Escape Clause by John Sandford
“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.
“What? Virgil! What happened?”
Virgil told her, and she pressed her hands to the sides of her head, and kept saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
When she’d recovered a bit, Sparkle said that she hadn’t seen anyone following her that day; that her interviews had been congenial, but she had names of all the canning factory people she’d spoken to. Mattsson took notes and asked more questions, and Virgil realized that he wouldn’t be able to help much, wouldn’t do anything that Mattsson wasn’t already doing.
As Sparkle was answering questions, Frankie’s youngest son, Sam, came walking up the driveway wearing his Cub Scout uniform, carrying a BB gun, and trailed by Honus the dog. Virgil went to meet him and before he could say anything, Sam said, “I finished second.”
“In what?”
“Marksmanship,” Sam said.
“How many people in the competition?” Virgil asked.
“Seven other ones. I shoulda won . . .” He squinted, just a bit, and then asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Ah, man, your mom got hurt,” Virgil said. “Not real bad, but she’s going to be in the hospital for a couple of days.”
“What happened?”
Virgil told him, and Sam said, “If I catch that motherfucker, I’ll kill him,” and he was deadly serious.
“No, no, the cops are taking care of that,” Virgil said. “And don’t say ‘motherfucker.’”
“You say it.”
“Yeah.” Virgil slapped Sam on the shoulder and looked around and then said, “Basically, you’re right. The guy’s a motherfucker.”
—
Sparkle and Mattsson were still talking when Virgil left, driving back to Mankato and the clinic. Sparkle said she’d come as soon as Mattsson was finished with her. At the hospital, Frankie was soundly asleep and a nurse said she’d be down for a few hours.
He called Sparkle to tell her that, but Sparkle said, “I’m coming anyway. I called Bill and he’ll take the night off and stay here with the kids. I’ll sit with Frankie until she wakes up, whenever that is.”
Virgil sat with Frankie for a while; signed onto the hospital Wi-Fi and checked his e-mail. Sandy the researcher had left a note that said five meat dryers had been shipped to an address in St. Paul’s Frogtown, from Bug-Out Supplies, a St. Louis survivalist supplier. She left a link to a website, and when Virgil went to it, he found a red headline that said, “When the SHTF, BOS’s Got Your Back.” Virgil figured out that “SHTF” meant “shit hits the fan,” a refrain he found throughout the online catalog. The dryers Sandy highlighted cost $231 each.
She included the address to which they were sent, and the buyer’s name: Bob Smith.
“Bob Smith,” Virgil said to himself. “Right.”
Sandy added a note: “BOS said the order came in with a postal money order for the full amount. They said that’s not uncommon with survivalist types—apparently they don’t want you to know that they’re making survival jerky in the basement.”
—
Virgil headed back north toward the Cities as night was falling.
As he did that, Winston Peck VI was driving the remnants of Hayk Simonian out of the farm and onto a Washington County back road, heading south. He no longer much cared if the second Simonian’s body was found—he’d been afraid of Hayk, but now Hayk was dead. Killing Hayk wouldn’t mean much, in terms of penalties, if the police ever figured out who’d killed Hamlet Simonian.
His main objective was to get Hayk’s body well away from the farm. He drove south, slowly, not to attract the attention of any roaming cops, past small farms and orchards and truck gardens, crossed the bridge at Prescott, and drove into Wisconsin toward River Falls.
After a couple of random turns, he found himself in the middle of a long, shallow valley with a wet, overgrown ditch on one side. With no headlights in view, he stopped the truck, dragged the Simonian load out of the back, wrapped in plastic, then staggered over to the ditch, waded into the weeds, and finally gave the body a heave.
That would do it, he thought. If somebody wanted to fish it out of there, good luck to them.
—
Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake.
“If you guys got the time, I got a target,” he told Jenkins. “We’ll probably need Shrake to add a little IQ to the expedition.”
“Well, shoot—we were planning to go out drinking tonight and pick up some loose women,” Jenkins said.
“You can still do that, as long as you don’t shoot anybody while you’re with me and get stuck with the paperwork,” Virgil said.
“Fine,” Jenkins said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“At the office—we won’t be going far.”
—
When Virgil got to the office, the duty officer said, “Jenkins and Shrake are upstairs, but there’re some guys looking for you. They’re out in the parking lot in an RV.”
“I saw the RV,” Virgil said. “Who are they?”
