John Sandford - Escape Clause

“If I can keep it to myself, I will,” Virgil said.

“Okay. It might not be anything…”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“I saw that TV thing about the house, where you went looking for the tigers, where they delivered the dryers, where that Simoniz guy lived,” Werner said. “There’s a guy here at the zoo, works here, named Barry King. He lives on the next block down from that house.”

“Huh. Interesting. What are you thinking?” Virgil asked.

“Well, uh, I really don’t want it to get out that I told you this, but Barry’s basically a jerk and he’s always got money problems. If you told me that you’d arrested Barry for stealing the tigers, I’d have said, ‘Yeah, I can see that.’ Anyway, I was thinking, if somebody asked Barry where you could get those dryers delivered… and if he knew a cheap place for rent…”

“Got it,” Virgil said. “You keep quiet about this, okay? I’ll be on it first thing in the morning. Thank you.”

–

Got the tigers?” Frankie asked.

“Not yet, but I might have a tail,” Virgil said.

His tip to Daisy Jones could have a nice payoff, he thought, and as far as Jones knew, she’d still owe him. A twofer.

Virgil left a phone message for Jenkins and Shrake and suggested that they meet at the BCA building at eight o’clock the next morning for another trip over to Frogtown. Jenkins was still up and sent a text back, saying that Virgil wouldn’t make it to the BCA at eight o’clock unless he got up at five o’clock in the morning-“No fast way to get across the south end of the Cities at that time in the morning.”

Virgil thought it over, agreed, and changed the meeting time. “Nine o’clock or as soon after that as I can get there.”

–

Virgil made it to the BCA at ten after nine. He’d stopped at the Mayo before heading north again, but Frankie was asleep and he left her that way. Shrake, looking fresh and smelling of French cologne, said he and Jenkins hadn’t gone out the night before because the trip to the possible tiger den “broke our focus. You want to nail yourself a cougar, you can’t be thinking about tigers.”

They drove in Virgil’s 4Runner to the same neighborhood they’d been in the night before, the two thugs giving Virgil a hard time about his vintage black “Hole” T-shirt.

“I reject your ignorant criticism,” Virgil said. “Courtney Love had a terrific voice and a good band behind her.”

“Wasn’t that hard to look at, either,” Jenkins conceded. “That doesn’t mean your shirt isn’t ridiculous. For one thing, it’s a size too small.”

The conversation continued, but they got to the target house about two hours too late. When they arrived, a St. Paul cop car was parked in the street in front of the house. “I’m suffering from a sudden lack of confidence in our mission,” Jenkins said.

“Ah, man. Let’s go see what’s going on,” Virgil said.

–

A St. Paul police sergeant named Random Powers came out the door as they walked up to the house. Powers knew Jenkins and Shrake and said he’d just taken a missing persons report from the girlfriend of a man who’d disappeared that morning, two hours earlier.

“Is his name Barry King?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah. You know where he is?”

“No, I don’t,” Virgil said. “Goddamnit.”

Virgil told Powers about the BCA investigation and the cop said, “Go talk to Gloria. Be my guest. And… try to look in her eyes.”

Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins found Gloria Ortiz sitting on the living room sofa, drinking a glass of green stuff. Ortiz was a pretty, brown-eyed woman with blond streaks in her dark hair and a gold crucifix dangling down her intriguing cleavage. She identified herself as Barry King’s live-in fiancée.

“I don’t know what happened. He got up, he said he was going out to run. He was wearing his running shorts and shoes and a T-shirt, and he went off. Then he didn’t come back. He’s supposed to be at work-when he didn’t come back, I got worried and called the police and asked if a runner had been hit by a car or anything.”

Powers, who’d followed them inside, said, “We got nothing like that.”

Shrake asked Ortiz, “You guys been getting along? Any chance he, you know… might be looking for a better opportunity?”

“No,” she said. “I can tell you that for sure. He left his wallet, watch, and iPhone on the bathroom counter. I promise you, Barry would never leave his wallet and cell phone behind, if he was planning to take off. There was a hundred and forty dollars in his wallet, and all his IDs and credit cards.”

Virgil: “Barry come into any money lately?”

Her eyes drifted sideways and Jenkins said to Virgil, “That looks like a big yes.”

“I don’t know where he got it, but he bought some neat new shoes last month-he likes shoes. I looked in his wallet and there was more than a thousand dollars in cash in there,” Ortiz said. “We had an argument about it. Oh… his shoes are still here. He didn’t take any of them, except his running shoes.”

“He ever mention the tigers to you? The missing tigers from the zoo?” Virgil asked.

Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my God. Is that what this is about? You think Barry helped steal them?”

“We would like to talk with him,” Virgil said. “See if he had any ideas about what might have happened to them.”

“I don’t think Barry… he’s not the kind of person who could organize a thing like that. You know, stealing the tigers. Barry can be nice, when he tries, but he’s not the sharpest knife in the dishwasher.”

“Did he spend any time watching the news about the tigers?” Virgil asked.

She bobbed her head. “Oh, yeah, I guess. Everybody has been, right? Especially if you worked at the zoo.”

“Do you know… has he had any new friends? Anybody you thought might be a little unusual?”

“No, but he has his own friends. I don’t hang out with them much. The boys, you know, go drinking with the boys. I go out with my girlfriends.”

Shrake: “You didn’t talk about the zoo, about the tigers?”

“Only about how terrible it was, the tigers being stolen. Anything more, he hasn’t said a thing to me. Not a thing.”

–

King wasn’t saying much to the Simonians, either. He lay face-down in the RV and bled into the carpet, and occasionally groaned.

One of the Simonians had talked to Hamlet and Hayk Simonian’s mother, who’d given them two names: Larry King, who she said worked at the zoo, and Simpson Becker, who’d hired them.

Her mistakes with the names occurred because Mother Simonian had been born and raised in Iran and had fled when the revolution made things difficult for Christian Armenians. Surrounded by family in California, speaking Farsi and Armenian, she’d learned only basic English-but she had watched a lot of television, Larry King and The Simpsons included; she in fact may have unconsciously modeled her blue-tinted hair on Marge Simpson’s. When her elder son called and said she should take down a couple of names, “just in case,” he said Barry King and Winston Peck, and she heard Larry King and Simpson Becker.

The Simonians in the truck had managed to identify Larry King as Barry King by searching references to zoo employees, but hadn’t yet located any doctor named Simpson Becker.

Still, Barry King was a start. When he went for his morning run, they’d pulled him into the Simonian RV and proceeded to question him. When he failed to cooperate, they beat the shit out of him. When that didn’t work, the youngest and most violent of the Simonians suggested breaking his fingers, one by one, but one of the older men rejected the idea.