Escape Clause

8

Virgil didn’t expect any immediate response to the tip line, so he got out the list of contacts that he’d gotten from Ho in Seattle.

One of them, Carolyn C. Monty-McCall, PhD, lived nearby, and he decided to go with her first.

He wasn’t very familiar with Apple Valley, other than having slid off a highway into a ditch the winter before, on his way to St. Paul after a snowstorm. The town turned out to be a pleasant and fairly standard middle-class suburb, quiet streets lined with trees, basketball nets beside the driveways, three-car garages everywhere.

Monty-McCall lived on Fossil Lane in an area where all the street names began with F, which Virgil found annoying, for reasons he couldn’t quite nail down. His nav system took him off 145th Street-perfectly good name for a street, in his opinion-onto Flora Way, then onto Freeport Trail, past Fridley Way, onto Flagstone Trail, down Footbridge Way, and then onto Fossil Lane. It all seemed unnecessary and maybe stupidly precious.

Monty-McCall had a two-story cocoa-colored house with yellow trim and a stand of paper birch trees in the small front yard. A discreet sign under a front window said, “Monty-McCall, PhD,” hinting that she might take clients-patients?-at the house.

She was home.

–

Virgil rang the doorbell, heard a thump, and a moment later, Monty-McCall, wearing a quilted and belted hip-length housecoat and turquoise-colored capri pants, came to the door and peered out at him. He held up his ID and she opened the interior door and through the screen said, “Yes?”

Virgil identified himself, told her that he was looking for the stolen tigers. “I’m told you have some expertise in traditional Chinese medicine, and we’re looking for contacts in that… er, community,” Virgil said.

“Well, I didn’t take them,” she said. She was a woman of average height, perhaps forty, with heavy dark hair and a single thick eyebrow that extended across both eyes.

“I didn’t think you did,” Virgil said. “I have a list of prominent experts on traditional Chinese medicine and your name was on that list. We have some questions about that, uh, community, and we’re looking for help.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said, “but I’ll answer questions. Come in.”

Inside, she pointed Virgil at a couch and asked, “You want a glass of white wine?”

“Can’t, thank you,” Virgil said. “I’m on duty.”

“Well, I haven’t had lunch, so I’m going to have one, if you don’t mind,” Monty-McCall said.

“That’s fine,” Virgil said. She went away to the kitchen, and Virgil took a furtive look around. Not much to see: a couple of commercial semi-abstract landscape paintings, one above the couch and the other on the wall near the entry, plus the couch he was sitting on, an easy chair, a coffee table, and wall-to-wall carpeting in pale green. The room was opaque, without real personality, and maybe, Virgil thought, by design, if she dealt with clients in her home.

–

Monty-McCall came back with a frosted beer mug and a bottle of white wine. “What can I do for you?” she asked, as she unscrewed the top on the bottle.

“All I got was your name… What kind of work do you actually do?” Virgil asked.

“I’m a psychotherapist with a subspecialty in traditional medicines,” she said. “These are not prescription medicines, but rather nutritive distillations, supportive potions that help clear the body of unnatural poisons. Not drugs.”

“Are any of them derived from animals?”

“Some, but nothing that would ever come from tigers, or rhinoceros horns, or anything like that.” She poured the beer mug full of wine. “Most of the animal-based tonics come from standard meat-processing plants, as I understand it. Some kinds come from suppliers of game meats and fur processors. The few that I use I buy premade, standard, brand-name things. I don’t actually get involved in any animal processing myself.” She took a long swallow of wine, as though she were drinking a Pepsi.

“All right. What I really need to know is whether you suspect any suppliers or manufacturers of the animal products of selling illicit products-like tiger or rhinoceros parts.”

“No, although I’ve never given it much thought. They’re all pretty commercial-there’s not a big demand for the products, so you have a few small retail suppliers nationally, most of them selling through the Internet. I know anecdotally that there’s a demand for some tiger products, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an underground Internet thingy that sold some of it. I do know there is a man here in Minnesota who collects bear gallbladders and ships them to China,” she said.

