Escape Clause

  “Okay, since two weeks ago,” Jenkins said.

  “A pretty long dry spell for you guys,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, not much you can really do about it,” Jenkins said. “Gotta be patient, wait them out.”

  —

  The St. Paul cop showed up in an unmarked car and parked behind Virgil. They all shook hands and the cop, Bowers, asked, “You don’t think they got the tigers in the apartment, do you?”

  “There’s a question that hasn’t been asked,” Shrake said.

  “No, I don’t. The two tigers together weigh more than a thousand pounds. Even if they were dead, getting them up to a second floor, without an elevator, is gonna be a load and a half,” Virgil said.

  “That’s good, because I really don’t have my tiger-shooting vest with me,” Bowers said.

  “Enough bullshit, let’s get it on,” Jenkins said.

  —

  Jenkins and Shrake took the Crown Vic across to the car wash. Shrake got out and put his back to the wall under the stairs and Jenkins took the car into the car wash, which started up with a roar.

  Virgil and the St. Paul cop crossed the street and parked on the side of the wash unit, where they couldn’t be seen from the apartment. They joined Shrake next to the staircase, and Shrake asked Virgil, “You got your gun?”

  Virgil patted his hip. “Right here.”

  “Try not to shoot anybody with it; I mean, one of us.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”

  They went up the stairs walking quietly, in a single file, and found Apartment One at the front of the building. The apartment had a steel door and the two visible windows were barred with fake ornamental wrought-iron window guards. There were no lights on.

  “Okay, so nobody’s gonna get through the iron bars,” Shrake muttered under his breath. “My question is, how do you get out if there’s a fire?”

  “What’s gonna burn?” Virgil asked. “The whole goddamn place is made of concrete.”

  —

  They listened at the windows and at the door and heard nothing at all, though it was hard to hear anything over the noise from the car wash. Shrake whispered, “What do you want to do?”

  Virgil shrugged. “The key. He won’t hear it with the car wash running.”

  Bowers dug it out of his pocket and passed it over and Shrake slid it into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open one-handed, while keeping his back to the wall. No sound, no reaction.

  Virgil, on the other side of the door opening, reached around the wall, groping for a light switch, found it, and turned on the porch light, which fully illuminated all of them. “Damn it.” He turned it off, and found another switch, and turned it on.

  Virgil backed up to the window. He could see the interior of the apartment now that the light was on, and it appeared to be empty. He could see a dark hallway leading to another room.

  “Don’t think anybody’s home,” he said. The car wash suddenly went silent, and Virgil said into the sudden silence, “Let’s clear it.”

  They did. The apartment door opened directly on the living room, and Shrake led the way in, both he and Bowers pointing their weapons at the hallway to the back. Shrake found a light switch that turned on the hall light; the hallway led to a small bedroom and a motel-style bathroom, tight and cheap, and both empty.

  Jenkins had come up the stairs to join them, and now said, “Look at that fuckin’ TV set.”

  They all looked at it.

  “Lucky guy,” Shrake said. “Having an appliance like that. Football season coming up.”

  The TV occupied most of the middle of the living room and must have been seventy inches across, perched on two metal folding chairs with a cable leading to a cable box that sat on the terrazzo floor under the chairs.

  Bowers, who’d been wandering around the apartment, said, “Here you go.” Without touching it, he pointed at a paper map of the Minnesota Zoo, sitting on the breakfast counter.

  “Okay, he’s the right guy,” Virgil said. “Wonder if he took off?”

  “If he’s got any brains, he did,” Jenkins said. “Shrake and I were sittin’ in a bar . . .”

  “No . . .”

  “We must’ve seen his face twenty times between nine o’clock and the news. If he was here, watching that thing”—Jenkins waved at the giant TV—“he couldn’t have missed seeing himself.”

  Virgil looked around at the bleak little apartment, the dirt-stiff ten-year-old chintz curtains, the dusty, rugless terrazzo floors, the few pieces of furniture, the near total absence of dinnerware: two cups that he could see, a glass, a couple of spoons, one knife, and a fork in the sink. “Let’s take the place apart. We need any kind of hint we can find about where he hid the tigers. Anything.”

  —

  What they found was an apartment that was little lived in. Almost everything looked like it came with the apartment, except the television, a few pieces of clothing hung in the single bedroom closet, and some underwear and socks packed into the single chest of drawers. A pair of new, unworn pointed-toe black dress shoes, with white sidewalls, lounged next to the chest.

