John Sandford - Escape Clause

He had to talk to Peck again.

–

Two hours later, while he was pulling on his socks, Virgil called the Polk County sheriff’s office in Wisconsin and spoke to the sheriff, who’d been to the scene. “It’s another one of your damn Twin Cities murders that you keep unloading on us,” the sheriff said. “If he’d dropped the refrigerator fifteen feet west, it’d technically be a Minnesota case, which it should be.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, sounds like it,” the sheriff said.

The sheriff told Virgil the story of the Yoder brothers and a description of the murder scene. “From eyeballing it, I’d say the guy hadn’t been in the river long at all,” the sheriff said. “I’ve seen any number of drownings, been down for anything from an hour to a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months. This guy was probably dumped earlier in the night. If the ME tells you different, he’s wrong and I’m right.”

Virgil and the sheriff talked for a few more minutes, Virgil extracting as many details as the sheriff had, then he hung up and drove across the Cities to the BCA building.

–

Clark, the duty officer, had gone home at seven o’clock, and since he’d notified Virgil, the lead investigator, he hadn’t bothered to leave a message for Jon Duncan, who freaked when Virgil showed up and told him about it.

“Cut off his arms? Cut off his arms? What have you done, Virgil?” Duncan cried, rocking back in his office chair.

“I haven’t done anything,” Virgil said.

“Why do your cases always wind up like this?” Duncan asked, running a hand through his hair. “Why can’t you have a straightforward missing-tigers case?”

Duncan was only half-joking. “You know, most of my cases don’t involve any violence at all,” Virgil said. “Most of them are really straightforward.”

“I can’t remember even one that was straightforward,” Duncan said. “What about the one with the spies? What about the one with, with… the dognapping one that turned into a triple murder or something and you arrested the school board? Are you kiddin’ me? You arrested the school board?”

“Not all of them,” Virgil said. “One of them is still on the run.”

“Ah, man, does the media know yet?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Virgil said. “A Wisconsin county sheriff’s office handled the case when the body was found. I expect they got the Simonian ID as soon as I did, and they know Simonian was wanted on the tiger theft.”

“So they’ll be calling. TV, radio, the whole shooting match,” Duncan said. He looked at his office telephone as though it were a cockroach. “I gotta talk to the director.”

“That’s not a good idea. He’s gonna be a little testy right now.”

The director was about to be fired, if office rumors were true. Since the building contained a couple of dozen professional investigators and the usual garden-variety snoops, the rumors were generally accurate.

“No help for it,” Duncan said, about calling the director.

“I thought you liked being on TV,” Virgil said.

“I do, most of the time,” Duncan said. “But I like it to be on the credit side of things, where I’m the hero. You know, I smile at the camera, show off my dimples. This is gonna be debit. Big-time debit.”

“Good luck with it,” Virgil said. “You do have the cute dimples. Here’s a tip: I’d stay away from the phrase ‘The suspect was disarmed.’”

–

Virgil left Duncan to his media problem and drove to the medical examiner’s office, a single-story gray building with all of the charm of a shoe box, built next to a Regions Hospital parking structure. The medical examiner, a chain-smoking doc named Nguyen Ran, asked, “You want to see the body?”

“No. What I want is some clue that’ll get me to the killer. And the tigers.”

“Don’t have any of those,” Ran said. “I also don’t have any chemistry back yet and won’t have until tomorrow, but I can tell you that you’re probably right on the means of death. No sign of the normal types of violence, not even defensive wounds, but I did find a small bruise next to his left nipple. When I looked closer, I could see a point of penetration that would be consistent with a wound made by a big needle. I dissected that area and found a lacuna in the underlying muscle, and bruising that would be consistent with the violent injection of a substantial quantity of fluid: almost like an inch-long blister in the muscle.”

“It’s what I thought,” Virgil said. “He was shot with a tranquilizer gun.”

“Yeah. I looked at his lungs… you don’t need the details, but it all points toward a massive dose of a fast-acting sedative. Big enough that the dose killed him. They didn’t have to finish him off with any of the conventional methods. The cheeseheads sent the whole refrigerator over. No tranquilizer dart inside, no dart was found at the scene.”

“ Anything else? Anything that would help me?”

“Nope. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Underwear, socks, and Nike brand shoes. No ID-no wallet or anything, no jewelry. Fingers were all intact, got a fine set of prints, about as good as you could hope for.”

“What about the arms?” Virgil asked. “Were they cut off with a scalpel? Hacked off with an ax? Anything I could look for?”

“More like sawn off with a sharp knife. I’m thinking a butcher knife. Postmortem, of course. No effort to carefully disarticulate the shoulders. They were cut right through. Nothing particularly neat about it. From what I get from my investigators, it was probably done because the killer couldn’t fit the body in the refrigerator any other way.”

“You wouldn’t say off the top of your head that it was done by a doctor… somebody with a knowledge of human anatomy?”

“No. The way it was done, a deer hunter could have done it. Anybody who’d ever taken apart a carcass. I mean, it wasn’t sloppy, but it wasn’t so skillfully done that I’d suspect a surgeon. You looking at a surgeon?”

“No,” Virgil said. “Maybe at a regular doc.”

Ran shrugged. “Couldn’t prove it with me.”

–

Virgil sat in his truck and thought: if you had to hide a tiger-skinning operation, you wouldn’t do it in a tightly packed suburb. You’d probably want to do it where you had a piece of land around yourself, free of snoops. Like out in the countryside.

The closest big patches of rural countryside were on both sides of the St. Croix River, and Simonian had been found under a bridge over the St. Croix. And Peck had given him the name of a woman who processed animals… in Wisconsin.

Need to take a look at her , he thought.

Peck was lying in bed, listening to WCCO radio, when he heard the news. Hamlet Simonian had been pulled out of the St. Croix River.

“Oh, mother of God,” he groaned to the thumbtack in the ceiling. He’d used the thumbtack for meditation exercises, before he’d discovered the full efficacy of Xanax. With his luck, he thought, the thumbtack would come unglued some night and land point-down on his eyeball.

After a while, aloud, he said, “They found Hamlet. How could they find Hamlet?”

He’d managed to keep his shit together during the interview with Flowers with the help of an extra tab of the Xanax. Drugs wouldn’t help him with Hayk Simonian, not after the bullshit he’d laid on the older brother.

He’d told Hayk that Hamlet Simonian was driving back to Glendale, California, where their family came from, where he planned to hide out until the heat dissipated. When Hayk had later complained that he couldn’t reach his brother on his cell phone, Peck had told him that Hamlet had turned it off, so the cops couldn’t check his call history. He’d suggested that Hayk go to the Apple lost-phone locater service and look for the phone’s location. Hayk had done that and the phone was shown as being in Des Moines, and later, moving west from Kansas City.