Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  The director was about to be fired, if office rumors were true. Since the building contained a couple of dozen professional investigators and the usual garden-variety snoops, the rumors were generally accurate.

  “No help for it,” Duncan said, about calling the director.

  “I thought you liked being on TV,” Virgil said.

  “I do, most of the time,” Duncan said. “But I like it to be on the credit side of things, where I’m the hero. You know, I smile at the camera, show off my dimples. This is gonna be debit. Big-time debit.”

  “Good luck with it,” Virgil said. “You do have the cute dimples. Here’s a tip: I’d stay away from the phrase ‘The suspect was disarmed.’”

  —

  Virgil left Duncan to his media problem and drove to the medical examiner’s office, a single-story gray building with all of the charm of a shoe box, built next to a Regions Hospital parking structure. The medical examiner, a chain-smoking doc named Nguyen Ran, asked, “You want to see the body?”

  “No. What I want is some clue that’ll get me to the killer. And the tigers.”

  “Don’t have any of those,” Ran said. “I also don’t have any chemistry back yet and won’t have until tomorrow, but I can tell you that you’re probably right on the means of death. No sign of the normal types of violence, not even defensive wounds, but I did find a small bruise next to his left nipple. When I looked closer, I could see a point of penetration that would be consistent with a wound made by a big needle. I dissected that area and found a lacuna in the underlying muscle, and bruising that would be consistent with the violent injection of a substantial quantity of fluid: almost like an inch-long blister in the muscle.”

  “It’s what I thought,” Virgil said. “He was shot with a tranquilizer gun.”

  “Yeah. I looked at his lungs . . . you don’t need the details, but it all points toward a massive dose of a fast-acting sedative. Big enough that the dose killed him. They didn’t have to finish him off with any of the conventional methods. The cheeseheads sent the whole refrigerator over. No tranquilizer dart inside, no dart was found at the scene.”

  “Anything else? Anything that would help me?”

  “Nope. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Underwear, socks, and Nike brand shoes. No ID—no wallet or anything, no jewelry. Fingers were all intact, got a fine set of prints, about as good as you could hope for.”

  “What about the arms?” Virgil asked. “Were they cut off with a scalpel? Hacked off with an ax? Anything I could look for?”

  “More like sawn off with a sharp knife. I’m thinking a butcher knife. Postmortem, of course. No effort to carefully disarticulate the shoulders. They were cut right through. Nothing particularly neat about it. From what I get from my investigators, it was probably done because the killer couldn’t fit the body in the refrigerator any other way.”

  “You wouldn’t say off the top of your head that it was done by a doctor . . . somebody with a knowledge of human anatomy?”

  “No. The way it was done, a deer hunter could have done it. Anybody who’d ever taken apart a carcass. I mean, it wasn’t sloppy, but it wasn’t so skillfully done that I’d suspect a surgeon. You looking at a surgeon?”

  “No,” Virgil said. “Maybe at a regular doc.”

  Ran shrugged. “Couldn’t prove it with me.”

  —

  Virgil sat in his truck and thought: if you had to hide a tiger-skinning operation, you wouldn’t do it in a tightly packed suburb. You’d probably want to do it where you had a piece of land around yourself, free of snoops. Like out in the countryside.

  The closest big patches of rural countryside were on both sides of the St. Croix River, and Simonian had been found under a bridge over the St. Croix. And Peck had given him the name of a woman who processed animals . . . in Wisconsin.

  Need to take a look at her, he thought.

  14

  Peck was lying in bed, listening to WCCO radio, when he heard the news. Hamlet Simonian had been pulled out of the St. Croix River.

  “Oh, mother of God,” he groaned to the thumbtack in the ceiling. He’d used the thumbtack for meditation exercises, before he’d discovered the full efficacy of Xanax. With his luck, he thought, the thumbtack would come unglued some night and land point-down on his eyeball.

  After a while, aloud, he said, “They found Hamlet. How could they find Hamlet?”

