Escape Clause

by John Sandford

  Virgil said, as quietly as he could, and still be audible, “I’m a cop and I’m not looking in your window. . . .”

  The man looked at Virgil’s long blond hair, the band T-shirt, and the cowboy boots and said, “Bullshit you’re a cop.”

  The woman, somewhere inside but not visible, shouted, “Get your gun, Dan. . . .”

  At that moment, from the front of the house, Mattsson screamed, “He’s running, he’s running. . . .”

  Virgil turned to Howe’s backyard and saw Blankenship bolt across the yard, stepping through ankle-deep water in a child’s plastic swimming pool as he went. There was a chain-link fence across the back of Howe’s lot, and he vaulted the waist-high fence with Jenkins, and then Shrake, behind him. Virgil followed as far as the fence, then thought to turn back to the house, in case Howe might be a threat, but a barefoot Howe had come out on the patio with the little girl. He said to Virgil, “He didn’t say nothing about cops looking for him.”

  “How long has he been here?” Virgil asked.

  “Since yesterday.”

  A man ran around the corner of the house. He was carrying a huge shiny revolver, saw Virgil, pointed the pistol generally in Virgil’s direction, and hollered: “Hold it.”

  Howe shouted, “What the fuck are you doing, Dan? These are cops.”

  The man hesitated, then said, “Oh,” and pointed the gun at the ground.

  Virgil said, “There are three other cops here. If they see that gun, they could kill you.”

  A woman jogged around the corner of the house in a bathrobe. She stopped behind Dan, pointed at Virgil, and said, “That’s him, Dan.”

  Howe said, “They’re cops, Jane. They’re gonna kill you guys if they see that fuckin’ gun.”

  Dan said to the woman, “We better get back inside.”

  The little girl said to Virgil, “My dad said ‘fuckin’.’”

  “That happens, sometimes, honey,” Virgil said. He heard Jenkins shouting something from what seemed to be down the block, but more toward the front yard. Virgil said, “I better get out there.”

  —

  He ran back down the side of the house and, in the front yard, saw Blankenship sprinting toward his truck, with Jenkins twenty yards behind. Shrake was out of sight somewhere, but Mattsson was standing near the back end of Blankenship’s truck, raking leaves. The rake had the fan-type thin, wide blades made for lawn care, rather than the heavy tangs of a garden rake.

  It worked well enough, though, especially when Blankenship tried to run past her, and she lifted the rake and swatted him in the face. He went down on his back, and Jenkins was on top of him before he got reorganized, flipped him over, and snapped on the cuffs. Shrake came puffing up a minute later as Jenkins and Mattsson were putting Blankenship in the back of Virgil’s truck. Blankenship was bleeding from three fan-shaped cuts on his face.

  “What happened to him?” Shrake asked.

  “Catrin hit him in the face with the rake,” Virgil said, nodding to the rake that was now lying on the neighboring lawn.

  “I’m liking this chick better all the time,” Shrake said. He looked down at his tan pants, which had two-foot-long grass stains on the legs. “I fell or I would have been here for it. Goddamnit, I miss all the fun stuff.”

  —

  Blankenship was cuffed to the ring welded to the floor in the back of Virgil’s truck. He said, “I’m gonna sue you motherfuckers. . . .”

  “Shut up,” Virgil said, as he got in the truck, “or I’ll tell all your friends in Mankato that you got your ass kicked by a woman.”

  “She ambushed me,” Blankenship said.

  “I’d lie about it,” Virgil said. “Now shut up.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shut up.”

  “My face is all cut up. I’m bleeding,” Blankenship said.

  “Throw a little dirt on it,” Virgil said.

  Mattsson added, “And shut up.”

  —

  They went by the BCA, and Mattsson picked up her car and followed Virgil over to the Ramsey County jail, where she took Blankenship inside and told Virgil, “Go find the tigers.”

  “Yeah. Catrin: thanks. I appreciate what you’ve done.”

