Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  “We’ll tell them,” Mattsson said.

  “Come get me, Grandma,” Reeves said. He began to cry and shake, tipped his head up to the sky and wailed, “Don’t put me in jail . . .”

  “Shouldn’t go beating up women,” Mattsson said.

  —

  They locked Reeves to a steel ring that was welded to the floor of Virgil’s truck, then got together outside, where Reeves couldn’t hear, and Mattsson said, “I cruised that Waterhole place. Not a good spot to make a bust. Gonna be a few guns in there.”

  “So we take Reeves back to Mankato, let him look at the lockup, and interview him. I think we can squeeze him for whatever we need. Then we go over to Blankenship’s and bust him there. You know where he lives?”

  “Yeah, I got an address.” She thought a moment, and then said, “That all sounds pretty good. Let’s see what we get from Reeves.”

  “We need to ask him about Frankie, too.”

  “Yup.”

  —

  They hauled Reeves into the Blue Earth County jail, stopping at Virgil’s to get his BCA-approved recorder. After they booked Reeves in, they took him to an interview room, read him his rights with the recorder running and the jail video turned on, and suggested that he spill his guts, which he did.

  “Don’t put me in jail . . .”

  He said that he’d worked with Blankenship doing security work at concerts and bars, and that Blankenship had told him that some dirty Mexicans had been sneaking left-wing union organizers into the Castro plant, and that somebody at the Castro plant—he didn’t think it was old man Castro himself—wanted to teach them a lesson.

  They’d only spanked a couple of people, he said, one of the left-wingers at a Kwik Trip and then the Mexican earlier that night. Blankenship told him that they were protected, and there was no chance that the cops would even look into it.

  “He said all the cops around here were on Castro’s payroll,” Reeves said.

  “He was lying to you,” Virgil said.

  “Why would he lie to me?”

  “Because he wanted a chump to go along and watch his back while he beat up people,” Mattsson said.

  “He didn’t really beat them up; he slapped them,” Reeves said.

  “And kicked them a few times,” Virgil added.

  Reeves turned away and muttered, “Yeah, Brad does that when he gets excited.”

  When they’d wrung him out, a couple of jailers led him away to a cell. He was shaking uncontrollably as they led him away, and one of the jailers assured him he’d be alone in the lockup.

  “Hope he doesn’t hurt himself,” Virgil said.

  Mattsson: “At some point, even dumb people have to take responsibility for what they do. He wore a mask: he knew what they were doing was wrong.”

  “Yeah, I know, but . . .”

  “Stop being an asshole,” Mattsson said. “Let’s find Blankenship.”

  —

  They didn’t, that night. Blankenship wasn’t at home. Virgil walked into the Waterhole five minutes before closing time, asked around, but nobody had seen him. With the bars closed, they sat outside his house for a while, but he never showed.

  “Maybe he’s got a girlfriend,” Virgil suggested.

  “I’ll get him tomorrow,” Mattsson said. “I can get a sheriff’s deputy to back me up, if you can’t make it.”

  “I gotta stay with the tigers,” Virgil said. “Jon would be pissed if he knew I was out here with you. There’s not much I can do with the tigers except wait for a break, but still: they want me up there staring at the telephones.”

  “You go ahead and stare,” Mattsson said. “I’ll take care of Blankenship.”

  “Deal,” Virgil said.

  21

  Virgil went back to his house and bagged out, Honus at the foot of the bed; he spent a few minutes thinking about Mattsson and decided, before he went to sleep, that a prudent man would stay on her right side. Mattsson could wind up running the BCA someday, he thought, unless she decided to go into politics, in which case, she could wind up running the whole state. Frankie was already one of her fans, and Frankie wasn’t that easy to impress.

  The next morning he took Honus for a run, fed him, dropped him at the farm, and left for the Twin Cities with six hours of sleep, groggy but functioning. Frankie called and said Sparkle would take her home, whenever the docs let her out of the hospital.

