Escape Clause

13

Two-thirty in the morning on the St. Croix, the river air cool and redolent with the odors of beached fish and automobile exhaust. The sheetrocking Yoder brothers, Curt and Hank, known to their friends as the Yos, were expecting some serious channel-catfish action; they’d be fishing right up to daybreak, barring thunderstorms and zombie outbreaks.

The Yos had stopped at an all-night convenience store for a six-pack of Miller Lite, a tin of Copenhagen Wintergreen for Curt, and a couple of Fudgsicles before heading down to the water.

Once off the road, they sat licking the Fudgsicles and drinking the first of their beers, while Dwight Yoakam finished singing “Long White Cadillac” on Outlaw Country. When the song, Fudgsicles, and beers were finished, Curt stuck a plug of Copenhagen under his tongue and said, “Let’s get ’er done.”

Curt got his gear from the truck bed and headed upstream from the bridge, while Hank believed that there were major catfish holes below the bridge piers, so he went that way.

Both men were wearing LED headlights, the better to bait their hooks and unhook any catfish. Hank turned his light on to more easily mold some stink bait on a treble hook-he had his own homemade formula, concocted of chopped chicken liver, diced night crawlers, nacho cheese, canned corn, and cornmeal, thoroughly mixed in his girlfriend’s Waring blender when she wasn’t around, and suitably aged in the hot sunlight on his back porch-and threw his first cast out next to a pier.

A big slab of gray stone shelved out of the river below the bridge, and while the bait sank into the hole, he walked back and forth, looking for a place to sit and smoke, where his line wouldn’t drag over the rock. He was doing that when he saw, in his headlight, a corner of the safe about a foot down in the water.

For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, then he called, “Hey, Curt! Curt! C’mere. Quick.”

Curt caught the tone in his brother’s voice, so he reeled in, turned on his headlight, walked down under the bridge, and asked, “What?”

Hank pointed to the water under the bridge. “Am I nuckin’ futs or is that a safe?”

Curt peered into the water, asked, “Where?” and then, before Hank could reply, “Holy shit. I see it. That’s a safe all right.”

Hank: “What do you think?”

“I think somebody couldn’t open the sonofabitch and threw it off the bridge,” Curt said. He was so excited he inadvertently hawked his whole plug of tobacco into the river.

Hank: “Like it’s stolen?”

“Of course it’s stolen, bonehead. If you owned a safe and wanted to get rid of it, you could sell it on Craigslist or even take it to a junkyard,” Curt said. “You wouldn’t throw it off a fuckin’ bridge. I bet there’s a million bucks in there.”

“What do you think we ought to do?”

Curt scratched his forehead for a moment, mulling it over, then said, “I think we fish that bitch out of there and get it back to your place. You know what? Maybe the people who stole it couldn’t open it, but Jerry Pratt could.”

Jerry Pratt was an unemployed machinist, with metal-cutting skills.

“You think we could lift it?”

“Somebody had to lift it over the bridge railing, so yeah-I think we could lift it,” Curt said.

“I wonder why he threw it in the shallows?”

“Probably didn’t know any better, or maybe he did it at night,” Curt said. He walked back to the shadow of the bridge, sat down, and started untying his boots. “Get your pants off.”

Hank looked around: nothing to see but brush, and not even that, if they turned off their LED headlights. An occasional car drove over the bridge, out of sight. “What if somebody sees us?”

“You ain’t got that much to see,” Curt said.

“That’s not what I’m talking about. What if somebody sees us with the safe?”

“We’ll tell them… that we thought it was an old refrigerator and we were taking it out for, you know, cleaning-up-the-river reasons. We’re, like, tree huggers or some fuckin’ thing.”

That sounded good. Hank nodded and said, “Better leave our shoes on. Lots of hooks been broke off in there.”

Five minutes later the naked brothers were chest deep in the river, trying to get a hold on the safe. “Fuckin’ heavy,” Hank said.

“Yeah… but… it’s movin’,” Curt said.

With more grunting and a few groans they got it out of the water and up on the rock, where Hank said, “Fuck. You know, it looks more like a refrigerator than a safe.”

“Too heavy,” Curt said.

“It’s a fuckin’ refrigerator, man. Probably full of water.” The refrigerator was loosely wrapped with water-soaked duct tape to keep the door closed. Hank yanked the tape off, pulled open the door, and in the pooled light of their headlamps, Hamlet Simonian’s left arm flopped out on the rock.

“Jesus Christ!” Hank shouted, dancing away from the arm.

–

There was a brief discussion of possible choices-throw the refrigerator back in the river and then run and hide; call the cops anonymously then run and hide; or just run and hide. But their truck had probably been seen up on the road, and somebody might have seen them in the water, and there was a house not far away. In the end, for a lack of reasonable alternatives, they called the Polk County sheriff’s office and waited.

A deputy showed up ten minutes later, took a look, and said, “Now you boys wait right here,” and Curt asked, “We got any choice?” and the deputy said, “No.”