“Don’t know,” the duty officer said. “They came looking for you, said they needed to talk to the guy in charge of the tiger investigation. We told them you were on the way in.”
“Huh. Call Jenkins and Shrake. I’ll take them with me,” Virgil said.
Jenkins and Shrake came down the stairs a minute later, dressed in their usual overly sharp suits, pastel dress shirts, Frenchy pointed shoes, and nylon neckties. “Where’re we going?” Jenkins asked.
“First stop’s out in the parking lot,” Virgil said.
—
Jenkins and Shrake flanked him as they walked out and down the slight hill to the RV. As they approached, Virgil could hear the engine running. At a lit back window, they could see four dark-haired men, apparently sitting at a table, playing cards.
Virgil knocked on the door. A minute later, the door popped open, and a swarthy, black-haired man in black slacks, a black T-shirt, and Frenchy pointed shoes, wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, looked down at him.
“You’re this fuckin’ Flowers?”
“That’s not . . .”
“That’s what they said you were called,” the man said, nodding toward the BCA building.
“Yeah, this is him,” Shrake said.
Jenkins added, “Say, those are some nice-looking shoes.”
“Thank you. Yours are also attractive.” The man turned to the back of the RV and said, “This is the Flowers.”
A moment later, six heavyset men, all wearing gold chains, in T-shirts and slacks or black jeans, with muscles and ample guts but no visible tattoos, dropped down out of the RV and lined up facing Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins. Like the OK Corral, Virgil thought, except that he didn’t have a gun.
“You have information about the tigers?” Virgil asked.
“No. We know nothing about tigers,” the first man said.
“Then what . . . ?”
“We are the Simonians,” he said. “We are here for Hamlet. To get justice for Hamlet.”
17
Virgil looked at the six Simonians for a moment, then said, “I hope ‘justice’ doesn’t mean ‘revenge.’” r />
Their spokesman said, “They can be the same.”
“Revenge can be a crime—usually is,” Jenkins said. “Whatever your shoes look like.”
One of the other Simonians said, “We want to know what is being done to capture this killer of Hamlet.”
“Everything we can,” Virgil said. He did a little tap dancing; he didn’t mention he was the only investigator on the case full-time. “The three of us are on the way to do another interview in the case. In the middle of the night. We don’t take murder lightly in Minnesota.”
A third Simonian nodded and said, “This is good. We need to look in the face of this Hamlet Simonian you say is dead. We have Hamlet’s cell phone number, and the Apple company says it is presently traveling through Kansas City, Kansas.”
Virgil’s eyebrows went up: “Really? We could use the number for his phone. It’s possible the killer took it from him.”
The spokesman said, “We will give you that number. When can we see the supposed dead Hamlet?”
“Right now, if you want.”
The six exchanged a long series of glances and nods, and the spokesman said, “Take us to him.”
—
They were five minutes from the medical examiner’s office, more or less, and when they got there, Virgil didn’t bother to go in with the Simonians. Instead, he stood in the parking lot and briefed Jenkins and Shrake on the Frogtown address where the meat dryers had been delivered.
When he was done, Jenkins asked, “We don’t know who lives there, or even if they’re involved?”
“That’s right. Don’t start shooting until we’re sure,” Virgil said.
“Okay. But . . .”
“What?”
“What if we kick in the door and find out we’re in a roomful of tigers?” Shrake asked.
“I’ll tell you what—you shoot a tiger, you’ll have to move to Texas,” Virgil said. “Don’t wait for a moving truck or anything. Get out of the state.”
They all thought about a house full of loose tigers for a minute, then Shrake asked, “How’s Frankie?”
He told them and about Catrin Mattsson taking the case.
Shrake nodded and said, “Catrin. That’s good. The main thing is, you won’t be around to kill whoever did it.”
“If either of those guys gets killed by a BCA agent and anybody finds out that Frankie’s the girlfriend of a BCA agent . . . there’ll still be a shitstorm,” Jenkins said.
“Maybe a little less with Catrin,” Shrake suggested. Because of her history.
—
One of the Simonians who’d gone inside came reeling back through the door of the ME’s office into the parking lot, making gasping, crying sounds, his hands pressed to the sides of his head.
“Guess it was Hamlet,” Jenkins said.
All six of them were out in a minute and one said to Virgil, “They cut off his arms. They cut off his arms.”