  On his way north, he started working the phones, called Barry King’s girlfriend, who said she hadn’t heard from him since he dropped her off the morning before, and that his phone was off-line.

  There were no further tips on the BCA tip line, and Virgil was feeling stuck, when the Simonians called: “This is Levon. Is it true?”

  “About Hayk? I’m afraid it is.”

  There was a collective moan on the other end of the phone line, and Virgil asked, “How did you know about Barry King?”

  “Hamlet told the name to his mom,” Simonian said. “She wrote it down.”

  “You don’t have King now, do you?”

  “No, he didn’t want to go with us anymore, so we let him go. I mean, you know, we dropped him off.”

  “Well, we can’t find him. I hope you didn’t do anything else, like murder him.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Simonian said, although, from his tone of voice, Virgil understood that murder was among the range of acceptable possibilities. “We haven’t seen him since we dropped him off. He didn’t know anything about the tigers.”

  “You sure?”

  “No. We talked to him for a pretty long time, though, and in the end . . . we believed him.”

  Virgil interrupted. “Did Hamlet’s mom mention anyone else besides King?”

  Simonian covered the microphone on his cell phone, although enough noise leaked through that Virgil understood that an argument was going on. Then Simonian came back and said, “Hamlet’s mom, you know, she doesn’t speak the English so good. She tells us that Hamlet says the name Larry King who works at the zoo. We look at the zoo, there is no Larry King, but there is a Barry King. We tell ourselves, this is the man. Hamlet’s mom, she used to watch Larry King every night on TV, she makes this mistake. We think. But we’re not sure. This is why we didn’t talk to him longer.”

  “You were probably right, though,” Virgil said. “You really didn’t beat anything good out of Barry?”

  “No. He was very stubborn. We think maybe he doesn’t know anything . . .” There was some more mumbling in the background. “But of course, we never would beat up this man. That is not the Simonian way.”

  “Okay. Now, are you leading up to something with this Barry King story?”

  “Yes. Hamlet’s mom, she doesn’t speak so good English. She writes down another name, but we can’t find this man’s name.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “She watches The Simpsons on TV, you know?” Simonian said.

  “Okay, but what . . . ?”

  “We think she makes a mistake again. She writes down Simpson Becker. Do you know this name?”

  “Simpson Becker? Never heard of him,” Virgil said. And he thought, Holy shit, it’s Winston Peck. “You have any idea of what he does?”

  “He is the big brain behind this operation,” Simonian said. “That is what we know.”

  There was more mumbling in the background, then Simonian added, “My brother Dikran says we should tell you that there might be two big brains, one here, one from California. Hamlet and Hayk were hired in California, but we don’t know who.”

  “Well, I’ll keep an eye out for them, and thank dickweed for mentioning that,” Virgil said. “It’s time you guys went home. If you don’t go home, you’ll wind up in a Minnesota prison. All six of you.”

  “We think of this, but I tell you, Virgil: we are a valuable resource. A treasure in A
rmenian clothing. If you find this Simpson Becker, you give him to us. We speak to him, and he will tell the truth about the tigers. And Hamlet and Hayk.”

  —

  Virgil got the Simonians off the phone and called Duncan: “Can I have Jenkins and Shrake? Only a couple of days?”

  “We’ve got to have them back before the action starts at the fair,” Duncan said. “You got something?”

  “Maybe. It’s possible that I’ve identified the guy who’s got the tigers and probably killed Hamlet and Hayk Simonian, but I’ve got no proof. We need to spend some time watching him. The good thing is, he’s got to be working with the tigers . . . you know, like processing them.”

  “Don’t say that,” Duncan said. “I’m still praying that they’re alive.”

  “That’s not realistic, Jon . . . the longer it goes, the smaller the chance,” Virgil said. “At this point, we’d be lucky to get one of them back.”

