Escape Clause by John Sandford
“That’s okay, as long as they don’t do anything about it.”
“Sparkle says she thought a guy in a red pickup truck followed her for a while, but she lost him in Mankato. She says. Kinda freaked me out, but when I really pushed her on it, she wasn’t sure she was being followed at all. I think she expected to be, and when she saw two trucks that looked more or less alike, she got paranoid. She checked her rearview mirror all the way out here, and never saw the truck after she left Mankato.”
“Huh. Well, as long as she’s okay,” Virgil said.
“You coming home tonight?”
“Might as well. Nothing happening here,” Virgil said.
“That’s not good.”
“I’ve still got a guy to talk to. . . .”
—
Sandy was tracking Peck through the wilds of the Internet. When Virgil went back to talk to her, he found her pounding on her keyboard. She glanced up at him, held up a hand that meant “stop” or “go away,” and he said, “I’ll get a Ding Dong. You finding anything?”
“Yes. Give me five minutes.”
Virgil got a Ding Dong from the vending machine and gave her ten minutes; he and Sandy had once had a sharply abbreviated romance and she continued to be testy with him. When the ten minutes were up, he went back to her office, where she was peering at a pale green document on-screen. She said, “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Dr. Peck lost his license to practice medicine in Indiana when a medical board found that he’d engaged in unethical behavior with some female patients. I had to go around some circles to find it, but it turned out he’d give women with sprains or muscle pulls or other minor injuries a shot of nitrous oxide to help relax them while he was putting on a splint or a wrap, or manipulating a limb. They’d wake up feeling all funny.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. He was lucky he wasn’t charged with rape, but nobody was exactly sure they’d been penetrated. One woman thought she might have been photographed . . . for later use. Anyway, the fact that he was disciplined would show up on any background check, and once the details were known, there’s no way he’d ever get licensed. Not here in the States.”
“But he still calls himself a doctor.”
“Well, not exactly. He calls himself Winston Peck VI, MD. And he does have an MD,” Sandy said.
“Huh. Thank you.”
“Not done,” she said.
“More?”
“He filed for bankruptcy two years ago, two hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt, twelve thousand in assets, not counting his house and two vehicles. He had to sell a car; he kept a truck, a Tahoe.”
“What business?”
“He had an idea like emojis,” Sandy said. “He called them ‘the nip family.’ They were digital nipple images that you could customize to look like your own nipples, and they could carry messages back and forth. You’d send somebody a nipple on your iPhone, and it’d talk to their nipples, and so on.”
“Nipples.”
“Yeah. You’d get the nipples for free, but then you go to ‘the nip’ website and customize them for a dollar, so they’d look like your own, you know, with nipple rings or whatever,” she said. “He copyrighted the idea, but he doesn’t know how to code, apparently, and he hired a couple of coders who drove him right into the ground with their salaries. And when nobody bought a nipple . . . he was screwed.”
“You’re pulling my wiener,” Virgil said, without thinking.
“No, I tried that, and it didn’t really pay off for me,” she said.
“Hey!”
“Okay, but what I’m telling you is the truth. He tried to create a nip family thing, hoping it’d go viral and it went more like bacterial—like flesh-eating bacteria. They ate all his money.”
“Which would give him a reason to grab the cats.” Virgil and Sandy looked at each other for a few seconds, Sandy waiting, until Virgil finally said, “He’s the most interesting guy I’ve run into so far. The only one who’d seem to have the . . . energy . . . to pull this off.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean he did it—there are probably another half-million people in the Cities with his energy level,” Sandy said.
“Yeah, but he’s been outside the law with these women; he’s in financial trouble; he deals in traditional medicine; he’s got the energy.”
“Certainly worth a closer look,” she said.
9
Peck still wasn’t answering his phone, so Virgil went to his address, which turned out to be a sixty-year-old white-shingled house with a tuck-under garage in a quiet neighborhood not far from the Cathedral of Saint Paul.
Virgil banged on the door for a while and got no response, looked through the garage windows and found enough light to see that the garage was empty.
Back in his truck, he tried calling Peck again, and again got no answer. Stuck for the moment, he looked up the number Dick Ho had given him for Toby Strait, called it, and got . . . nothing. No phone with that number, at least, not on any network, anywhere.
Virgil next tried the number Lucas had given him and connected with Strait’s girlfriend, whose name was Inez.
“I already talked to that other cop about this, that Lucas what’s-his-name: Toby’s hiding,” Inez said. “That Knowles bitch is hunting him down, and the law knows it, and they don’t do a friggin’ thing about it. Toby’s afraid to turn on his phone because there are ways of tracking it. If somebody spoofs a number and he answers it, Knowles can figure out exactly where he’s at.”
“You really think she’s still hunting for him? She’s lucky to be walking around free,” Virgil said.
“I know she’s still hunting him. She’s told people that. You want to know something? If anybody has any idea of where Toby is, it’s probably Knowles.”
