residents, who’d be the main customers. Unless, of course, it’s being shipped directly to China.”
“Huh.”
“I’d point out that somebody with access to a large illegal distribution network is not going to be a debutante. You said this man who was murdered was a professional criminal. That fits.”
Virgil asked, “You have any idea of where I’d look?”
“None at all, except what I see in the movies. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, maybe . . . Vancouver, I guess.”
“Jeez.” He drank the last of the root beer. “I wonder if they might have already moved the tigers out?”
She shrugged. “Could have, I guess, although that’d be a problem. I have horses, and moving them around is a pain, even with a good horse trailer, when you’re going any long distance. With tigers? Be a heck of a lot easier killing and processing them here. Once they’re processed and the products get fake labels, who would know that they’re looking at illegal tiger parts and not legal cattle parts? Ground-up bone looks like ground-up bone. You’d need a DNA test to tell the difference.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. He was at least semiconvinced. He took a business card from his pocket and slid it across the table to her. “Thanks for your help. And the root beer float. Call me if you hear anything or think of anything else.”
She picked up the card. “I will. I do hope you find these guys. They’re the kind of people who give traditional medicine a bad name.”
—
Virgil headed back to the Twin Cities. He was crossing the St. Croix bridge at Hudson when a call came in from an unknown number.
When he answered, Patterson said, “This is Bobbie Patterson again. Listen, I did think of something else. It’s possible that they killed the tigers and then froze them to take them somewhere else to process them. That involves refrigerated trucks. Keeping a thousand pounds of meat at freezing temperatures isn’t all that easy, if you’re moving. It’d be easier to buy some meat dryers and do it right here. They’re not expensive; people use them to make deer jerky. They’d probably need four or five of the smaller dryers. I doubt that they’d buy a big commercial deal . . . so maybe you should call up the dealers of meat dryers, see if anybody delivered a whole bunch of them to the Cities.”
“You are a very smart woman,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”
—
Virgil called Sandy, the BCA researcher, and got her started on that, then called St. Paul’s gang guy, who said he had no idea about Chinese gangs, though there were a couple of Hmong gangs. “I can guarantee they’re not up to smuggling tiger parts, dried or not. These guys are hustling a little Mexican Mud and hillbilly heroin; they wouldn’t be involved in anything more sophisticated.”
He said he’d call a guy in San Francisco and ask who’d know about Chinese gangs. “If you’ve got this dead guy from Glendale, it seems like you’re looking at California. I don’t know if my guy would know anything about LA gangs, but he might know another guy who’d know.”
—
Virgil had just crossed into St. Paul when he took a call from another unknown number. “Virgil? Bob Roberts from Mankato PD.”
“Hey, Bob-Bob. You got my tigers?”
“Uh, no, man. Listen, I hate to be the guy to tell you this . . . but somebody beat up your girlfriend.”
Virgil nearly drove off the highway. “What! What!”
“Frankie. She’s hurt, man, she’s on her way to the hospital. A couple guys jumped her outside a Kwik Trip. Nobody knows why, there wasn’t any argument or anything. They didn’t even talk to her. They jumped her and beat her up and took off. Looks like it was a setup—one of the cops out there says they were wearing masks.”
“How bad? How bad is she?”
“Don’t know yet, but she got smacked around pretty good. That’s about all I know. I mean, she isn’t gonna die or anything, but she’s beat up.”
“I’m coming,” Virgil said.
16
Virgil got south in a hurry, cutting through traffic with his lights and siren. On his way, he called Jon Duncan to tell him what happened. Duncan asked if he had any idea who’d attacked Frankie, or why, and Virgil said that he didn’t.
“I’ve made a lot of people unhappy the last few years, but not many who’d know that I’ve been hanging out with Frankie,” Virgil said. “Or even if they knew, nobody who would go after her. Besides, nobody goes after a cop’s girlfriend; if they’re going to do anything, they go after the cop, and they don’t do that very often.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you what, Virgil—you go down there and do what you have to do, and take care of Frankie, and keep me informed,” Duncan said. “I don’t want you investigating this. I want you to stay away from it.”
“What? Jon, I’ve got to, this is . . .”
“You don’t investigate attacks that might be aimed at you,” Duncan said. “I’ll get Sands to pull somebody off another job to do it.”
Sands was the BCA director. “He doesn’t like me much,” Virgil said.
“Who cares? He’s about to get fired, and his boss, and his boss’s boss, both do like you. Even Sands can’t say that we don’t take care of our people, so . . . I’ll get somebody good,” Duncan said.
—
Frankie had been taken to the emergency room at the Mayo Clinic, an orange-brick building on Marsh Street. Virgil dumped his truck in the parking lot and hustled inside, where a nurse told him that Frankie was in the ICU. “That’s temporary until we get test results back,” she said.
“How bad?” Virgil asked. “How bad?”