  —

  Virgil arranged to hook up with Jenkins and Shrake at a French bakery in St. Paul, where Jenkins liked to go to watch the madding crowd and Shrake liked to go for the scrambled eggs and croissants. They’d gotten a table and Virgil cut through the crowd and sat down next to Shrake, looked around, and asked, “You guys come here all the time?”

  “All the time,” Jenkins said. “The girls take me back to my college days.”

  “I didn’t think they had girls at East Jesus Community College,” Shrake said. And: “Virgie, what’ve you got?”

  “I think a guy named Winston Peck has our tigers and probably killed the Simonian brothers. We need to watch him until he takes us to wherever the cats are.”

  “We have any proof that he killed the brothers?”

  “No. All we’ve got is the fact that the brothers were helping with the tigers. If we get him with the tigers, though, we can tie Peck to the Simonians as a felony murder, even if he didn’t personally kill them. Though I suspect he probably did. I don’t think there were a whole bunch of people involved in stealing the tigers—no more than you could get in a van.”

  “Good enough,” Jenkins said. “You know where Peck is right now?”

  “At home, I hope,” Virgil said. “He operates out of his house.”

  —

  After talking it over, they decided that Virgil would go to Peck’s house, with Shrake and Jenkins trailing in their cars. They’d find a spot to watch the house, while Virgil knocked on the door to make sure that Peck was home. They cooked up a thin excuse for Virgil’s appearance at Peck’s place—Virgil would show Peck the mug shots of the dead Simonians and ask if he’d seen them in any place linked to traditional medicine.

  But Peck wasn’t home. Virgil knocked on his door, and a neighbor, backing out of his garage, stopped long enough to say, “Dr. Peck isn’t home. He pulled out an hour or so ago.”

  Virgil walked across the grassy strip separating Peck’s driveway from the neighbor’s, and said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Dr. Peck is helping us with a case, but I haven’t been able to contact him. Are you sure it was him pulling out?”

  “Yeah, I saw him. The guy with the Ferrari was there, and Dr. Peck came out of the house with the Ferrari guy and they were talking in the driveway, and then he went in his garage and got in his truck and pulled out. It looked like he was following the Ferrari guy somewhere.”

  “Sure it was a Ferrari, and not, you know, a Corvette or something?”

  “No, it was a Ferrari. Red. Driver was an Asian guy,” the neighbor said.

  “You didn’t happen to see the plates on the Ferrari?”

  “I did, but I don’t remember any numbers. I do know that there were too many numbers and letters on it. I think . . . don’t quote me on this . . . it might have been from California.”

  “Thanks,” Virgil said. “That helps.”

  “Is Peck in trouble?”

  “We’re just trying to get some information, actually,” Virgil said.

  “That’s what you always say when a guy’s in trouble. I’ve got kids at home after school . . .”

  “We’re not going to shoot anybody,” Virgil said. “We want to talk to Dr. Peck about his area of expertise.”

  “If you say so,” the neighbor said.

  —

  That was all the neighbor had. Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake and told them that Peck was gone, and about the Ferrari.

  “Probably get on to the communications center and find that Ferrari in fifteen minutes,” Jenkins said. “Can’t be more than a dozen of them in the metro area, and probably only one with California plates.”

  “I’ll do that, but what are you guys going to do?”

  “We can sit here and watch and read our iPads,” Jenkins said. “If he shows up, we’ll call you. If not, at least we’ve educated ourselves.”

  —

  With no better ideas, they settled in to watch Peck’s house. Virgil spread the word about the Ferrari; forty minutes later, he took a call from a highway patrolman named Jason Rudd who was running a speed trap near the airport: “I think I got your Ferrari. Red, Asian driver, one passenger, also Asian, California plates. He’s heading west on 494. I think he just came out of the airport.”

  “Can you run the plates?”

  “Doing that now, but I thought you might want a little subtlety here, so I went on past him and I’m sitting on the overpass at 77. They’re about to go by me.”

  “Wait a minute. The highway patrol has gone subtle?”

