Escape Clause

19

Virgil was working the phones, spreading the word among police agencies about the search for Barry King and the Simonians. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and he had to be content to sit and wait and think about something he might do.

One thing he didn’t do was watch the local television news, where the BCA-meaning him-was getting ripped for not finding the tigers. The talking heads had no suggestions about how that might be done; they simply wanted it done, never mind that the BCA was looking for one or two people in an area with a population of three and a quarter million.

Virgil still believed the tigers were nearby, but he had resigned himself to the idea that they were probably dead. He also had the sense that they weren’t down in somebody’s basement in suburban Woodbury, or any other suburb, because there were too many people around. But where would they be?

In the meantime, following up on a tip from the Simonians themselves, he gave Hamlet Simonian’s phone number to Sandy, who talked to Apple about lost phones, found out how you tracked them, and determined that the phone was moving west out of Denver, down I-70.

“We need to find the guy who’s got it,” Virgil said. “Any ideas would be appreciated.”

“Lots of cars on I-70,” Sandy said. “I don’t think the Colorado highway patrol is going to shut down an interstate and start searching cars for a cell phone.”

“We gotta do something-we need that phone,” Virgil said.

“I can call around,” she said. “I wouldn’t count on getting it.”

“I gotta think,” Virgil said. “I mean, I am thinking, but I’m not coming up with anything.”

–

While they were doing that and Peck was murdering King, Sparkle was sneaking into the Castro canning factory with a woman named Ramona Alvarez. Alvarez’s husband unloaded trucks, while Alvarez worked on the topping line, where open jars coming down a roller track were topped up with pickle slices.

“Not as many people here as I thought,” Sparkle muttered to Alvarez, as Alvarez walked past the time-card rack. She wouldn’t be checking in; the ghost workers didn’t have time cards.

“There are a lot of people here; you don’t see them so much, except down at the loading docks,” Alvarez said in good but heavily accented English. “Here, it’s mostly machines. We got to watch for Stout. If he sees you here, there’ll be lots of trouble. They put you in jail for trespassing.”

The factory, Sparkle thought, looked like what she imagined the inside of a coffeemaker might look like-hot, lots of moving parts, saturated with a wide variety of odors, ranging from fresh cucumber to the smell of the spices and vinegars that made pickles. While the exterior of the place was foreboding, that big dark brick wall, the interior was painted a uniform beige, with a slick easy-wash finish.

A few minutes after Sparkle and Alvarez entered the factory, the pickle-packing machinery shut down momentarily for a shift change. Alvarez changed into a blue apron, hairnet, and plastic gloves, and took her spot next to a bin of wet pickle slices, waiting for the jars to come down the roller track.

Four other women worked the line, two facing Alvarez and a third on Alvarez’s side, five feet away. After three or four minutes, with a clatter and a bang, the line started moving again, the jars coming down fast, side by side, maybe eighty percent full of sliced pickles. Alvarez started topping up the jars.

Sparkle watched for a while, took a couple of photographs with a point-and-shoot camera, and Alvarez said, “You seen it. It ain’t gonna change for the next eight hours. Kills my legs.” She kept topping the jars as she spoke; every once in a while a pickle slice got away from her and landed on the concrete floor.

“What happens if you miss a jar?” Sparkle asked.

“You don’t miss any,” Alvarez said. “If you make a bad drop-you know, you’re working fast and you miss the jar-then you gotta catch that jar and work faster coming back to your station, getting them all full. If one gets away from you now and then… that’s just what it is. If it’s too many, they’ll dock Leandro’s pay. Say he came in late.”

“Criminals,” Sparkle said. She watched for another couple of minutes, then stepped back from the line as another woman came in with a broom and started pushing discarded pickles into piles and scooping them into a plastic bucket. Sparkle muttered to Alvarez, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“What?”

Sparkle didn’t answer, but stepped away, turned, and walked along the backside of the large stainless-steel tanks. She was the only one back there, and she slipped through the factory, taking pictures of women sorting cucumbers before they went into a huge vat; other women pulling cucumbers off a moving track into separate bins to be speared, sliced, or discarded; a woman monitoring a machine that dumped brine into the jars.