  “Guy must like to boogie,” Shrake said.

  A green plywood box sat at the end of the bed, with a Master padlock fastened through a simple latch.

  “It’s an old army footlocker,” Virgil said, touching it with his toe.

  “I got a bolt cutter in the car,” Bowers said. “I’ll run and get it.”

  He did, and they cut the padlock off.

  —

  Inside, they found a lot of junk—earphones; an old Apple iPod filled with music of a style Virgil was unable to identify; a short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 that looked to be a hundred years old, though loaded with fresh cartridges; a short stack of printed porn, plus some car magazines; and at the bottom, a thin address book that contained no addresses, but did contain a list of what appeared to be passwords.

  “This could be useful,” Virgil said. “If we can find his computer. If he had a computer.”

  “I don’t see anything like a router,” Bowers said.

  “I don’t think he lived here and I don’t think he expected to stay long,” Shrake said. “Looks like he came here for the job and planned to go back home when it was done.”

  “Should have left sooner,” Bowers said.

  13

  Two-thirty in the morning on the St. Croix, the river air cool and redolent with the odors of beached fish and automobile exhaust. The sheetrocking Yoder brothers, Curt and Hank, known to their friends as the Yos, were expecting some serious channel-catfish action; they’d be fishing right up to daybreak, barring thunderstorms and zombie outbreaks.

  The Yos had stopped at an all-night convenience store for a six-pack of Miller Lite, a tin of Copenhagen Wintergreen for Curt, and a couple of Fudgsicles before heading down to the water.

  Once off the road, they sat licking the Fudgsicles and drinking the first of their beers, while Dwight Yoakam finished singing “Long White Cadillac” on Outlaw Country. When the song, Fudgsicles, and beers were finished, Curt stuck a plug of Copenhagen under his tongue and said, “Let’s get ’er done.”

  Curt got his gear from the truck bed and headed upstream from the bridge, while Hank believed that there were major catfish holes below the bridge piers, so he went that way.

  Both men were wearing LED headlights, the better to bait their hooks and unhook any catfish. Hank turned his light on to more easily mold some stink bait on a treble hook—he had his own homemade formula, concocted of chopped chicken liver, diced night crawlers, nacho cheese, canned corn, and cornmeal, thoroughly mixed in his girlfriend’s Waring blender when she wasn’t around, and suitably aged in the hot sunlight on his back porch—and threw his first cast out next to a pier.

  A big slab of gray stone shelved out of the river below the bridge, a
nd while the bait sank into the hole, he walked back and forth, looking for a place to sit and smoke, where his line wouldn’t drag over the rock. He was doing that when he saw, in his headlight, a corner of the safe about a foot down in the water.

  For a moment, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, then he called, “Hey, Curt! Curt! C’mere. Quick.”

  Curt caught the tone in his brother’s voice, so he reeled in, turned on his headlight, walked down under the bridge, and asked, “What?”

  Hank pointed to the water under the bridge. “Am I nuckin’ futs or is that a safe?”

  Curt peered into the water, asked, “Where?” and then, before Hank could reply, “Holy shit. I see it. That’s a safe all right.”

  Hank: “What do you think?”

  “I think somebody couldn’t open the sonofabitch and threw it off the bridge,” Curt said. He was so excited he inadvertently hawked his whole plug of tobacco into the river.

  Hank: “Like it’s stolen?”

  “Of course it’s stolen, bonehead. If you owned a safe and wanted to get rid of it, you could sell it on Craigslist or even take it to a junkyard,” Curt said. “You wouldn’t throw it off a fuckin’ bridge. I bet there’s a million bucks in there.”

  “What do you think we ought to do?”

  Curt scratched his forehead for a moment, mulling it over, then said, “I think we fish that bitch out of there and get it back to your place. You know what? Maybe the people who stole it couldn’t open it, but Jerry Pratt could.”

  Jerry Pratt was an unemployed machinist, with metal-cutting skills.

  “You think we could lift it?”

  “Somebody had to lift it over the bridge railing, so yeah—I think we could lift it,” Curt said.

  “I wonder why he threw it in the shallows?”

  “Probably didn’t know any better, or maybe he did it at night,” Curt said. He walked back to the shadow of the bridge, sat down, and started untying his boots. “Get your pants off.”

  Hank looked around: nothing to see but brush, and not even that, if they turned off their LED headlights. An occasional car drove over the bridge, out of sight. “What if somebody sees us?”