  He’d managed to keep his shit together during the interview with Flowers with the help of an extra tab of the Xanax. Drugs wouldn’t help him with Hayk Simonian, not after the bullshit he’d laid on the older brother.

  He’d told Hayk that Hamlet Simonian was driving back to Glendale, California, where their family came from, where he planned to hide out until the heat dissipated. When Hayk had later complained that he couldn’t reach his brother on his cell phone, Peck had told him that Hamlet had turned it off, so the cops couldn’t check his call history. He’d suggested that Hayk go to the Apple lost-phone locater service and look for the phone’s location. Hayk had done that and the phone was shown as being in Des Moines, and later, moving west from Kansas City.

  Hayk had been satisfied with that and had gone back to work, drying out tiger meat. He’d planned to work most of the night, finishing the soft-tissue part of processing Artur, and then he’d move on to grinding the bones. He was probably still asleep in the farmhouse: but Hayk spent a lot of time listening to Minnesota Public Radio and when the noon news came up . . .

  Only one thing Peck could do about that.

  —

  Peck went down to the garage and got the rifle out—not the tranquilizer gun, but the .308 that Hamlet had used to shoot the male tiger. Peck didn’t know a lot about guns, but he’d fired a few, knew how to load the rifle, knew how the safety worked: guns were simple machines and a child could operate them. Children often did, as illustrated by the accidental death statistics.

  He left the gun unloaded and worked the bolt a few times and pulled the trigger, getting the click of the firing pin, then slipped a .308 round into the chamber, put it in the Tahoe, and headed out to the farm.

  The Xanax was still at work. He was worried, even frightened, but functioning.

  In the run-up to his company’s bankruptcy, he’d been handling the daily stress with Ambien at night to help him sleep, and Xanax during the day to smooth himself out. That had worked for a while. Then one night, while on Ambien and Xanax simultaneously, he’d had a couple of evening margaritas at a St. Paul bar, had gone outside, and had physically frozen on a street corner. For nearly half an hour, he’d been unable to pick up a foot to move.

  Since it was St. Paul, nobody had noticed. He might have stood there for a week if something in his brain hadn’t finally broken loose, and he found himself able to walk again.

  He had thrown the Ambien away, but kept the Xanax and now was rolling through the warm morning with a smooth chemical calm. He didn’t think about the consequences of what he’d done with Hamlet Simonian, or what he was planning to do with Hayk Simonian, because the consequences were simply unthinkable. The Pecks were physicians: they did not go to prison.

  Were the Pecks psychopaths? He didn’t think so. Sociopaths, probably, since he had to admit that he really didn’t feel much for his fellow human beings. He even had a hard time figuring out what it would be like, feeling something for his fellow humans.

  His father, he thought, was probably the same way, since he hadn’t apparently felt much for his wives or his only child. He didn’t know about Pecks IV, III, or II, but his father had owned a photograph of Peck I standing next to a wagonload of severed legs, supposedly taken during the fighting at Cold Harbor in the Civil War. Peck I was leaning on the wagon, a cigar in his hands. He was smiling.

  Basically, Peck VI thought, he was carrying out an old family tradition.

  —

  At the farm, Hayk was up
and sitting on a stump outside the barn, smoking a cigarette, wearing a wifebeater shirt and jeans. He yawned, apparently just up. Peck parked and got the gun out of the back. The safety was off, so he kept his finger away from the trigger as he carried it toward the barn.

  “Gonna shoot the girl?”

  “No, but you are, when the time comes,” Peck said. “I thought I better leave the rifle here. It makes me nervous having it around the house.”

  “A lot of shit makes you nervous,” Simonian said. He yawned again.

  “Because I think ahead,” Peck said. “You should try it sometime. How’s the drying going?”

  “Should be done by tomorrow, then we can start on the girl. The testicle slices came out good. You can start grinding and bottling if you want.”

  “Probably tonight,” Peck said. He could hear classical music coming from inside. Public radio. “You hear from Hamlet?”