The place smelled like a huge wet cucumber, Sparkle thought, and so did she, after twenty minutes in the building.

She was looking at the brining operation when a heavyset man in a white shirt with a Castro label on the pocket walked out from behind a machine on the other side of the factory and saw her. He called, “Hey!”

Sparkle pretended not to hear and ambled away, and he shouted again, “Hey!” And then, to somebody out of sight, “Vic, grab that woman! Grab that woman!”

Sparkle still didn’t see anybody, but she ran.

Thirty feet down the wall of the factory, she saw an intersecting hallway and took it, and down that, another thirty feet, two restrooms. She ducked into the women’s restroom, realized it was a dead end, ran back out to a T intersection, took a right toward what looked like daylight.

Behind her, she heard a man shouting. She didn’t look.

The daylight turned out to be an office with nobody in it. On the far wall was a line of old-style sash windows. She went to one not visible from the hallway, pulled it up, unlocked the outside window, pushed it open, clambered out, turned, and pulled the inner window back down, then pushed the outer window back in place.

She was on the side of the factory, with twenty feet of short scraggly grass between her and a line of trees. She dashed across the grassy strip into the trees, down into the sand of a dry, seasonal creek. Her car was parked off the side of the county road, four or five hundred yards from the factory. She jogged out to the road, looked both ways, then down the road to the car.

Elapsed time, from the moment the man shouted at her to the car, perhaps four minutes. She was breathing hard, her lungs aching when she got to the Mini. She drove out of the turnout, took a right, and rolled away from the factory.

Should she have been frightened? She didn’t know. She didn’t particularly care, either. With her photographs of fifty or sixty Mexican women working in the plant, on this single shift, she had her dissertation in the bag.

–

Virgil was sitting with his feet up on his temporary desk, talking with Sandy when he took a call from a Wisconsin deputy sheriff.

“This is Roger Briggs; I’m with the Pierce County sheriff’s office over in Wisconsin. We’ve got a body here, in a ditch. It’s missing its legs. Looks like they were cut off and we think it might be that guy you’re looking for, Hayk Simonian. His face was down in the water, so it’s messed up, but it resembles that mug shot you sent around and you had that other guy up north, who had his arms cut off. We think this one was shot.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.

–

A half hour later, he stood on the side of a country road as two sheriff’s department investigators prepared to pull the plastic-wrapped body out of the ditch and up onto the road. The ditch held six or eight inches of water down among the cattail roots, and the investigators wore gum boots as they worked.

Briggs, the deputy who’d called in the discovery, stood on the side of the road and told Virgil about it.

“Found by a farm guy who lives up the road. He saw three coyotes pulling on the plastic and got to wondering about it. He chased the coyotes off and walked over to the other side of the ditch and looked down, and he could see a hand, so he called us. I was the first guy here and called for help.”

“Nothing around the body?”

Briggs shook his head. “He was pretty well wrapped up and obviously dumped here, killed somewhere else. The investigators will do the crime-scene thing here, probably send the rest of it down to Madison.”

“I’ll talk to the Madison guys,” Virgil said. “We need whatever they can get, in a hurry.”

“Talk to the sheriff. You could probably get somebody to drive the whole shootin’ match straight down, have the lab working on it by the end of the day.”

“That’d be good,” Virgil said. “If that’s Hayk Simonian in there, it’ll be the second murder. There’s a real bad guy out there.”

–

The body was plugged into the mud at the bottom of the little roadside swamp, and once the investigators had freed it, and the plastic wrapper, they slipped the body easily over to the side of the road and hoisted it up to the dry surface. A funky sulfuric odor came with it. As they were doing that, a hearse came down the road to take the body.

The coyotes had chewed into the dead man’s face, neck, and part of one upper arm. The body was naked from the waist down, although a pair of jeans was wadded up at one end of the plastic wrap, and Virgil could see the legs were missing from the hip down. Unlike the arms of Hamlet Simonian, the legs were not with the body.