  “You ain’t got that much to see,” Curt said.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. What if somebody sees us with the safe?”

  “We’ll tell them . . . that we thought it was an old refrigerator and we were taking it out for, you know, cleaning-up-the-river reasons. We’re, like, tree huggers or some fuckin’ thing.”

  That sounded good. Hank nodded and said, “Better leave our shoes on. Lots of hooks been broke off in there.”

  Five minutes later the naked brothers were chest deep in the river, trying to get a hold on the safe. “Fuckin’ heavy,” Hank said.

  “Yeah . . . but . . . it’s movin’,” Curt said.

  With more grunting and a few groans they got it out of the water and up on the rock, where Hank said, “Fuck. You know, it looks more like a refrigerator than a safe.”

  “Too heavy,” Curt said.

  “It’s a fuckin’ refrigerator, man. Probably full of water.” The refrigerator was loosely wrapped with water-soaked duct tape to keep the door closed. Hank yanked the tape off, pulled open the door, and in the pooled light of their headlamps, Hamlet Simonian’s left arm flopped out on the rock.

  “Jesus Christ!” Hank shouted, dancing away from the arm.

  —

  There was a brief discussion of possible choices—throw the refrigerator back in the river and then run and hide; call the cops anonymously then run and hide; or just run and hide. But their truck had probably been seen up on the road, and somebody might have seen them in the water, and there was a house not far away. In the end, for a lack of reasonable alternatives, they called the Polk County sheriff’s office and waited.

  A deputy showed up ten minutes later, took a look, and said, “Now you boys wait right here,” and Curt asked, “We got any choice?” and the deputy said, “No.”

  —

  After that, the Yos found themselves deeper in bureaucracy than they’d ever been in the river, but nobody seemed to think they had anything to do with what was obviously a murder, and they were eventually told they were free to go. The Polk County medical examiner took one look at the body, still stuffed in the refrigerator, and moved it along to a better-equipped facility in St. Paul.

  Not much got done in St. Paul, except that an assistant medical examiner took fingerprints from the hands on the severed arms and sent them off to the FBI.

  —

  Virgil had gone back to bed at the hotel and was sleeping soundly when the BCA’s duty officer called him at five a.m. Virgil crawled across the bed to the nightstand, where his phone was playing the first few bars of George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”

  “This is Virgil.”

  “Hey, man, this is Clark, up at the office.”

  “If I can find my pistol, I’m gonna kill you,” Virgil said.

  “Pretty unlikely scenario, right there, you finding the gun. Anyway, I thought I better call. This Hamlet Simonian guy’s been found. We got a call from the FBI.”

  Virgil sat up. “Terrific. Where is he?”

  Clark said, “In the ME’s office, here in St. Paul.”

  “What?”

  “Somebody killed him—they don’t know how yet—and tried to stuff his body in a compact refrigerator. He didn’t fit, so they cut off his arms and squeezed them in around the body.”

  “Cut off his arms?”

  “Yeah. Of course, I’m assuming it wasn’t a suicide . . .”

  “Hey, Clark . . . ?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the killer threw the refrigerator into the St. Croix, up by Osceola,” Clark said. “It landed in shallow water and a couple of fishermen spotted it. They thought it was a safe.”

  Clark told the rest of the story, which he found amusing, and finished by saying, “Now you got a murder.”

  “Aw, shit. Give me the ME’s number.”

  As long as he had to be awake, Virgil thought the ME ought to be, as well. He got hold of an assistant, who said nothing would be done with the body until eight o’clock. “I had a look at it, while they were bringing it in. I don’t see any obvious trauma . . . other than the dismembered arms, of course.”

  “No gunshot wounds? Nothing like that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Tell the doc that the murder is related to the tiger theft,” Virgil said. “I’ll be up there to talk to him, but soon as he gets in, ask if there’s some chemistry that would pick up the kind of sedative overdose you’d get if somebody shot you with a tranquilizer gun, the kind used on large animals.”

  “Huh. I can tell you that kind of chemistry is routine, but I’ll be sure to mention it. Could get some results back pretty quick.”

  “Great. I’ll be up.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got an interesting case here,” the assistant said.

  “Provocative, even,” Virgil said. He reset the alarm clock, rolled over, and before he went back to sleep, he asked himself, who’d cut off a dead man’s arms? Who would even think of it? A medical doctor, maybe?

  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.”