Toby Strait, Virgil thought. “I’ve heard about him and I’ve got him on my list to talk to,” Virgil said. “Do you know either a Dr. Winston Peck, MD, in St. Paul, or India Healer Sandra S. A. Gupti-Mack in Minneapolis?”

The corners of Monty-McCall’s mouth turned down and she said, “Where did you come up with those names? They can’t be on your expert lists-they must be suspects.”

Virgil leaned back. “I’d prefer not to say… but if you have any information?”

She’d already drunk half the mug of wine and now took another gulp and did a fake shiver as she swallowed. “Winston Peck is a creep. Believe me, I know. He did a seminar on traditional medicines, oh, five years ago, where we met. I was talking to him afterward, and one thing led to another, you know, and he asked me out. We went out a couple times… To cut it short, he’s a sex freak. I would have nothing to do with him.”

“Violent?” Virgil asked.

“Not… dangerously. He didn’t try to drug me or anything. He didn’t try to rape me. He’s simply creepy.”

“Do you want to define ‘creepy,’ or do you want to pass?” Virgil asked.

“Mmm, I’ll give you the outline. Winston is a narcissist; he wants women to… service him. Not, you know, interactive sex; he wants what he wants. When he gets what he wants, his interest in sex goes away. If you understand what I’m saying.”

Virgil rubbed the side of his nose, then said, “Okay. What about the tigers? Could he do that?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Possibly. He lives high and there’s a rumor that he can’t practice medicine anymore. He might need the money. I looked up his degree and it’s legit, but the rumor is, he did something really bad and can’t practice.”

Virgil nodded: that was interesting. “No details?”

“No. I looked him up a lot on the Internet, but couldn’t find anything,” she said.

“What about Sandra Gupti-Mack?”

“Yeah. Sandy Mack graduated from high school down in Farmington and sold real estate for years, and then she went off to India for about fifteen minutes one year and came back as a guru with a dot on her forehead and a hyphenated name that she hopes sounds Indian,” Monty-McCall said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with hyphenated names, obviously, if they’re legitimate. She does what she calls psychotherapy and peddles her homemade pills all over the country. She even wrote a book about it: The Buddha’s Apothecary. Now, I’ll tell you what: it would not surprise me at all if she used animal-based medications. She brags about being a traditionalist ‘compounding pharmacy,’ so she’d need the raw product.”

“But you don’t think she’s totally legitimate?” Virgil asked.

She finished the wine with a gulp, pulled a hand across her lips, and said, “Huh. That bitch wouldn’t know an ethic if one bit her on her butt. The Buddha’s Apothecary. Are you kiddin’ me? It’s like the Buddha was a drugstore clerk in his spare time. A soda jerk or something. She’s gotten rich with her pills. I’ll tell you something else that didn’t occur to me until right now. If she had some real honest-to-God tiger, she could roll her tiger pills out there for a million dollars. Maybe more. How many pills could you get out of a tiger? A hundred thousand or more?”

“I have no idea.”

“Bet she does.”

–

Monty-McCall was refilling her beer mug with wine when Virgil left. Her information had been fairly tepid, with a few interesting raisins: that whole thing about Peck having a questionable history. And Virgil got in his truck thinking about female alcoholics, and how they were less visible than men-except when they got behind a steering wheel. Usually though, they’d sit home and hammer the white wine, instead of going out to a bar and drinking and falling down in public. He liked an after-work beer himself, had no problem with people who liked to take a drink. Sometimes, though, you could see what was coming: Monty-McCall was killing herself.

–

Sandra Gupti-Mack was next up. She lived in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, in a gray two-story house that probably dated to the prewar years. Two bicycles were chained to the white-painted railings on a tiny front porch, and a bronze statue of the seated Buddha gazed at passersby from a wall niche that once had been a window. The Buddha was positioned on a rug, the rug providing a platform for the bolts that held the statue in its niche. Evidence, Virgil thought, of the existence of Buddha-statue thieves.