—
Well, that’s an idea, Virgil thought, and it was good from two angles: Knowles might know where Strait was hiding, and she was among the most radical of animal rights activists in the state. A lot of radical animal rights people didn’t care for zoos, so there was at least a slender possibility that Knowles might know about somebody who had taken the animals as a publicity stunt, if that’s what had happened.
Lucas had said she lived near Monticello, on the northwest edge of the Twin Cities metro area. He could probably jump the rush-hour traffic and make it up there in an hour or so. He called the BCA duty officer, asked him to find out where Maxine Knowles had been arrested, and to get the address she’d left with whatever police agency had arrested her; and to check her driver’s license and see if that matched with her bail papers.
He made it out of town ahead of the rush and was on I-94 driving north when he took the callback from the duty officer, who told him that Knowles lived eight miles out of Monticello. He’d looked at a Google Earth picture of the address, and told Virgil, “It looks like a house with a half-dozen trailers scattered around. It’s out in the sticks. I’ll tell you, Virgie, I’d call up Sherburne County and get a couple deputies to go out there with you.”
Virgil did that. He explained to the sheriff what the problem was, and the sheriff agreed to send a couple of deputies along. They’d meet in a Walgreens parking lot in Monticello, and then cross the Mississippi to Knowles’s place.
Virgil found the two Sherburne County deputies, who were named Buck and James, chatting with a couple of Wright County deputies at the Walgreens. Virgil shook hands with everybody, then ran into the Walgreens and bought a couple packs of cheese crackers and a Coke. The Wright County deputies said, “Keep your asses down,” and Virgil, Buck, and James rolled in a three-car caravan north across the Mississippi.
North of the river, they threaded their way through a skein of backroads that ended at a shabby farmstead, with that semicircle of trailers the duty officer had told him about. Behind the trailers, they
They crossed a culvert into the farmyard, and within a minute or so, people began wandering out of the trailers. Virgil, out of his truck, was joined by Buck and James, and Buck whispered uneasily, “Jesus, it’s a zombie outbreak.”
A dozen people came out of the trailers, most of them dressed in ragged farm-style clothing, denim overalls and long-sleeved shirts and gum boots, both men and women; and they were old, with long badly cut hair, gone gray, and all but one or two were noticeably thin. The combination of age, hair, and spindly bodies did give them the look of zombies, Virgil thought, along with the shuffling gait that one or two of them had.
A tall, sunken-cheeked man asked, “What can we do for y’all?”
“I need to talk to Maxine Knowles,” Virgil said.
“Can I ask what for? She’s legally bailed out,” the man said.
“I’m not here about her legal problems,” Virgil said. “I actually need to talk to her about her area of expertise. I’m the cop looking for the stolen zoo tigers.”
That set off a rash of commentary among the crowd and the tall man shook his head and said, “Well, that’s a disaster. I can tell you, we don’t have them, and I don’t know who would.”
“I believe you, but I still need to talk to Maxine,” Virgil said.
The tall man looked at them for a few seconds, then pulled a cell phone from his pocket and poked in a number. After a few more seconds, he said, “Maxine, there are some police officers out in the yard looking for you. It’s about the tigers.”
He listened briefly, then hung up and said to Virgil, “She’ll be right out.”
—
Maxine Knowles came through the back door of the house, nodded to the group facing Virgil and the deputies, and said to Virgil, “I don’t know about the tigers. I hope you find them before they’re killed.” She was a tall, stocky red-haired woman wearing an olive knit blouse, black jeans, and hiking boots, who added, “I have no idea who’d take them.”
Virgil said, “Is there somewhere you and I can go to talk?”
She pushed out a lip, considering, and said, “I guess so. We could talk in the kitchen.” To the group, she said, “I think we’re okay here, everybody. Let’s get ready to feed.”
The group began to break up, some people going to their trailers, others walking out toward a couple of sheds set off to one side of the chain-link fences.
“What’s the chain link for?” Virgil asked, as he followed Knowles through the house’s mudroom and into a funky-smelling kitchen, redolent of old potatoes and overripe tomatoes.
“Our animals,” Knowles said. “We have fourteen horses, four cows, six pigs, one broken-wing crow. All rescued. We’ve got a bunch of cats and dogs, also rescued, that mostly run around loose, unless they’ve been too abused and we have to sequester them. No tigers.”
Virgil explained his mission and his thinking: “You’re pretty well hooked into the animal rights people. Do you have any ideas for me, who might have been radical enough to grab the tigers?”
She started shaking her head before he got through explaining. “I really don’t, and I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. You want some nutcakes who are processing them for Asian medicines.”
“That’s what we’re all afraid of,” Virgil said.
“There’s a man named Toby Strait—”
“That’s the other reason I’m here. He’s apparently in hiding, ever since you made bail.”
“That sonofabitch.” Her eyes grew wider and her face turned red. “You know what he does for a living?”
