John Sandford - Escape Clause

“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.

Peck still wasn’t answering his phone, so Virgil went to his address, which turned out to be a sixty-year-old white-shingled house with a tuck-under garage in a quiet neighborhood not far from the Cathedral of Saint Paul.

Virgil banged on the door for a while and got no response, looked through the garage windows and found enough light to see that the garage was empty.

Back in his truck, he tried calling Peck again, and again got no answer. Stuck for the moment, he looked up the number Dick Ho had given him for Toby Strait, called it, and got… nothing. No phone with that number, at least, not on any network, anywhere.

Virgil next tried the number Lucas had given him and connected with Strait’s girlfriend, whose name was Inez.

“I already talked to that other cop about this, that Lucas what’s-his-name: Toby’s hiding,” Inez said. “That Knowles bitch is hunting him down, and the law knows it, and they don’t do a friggin’ thing about it. Toby’s afraid to turn on his phone because there are ways of tracking it. If somebody spoofs a number and he answers it, Knowles can figure out exactly where he’s at.”

“You really think she’s still hunting for him? She’s lucky to be walking around free,” Virgil said.

“I know she’s still hunting him. She’s told people that. You want to know something? If anybody has any idea of where Toby is, it’s probably Knowles.”

–

W ell, that’s an idea , Virgil thought, and it was good from two angles: Knowles might know where Strait was hiding, and she was among the most radical of animal rights activists in the state. A lot of radical animal rights people didn’t care for zoos, so there was at least a slender possibility that Knowles might know about somebody who had taken the animals as a publicity stunt, if that’s what had happened.

Lucas had said she lived near Monticello, on the northwest edge of the Twin Cities metro area. He could probably jump the rush-hour traffic and make it up there in an hour or so. He called the BCA duty officer, asked him to find out where Maxine Knowles had been arrested, and to get the address she’d left with whatever police agency had arrested her; and to check her driver’s license and see if that matched with her bail papers.

He made it out of town ahead of the rush and was on I-94 driving north when he took the callback from the duty officer, who told him that Knowles lived eight miles out of Monticello. He’d looked at a Google Earth picture of the address, and told Virgil, “It looks like a house with a half-dozen trailers scattered around. It’s out in the sticks. I’ll tell you, Virgie, I’d call up Sherburne County and get a couple deputies to go out there with you.”

Virgil did that. He explained to the sheriff what the problem was, and the sheriff agreed to send a couple of deputies along. They’d meet in a Walgreens parking lot in Monticello, and then cross the Mississippi to Knowles’s place.

Virgil found the two Sherburne County deputies, who were named Buck and James, chatting with a couple of Wright County deputies at the Walgreens. Virgil shook hands with everybody, then ran into the Walgreens and bought a couple packs of cheese crackers and a Coke. The Wright County deputies said, “Keep your asses down,” and Virgil, Buck, and James rolled in a three-car caravan north across the Mississippi.

North of the river, they threaded their way through a skein of backroads that ended at a shabby farmstead, with that semicircle of trailers the duty officer had told him about. Behind the trailers, they could see a maze of eight-foot chain-link fences, which appeared to be much newer and in much better shape than the trailers. Two gray Subaru station wagons, one with a flat front tire, were parked in front of the cages.

They crossed a culvert into the farmyard, and within a minute or so, people began wandering out of the trailers. Virgil, out of his truck, was joined by Buck and James, and Buck whispered uneasily, “Jesus, it’s a zombie outbreak.”

A dozen people came out of the trailers, most of them dressed in ragged farm-style clothing, denim overalls and long-sleeved shirts and gum boots, both men and women; and they were old, with long badly cut hair, gone gray, and all but one or two were noticeably thin. The combination of age, hair, and spindly bodies did give them the look of zombies, Virgil thought, along with the shuffling gait that one or two of them had.