Virgil said, “I should have warned you.”
The man said, “They cut off his arms.”
Another one agreed. “His arms, they cut them off.”
The first one asked, “What do I tell his mother? They cut off his arms?”
Shrake said, “There can be some . . . adjustments . . . in a good funeral home.”
“They cut off his arms . . .”
Virgil tried to empathize, talking quietly to the Simonians about how he’d run down the killers, devote his life to it, if necessary, but in his heart, he worried a lot more about his injured girlfriend than a dead Simonian.
The Simonian, in his view, was another asshole who’d volunteered for a Bad Thing and paid for it. Given a choice, he wouldn’t have chosen for that to happen, but neither did he really agonize over it. The other Simonians may have sensed that, turning away from him and back to each other. Their head guy gathered the others around him and said, “This cannot stand. We will avenge our brother, I promise you.”
Jenkins said, “Hey, chill out, there,” but they ignored him.
—
The Simonians never did calm down. Virgil took out his ID case, pulled out several business cards, shuffled through them, found the one he wanted, handed one to the lead Simonian, and told him to call with questions. They said they would check into a motel and the original spokesman said, “We will call you and you can call us if you find anything.” He gave Virgil what had been a blank business card, with the name Levon Simonian and a phone number written in pencil.
As they drove away from the medical examiner’s office, Jenkins said to Virgil, “Better you than me.”
“What?”
“Giving those guys your business card. They got nothing to contribute, but they’re gonna call you every fifteen minutes.”
“Don’t think so,” Virgil said.
“You saw them, how freaked out they are,” Jenkins said. “I got a hundred dollars that says they call you fifteen times a day. At least fifteen times a day.”
“You’re on,” Virgil said.
Jenkins examined him for a moment, then said, “You’re too confident.”
“Because I gave them one of Shrake’s business cards,” Virgil said.
Shrake, in the backseat, said, “What? What?”
Jenkins snorted and said to Virgil, “You’re my new role model.”
“You really couldn’t do much better,” Virgil said.
Shrake’s phone rang and Jenkins started laughing.
—
Frogtown was a low-income neighborhood in St. Paul, mostly built in the later nineteenth century for working-class families. Although a few old Victorians still spotted the neighborhood, the streets were dark and close and many of the houses were failing.
Virgil turned down one of the narrower streets, and Jenkins said, “What the fuck?”
Up ahead, not far from what Virgil supposed was the address of the target house, two white trucks were parked on the side of the street. Television trucks.
“How did they know?” Shrake asked.
“You know goddamn well how it happened,” Virgil said. “Somebody at the office tipped them off. Sandy must have mentioned it to somebody, and the word got around. I don’t think she’d have done it on purpose. Never has in the past.”
“That ain’t right,” Jenkins said. “If they were there, they’re gone—unless they’re inside waiting for us.”
“Doubt that they’d hang around,” Virgil said.
—
The address where the meat dryers had been delivered was worse than most of the houses around, a crumbling two-story with a narrow porch. Virgil stopped the truck a few houses away, and they all looked at the unlit windows of the target house until Shrake said, “Well, shit. Let’s go knock.”
“You guys got your guns?” Virgil asked.
“Does a fat dog fart?” Jenkins asked. “Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get yours.”
“You’re right,” Virgil said. “Shrake—pull up the other seat and hand me the safe.”
Shrake pulled up the backseat that he wasn’t sitting on, dug out the gun safe, and handed it to Virgil. Virgil punched in the safe’s combination and took out the pistol and the belt-clip holster.
Jenkins, watching, said, “You know, chicks don’t go for guys who carry Glocks.”
Virgil said, “Yeah, but they go for guys who carry what I’m carrying.”
“Hope you got a safety on it, whatever it is; unlike a Glock.”
“Let’s shut up now, and stop being all nervous, smile for the cameras, and go knock on the fuckin’ door,” Virgil said. “Shrake, there’s a flashlight in the door pocket. Bring it.”
They got out of the truck and Shrake muttered, “I hope a Glock can stop a tiger.”
As they walked down the street toward the target house, ignoring the TV trucks, a girl came out on
the porch of a house they were passing and said, “Hi, policemen.”
Shrake said, “Hi, honey. Listen, who lives in the house two doors up? Not the next one, but the one after that? Who lives there?”
“That’s a rent.”
“So you don’t know who lives there?”
“Nobody, now,” she said.