  Simonian shook his head. “Nobody has. I called Mom, she hasn’t heard a thing. You’d think he’d call from a pay phone or something.”

  “You tried to find a pay phone lately?” Peck asked.

  “There’s that,” Simonian said. He stubbed the cigarette on the stump, then snapped the butt into the driveway. “Back to the salt mine.”

  Peck led the way inside, which stank from the electric dryers; the temperature in the place must have been over a hundred. Peck pulled the door shut behind them. A collection of bones lay on a blue plastic tarp on the floor and a pile of tiger meat on another tarp. Simonian had pulled all the teeth and they lay on an improvised table, along with pans of dried flesh. Still carrying the rifle, Peck bent over the table, looking at what amounted to tiger jerky.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re doing good here. Anybody been snooping around?”

  “The mailman stopped this morning—I was out by the road and he asked if we were moving in. I told him no, we were getting the place ready to sell off. Probably take the buildings down. I told him we wouldn’t be using the mailbox or getting mail, and he went away.”

  “All right,” Peck said. He looked at the tiger meat, including the defleshed, toothless skull, and said, “We’ll grind up all the bones separately, by type—keep the femurs away from everything else. Anything we’re not gonna use, we can bury out back. You ought to use a hammer and break up the skull, but keep that separate. I’m not sure, but I suspect we’ll get more for skull bones, or brain-pan bones. I’ll ask old man Zhang about that.”

  “How would anybody know if it was brain-pan bones or leg bones, after it’s ground up?”

  “Well, I would,” Peck said. “There are some ethical standards involved here.”

  —

  Simonian yawned and turned away from Peck to look at the bones, which was what Peck had been waiting for. He was five feet from the other man, and when Simonian turned, Peck lifted the rifle and shot him in the back.

  Boom!

  Again, the muzzle blast was deafening; and at the last second, Peck flinched, remembering the ricocheting bullet the first time the gun had been shot in the barn. He wasn’t hit this time, though, and he looked on with interest as Simonian lurched away, one step, two, and reached out toward the remaining strip of tiger bone and meat hanging from the overhead hook, turned, and gave Peck a puzzled look, then fell facedown on one of the blood-spattered tarps. Nothing dramatic happened—no last words, no struggle for life, scrabbling across the bloodstained floor.

  Peck looked at the suddenly deceased for a moment, then went to the barn door, pushed it open a crack, and looked out. The barn was set well back from the road, and nobody was on the road.

  So it was done.

  Peck had known from the start that he’d have to get rid of the Simonians, though he’d hoped it would be later than this—now he’d have to finishing processing the tiger meat on his own. As that thought occurred to him, he felt the prickling of hair on the back of his neck, and turned to see Katya peering at him with her golden eyes. She seemed to be waiting.

  “What do you want?” Peck asked the cat.

  Katya stared back at him, unmoving, making no noise.

  —

  A pan sat inside the cage, empty. They’d known they’d want to keep the female tiger alive for a few days, until they were finished processing the male, so they’d provided a water pan. Hayk apparently hadn’t been filling it.

  A hose came in from outside—Hayk had been using it to wash down the tiger carcass—and now Peck set the rifle aside and dragged the hose over to the cage, turned the nozzle on, and filled the pan through the fence. Katya didn’t move.

  “It’s there if you want it,” Peck told her.

  He turned to the problem of getting rid of Hayk’s body. He could back the Tahoe up to the barn door and get the body out without being seen, but getting a 240-pound body into the truck would be a problem. Three of them had struggled to get the male tiger onto a six-inch-high dolly, when they’d only had to lift a bit more than two hundred pounds each, and Hayk had lifted a lot more than his share.

  Katya made a rumbling sound from her cage, and Peck glanced back at her. She hadn’t eaten in three days, probably hungry.

  He turned back to the problem of moving Hayk, and then thought, Wait, a hungry tiger? He had 240 pounds of fresh meat. Hayk was heavily built, especially from the waist down and one of his legs probably weighed between forty-five and fifty pounds, if he remembered his medical texts correctly.