–

After that, the Yos found themselves deeper in bureaucracy than they’d ever been in the river, but nobody seemed to think they had anything to do with what was obviously a murder, and they were eventually told they were free to go. The Polk County medical examiner took one look at the body, still stuffed in the refrigerator, and moved it along to a better-equipped facility in St. Paul.

Not much got done in St. Paul, except that an assistant medical examiner took fingerprints from the hands on the severed arms and sent them off to the FBI.

–

Virgil had gone back to bed at the hotel and was sleeping soundly when the BCA’s duty officer called him at five a.m. Virgil crawled across the bed to the nightstand, where his phone was playing the first few bars of George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”

“This is Virgil.”

“Hey, man, this is Clark, up at the office.”

“If I can find my pistol, I’m gonna kill you,” Virgil said.

“Pretty unlikely scenario, right there, you finding the gun. Anyway, I thought I better call. This Hamlet Simonian guy’s been found. We got a call from the FBI.”

Virgil sat up. “Terrific. Where is he?”

Clark said, “In the ME’s office, here in St. Paul.”

“What?”

“Somebody killed him-they don’t know how yet-and tried to stuff his body in a compact refrigerator. He didn’t fit, so they cut off his arms and squeezed them in around the body.”

“Cut off his arms?”

“Yeah. Of course, I’m assuming it wasn’t a suicide…”

“Hey, Clark…?”

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the killer threw the refrigerator into the St. Croix, up by Osceola,” Clark said. “It landed in shallow water and a couple of fishermen spotted it. They thought it was a safe.”

Clark told the rest of the story, which he found amusing, and finished by saying, “Now you got a murder.”

“Aw, shit. Give me the ME’s number.”

As long as he had to be awake, Virgil thought the ME ought to be, as well. He got hold of an assistant, who said nothing would be done with the body until eight o’clock. “I had a look at it, while they were bringing it in. I don’t see any obvious trauma… other than the dismembered arms, of course.”

“No gunshot wounds? Nothing like that?”

“Nope.”

“Tell the doc that the murder is related to the tiger theft,” Virgil said. “I’ll be up there to talk to him, but soon as he gets in, ask if there’s some chemistry that would pick up the kind of sedative overdose you’d get if somebody shot you with a tranquilizer gun, the kind used on large animals.”

“Huh. I can tell you that kind of chemistry is routine, but I’ll be sure to mention it. Could get some results back pretty quick.”

“Great. I’ll be up.”

“Sounds like you’ve got an interesting case here,” the assistant said.

“Provocative, even,” Virgil said. He reset the alarm clock, rolled over, and before he went back to sleep, he asked himself, who’d cut off a dead man’s arms? Who would even think of it? A medical doctor, maybe?

He had to talk to Peck again.

–

Two hours later, while he was pulling on his socks, Virgil called the Polk County sheriff’s office in Wisconsin and spoke to the sheriff, who’d been to the scene. “It’s another one of your damn Twin Cities murders that you keep unloading on us,” the sheriff said. “If he’d dropped the refrigerator fifteen feet west, it’d technically be a Minnesota case, which it should be.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, sounds like it,” the sheriff said.

The sheriff told Virgil the story of the Yoder brothers and a description of the murder scene. “From eyeballing it, I’d say the guy hadn’t been in the river long at all,” the sheriff said. “I’ve seen any number of drownings, been down for anything from an hour to a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months. This guy was probably dumped earlier in the night. If the ME tells you different, he’s wrong and I’m right.”

Virgil and the sheriff talked for a few more minutes, Virgil extracting as many details as the sheriff had, then he hung up and drove across the Cities to the BCA building.

–

Clark, the duty officer, had gone home at seven o’clock, and since he’d notified Virgil, the lead investigator, he hadn’t bothered to leave a message for Jon Duncan, who freaked when Virgil showed up and told him about it.

“Cut off his arms? Cut off his arms? What have you done, Virgil?” Duncan cried, rocking back in his office chair.

“I haven’t done anything,” Virgil said.

“Why do your cases always wind up like this?” Duncan asked, running a hand through his hair. “Why can’t you have a straightforward missing-tigers case?”

Duncan was only half-joking. “You know, most of my cases don’t involve any violence at all,” Virgil said. “Most of them are really straightforward.”

“I can’t remember even one that was straightforward,” Duncan said. “What about the one with the spies? What about the one with, with… the dognapping one that turned into a triple murder or something and you arrested the school board? Are you kiddin’ me? You arrested the school board?”

“Not all of them,” Virgil said. “One of them is still on the run.”

“Ah, man, does the media know yet?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Virgil said. “A Wisconsin county sheriff’s office handled the case when the body was found. I expect they got the Simonian ID as soon as I did, and they know Simonian was wanted on the tiger theft.”

“So they’ll be calling. TV, radio, the whole shooting match,” Duncan said. He looked at his office telephone as though it were a cockroach. “I gotta talk to the director.”

“That’s not a good idea. He’s gonna be a little testy right now.”

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.