  He couldn’t decide whether to shake Mattsson’s hand or hug her, but didn’t do either when she simply nodded, stepped back, and said, “Nice working with you, Virgil. Let’s do it again.”

  30

  Virgil left the jail and, as he headed out of the parking lot, checked his phone. Two missed calls from the same personal number, and he thought it might belong to Sandy, the BCA researcher.

  He was right. “Virgil,” she said. She sounded breathless. “Where have you been?”

  “Arresting a guy, nothing to do with the tigers. What happened?”

  “You know I was tracking that phone that belonged to Hamlet Simonian? Well, I figured it out.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It was in Oakland, California—at a FedEx place. Whoever sent it, shipped it ground so we’d think somebody was driving it across country,” Sandy said.

  “Ah, hell. Is it still there?”

  “No, it’s in a truck heading south, toward Los Angeles. It should be there in a couple of hours. But here’s the thing—it’s an iPhone, and iPhones have their location services on by default. That means if we get the phone and if it’s not password protected, and he hasn’t turned off the location services, we can open up the privacy section and see everywhere the phone’s been. Like, if he went to where the tigers were, we would probably get an exact address.”

  “We need that. Right now. You think the phone is headed toward LA?”

  “Yes. Probably in a semitruck, which would be a huge load of packages, but I talked to FedEx and everything on the truck will be sorted for local delivery, which means we can probably narrow it down to one delivery truck. From there, we ought to be able to find it.”

  “Do you have a date this evening?” Virgil asked.

  “What?”

  “If I get Jon to put you on a plane, are you up for a quick trip to LA?”

  “Well . . . sure. But I gotta tell you, it could be password protected, and Apple doesn’t help you crack those. Even if you’re a cop.”

  “I know all about Apple and I also know that when we searched Hamlet Simonian’s room, we found a little book that seems to be full of passwords. Pack your party panties and get out to the airport—you’re going,” Virgil said. “I’ll call Jon right now and get him to authorize a ticket. And a hotel with a pool.”

  “Oh my God. All right. I’ll be on my phone.”

  —

  Virgil called Duncan, who said he’d fix it and put Sandy on the first flight into LAX.

  If Sandy could find out where Hamlet Simonian had been, Virgil thought . . . and then he thought, Wait a minute. We’ve got phones closer than LA.

  He called Minneapolis homicide, got Howser on the phone. “Does Zhang have an iPhone?”

  “Yeah. He’s also got a lawyer, who’s standing right behind him,” Howser said. “And we really don’t have enough to hold him.”

  “Damnit. Ask him anyway; ask him if he’ll let you look in his iPhone. Don’t specify what you’re looking for, but you might hint you want to look at his messages. Then you go to the privacy settings, see if the location services are turned on, and if they are, look at the phone’s history and tell me where it’s been the last few days.”

  “I can ask, but I’ll tell you, he’s got Horace Turner here. You know him, the attorney? No? Well, Horace is an asshole of Jovian dimensions. The chances of him letting me look are slim and none.”

  “And slim is out of town.”

  “Not just out of town, he’s in fuckin’ Transnistria,” Howser said. “But I’ll try.”

  —

 
; Virgil headed over to the BCA building and was nearly there when Howser called back. “Turner told me where I could stick my request, and it’s not a place you’d want to visit. I have one fact that you’ll find interesting, and a thought.”

  “I’ll take both,” Virgil said. “What’s the fact?”

  “Found a couple of hairs on the old man’s shoes. Crime Scene isn’t promising anything, but they could well be from a tiger. Definitely animal hair, or fur, or whatever it is, and the right color for a tiger.”

  “Excellent. That’s great. What’s the thought?”

  “If his old man was in on this, if he was killed by this Peck guy . . . well, we have the old man’s phone. We don’t need anybody’s permission to look at that, since he’s, like, dead.”

  “Despite what people say, you are a man of average intelligence,” Virgil said. “I’m on my way.”

