John Sandford - Escape Clause

“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?”