John Sandford - Escape Clause

“I’ll take both,” Virgil said. “What’s the fact?”

“Found a couple of hairs on the old man’s shoes. Crime Scene isn’t promising anything, but they could well be from a tiger. Definitely animal hair, or fur, or whatever it is, and the right color for a tiger.”

“Excellent. That’s great. What’s the thought?”

“If his old man was in on this, if he was killed by this Peck guy… well, we have the old man’s phone. We don’t need anybody’s permission to look at that, since he’s, like, dead.”

“Despite what people say, you are a man of average intelligence,” Virgil said. “I’m on my way.”

–

Zhang senior’s phone was sitting on Howser’s desk when Virgil arrived back at Minneapolis homicide. It had been processed by the crime-scene people and sent to the evidence room, where Howser had collected it. He dumped it out of a plastic bag, and they stood around and looked at it.

“Not an iPhone,” Howser said. “What the hell is a Jazzpod?”

“There’s some Chinese writing on it,” Virgil observed.

“Must be a Chinese brand,” Howser said. “Turn it on.”

Virgil did, and they found that the phone’s top language was English, and that it was fingerprint protected. Howser said, “Goddamnit. So close.”

Virgil, thinking of the prints they’d taken from Hamlet Simonian, said, “Well, we’ve got his fingers.”

–

Before going to the medical examiner’s office, where Zhang’s body was being held, Virgil and Howser went back to the homicide office, where a cop was being harangued by Horace Turner, the younger Zhang’s attorney.

“We’re already deep into the lawsuit. You’ve got no reason to hold my client…” Turner spotted Howser and said, “It’s about time. This has gone beyond any reasonable hold and into physical abuse.”

Howser looked at the other homicide cop and demanded, “Have you been beating up Mr. Zhang?”

The other cop yawned and said through the yawn, “Only with my dry wit.”

Howser said to Turner, “Does dry wit fall under the Civil Rights Act?”

“Let my person go,” Turner said. And, “For you cops, that’s what we call a play on words. Anyway… let him go. Now. I am instructing him not to say another word to you. Not under these conditions.”

Virgil said to Turner, “I think he choked his father to death for the inheritance. I think he was involved in the theft of the tigers. I think he’s involved with at least a triple murder, and maybe four murders.”

“No!” Zhang said.

Virgil said, “I’m not talking to you.”

“Show me a single thing and there’s a slim possibility that I won’t sue you for abusing my client,” Turner said.

“His father’s shoes had tiger hair on them. That’s a single thing. This guy”-Virgil pointed at Zhang-“drove his father everywhere. His father didn’t even have a car here. They took junior’s Ferrari when they wanted to go somewhere.”

“He took Ubers,” Zhang blurted.

“Shut up,” Turner said to Zhang.

Virgil said, “Really. Ubers? I bet there’s a record of that. Thanks, that helps. You mind if we look at your shoes?”

“If you’ve got a warrant,” Turner said.

Howser said, “Why don’t we keep Mr. Zhang sitting here for a while longer, while we go get a warrant, then?”

“I had nothing to do with…”

“Shut up,” Turner said. “Not another word.” And to Howser: “Get your warrant, if you think you can.”

–

They left Turner, still complaining, and Zhang, now sourly silent, sitting in the homicide office. Virgil and Howser went off to the medical examiner’s office, and another cop went to apply for a warrant, and a fourth one sat with Zhang to make sure he didn’t rub the soles of his shoes too hard on the carpet.

The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office had the same shoe-box ambience as the Ramsey County medical examiner’s office, but instead of being simply plain, it was aggressively beige. An investigator pulled Zhang senior’s nude body, and Virgil looked away as the experts figured out how best to get a fingerprint.

One of the examiner’s employees, apparently an expert on cell phones, said, “There’s no way to know which finger he used until we try them.”

“Try his right hand first,” said the investigator, a tall thin man with a hipster’s goatee.

“Based on…?”

“The fact that ninety percent of the people in the world are right-handed,” the investigator said. “Try his right index finger first.”

They hit it on the first try and the phone opened up. Virgil said, “I’ll take it out in the waiting area… but let Mr. Zhang hang on here, in case we need the finger again.”

“You could take the finger with you,” the investigator said.

“Ah…”

“Just kiddin’. A little medical examiner humor there. Zhang parts ain’t going anywhere.”

–

Virgil and Howser went out to the waiting area, where it smelled less funny, and Virgil, who’d rehearsed on his own phone, poked his way through the menus of the Jazzpod to the location history, and the history opened up.

Most of the locations shown on the phone were in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul, but one was in Washington County, east of St. Paul and adjoining the St. Croix River and Wisconsin.

The problem was, all the locations were much more general than they were on iPhones. Instead of addresses, they got areas: for Washington County, they got a location circle that Virgil figured was ten miles across. From previous such calculations during fugitive searches, Virgil knew that a circle ten miles across would cover almost eighty square miles, and in this case, a nice chunk of suburbs and probably a few thousand homes.

“That help?” Howser asked.

“It does, some,” Virgil said. “We tracked the kid and his old man out that way, but they got onto us and turned around. We never did find out where they were going.”

The medical examiner’s investigator had an iPad and a Wi-Fi connection, and they called up a mapping program’s satellite photos and compared it to the phone location. That part of Washington County had dozens of small lakes and ponds, most of them isolated from the road system, and many with houses around them.

“That’s a rat’s nest of streets out there, twisted around all those lakes. You need a better location,” Howser said. “You can’t just go out there and drive around.”

“Yeah. I maybe got a better location coming. In the meantime, talk to Zhang about his old man’s travels through the countryside out there… maybe crank up the pressure a little.”

–

As Virgil left the medical examiner’s office, Sandy called from a plane that was on the runway at Minneapolis-St. Paul International: “Got here by the skin of my teeth-Jon had to shout at Delta Air Lines to get them to hold the plane for five minutes. Everybody’s looking at me. They think I’m a movie star or something.”

“I can see that,” Virgil said.

“You should. Anyway, they’re telling me to turn off my phone. I’ll be in LA in four hours.”

“Call me,” Virgil said. “Hey, where’s the FedEx truck?”

“Going into San Bernardino, last time I could look. Gotta go, or they’ll throw me off the plane.”

–

The pressure to find the killer, and the tigers, had grown intense, especially with Channel Three now running a clock on the number of hours and minutes the animals had been missing.

Virgil considered the possibilities, and went to lunch.

While he was working his way through an egg-salad sandwich at the Parrot Café, he called around to see if he could find a human being at Uber. He eventually found one, who passed him up through several levels of management to a guy who said he couldn’t call every Uber driver in the Twin Cities-he said there were thousands of them, though Virgil thought he might be exaggerating. “I can get a mass e-mailing to them, but I can’t guarantee that they’ll read it,” the Uber guy said. “Tell me again exactly what you’re looking for?”