  Removing the legs would seriously reduce the load, he thought, and all the tools for doing that were right here in the barn. Two birds with one stone. He looked at the cat.

  “Got the munchies?”

  Katya didn’t say anything, but lay back and watched him.

  15

  Roberta Patterson lived out in the countryside, in a ranch-style house with yellow siding and an oversized mailbox surrounded by dusty-looking cone flowers, out on the county road. She was getting her mail when Virgil pulled into her hosta-lined driveway. Virgil knew a man who bred hostas, but he was not confident of that man’s intelligence.

  “Do I know you?” Patterson asked, as he got out of his truck, stepping carefully to avoid the hostas.

  “Nope. I’m a Minnesota cop looking for the tigers,” Virgil said.

  “Ah. I wondered if you’d come around here,” she said, as she thumbed through the mail. “You got some ID?”

  Virgil showed her his ID and they walked up the driveway to the house, talking about what a nice day it was, and how last week’s rain had kept down the dust after a dry summer. A metal garage or work building sat behind the main house and was nearly as large as the house. Patterson said, “That’s where I work; I guess you know what I do.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know exactly how you do it,” Virgil said.

  “Come on inside. You want a root beer? I just bought some.”

  “That’d be good,” he said.

  “Scoop of vanilla ice cream?”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  They sat in her compact kitchen to talk; the kitchen smelled of country vegetables like carrots and onions, with just the barest undertone of soil and skunk. As Patterson put the root beer floats together, she said, “To keep it simple, I collect a variety of fauna and flora, animals and plants, and dry them and prepare them and bottle them and ship them to people who distribute them through traditional medical channels.”

  She was a tall, thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed woman in her middle forties. She was wearing a white blouse with a wolf’s head embroidered into it, jeans, and hiking boots. “I get the animal parts through a local fur dealer and some from roadkill. The plants I collect myself, usually from river bottoms, and I have a patch of ground I lease from a local farmer for growing marigolds and mint and a bunch of other herbs.”

  “You haven’t heard anything about the tigers?”

  “No, of course not, or I would
have called the police,” she said. She handed him the float in a ceramic mug. “I’d never be involved with anything like that, or anything that involved endangered animals. The animals that I use are members of the weasel family—mink, otters, martens—brought in by trappers, and I’ll get striped skunks from the same place. Or from roadkill. They’re all used for their musk. In the fall, I’ll get bear gallbladders, which are collected for the bile. Animals are a relatively small part of the business. I do a ton of herbs. That’s most of it.”

  “Do you know anybody who would have heard about the tigers . . . if there’s anything out there to hear?”

  “Honestly? If there was anything to hear, it’d probably be me,” Patterson said. “There hasn’t been a hint, so if the tigers were going to be used for medicine, I believe it has to be somebody working on his own. Or it’s not people who are going to use them for medicine. There are animal rights people . . .”

  Virgil spooned up a chunk of ice cream, ate it, and said, “We haven’t ruled that out, but there’s a problem: one of the people who we strongly believe was involved was found murdered. Dumped in the St. Croix, not far from here. The thing is, he was a professional criminal. A professional thief. Not the kind of person you find hanging around with, um, you know, radical do-gooders.”

  “Do you even know any radical do-gooders?” she asked, with a tinge of skepticism.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. I talked to a couple of them and they say they haven’t heard a thing. I believe them,” Virgil said. “Besides, they pointed out that the zoo is part of a project to save the Amur tiger from extinction. Even the most radical animal rights people would support that.”

  “All right—but here’s the problem,” Patterson said. “Tiger parts are illegal in the U.S. and most of the rest of the world. They’re even illegal in China, though the law is mostly ignored there. So, you’ve got, say, a thousand pounds of tiger that you need to distribute. How do you do that? To put it another way, since you’re a police officer, how would somebody get rid of a thousand pounds of cocaine or heroin?”