John Sandford - Escape Clause

A tall, sunken-cheeked man asked, “What can we do for y’all?”

“I need to talk to Maxine Knowles,” Virgil said.

“Can I ask what for? She’s legally bailed out,” the man said.

“I’m not here about her legal problems,” Virgil said. “I actually need to talk to her about her area of expertise. I’m the cop looking for the stolen zoo tigers.”

That set off a rash of commentary among the crowd and the tall man shook his head and said, “Well, that’s a disaster. I can tell you, we don’t have them, and I don’t know who would.”

“I believe you, but I still need to talk to Maxine,” Virgil said.

The tall man looked at them for a few seconds, then pulled a cell phone from his pocket and poked in a number. After a few more seconds, he said, “Maxine, there are some police officers out in the yard looking for you. It’s about the tigers.”

He listened briefly, then hung up and said to Virgil, “She’ll be right out.”

–

Maxine Knowles came through the back door of the house, nodded to the group facing Virgil and the deputies, and said to Virgil, “I don’t know about the tigers. I hope you find them before they’re killed.” She was a tall, stocky red-haired woman wearing an olive knit blouse, black jeans, and hiking boots, who added, “I have no idea who’d take them.”

Virgil said, “Is there somewhere you and I can go to talk?”

She pushed out a lip, considering, and said, “I guess so. We could talk in the kitchen.” To the group, she said, “I think we’re okay here, everybody. Let’s get ready to feed.”

The group began to break up, some people going to their trailers, others walking out toward a couple of sheds set off to one side of the chain-link fences.

“What’s the chain link for?” Virgil asked, as he followed Knowles through the house’s mudroom and into a funky-smelling kitchen, redolent of old potatoes and overripe tomatoes.

“Our animals,” Knowles said. “We have fourteen horses, four cows, six pigs, one broken-wing crow. All rescued. We’ve got a bunch of cats and dogs, also rescued, that mostly run around loose, unless they’ve been too abused and we have to sequester them. No tigers.”

Virgil explained his mission and his thinking: “You’re pretty well hooked into the animal rights people. Do you have any ideas for me, who might have been radical enough to grab the tigers?”

She started shaking her head before he got through explaining. “I really don’t, and I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. You want some nutcakes who are processing them for Asian medicines.”

“That’s what we’re all afraid of,” Virgil said.

“There’s a man named Toby Strait-”

“That’s the other reason I’m here. He’s apparently in hiding, ever since you made bail.”

“That sonofabitch.” Her eyes grew wider and her face turned red. “You know what he does for a living?”

“I think so…”

“If he’s allowed to keep doing that, he’ll kill off every bear in the state and in Wisconsin and the Dakotas, too. For their gallbladders! So some Chinese assholes can make a medicine that doesn’t even work! People get all weepy about rhinoceroses, and they should, but who’s crying for the black bear, that’s what I want to know! Who’s crying for the black bear?”

“Well…”

“If you asked me for one likely man to steal the tigers…” She paused, settled a bit, and then said, “I’m not going to talk to a police officer about my case.”

“I don’t need that,” Virgil said. “What I need is any idea you might have about where Strait might be hiding.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Have you looked?”

She shook her head. “I’m not talking to you.”

“Do you have any ideas? Anything? We’re pretty desperate here.”

She got up and got a glass of water, and leaned against the kitchen sink, considering, then said, “He won’t be processing bear gallbladders, not at this time of year. I’d have to guess that he’s out at one of his snake barns. Even if he isn’t, I know they’re processing the skins now, so his snake barn people must be able to get in touch with him.”

“You haven’t been sneaking around to his snake barns, checking up on him?”

“I’m not… No, I haven’t, and you know why? If I did, I believe I’d get shot. He’d be willing to do that, to get me off his back. And I have to believe that the law would take his side, if I was found creeping around him. He’d shoot me and get away with it.”

“Do you know where one of his snake barns is at?” Virgil asked.

She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“But you haven’t been sneaking around?”

“Of course not.”

–

She got a map up on her laptop and pointed out the snake barn. From a satellite view, it looked like a nicely kept place, nothing at all remarkable-another pretty Minnesota dairy farm. Best of all, it was straight south from Monticello, and a little west, two-thirds of the way back to Virgil’s home in Mankato.

Virgil thanked her, got up to go, and asked, “What’s the story on all the old folks?”

“Volunteers,” she said. “Help me with the animals. You know, they sort of moved in on me; mostly old people, living on Social Security, who care about things. They figured if we got some old trailers-didn’t even have to pay for them, they’re rescue trailers, like the rescue animals-and came out here as a group, they could pool their money, live better, have friends around as they get old and start dying off. It works for us.”

“Huh. I hope that none of you really has anything to do with the tigers,” Virgil said.

“We don’t. I’m not too happy about the whole concept of zoos, as a philosophical matter, but for some animals, like Amur tigers, zoos are about the only thing standing between them and extinction. For that, we need the zoos.”

–

Outside, Virgil found Buck and James watching through the chain-link fence as the old people fed the horses. Most of the horses looked solid enough, but two were radically thin. “We got those a week ago. Don’t yet know if they’re going to make it-you can’t just stuff them full of hay all at once,” Knowles said. “What I want to know is, how in the hell can you starve a horse to death, in Minnesota, in the summer? All you have to do is let them out in a ditch and they’ll feed themselves.”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “I don’t understand it, either.”

–

From Monticello to the snake barn, located south of the town of Gaylord, was ninety minutes or so, the blacktop roads shimmering with heat mirages. Virgil ate the cheese crackers before he made it back to Monticello and on his way south stopped at a McDonald’s in Norwood Young America for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, small fries, and a strawberry shake.

He thought about Knowles as he ate, and why God might create somebody like her. She’d seemed sane enough, not somebody who was hunting down another human being so she could shoot him to death. But she’d been caught more or less red-handed doing exactly that. People, he thought, were never one thing. Knowles was an intelligent, thoughtful lover of animals, and a potential killer.

Virgil could feel his heart clogging up with grease as he finished the sandwich, but continued on to Gaylord, and out the far side of town to the farm of Jan Aarle, “Jan” being pronounced like Yawn .

Aarle’s wife came to the side door of the suburban ranch-style farmhouse and said Jan was working in the barn. She called him on her cell phone, and a moment later, he walked out of the barn and across the yard to the house.

“I don’t really know where Toby is, but I could probably get a message to him,” Aarle said. He was a fat, pink-faced man with an accent that sounded German, but not quite German-maybe like an American-born kid who grew up speaking German around the house. “What I’d have to do is call around the other barns, and somebody probably has a working number.”