An older woman came to the door, carrying a dish towel, and asked, “Janey, who’re you talking to?”
“Some policemen.”
The woman looked past the girl and said, “Oh. Oh, are you the policemen? We’ve been waiting for you. The television reporters said you were on the way, but that was a long time ago.”
Shrake: “Ah, boy.”
Virgil said, “We’re going to the house on the other side of your neighbor, here. Your daughter says it’s a rental?”
“Always has been,” the woman said. “Nobody there now. They moved out a couple of weeks ago.”
“How long were they there?”
“Not long, hardly ever saw them.”
They chatted for another couple of minutes: the renters had been two men, one large and one much smaller, but who looked alike—brothers, the woman thought. “You know who’d know better? Mrs. Broda. She lives right across the street from them, the house with the porch light. She’s an old lady, she watches everything.”
—
They continued up to the target house, moving slowly, looking for any movement at all. There was none, and while Shrake and Jenkins waited on the sidewalk, Virgil climbed two steps up to the narrow board porch, looked in the mailbox—it was empty—and knocked on the door. There was no movement inside. He knocked louder, still got no movement, and the house lacked the organic feel of an inhabited place. Virgil couldn’t have explained that feeling, but a lot of cops experienced it, and it was rarely wrong.
Shrake came up on the steps and said, “Window shade’s up over here.” They walked down the porch to the front window and Shrake turned on the flashlight and they looked inside.
The place was empty: no furniture, no rugs, no nothing. They could see the corner of a small kitchen: no glasses, no soap.
“Goddamnit,” Virgil said.
—
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.
“What? Virgil! What happened?”
Virgil told her, and she pressed her hands to the sides of her head, and kept saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
When she’d recovered a bit, Sparkle said that she hadn’t seen anyone following her that day; that her interviews had been congenial, but she had names of all the canning factory people she’d spoken to. Mattsson took notes and asked more questions, and Virgil realized that he wouldn’t be able to help much, wouldn’t do anything that Mattsson wasn’t already doing.
As Sparkle was answering questions, Frankie’s youngest son, Sam, came walking up the driveway wearing his Cub Scout uniform, carrying a BB gun, and trailed by Honus the dog. Virgil went to meet him and before he could say anything, Sam said, “I finished second.”
“In what?”
“Marksmanship,” Sam said.
“How many people in the competition?” Virgil asked.
“Seven other ones. I shoulda won . . .” He squinted, just a bit, and then asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Ah, man, your mom got hurt,” Virgil said. “Not real bad, but she’s going to be in the hospital for a couple of days.”
“What happened?”
Virgil told him, and Sam said, “If I catch that motherfucker, I’ll kill him,” and he was deadly serious.
“No, no, the cops are taking care of that,” Virgil said. “And don’t say ‘motherfucker.’”
“You say it.”
“Yeah.” Virgil slapped Sam on the shoulder and looked around and then said, “Basically, you’re right. The guy’s a motherfucker.”
—
Sparkle and Mattsson were still talking when Virgil left, driving back to Mankato and the clinic. Sparkle said she’d come as soon as Mattsson was finished with her. At the hospital, Frankie was soundly asleep and a nurse said she’d be down for a few hours.
He called Sparkle to tell her that, but Sparkle said, “I’m coming anyway. I called Bill and he’ll take the night off and stay here with the kids. I’ll sit with Frankie until she wakes up, whenever that is.”
Virgil sat with Frankie for a while; signed onto the hospital Wi-Fi and checked his e-mail. Sandy the researcher had left a note that said five meat dryers had been shipped to an address in St. Paul’s Frogtown, from Bug-Out Supplies, a St. Louis survivalist supplier. She left a link to a website, and when Virgil went to it, he found a red headline that said, “When the SHTF, BOS’s Got Your Back.” Virgil figured out that “SHTF” meant “shit hits the fan,” a refrain he found throughout the online catalog. The dryers Sandy highlighted cost $231 each.
She included the address to which they were sent, and the buyer’s name: Bob Smith.
“Bob Smith,” Virgil said to himself. “Right.”
Sandy added a note: “BOS said the order came in with a postal money order for the full amount. They said that’s not uncommon with survivalist types—apparently they don’t want you to know that they’re making survival jerky in the basement.”
—
Virgil headed back north toward the Cities as night was falling.
