Escape Clause

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?”

Virgil considered that for a moment, then said, “You’d need a distribution network.”

“Not just a distribution network,” she said. “An illegal distribution network. As illegal as a Mexican drug cartel. Everybody involved would be committing a felony.”

“Hadn’t thought about that part,” Virgil said. “Where would I find a network like that?”

“Ask your drug people,” she said. “I suppose it’d be out on the West Coast, where you’ve got a lot of older Asian residents, who’d be the main customers. Unless, of course, it’s being shipped directly to China.”

“Huh.”

“I’d point out that somebody with access to a large illegal distribution network is not going to be a debutante. You said this man who was murdered was a professional criminal. That fits.”

Virgil asked, “You have any idea of where I’d look?”

“None at all, except what I see in the movies. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, maybe… Vancouver, I guess.”

“Jeez.” He drank the last of the root beer. “I wonder if they might have already moved the tigers out?”

She shrugged. “Could have, I guess, although that’d be a problem. I have horses, and moving them around is a pain, even with a good horse trailer, when you’re going any long distance. With tigers? Be a heck of a lot easier killing and processing them here. Once they’re processed and the products get fake labels, who would know that they’re looking at illegal tiger parts and not legal cattle parts? Ground-up bone looks like ground-up bone. You’d need a DNA test to tell the difference.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. He was at least semiconvinced. He took a business card from his pocket and slid it across the table to her. “Thanks for your help. And the root beer float. Call me if you hear anything or think of anything else.”

She picked up the card. “I will. I do hope you find these guys. They’re the kind of people who give traditional medicine a bad name.”

–

Virgil headed back to the Twin Cities. He was crossing the St. Croix bridge at Hudson when a call came in from an unknown number.

When he answered, Patterson said, “This is Bobbie Patterson again. Listen, I did think of something else. It’s possible that they killed the tigers and then froze them to take them somewhere else to process them. That involves refrigerated trucks. Keeping a thousand pounds of meat at freezing temperatures isn’t all that easy, if you’re moving. It’d be easier to buy some meat dryers and do it right here. They’re not expensive; people use them to make deer jerky. They’d probably need four or five of the smaller dryers. I doubt that they’d buy a big commercial deal… so maybe you should call up the dealers of meat dryers, see if anybody delivered a whole bunch of them to the Cities.”

“You are a very smart woman,” Virgil said. “Thank you.”

–

Virgil called Sandy, the BCA researcher, and got her started on that, then called St. Paul’s gang guy, who said he had no idea about Chinese gangs, though there were a couple of Hmong gangs. “I can guarantee they’re not up to smuggling tiger parts, dried or not. These guys are hustling a little Mexican Mud and hillbilly heroin; they wouldn’t be involved in anything more sophisticated.”

He said he’d call a guy in San Francisco and ask who’d know about Chinese gangs. “If you’ve got this dead guy from Glendale, it seems like you’re looking at California. I don’t know if my guy would know anything about LA gangs, but he might know another guy who’d know.”

–

Virgil had just crossed into St. Paul when he took a call from another unknown number. “Virgil? Bob Roberts from Mankato PD.”

“Hey, Bob-Bob. You got my tigers?”

“Uh, no, man. Listen, I hate to be the guy to tell you this… but somebody beat up your girlfriend.”

Virgil nearly drove off the highway. “What! What!”

“Frankie. She’s hurt, man, she’s on her way to the hospital. A couple guys jumped her outside a Kwik Trip. Nobody knows why, there wasn’t any argument or anything. They didn’t even talk to her. They jumped her and beat her up and took off. Looks like it was a setup-one of the cops out there says they were wearing masks.”

“How bad? How bad is she?”

“Don’t know yet, but she got smacked around pretty good. That’s about all I know. I mean, she isn’t gonna die or anything, but she’s beat up.”

“I’m coming,” Virgil said.