  “We have that capacity, though we seldom need to call upon it,” the patrolman said. “Okay, he’s still on 494, out in front of me again. It’s not like I’m going to lose a red Ferrari.”

  “Stay way back, see where he’s going. I’m heading that way,” Virgil said.

  —

  Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake, told them to stay put, and drove over to I-94 and went west. A minute later, the highway patrolman called again. “Okay, he’s on I-35 going north into Minneapolis. He’s doing about eighty, so I could pull him over anytime. Still want me to stay back?”

  “Yes, but when we get to where he’s going, I might want you to block him in, get some ID, give him a ticket. We’ll talk about that when we get there.”

  “I already got an ID on the owner. It’s a Zhang Min, sixty-five, of San Marino, California, if that means anything to you,” Rudd said.

  “It doesn’t yet, but file that. I’m on 94, going across the river bridge. I’ll be in downtown Minneapolis in a couple of minutes.”

  “Then you’re ahead of us. You ought to get off at Eleventh Street and find a place to pull over and wait. He’ll go right past you if he’s going into town, and if not, you can jump back on the highway right behind us and catch up.”

  “I’ll do that. Stay with me.”

  Five minutes later, Rudd called back. “He’s getting off. He’s coming into town. Where are you?”

  “Right by the Hilton.”

  “He’ll be coming by in fifteen seconds.”

  —

  The Ferrari went by a few seconds later and Virgil pulled out behind it. The Ferrari driver apparently knew where he was going, as he threaded through town with Virgil a few cars back. They caught a couple of stoplights together, and the Ferrari eventually turned into the Loews Hotel.

  Virgil called the patrolman, who was a few more cars behind him, and asked, “Let’s not ticket him. Not yet. Can you hang around for a while?”

  “Sure. I already talked to the boss and he’s okay with it,” Rudd said.

  “Then stick your car where they can’t see it from the hotel, I’m going to take a look at these guys.”

  A valet met Virgil at the front entrance, as another one spoke to the Ferrari’s driver. “Checking in?” the valet asked.

  Virgil held up his ID. “No, I’m checking out, so to
speak. Leave the car here. I’m taking my keys. I’ll move it if I’m going to be more than five minutes.”

  “Well, you are The Man,” the valet said.

  —

  Virgil got his travel bag out of the back and hurried to the hotel door, slowed to an amble, and came up behind the two Asian men. The older of the two, who looked to be in his sixties and might therefore be Zhang Min, had produced an American Express black card. The younger man was looking around the lobby; he checked Virgil, then Virgil’s bag, a tan canvas bag from Filson, dismissed him, and his eyes moved on to a better-dressed man with a diamond earring.

  Another receptionist asked Virgil if she could help, and Virgil shook his head: “Waiting for a friend. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”

  The two Asian men got the penthouse suite and disappeared behind a bellhop pushing a luggage rack.

  Virgil called Jenkins, told him where he was. Jenkins said, “Old Asian man, California, Ferrari, penthouse suite. That sounds like a client for some tiger chops.”

  “I’m trying to think that without being a bigot,” Virgil said. “He could be here for our Peking duck.”

  “I’m thinking not. What are you going to do?”

  “Same as you,” Virgil said. “Wait.”

  —

  He waited for a long crappy hour, parked illegally in a handicapped spot across the street at the Target Center. Halfway through the hour, he called Rudd, the highway patrolman, and told him he could take off. Another half hour, and the valet brought the Ferrari around, and Virgil called Jenkins, who said they hadn’t seen anything of Peck, and Virgil said, “We’re moving here. If they come anywhere close to you, I’m going to want you to drop into the box. Shrake can stay where he’s at.”

  “Got it,” Jenkins said.

  The two Asian men walked out of the hotel and got into the Ferrari. The driver wheeled out of the parking circle and again threaded his way through town, this time out to I-94, east toward St. Paul. Virgil called Jenkins, who said he’d be waiting at Snelling Avenue, if the Ferrari got that far.