Above the Buddha was a sign much like Monty-McCall’s: “Dr. Sandra Gupti-Mack, Psychotherapy and Traditional Medicine”; beside him was a yellowing copy of The Buddha’s Apothecary.

Gupti-Mack was home, too.

A tall, heavy, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who trembled like an aspen when she opened the door, Gupti-Mack was dressed all in white, a blouse that looked like a doctor’s hospital jacket with matching white slacks with bell bottoms. She was barefoot; she had a black dot in the middle of her forehead, not quite centered between her eyebrows.

When Virgil introduced himself, she said, “I have a client at the moment. I’ll be with her for another twenty minutes, and I have another client a half hour after that…”

“I’ll walk up to the corner store and get a Coke and come sit on your porch and wait,” Virgil said. “Come get me when your client leaves. I won’t need a half hour.”

She nodded, reluctantly, and closed the door. He walked up the street, got a Coke, came back and sat on the porch, and watched the people go by. Mostly women, getting into their lives. Uptown was where you went after you graduated from the university and got a job in marketing at Pillsbury or General Mills, but still had that butterfly tattoo on your shoulder blade, hip, or ankle.

As he was sitting there, an ancient man hobbled by, assisted by a cane. He looked like he’d been dressed by somebody else, in a floppy-brimmed boonie hat, a T-shirt that said “Chairman of the Board” over a black-and-white photo of Frank Sinatra, and faded madras shorts. He was wearing black over-the-calf socks and sandals. His legs looked like they came off a café table.

He stopped on the sidewalk and eyed Virgil. “What are you looking at?”

Virgil said, “Mostly, the girls going by.”

“Oh. Yeah. I used to do that,” the old man said. After a moment’s thought: “I just can’t remember why.”

He went on his way.

–

A half hour after Gupti-Mack said she’d be twenty minutes, a red-eyed woman walked out, dabbing at her eye sockets with a Kleenex. As Virgil stood up, she said, “I hope you’re not here to harass Dr. Gupti.”

“No, I’m not,” Virgil said.

“You’d better not be. My husband’s a lawyer and he’d be on you like a permanent wave.”

“I’m…” Virgil realized he had no place to go with the conversation-he didn’t even know what a permanent wave was-so he fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “If your husband thinks he needs to talk to me, my number is on the card.”

“I’m sure he’ll do that,” she said. She scuttled off down the sidewalk to a blue Prius and stared at him through the windshield with the electric ferocity only a Prius owner could summon, as he knocked on Gupti-Mack’s door.

Gupti-Mack let him in and said, “My last session ran long. I’m afraid I couldn’t help it. I only have fifteen minutes or so until my next one…”

The house smelled like incense, which was no surprise; the only surprise was that it smelled so good. “I’m the BCA agent assigned to recover the tigers stolen from the zoo,” Virgil began. “I’m sure you’ve heard about it, so I’ve been contacting people with knowledge of the traditional medicine community, seeing if they could point me in any particular direction…”

Gupti-Mack asked the usual questions about where he’d gotten her name and why he’d come to her in particular, and Virgil replied with the usual evasions, and finally she said, “I have no idea who might have taken the tigers. I was shocked when I heard. Shocked! When I saw in the paper this morning that you police believe somebody in the traditional medicine community was involved… well, I dissolved in disbelief. Absolutely dissolved.”

“Do you use any tiger products in your compounding?” Virgil asked.

“Absolutely not! Never! Is that why you’re here? Because you think I took these tigers to make medications out of them? That’s… that’s… absurd. Should I have a lawyer here?”

“If you’re not involved in the theft, of course not,” Virgil said. “We’re trying to get the tigers back alive and if somebody snatched them to make them into pills, we might already be too late.”

“Then if you don’t suspect me, what exactly do you want?”

“You know lots of people in this community. If people took the tigers to make them into medicines, they’d have to have a way to market them,” Virgil said.