The RV Simonians would not be happy. On the other hand, Hayk was apparently the same kind of asshole as his brother, Hamlet, not to be especially mourned, by Virgil, anyway. Further, he might be a hook into the information that the Simonians had, which had led them to the missing Barry King. If Virgil could get the news about Hayk to the Simonians, maybe he could blackmail them for whatever other information they might have. Something to think about.

As he was plotting, one of the Wisconsin investigators used a tongue depressor to move scraps of the plastic away from the face. There was enough left for Virgil to identify the body as Hayk Simonian.

“Yeah, that’s him.” He sighed and straightened up, said, “Tell your lab guys that they need to move some fingerprints to the feds, just to make one hundred percent sure, but that’s him.”

Briggs said, “He’s a mess. At least we know the tigers are still alive.”

Virgil: “Yeah? How do we know that?”

Briggs: “Where do you think the legs went?”

Virgil: “Oh… Oh, jeez.” Briggs, he thought, could be right.

A car was coming down the road toward them, saw all the red lights clogging up the roadway, paused, then pulled into a farmer’s field track, did a three-point turn, and disappeared back down the road.

Country people, Virgil thought, didn’t like even the concept of a traffic jam, temporary as it might be.

–

Winston Peck VI saw the cop cars and the flashers and thought, Uh-oh. He pulled into a farmer’s field track, did a three-point turn, and headed back the way he came. Barry King’s body was in the back of the truck. The place where he’d dumped Hayk Simonian had seemed like a good one, so he’d come back to make another deposit. Not a good idea, as it turned out.

As he headed away from the cop cars, he looked in the rearview mirror. A guy standing on the side of the road in civilian dress, tall, lanky, blond…

Was that Flowers?

Whoa! Skin of his teeth!

–

Late in the afternoon, back at the office.

Virgil had talked to an investigator with the Wisconsin DCI. They were sending an agent to the area, because of the two bodies found on the Wisconsin side of the line, but they expected Virgil to carry most of the weight.

“Wisconsin’s a dumping ground for something going on in Minnesota. If you get any indication that the tigers are on our side of the river, we’ll give you all the help we can,” the DCI guy said.

–

Catrin Mattsson called with the good news of the day: she thought she had identified the man who’d beaten up Frankie.

“It’s a guy named Brad Blankenship. Got it from a not-so-good friend of his who said that Blankenship is walking around in long-sleeve shirts when he never wears anything but T-shirts in the summer. He said that Blankenship was drinking at Waters’ Waterhole last night and his sleeve slipped up a couple of times and he could see a pretty good bandage under it. Blankenship has four previous arrests for fighting-worked as a bouncer at the Waterhole on Fridays and Saturdays when they have live music.”

“What do you want to do?” Virgil asked.

“Well, first thing, the not-so-good friend says if Blankenship did it, the other person with him was almost certainly Frederick Reeves, who they call Slow Freddie. You know that song, ‘If You’re Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough’?”

“Sure. Roger Alan Wade.”

“That’s apparently Slow Freddie’s life story. My source says he was in jail for theft a few years ago, and something really, really bad happened to him in there. I’m thinking rape, and it turned him mean. No smarter, but mean. It also gave him a permanent fear of being locked up, which means… we might be able to talk to him.”

“Either that, or he’ll shoot you,” Virgil said.

“I said ‘we.’ I’d appreciate some company for this talk,” Mattsson said.

“When?” Virgil asked.

“Now-as soon as you can get here.”

“All right. Things are moving like glue up here, but we’ve got a second confirmed murder,” Virgil said. “I’ll help out, but you’ve got to front the thing-I don’t want people saying I was down there working on a simple assault on my girlfriend and skipping out on a double murder.”

“I’ll front it,” she said. “Besides, by the time it gets to court, you’ll have the killers locked up, and nobody will remember the sequence of events.”

“See you in an hour and a half,” Virgil said. “Let’s meet at the hospital. I can check on Frankie and hook up with you at the same time.”

–

On the way to Mankato, Virgil decided that he really needed to get to the Simonians again. He needed to know where Hamlet Simonian’s phone might be going and how the Simonians knew to pick up Barry King. They had a source of information that was better than any he had.