“Don’t really know yet, but not so bad, I think. She apparently lost consciousness for a while, back where the attack took place. That’s what we were told, anyway. She was conscious when the ambulance got there, so she wasn’t out for long,” the nurse said. “She was having trouble breathing when the paramedics got to her. We put her through a CAT scan; she had cracked ribs and a partially collapsed lung. The docs put in a chest tube, and the lung’s reinflated. Didn’t see any brain damage, but she’s got a mild concussion.”
“Man, that sounds bad, that sounds bad, man,” Virgil said. He felt an urgent need to do something, anything, but there was nothing he could do.
“It’s never good,” the nurse said. He added, “There’s a lot worse comes through here every day, and they walk out a few days later.”
A cop was sitting in a plastic chair at the end of the emergency room and he got up and walked over when he saw Virgil. “Hey, Virg. I talked to Donnie Carlson a minute ago, and he said they don’t have any names yet, but Frankie took a piece out of the arm of one of the guys who jumped her. Bit out a piece the size of a quarter, so when we get a name, we’ll have DNA and he’s probably got a pretty good hole on his arm.”
Virgil nodded. “Hang here for a minute, Al, will you? I want to talk, but I want to go look at Frankie . . .”
“Sure.”
—
With the nurse on his heels, Virgil went into the ICU, where the nurse opened a crack in the curtains around Frankie’s bed. Frankie’s eyes were closed, but when he stepped in, she must have heard the heels on his cowboy boots, and she asked, “Is that you?”
“Got here as fast as I could. What the hell happened?” Virgil asked.
Now her eyes opened. “How shitty do I look?”
Virgil shook his
Her face was a massive bruise, and though her nose was straight and unsplinted, and so probably not broken, there was dried blood around her nostrils and at the corners of her mouth. He could see her bare arms and they were scraped as badly as her face. Both eyes would be blackened for a while.
“That’s what I was worried about,” she said. Then she asked, “You okay?”
“What? Of course . . .”
“I don’t want you killing anybody,” she said.
Virgil looked at her for a few seconds, then said, “I can’t make any promises.”
“Virgil!”
“Fuck you. I’m not making any promises.” Virgil started to tear up, looking at her, wiped the tears away with the heels of his hands. “Ah, Jesus, Frankie . . . We’ll find the guys who did this. Have you pissed anybody off lately? Bad enough to do this? Unless you know somebody, it’s gotta be aimed at me.”
“No, no. It wasn’t.” Her voice was quiet, almost rusty. “It’s Sparkle. She wanted to visit a migrant trailer park on a farm out west of here; it’s off a rutted dirt road. She borrowed my truck to get up there. I was driving her speck.”
Specks were cars that Frankie thought were too small to be useful. “They thought I was her,” she said.
“Ah, shit . . .”
“They kept saying, ‘You get your nose outa our business. Go home, bitch.’”
“There’s a cop out in the emergency room, Al Foreman. You know him?”
“I know Al . . .”
“He says you bit a chunk out of one of them and the cops picked it up,” Virgil said. The guy’s gonna have a hole in his arm and we can nail him with the DNA. We’ll get him, I swear to God.”
Frankie said, “That’s nice . . . I feel really sleepy . . .”
The nurse, who had trailed in behind Virgil, said, “You’re filled up with painkillers, honey. You’ll be sleeping a lot.”
They talked for a few more minutes, but Frankie was slipping into sleep, and when she was gone, Virgil kissed her on the forehead, backed out of the room, and found Foreman, the Mankato cop. “What do you know?”
“Nothing but what I heard from the guys. She went over to the Kwik Trip around three o’clock. She went inside and bought some groceries and when she came back out, she was jumped by two guys who caught her between her car and a truck that was parked beside her,” Foreman said. “Donnie can tell you how big they were and all that, but I can tell you that they parked in the street, so the cameras didn’t get the license plate number. A witness says the vehicle was a red Ford SuperCrew pickup. Probably a couple years old.”
“Get their faces on the video?”
“No. They wore ball caps without any brand markings, which means they must have bought them for this job, and rubber Halloween masks. Somebody says they were Mitt Romney masks. They wore canvas work gloves. The guys have the video down at the shop, if you want to see it. Can’t really see too much after the first few seconds, because Frankie goes down between the cars. They were wearing work shirts and jeans.”
“Do you . . .” Virgil trailed away as a pretty but tough-looking blonde walked into the emergency room. She was tall, square-jawed, and wide-shouldered, with small, barely discernible boxer’s scars under both eyes. She wore dark slacks, a tan blouse under a dark blue jacket, and black marginally fashionable boots that could be used to kick somebody to death.
She said, “Virgil. How’s your friend? Is it Frankie?”
“Yeah, Frankie. She’s pretty roughed up, but she’ll be okay,” Virgil said. He knew Catrin Mattsson, but not well. “Catrin—good to see you. This is Al Foreman, Mankato PD. Al, this is Catrin Mattsson, she’s with us at the BCA.”