“Two tigers… I’ll tell you, Officer Flowers, I have no idea who’d be able to handle that much weight in traditional medication. My total sales, if you were to weigh them, would probably come out to ten pounds of medications a year. The newspaper this morning said that the tigers weigh over a thousand pounds, together. I would think that the only way they could be sold is if somebody had a way to get them to China.”

“Alive?”

“Oh… probably not. They would probably process them in some out-of-the-way laboratory and ship the medications,” she said. “The U.S. doesn’t care so much about what goes out of here, and the Chinese are quite… flexible… about what they allow in.”

“Any other possibilities that you can think of?”

“There is one man here in Minnesota…” She was talking about the guy who bought and sold bear gallbladders, as had Monty-McCall, but she couldn’t come up with anyone else except an herbal wholesaler in Chicago and a ginseng dealer in Wausau, Wisconsin.

Virgil had a hard time looking into her eyes: the black dot on her forehead was the tiniest bit off-center, and he found himself watching it, wishing it an eighth inch to the left. He asked about Monty-McCall.

“That fraud,” Gupti-Mack sneered. “She calls herself a specialist in traditional Chinese and South Asian medicine, but I don’t think she’s ever set foot outside the United States, much less India or China. And she has that phony doctorate from some Jesus-Jumpin’-Up-and-Down diploma mill in Mississippi or Alabama. Yet she dares to compete with me, after I have put myself through a rigorous training program in both Mumbai and Beijing, with the highest authorities-”

Virgil interrupted: “Is there any real use for tigers in medicines?”

That brought her up short, and after a moment, she said, “Yes. Just as there is a real use for heroin in Western medicines. Those nostrums are not used only because of the ethical issues involved.”

“But if somebody knew they were getting real tiger pills… there’d be a market?”

She didn’t want to say it, but did: “I suppose so.”

–

What about a Dr. Winston Peck?” Virgil asked. “Do you know anything about him?”

“Winston? Well, he has an MD in Western medicine, but no longer practices. He’s an authority in traditional medicines of all kinds-Asian, Indian, Native American, and Inuit, among others. He has written two books comparing traditional and contemporary Western medications, tracing the way traditional societies have often used analogues of modern medicines well before Westerners ever discovered the modern equivalents. The Sioux, for example, used red willow bark as an analgesic, and it turns out that willow bark contains salicylic acid, which we know as aspirin.”

She went on for a while, until Virgil asked, “Have you, uh, I don’t know quite how to put this… have you heard that Dr. Peck has been involved in… unusual behavior… with women?”

She blushed, but shook her head, and Virgil thought, So it’s true. The only question was, how unusual. “I have never heard anything like that,” she said. “He’s a scholar and a medical doctor, with a good reputation in the traditionalist community.”

–

Out in his truck, Virgil dug out his iPad and Googled Peck. He found the usual mishmash of LinkedIn, Facebook, and medical conference listings, often confusing Peck VI with Peck V and Peck IV, the latter two alive only by reputation. The accumulation of Internet stuff was as boring as anything Virgil had ever read.

With no luck on the Internet, Virgil called Peck, but got an answering machine. He left a message and drove back to BCA headquarters, where he found Sandy, the BCA researcher, in her shoebox office.

“How do I find out about a guy who doesn’t have a criminal record, as far as I know, and has the most boring Internet personality ever?”

“Boring Internet personality-huh. Gotta be a crook, laying low. Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll go out on the ’net and look around.”

–

While Sandy did her search, Virgil checked with Jon Duncan, who asked hopefully, “Anything good?”

“I’m not stirring up anything I can get hold of,” Virgil said. He told Duncan about his talk at the zoo, and his conversations with Monty-McCall and Gupti-Mack.

When he finished, Duncan, who was twiddling a yellow pencil, said, “Jeez. Not much there.”

“Not yet. These are unusual people, though. I think we’re in the right area,” Virgil said.

“All right. Well, pray for rain. Anything I can do, let me know.”

Duncan, having been a field cop, knew well enough that even on important cases, sometimes nothing happened when you needed it to.