“I think so . . .”
“If he’s allowed to keep doing that, he’ll kill off every bear in the state and in Wisconsin and the Dakotas, too. For their gallbladders! So some Chinese assholes can make a medicine that doesn’t even work! People get all weepy about rhinoceroses, and they should, but who’s crying for the black bear, that’s what I want to know! Who’s crying for the black bear?”
“Well . . .”
“If you asked me for one likely man to steal the tigers . . .” She paused, settled a bit, and then said, “I’m not going to talk to a police officer about my case.”
“I don’t need that,” Virgil said. “What I need is any idea you might have about where Strait might be hiding.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Have you looked?”
She shook her head. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Do you have any ideas? Anything? We’re pretty desperate here.”
She got up and got a glass of water, and leaned against the kitchen sink, considering, then said, “He won’t be processing bear gallbladders, not at this time of year. I’d have to guess that he’s out at one of his snake barns. Even if he isn’t, I know they’re processing the skins now, so his snake barn people must be able to get in touch with him.”
“You haven’t been sneaking around to his snake barns, checking up on him?”
“I’m not . . . No, I haven’t, and you know why? If I did, I believe I’d get shot. He’d be willing to do that, to get me off his back. And I have to believe that the law would take his side, if I was found creeping around him. He’d shoot me and get away with it.”
“Do you know where one of his snake barns is at?” Virgil asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“But you haven’t been sneaking around?”
“Of course not.”
—
She got a map up on her laptop and pointed out the snake barn. From a satellite view, it looked like a nicely kept place, nothing at all remarkable—another pretty Minnesota dairy farm. Best of all, it was straight south from Monticello, and a little west, two-thirds of the way back to Virgil’s home in Mankato.
Virgil thanked her, got up to go, and asked, “What’s the story on all the old folks?”
“Volunteers,” she said. “Help me with the animals. You know, they sort of moved in on me; mostly old people, living on Social Security, who care about things. They figured if we got some old trailers—didn’t even have to pay for them, they’re rescue trailers, like the rescue animals—and came out here as a group, they could pool their money, live better, have friends around as they get old and start dying off. It works for us.”
“Huh. I hope that none of you really has anything to do with the tigers,” Virgil said.
“We don’t. I’m not too happy about the whole concept of zoos, as a philosophical matter, but for some animals, like Amur tigers, zoos are about the only thing standing between them and extinction. For that, we need the zoos.”
—
Outside, Virgil found Buck and James watching through the chain-link fence as the old people fed the horses. Most of the horses looked solid enough, but two were radically thin. “We got those a week ago. Don’t yet know if they’re going to make it—you can’t just stuff them full of hay all at once,” Knowles said. “What I want to know is, how in the hell can you starve a horse to death, in Minnesota, in the summer? All you have to do is let them out in a ditch and they’ll feed themselves.”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I don’t understand it, either.”
—
From Monticello to the snake barn, located south of the town of Gaylord, was ninety minutes or so, the blacktop roads shimmering with heat mirages. Virgil ate the cheese crackers before he made it back to Monticello and on his way south stopped at a McDonald’s in Norwood Young America for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, small fries, and a strawberry shake.
He thought about Knowles as he ate, and why God might create somebody like her. She’d seemed sane enough, not somebody who was hunting down another human being so s
Virgil could feel his heart clogging up with grease as he finished the sandwich, but continued on to Gaylord, and out the far side of town to the farm of Jan Aarle, “Jan” being pronounced like Yawn.
Aarle’s wife came to the side door of the suburban ranch-style farmhouse and said Jan was working in the barn. She called him on her cell phone, and a moment later, he walked out of the barn and across the yard to the house.
“I don’t really know where Toby is, but I could probably get a message to him,” Aarle said. He was a fat, pink-faced man with an accent that sounded German, but not quite German—maybe like an American-born kid who grew up speaking German around the house. “What I’d have to do is call around the other barns, and somebody probably has a working number.”
“I need to talk to him today,” Virgil said.
“I can start calling right now,” Aarle said.
“I’d appreciate it.”
—
Aarle went inside the house to start calling—he said he needed to sit down—and Mrs. Aarle stood in the yard with Virgil and said, “Real nice day, isn’t it? A little too hot, though.”
Virgil looked up at the blue sky and puffy white fair-weather clouds and said, “Yep, sure is. Looks to go on like this. For a while, anyway.”
“Not that we couldn’t use some rain,” she said.
“Most always could use some rain,” Virgil said. “As long as it’s not too much.”
“Sure got it last year, in July,” she said. “Way too much. I think it was heaviest on the sixth.”
“I remember that,” Virgil said. “We got something like three inches in Mankato.”
“Five inches out here, on our rain gauge,” she said.
Virgil said, “Whoa. That must have been something.”
“Sounded like we had a drummer up on the roof,” she said. They both turned to look at the roof.