  —

  Zhang senior’s phone was sitting on Howser’s desk when Virgil arrived back at Minneapolis homicide. It had been processed by the crime-scene people and sent to the evidence room, where Howser had collected it. He dumped it out of a plastic bag, and they stood around and looked at it.

  “Not an iPhone,” Howser said. “What the hell is a Jazzpod?”

  “There’s some Chinese writing on it,” Virgil observed.

  “Must be a Chinese brand,” Howser said. “Turn it on.”

  Virgil did, and they found that the phone’s top language was English, and that it was fingerprint protected. Howser said, “Goddamnit. So close.”

  Virgil, thinking of the prints they’d taken from Hamlet Simonian, said, “Well, we’ve got his fingers.”

  —

  Before going to the medical examiner’s office, where Zhang’s body was being held, Virgil and Howser went back to the homicide office, where a cop was being harangued by Horace Turner, the younger Zhang’s attorney.

  “We’re already deep into the lawsuit. You’ve got no reason to hold my client . . .” Turner spotted Howser and said, “It’s about time. This has gone beyond any reasonable hold and into physical abuse.”

  Howser looked at the other homicide cop and demanded, “Have you been beating up Mr. Zhang?”

  The other cop yawned and said through the yawn, “Only with my dry wit.”

  Howser said to Turner, “Does dry wit fall under the Civil Rights Act?”

  “Let my person go,” Turner said. And, “For you cops, that’s what we call a play on words. Anyway . . . let him go. Now. I am instructing him not to say another word to you. Not under these conditions.”

  Virgil said to Turner, “I think he choked his father to death for the inheritance. I think he was involved in the theft of the tigers. I think he’s involved with at least a triple murder, and maybe four murders.”

  “No!” Zhang said.

  Virgil said, “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Show me a single thing and there’s a slim possibility that I won’t sue you for abusing my client,” Turner said.

  “His father’s shoes had tiger hair on them. That’s a single thing. This guy”—Virgil pointed at Zhang—“drove his father everywhere. His father didn’t even have a car here. They took junior’s Ferrari when they wanted to go somewhere.”

  “He took Ubers,” Zhang blurted.

  “Shut up,” Turner said to Zhang.

  Virgil said, “Really. Ubers? I bet there’s a record of that. Thanks, that helps. You mind if we look at your shoes?”

  “If you’ve got a warrant,” Turner said.

  Howser said, “Why don’t we keep Mr. Zhang sitting here for a while longer, while we go get a warrant, then?”

  “I had nothing to do with . . .”

  “Shut up,” Turner said. “Not another word.” And to Howser: “Get your warrant, if you think you can.”

  —

  They left Turner, still complaining, and Zhang, now sourly silent, sitting in the homicide office. Virgil and Howser went off to the medical examiner’s office, and another cop went to apply for a warrant, and a fourth one sat with Zhang to make sure he didn’t rub the soles of his shoes too hard on the carpet.

  The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office had the same shoe-box ambience as the Ramsey County medical examiner’s office, but instead of being simply plain, it was aggressively beige. An investigator pulled Zhang senior’s nude body, and Virgil looked away as the experts figured out how best to get a fingerprint.

  One of the examiner’s employees, apparently an expert on cell phones, said, “There’s no way to know which finger he used until we try them.”

  “Try his right hand first,” said the investigator, a tall thin man with a hipster’s goatee.

  “Based on . . . ?”

  “The fact that ninety percent of the people in the world are right-handed,” the investigator said. “Try his right index finger first.”

  They hit it on the first try and the phone opened up. Virgil said, “I’ll take it out in the waiting area . . . but let Mr. Zhang hang on here, in case we need the finger again.”

  “You could take the finger with you,” the investigator said.

  “Ah . . .”

  “Just kiddin’. A little medical examiner humor there. Zhang parts ain’t going anywhere.”