–

Virgil checked the tip line, found nothing intended for him, and called Frankie to ask about Sparkle. “Have you seen her this afternoon?”

“Yeah, she’s home. She said everybody at Castro was nice enough, but she says they hated her being there.”

“That’s okay, as long as they don’t do anything about it.”

“Sparkle says she thought a guy in a red pickup truck followed her for a while, but she lost him in Mankato. She says. Kinda freaked me out, but when I really pushed her on it, she wasn’t sure she was being followed at all. I think she expected to be, and when she saw two trucks that looked more or less alike, she got paranoid. She checked her rearview mirror all the way out here, and never saw the truck after she left Mankato.”

“Huh. Well, as long as she’s okay,” Virgil said.

“You coming home tonight?”

“Might as well. Nothing happening here,” Virgil said.

“That’s not good.”

“I’ve still got a guy to talk to…”

–

Sandy was tracking Peck through the wilds of the Internet. When Virgil went back to talk to her, he found her pounding on her keyboard. She glanced up at him, held up a hand that meant “stop” or “go away,” and he said, “I’ll get a Ding Dong. You finding anything?”

“Yes. Give me five minutes.”

Virgil got a Ding Dong from the vending machine and gave her ten minutes; he and Sandy had once had a sharply abbreviated romance and she continued to be testy with him. When the ten minutes were up, he went back to her office, where she was peering at a pale green document on-screen. She said, “Interesting.”

“What’s interesting?”

“Dr. Peck lost his license to practice medicine in Indiana when a medical board found that he’d engaged in unethical behavior with some female patients. I had to go around some circles to find it, but it turned out he’d give women with sprains or muscle pulls or other minor injuries a shot of nitrous oxide to help relax them while he was putting on a splint or a wrap, or manipulating a limb. They’d wake up feeling all funny.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. He was lucky he wasn’t charged with rape, but nobody was exactly sure they’d been penetrated. One woman thought she might have been photographed… for later use. Anyway, the fact that he was disciplined would show up on any background check, and once the details were known, there’s no way he’d ever get licensed. Not here in the States.”

“But he still calls himself a doctor.”

“Well, not exactly. He calls himself Winston Peck VI, MD. And he does have an MD,” Sandy said.

“Huh. Thank you.”

“Not done,” she said.

“More?”

“He filed for bankruptcy two years ago, two hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt, twelve thousand in assets, not counting his house and two vehicles. He had to sell a car; he kept a truck, a Tahoe.”

“What business?”

“He had an idea like emojis,” Sandy said. “He called them ‘the nip family.’ They were digital nipple images that you could customize to look like your own nipples, and they could carry messages back and forth. You’d send somebody a nipple on your iPhone, and it’d talk to their nipples, and so on.”

“Nipples.”

“Yeah. You’d get the nipples for free, but then you go to ‘the nip’ website and customize them for a dollar, so they’d look like your own, you know, with nipple rings or whatever,” she said. “He copyrighted the idea, but he doesn’t know how to code, apparently, and he hired a couple of coders who drove him right into the ground with their salaries. And when nobody bought a nipple… he was screwed.”

“You’re pulling my wiener,” Virgil said, without thinking.

“No, I tried that, and it didn’t really pay off for me,” she said.

“Hey!”

“Okay, but what I’m telling you is the truth. He tried to create a nip family thing, hoping it’d go viral and it went more like bacterial-like flesh-eating bacteria. They ate all his money.”

“Which would give him a reason to grab the cats.” Virgil and Sandy looked at each other for a few seconds, Sandy waiting, until Virgil finally said, “He’s the most interesting guy I’ve run into so far. The only one who’d seem to have the… energy… to pull this off.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean he did it-there are probably another half-million people in the Cities with his energy level,” Sandy said.

“Yeah, but he’s been outside the law with these women; he’s in financial trouble; he deals in traditional medicine; he’s got the energy.”

“Certainly worth a closer look,” she said.