“Oh, yeah,” Foreman said, as they shook hands.
Foreman said “Oh, yeah” because he recognized the name: Mattsson had been a sheriff’s deputy famously kidnapped, raped, and beaten by an insane serial killer. She’d been rescued at the last minute by Lucas Davenport, and she had killed her captor with a steel bar, as Davenport had been reeling with a smashed nose. That was their story, anyway.
Her ordeal and her resilience had brought her to the attention of the governor, who’d pressured the BCA into hiring her. Davenport had supported the appointment, having worked with Mattsson on the serial killer case, before she was kidnapped. She was building her own reputation at the BCA as someone not to be messed with and who carried more than her own load.
Foreman filled her in on the details of the attack and Virgil told her what he’d gotten from Frankie: that the attack was probably aimed at Frankie’s sister, Sparkle, and why that might be. Mattsson listened closely, one fist on her hip; a full-sized black Beretta was clipped to her waistband just ahead of her fist.
When they were finished, Mattsson said, “Virgil, Jon wants you back on the tigers. Soon as you can reasonably do it. He knows you’ve been making progress—Sandy said to tell you that she’s found a shipment of meat dryers and has e-mailed the details to you. I’ll find the guys who attacked Ms. Nobles.”
“Frankie,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, Frankie.”
“She’s asleep; she’s full of pain medication,” Virgil said.
“Okay, I’ll be here overnight. I’ll check every once in a while, see if she’s awake,” Mattsson said. “In the meantime, I need to talk to this Sparkle.”
“She’s staying at Frankie’s farm.”
“Why don’t you wait here for a minute,” Mattsson said. “I want to talk to the doc. Then we’ll go look at the video, see what the locals have, and then I’ll follow you out to the farm. You better get back to the Cities tonight. The tigers are still number one on the media hit parade.”
She went off with the nurse to find the doc and when she was out of earshot, Foreman said, “Whoa.”
Virgil looked after her and said, “Yeah.”
Foreman: “Hot and scary. I mean, totally jumpable, but then she’d probably eat your head, like a black widow.”
“I’m not sure I’d say that out loud,” Virgil said.
“I hear you, brother. You okay with her on the case?”
“More than okay,” Virgil said. And he was: nobody at the BCA would go after Frankie’s attacker harder than Mattsson. He owed Duncan for that one.
—
Mattsson came back a few minutes later and Virgil led the way across town to the Mankato public safety department. Mattsson had called ahead, and the Mankato detective, Donnie Carlson, had the video ready to run.
“The store has a digital recorder tied to the cameras, and the whole thing is hooked up to the Internet,” he said. “We had the video a half hour after Ms. Nobles was attacked. Two cameras cover the gas pumps, a third one is mounted above the pumps and looks at the front door to catch a stickup man coming out. We can see the attack on the edge of that one.”
They bent over the desk watching the full-color video, which had no sound. It began as two men, one rangy and athletic looking, the other too fat and built like a door, walked up to the side of the store and passed out of sight. The video then skipped forward three or four minutes to show Frankie walking out the door carrying a sack of groceries. As she turned down the slot between Sparkle’s Mini and a truck, the two men jogged back into the video frame, then into the slot between the vehicles.
Frankie saw them coming and turned at the last second, as one of the men swung an open-handed slap at the side of her head. The slap connected and she dropped the bag and flattened against the car, her hands going up to protect her face, then the man hit her with a gloved fist, once, twice, and she tried to squeeze past him but the second man, the heavy one, blocked her retreat and shoved her back to the first one.
The athletic man swatted h
Without sound, the video was flat and looked something like a puppet show: the punches and slaps didn’t have the sound effects of movies.
A few seconds after the attackers ran out of the picture, a third man hurried around the nose of the truck and looked at her, then turned and shouted to somebody out of sight, and went to his knees over her, although the camera still couldn’t see her, and they saw a heavy brown-haired woman in what appeared to be a hairstylist’s nylon uniform run into the store and then, a moment later, two more men run out to where the third man was now standing over Frankie, shouting. One of the newcomers turned and ran back into the store.
The video then skipped ahead to an ambulance arriving. The paramedics hurried up to the small crowd between the cars, and a moment later brought a backboard, and then loaded Frankie onto a gurney and wheeled her to the ambulance and loaded her inside. A moment later, the ambulance was gone.
Virgil hadn’t really been aware that the two attackers had been wearing masks, and said so.
“It’s hard to see,” the Mankato cop said. “Watch this.”
He typed in a number and the video recording skipped back to the point where Frankie turned between the two vehicles and the two men appeared. Mattsson muttered, “Watch out!”
At that point in the attack, the men’s heads were up and looking straight at the cameras. That lasted for only a second or two, but Carlson froze the photo as the two looked toward Frankie. With the image frozen, Virgil could see that they wore pale rubber masks. “Don’t think they look like Mitt Romney, but I’ve been told that’s what they are,” Virgil said.