  —

  Virgil and Howser went out to the waiting area, where it smelled less funny, and Virgil, who’d rehearsed on his own phone, poked his way through the menus of the Jazzpod to the location history, and the history opened up.

  Most of the locations shown on the phone were in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul, but one was in Washington County, east of St. Paul and adjoining the St. Croix River and Wisconsin.

  The problem was, all the locations were much more general than they were on iPhones. Instead of addresses, they got areas: for Washington County, they got a location circle that Virgil figured was ten miles across. From previous such calculations during fugitive searches, Virgil knew that a circle ten miles across would cover almost eighty square miles, and in this case, a nice chunk of suburbs and probably a few thousand homes.

  “That help?” Howser asked.

  “It does, some,” Virgil said. “We tracked the kid and his old man out that way, but they got onto us and turned around. We never did find out where they were going.”

  The medical examiner’s investigator had an iPad and a Wi-Fi connection, and they called up a mapping program’s satellite photos and compared it to the phone location. That part of Washington County had dozens of small lakes and ponds, most of them isolated from the road system, and many with houses around them.

  “That’s a rat’s nest of streets out there, twisted around all those lakes. You need a better location,” Howser said. “You can’t just go out there and drive around.”

  “Yeah. I maybe got a better location coming. In the meantime, talk to Zhang about his old man’s travels through the countryside out there . . . maybe crank up the pressure a little.”

  —

  As Virgil left the medical examiner’s office, Sandy called from a plane that was on the runway at Minneapolis-St. Paul International: “Got here by the skin of my teeth—Jon had to shout at Delta Air Lines to get them to hold the plane for five minutes. Everybody’s looking at me. They think I’m a movie star or something.”

  “I can see that,” Virgil said.

  “You should. Anyway, they’re telling me to turn off my phone. I’ll be in LA in four hours.”

  “Call me,” Virgil said. “Hey, where’s the FedEx truck?”

  “Going into San Bernardino, last time I could look. Gotta go, or they’ll throw me off the plane.”

  —

  The pressure to find the killer, and the tigers, had grown intense, especially with Channel Three now running a clock on the number of hours and minutes the animals had been missing.

  V
irgil considered the possibilities, and went to lunch.

  While he was working his way through an egg-salad sandwich at the Parrot Café, he called around to see if he could find a human being at Uber. He eventually found one, who passed him up through several levels of management to a guy who said he couldn’t call every Uber driver in the Twin Cities—he said there were thousands of them, though Virgil thought he might be exaggerating. “I can get a mass e-mailing to them, but I can’t guarantee that they’ll read it,” the Uber guy said. “Tell me again exactly what you’re looking for?”

  Virgil described the two Zhangs and suggested that they may have been taken to Washington County the previous day, from downtown Minneapolis. He gave the Uber guy his phone number and authorized him to give it to anyone who called back with information.

  “I’ll do all that, but I wouldn’t hold your breath,” the Uber guy said.

  Before he rang off, Virgil asked, “Has anyone ever asked you if you’re like an Uber manager, you know like . . .”

  “Like an Obersturmbannführer in Nazi Germany? Yeah, people ask me that all the time, because they think it’s funny. I tell them that for one thing, in Germany it was spelled with an O, not a U, and for another thing, shut the fuck up.”

  “Thanks,” Virgil said. “You’ve been really helpful. Really.”

  A television in the corner of the café began running a midday news program, and the first thing shown were the faces of two tigers, and an all-caps caption that said, “DEAD?” Virgil didn’t need to have the sound turned up to know what was being said.

  He finished the egg-salad sandwich and tried to figure out what to do next.

  31

  Peck was at a Walgreens off I-94, pushing a Xanax prescription across the counter, hoping it wouldn’t bounce. The clerk looked at it, typed into a computer for a while, then asked, “Do you want to pick these up later or wait?”

  “How long if I wait?”

  “Fifteen or twenty minutes,” the clerk said. The clerk seemed to be looking at him oddly, but Peck couldn’t think why.