Although they were no longer answering his calls, he still had one good way to contact them. He got on the phone to Daisy Jones, the TV reporter. “You’re going to owe me even more,” he said.

“Is it like Texas barbeque or leftover porridge?”

“Hamlet Simonian’s older brother, Hayk, that’s H-A-Y-K, was found murdered in a ditch over in Wisconsin. I mean, murdered and dumped in a ditch. We think he was murdered somewhere else, and that probably means here in Minnesota.”

“Give me the details,” she said.

“Can’t. I’m anonymous. You can call the Pierce County sheriff’s office and they’ll probably talk your ear off.”

“The tigers are dead, right?”

He thought about it for a second, and then said, “No. Probably not.”

“How do you know?”

“Masculine intuition,” Virgil said. “Now go away and report the news, like you’re supposed to. Your debt has now grown to huge proportions. Huge.”

“Then why do I have a feeling I’m doing you a favor by putting this on the air?” she asked.

“Because you’re a cynic, a terrible thing to see in a young person like yourself. I feel awful for you. Now go.”

“Thanks for saying I’m young…”

–

Virgil went to the Mayo Clinic to see Frankie, who’d been moved to a bed in a private room. Sparkle was sitting in a corner, reading the comics in a bent-up copy of the Mankato Free Press. “They’re letting me out of here tomorrow,” Frankie said. “It should be tonight, but the doc said he wanted somebody to watch me for a few more hours. That’s the good news.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“No sex for six months,” Frankie said.

Virgil sank into a chair and said, “I can understand that. A woman with a concussion wouldn’t want to be intimately exposed to a jackhammer.”

“How come,” Frankie asked, “every time I want to get a little ribald, you take it farther into the ditch than I ever intended to go?”

“Speaking of ditches,” Virgil said, “guess what we found in a ditch over in Wisconsin?”

–

He told them about Hayk Simonian, and the deputy’s guess that the missing legs were feeding a tiger.

“That’s gross,” Sparkle said. “There’s got to be some other reason.”

“Think of one,” Virgil said.

She thought for a moment, then, “I don’t want to think about it. The whole idea is gross.”

“But not entirely bad,” Virgil said. “Hayk didn’t need his legs anymore, because he was dead, and maybe the tigers are alive. You know, if they’re feeding them.”

“Gross,” Sparkle said.

–

He told them about Catrin Mattsson possibly locating the guys who assaulted Frankie, and the plan to roust one of them that very night.

Sparkle was telling them about sneaking into the pickle factory when Mattsson showed up, sipping from a cup of coffee. She was dressed in dark cotton permanent-press canvas slacks and a beige canvas hunting shirt, with a pistol on her hip under her right hand. She was wearing hiking boots. A combat uniform, Virgil thought.

“That coffee’s gonna make you all jittery,” Frankie said. “You sure you want to be messing around with guns when you’re jittery?”

“Jittery is always good,” Mattsson said. “If you’re holding a gun on somebody, and your hands are all shaking, that’ll scare them every time. They’ll lay right down for you.”

That was the first sign of any sense of humor he’d gotten from Mattsson, Virgil thought, even if it was cop humor.

To Sparkle, Mattsson said, “I heard part of that pickle plant story. What happened next?”

Sparkle finished the story, the part about going out the window and running for her life. “I got it now-everything I need for my dissertation. I’d head back home to the Cities, except that I don’t want to disappoint Father Bill.”

Catrin looked at them all, and then said, “You know, you’re an odd bunch of people.”

–

Virgil slapped his thighs, stood up, kissed Frankie, and said to Mattsson, “Let’s get this guy.”

They were on the first floor, heading out the gate, when Sparkle shouted at them: “Wait! Virgil, Catrin! Wait!”

She was wearing flip-flops and ran flapping down the hall clutching her cell phone. She came up, grabbed Virgil’s arm, and said, “My friend Ramona. My friend who got me into the factory. Some guys beat her up. Tonight, a little while ago. Her husband called. An ambulance is on the way here. Virgil, they beat her up! They beat her up bad.”