John Sandford - Escape Clause

“Get their faces on the video?”

“No. They wore ball caps without any brand markings, which means they must have bought them for this job, and rubber Halloween masks. Somebody says they were Mitt Romney masks. They wore canvas work gloves. The guys have the video down at the shop, if you want to see it. Can’t really see too much after the first few seconds, because Frankie goes down between the cars. They were wearing work shirts and jeans.”

“Do you…” Virgil trailed away as a pretty but tough-looking blonde walked into the emergency room. She was tall, square-jawed, and wide-shouldered, with small, barely discernible boxer’s scars under both eyes. She wore dark slacks, a tan blouse under a dark blue jacket, and black marginally fashionable boots that could be used to kick somebody to death.

She said, “Virgil. How’s your friend? Is it Frankie?”

“Yeah, Frankie. She’s pretty roughed up, but she’ll be okay,” Virgil said. He knew Catrin Mattsson, but not well. “Catrin-good to see you. This is Al Foreman, Mankato PD. Al, this is Catrin Mattsson, she’s with us at the BCA.”

“Oh, yeah,” Foreman said, as they shook hands.

Foreman said “Oh, yeah” because he recognized the name: Mattsson had been a sheriff’s deputy famously kidnapped, raped, and beaten by an insane serial killer. She’d been rescued at the last minute by Lucas Davenport, and she had killed her captor with a steel bar, as Davenport had been reeling with a smashed nose. That was their story, anyway.

Her ordeal and her resilience had brought her to the attention of the governor, who’d pressured the BCA into hiring her. Davenport had supported the appointment, having worked with Mattsson on the serial killer case, before she was kidnapped. She was building her own reputation at the BCA as someone not to be messed with and who carried more than her own load.

Foreman filled her in on the details of the attack and Virgil told her what he’d gotten from Frankie: that the attack was probably aimed at Frankie’s sister, Sparkle, and why that might be. Mattsson listened closely, one fist on her hip; a full-sized black Beretta was clipped to her waistband just ahead of her fist.

When they were finished, Mattsson said, “Virgil, Jon wants you back on the tigers. Soon as you can reasonably do it. He knows you’ve been making progress-Sandy said to tell you that she’s found a shipment of meat dryers and has e-mailed the details to you. I’ll find the guys who attacked Ms. Nobles.”

“Frankie,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, Frankie.”

“She’s asleep; she’s full of pain medication,” Virgil said.

“Okay, I’ll be here overnight. I’ll check every once in a while, see if she’s awake,” Mattsson said. “In the meantime, I need to talk to this Sparkle.”

“She’s staying at Frankie’s farm.”

“Why don’t you wait here for a minute,” Mattsson said. “I want to talk to the doc. Then we’ll go look at the video, see what the locals have, and then I’ll follow you out to the farm. You better get back to the Cities tonight. The tigers are still number one on the media hit parade.”

She went off with the nurse to find the doc and when she was out of earshot, Foreman said, “Whoa.”

Virgil looked after her and said, “Yeah.”

Foreman: “Hot and scary. I mean, totally jumpable, but then she’d probably eat your head, like a black widow.”

“I’m not sure I’d say that out loud,” Virgil said.

“I hear you, brother. You okay with her on the case?”

“More than okay,” Virgil said. And he was: nobody at the BCA would go after Frankie’s attacker harder than Mattsson. He owed Duncan for that one.

–

Mattsson came back a few minutes later and Virgil led the way across town to the Mankato public safety department. Mattsson had called ahead, and the Mankato detective, Donnie Carlson, had the video ready to run.

“The store has a digital recorder tied to the cameras, and the whole thing is hooked up to the Internet,” he said. “We had the video a half hour after Ms. Nobles was attacked. Two cameras cover the gas pumps, a third one is mounted above the pumps and looks at the front door to catch a stickup man coming out. We can see the attack on the edge of that one.”

They bent over the desk watching the full-color video, which had no sound. It began as two men, one rangy and athletic looking, the other too fat and built like a door, walked up to the side of the store and passed out of sight. The video then skipped forward three or four minutes to show Frankie walking out the door carrying a sack of groceries. As she turned down the slot between Sparkle’s Mini and a truck, the two men jogged back into the video frame, then into the slot between the vehicles.

Frankie saw them coming and turned at the last second, as one of the men swung an open-handed slap at the side of her head. The slap connected and she dropped the bag and flattened against the car, her hands going up to protect her face, then the man hit her with a gloved fist, once, twice, and she tried to squeeze past him but the second man, the heavy one, blocked her retreat and shoved her back to the first one.

The athletic man swatted her across the forehead and this time she began to sink down, and he grabbed her blouse with one hand and wound up to hit her again, but she turned her head and bit into a length of exposed arm above the work glove, and they could see him shout or scream as she wrenched her head away from the arm and she fell out of sight, but the man kicked her twice, and then ran out of the picture, followed by the fat man.

Without sound, the video was flat and looked something like a puppet show: the punches and slaps didn’t have the sound effects of movies.

A few seconds after the attackers ran out of the picture, a third man hurried around the nose of the truck and looked at her, then turned and shouted to somebody out of sight, and went to his knees over her, although the camera still couldn’t see her, and they saw a heavy brown-haired woman in what appeared to be a hairstylist’s nylon uniform run into the store and then, a moment later, two more men run out to where the third man was now standing over Frankie, shouting. One of the newcomers turned and ran back into the store.

The video then skipped ahead to an ambulance arriving. The paramedics hurried up to the small crowd between the cars, and a moment later brought a backboard, and then loaded Frankie onto a gurney and wheeled her to the ambulance and loaded her inside. A moment later, the ambulance was gone.

Virgil hadn’t really been aware that the two attackers had been wearing masks, and said so.

“It’s hard to see,” the Mankato cop said. “Watch this.”

He typed in a number and the video recording skipped back to the point where Frankie turned between the two vehicles and the two men appeared. Mattsson muttered, “Watch out!”

At that point in the attack, the men’s heads were up and looking straight at the cameras. That lasted for only a second or two, but Carlson froze the photo as the two looked toward Frankie. With the image frozen, Virgil could see that they wore pale rubber masks. “Don’t think they look like Mitt Romney, but I’ve been told that’s what they are,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, they are,” Carlson said. “We matched them with some masks you can buy from a Halloween place on the Internet.”

–

Mattsson spent five minutes quizzing Carlson, with Virgil chipping in from time to time, then Mattsson closed her notebook and said to Virgil, “Let’s go talk to this Sparkle person.”

–

Frankie’s farm was northwest of Mankato, across the Minnesota River and out in the countryside, a fifteen-minute ride from the public safety department. Frankie’s truck was parked on the side of the driveway past the house. Virgil parked and Mattsson pulled in beside him, and as they got out, Sparkle came out of the house. She was smiling, but when she saw Virgil’s face, the smile fell away like a dead leaf off a tree.