Escape Clause

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 could see a maze of eight-foot chain-link fences, which appeared to be much newer and in much better shape than the trailers. Two gray Subaru station wagons, one with a flat front tire, were parked in front of the cages.

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 she could shoot him to death. But she’d been caught more or less red-handed doing exactly that. People, he thought, were never one thing. Knowles was an intelligent, thoughtful lover of animals, and a potential killer.

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.

–

And so on. Aarle came out after ten minutes and said, “Well, I spread the word. I expect you’ll be hearing from him. You’re welcome to stay for dinner if you like.”

“Had a McDonald’s up in Young America; thanks anyway,” Virgil said. “I’d kind of like to get home before dark.”

“Mr. Flowers lives in Mankato,” Mrs. Aarle said, as they walked over to Virgil’s truck.

“That must be real nice,” Aarle said. “Nice town. We’ve talked about retiring there.”

“Probably not for a while yet, though,” Mrs. Aarle said.

Virgil waved and got the fuck out of there before his ears fell off.

–

He was three miles out of the Aarles’ gate when Strait called.

“This is Toby. Who are you, again?”

“Virgil Flowers. I got your name from Lucas Davenport.”

“He quit,” Strait said.

“Yeah, but he’s still got his database,” Virgil said.

“All right. I’m going to call Davenport and I’ll call you back if he says it’s okay.”

“Do that,” Virgil said.

Strait called back five minutes later: “He says you’re okay. Where are you?”

“I left the Aarle snake barn maybe ten minutes ago, heading south,” Virgil said.

“Then we could meet up in New Ulm. You go straight on south until you hit the river, take a right, come across the bridge,” Strait said. “There’s a Taco Bell off on the right side of the road, couple blocks in.”

“When?”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” Strait said.

–

Beans and corn, beans and corn, beans and corn, all the way down.

Strait was leaning against the back of his Chevy pickup, a soft drink cup in his hand, when Virgil pulled into the Taco Bell parking lot. Strait was a short, husky man in a canvas outdoors shirt, worn loose, and jeans and boots. He was wearing a camouflage PSE hat and mirrored sunglasses.

Virgil climbed out of his 4Runner and noticed the lump under Strait’s elbow and said, “You’re carrying.”

Strait lifted his shirt to show Virgil the butt of a full-sized Beretta, and said, “Wouldn’t you, if you were me? I still can’t walk right and maybe never will. I do got a carry permit.”

“Where’d she hit you?”

“Back of both legs. Didn’t lead me enough.”

“Looks like she got the elevation wrong, too,” Virgil observed.

“Well, it was a snap shot, and I was running. I got to give her that much,” Strait said. “She ain’t a bad shot. I saw her get out of her truck and I knew what was coming-this was back at my place in Owatonna-and I started running to get behind my truck. I was carrying, then, too, and when I went down, I got behind the tire and emptied a whole goddamn magazine at her. I measured it off later at three hundred and twelve yards. I gave her about six feet of elevation shooting my Beretta, which turned out to be right. That was the clincher when they arrested her-bullet holes and bullet dings on her truck. They got a slug with rifling marks that matched my gun.”

“Lucky that she didn’t have time to get set up,” Virgil said.

“You’re telling me,” Strait said. He hitched up his pants. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for those stolen tigers.”

“I don’t have them. I got enough to do with my bears and my snakes,” Strait said. “To tell the absolute truth, you’d have to be crazy to snatch those tigers. I mean, Jesus Christ, didn’t those people know what was gonna happen? That they were gonna have a world of shit rainin’ down on their heads? All of our heads. I knew goddamn well that when somebody stole those tigers, somebody would be coming around to give me a hard time. It’s just ain’t fair to legitimate businessmen to get painted with this broad brush.”

“I don’t know what they were thinking,” Virgil said. “That’s something I’d like to know.”

“They wouldn’t have done it, if they knew about my situation-that goofy twat Maxine hunting me down like I was a rabid dog.”

“You’re an expert in this stuff,” Virgil said. “If they’re processing these tigers for medicine, how long would it take?”

Strait took his hat off, brushed his hair back with one hand, and looked up at the sky. After a while, he said, “They were full-grown, right? I’d say a couple, three days apiece, if they got access to a good commercial dryer. That’s if they’re processing the whole animal. With tigers, over in Asia, sometimes the poachers will only take the eyes, heart, whiskers, teeth, penis and balls, and femur bones. You could do that in an hour, maybe, put everything in a sack. When you do that, you leave a lot of money on the ground.”

“What are the femurs for?”

“Well, all ground up, they’re supposed to cure about anything,” Strait said. “Everything from ulcers to burns. Then there’s the baculum-that’s a bone in the penis. You could get anything up to five thousand dollars for an Amur tiger baculum alone.”

“Really?”

“That’s the fact, Jack.”

“Who would you look at for this?”

Strait stuck a pinky finger in his ear, wiggled it around, then said, “Well… Amur tiger’s gonna be worth some serious money, but you’d have to be able to prove it was real. That’s probably why they don’t care about the publicity-maybe even want some of it, to prove it’s real Amur they’re talking. There’s a premium for endangered species. What I’m saying is, I don’t know anybody local who could handle two tigers, but there’s enough money involved that it could be an outsider. Crew goes around, looks at a bunch of zoos, picks out the most likely one, hits it.”

He hesitated, then said, “Of course, grabbing the tigers seems totally batshit anyway. Too much risk, no matter what the payoff is.”

“Nobody local.”

“There are some local people who handle animal products, I just don’t see them hitting the zoo.”

“Give me some names,” Virgil said.

“Three that I can think of. There’s a company in St. Paul called Carvin Exports, which mostly deals in wildlife hides-not furs, but deer hides, wolf skins, bear skins, that kind of thing. I sell them bear hides and some snake, though they’re at the lower end of the market. I can’t see them involved in this because they’re too corporate. Too many people would know, although I suppose the company business could have given the employees some ideas, and they went off on their own…”

“But doesn’t seem likely to you?”

“No, it doesn’t. Then there’s a guy in St. Paul named Winston Peck… a doctor…”

“I’ve been looking for him already,” Virgil said. “Haven’t been able to find him.”

“All right. I don’t think he could handle a tiger on his own. He buys in small amounts for his retail clientele. You know, for patients, and for people who go to his traditional medicine website. There’s a woman over in western Wisconsin who does deal in animal musks and so on. Her name is Bobbie Patterson, don’t know exactly where she lives.”

Virgil said, “Toby, I really hope you’re not involved in this. If I find out you were, I’m going to call up Maxine and tell her how to find you.”

“C’mon, man, don’t even joke about that,” Strait said. He looked nervously up and down the street. “In fact, I’ve been standing around too long. I’m getting the fuck out of here… but, uh, why don’t you get out first?”

“Don’t trust me?”

“I’m not saying that… but why don’t you pull out first.”

“All right, but give me a phone number. I might need to call you,” Virgil said.

“Don’t be giving this out. Maxine’s mad as a goddamn hatter.”

“You’re good with me,” Virgil said, as he entered Strait’s phone number into his cell phone’s contact list. “As long as you don’t have those tigers.”