As he did that, Winston Peck VI was driving the remnants of Hayk Simonian out of the farm and onto a Washington County back road, heading south. He no longer much cared if the second Simonian’s body was found—he’d been afraid of Hayk, but now Hayk was dead. Killing Hayk wouldn’t mean much, in terms of penalties, if the police ever figured out who’d killed Hamlet Simonian.
His main objective was to get Hayk’s body well away from the farm. He drove south, slowly, not to attract the attention of any roaming cops, past small farms and orchards and truck gardens, crossed the bridge at Prescott, and drove into Wisconsin toward River Falls.
After a couple of random turns, he found himself in the middle of a long, shallow valley with a wet, overgrown ditch on one side. With no headlights in view, he stopped the truck, dragged the Simonian load out of the back, wrapped in plastic, then staggered over to the ditch, waded into the weeds, and finally gave the body a heave.
That would do it, he thought. If somebody wanted to fish it out of there, good luck to them.
—
Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake.
“If you guys got the time, I got a target,” he told Jenkins. “We’ll probably need Shrake to add a little IQ to the expedition.”
“Well, shoot—we were planning to go out drinking tonight and pick up some loose women,” Jenkins said.
“You can still do that, as long as you don’t shoot anybody while you’re with me and get stuck with the paperwork,” Virgil said.
“Fine,” Jenkins said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“At the office—we won’t be going far.”
—
When Virgil got to the office, the duty officer said, “Jenkins and Shrake are upstairs, but there’re some guys looking for you. They’re out in the parking lot in an RV.”
“I saw the RV,” Virgil said. “Who are they?”
“Don’t know,” the duty officer said. “They came looking for you, said they needed to talk to the guy in charge of the tiger investigation. We told them you were on the way in.”
“Huh. Call Jenkins and Shrake. I’ll take them with me,” Virgil said.
Jenkins and Shrake came down the stairs a minute later, dressed in their usual overly sharp suits, pastel dress shirts, Frenchy pointed shoes, and nylon neckties. “Where’re we going?” Jenkins asked.
“First stop’s out in the parking lot,” Virgil said.
—
Jenkins and Shrake flanked him as they walked out and down the slight hill to the RV. As they approached, Virgil could hear the engine running. At a lit back window, they could see four dark-haired men, apparently sitting at a table, playing cards.
Virgil knocked on the door. A minute later, the door popped open, and a swarthy, black-haired man in black slacks, a black T-shirt, and Frenchy pointed shoes, wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, looked down at him.
“You’re this fuckin’ Flowers?”
“That’s not . . .”
“That’s what they said you were called,” the man said, nodding toward the BCA building.
“Yeah, this is him,” Shrake said.
Jenkins added, “Say, those are some nice-looking shoes.”
“Thank you. Yours are also attractive.” The man turned to the back of the RV and said, “This is the Flowers.”
A moment later, six heavyset men, all wearing gold chains, in T-shirts and slacks or black jeans, with muscles and ample guts but no visible tattoos, dropped down out of the RV and lined up facing Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins. Like the OK Corral, Virgil thought, except that he didn’t have a gun.
“You have information about the tigers?” Virgil asked.
“No. We know nothing about tigers,” the first man said.
“Then what . . . ?”
“We are the Simonians,” he said. “We are here for Hamlet. To get justice for Hamlet.”
17
Virgil looked at the six Simonians for a moment, then said, “I hope ‘justice’ doesn’t mean ‘revenge.’”
Their spokesman said, “They can be the same.”
“Revenge can be a crime—usually is,” Jenkins said. “Whatever your shoes look like.”
One of the other Simonians said, “We want to know what is being done to capture this killer of Hamlet.”
“Everything we can,” Virgil said. He did a little tap dancing; he didn’t mention he was the only investigator on the case full-time. “The three of us are on the way to do another interview in the case. In the middle of the night. We don’t take murder lightly in Minnesota.”
A third Simonian nodded and said, “This is good. We need to look in the face of this Hamlet Simonian you say is dead. We have Hamlet’s cell phone number, and the Apple company says it is presently traveling through Kansas City, Kansas.”
Virgil’s eyebrows went up: “Really? We could use the number for his phone. It’s possible the killer took it from him.”
The spokesman said, “We will give you that number. When can we see the supposed dead Hamlet?”
“Right now, if you want.”
The six exchanged a long series of glances and nods, and the spokesman said, “Take us to him.”
—
They were five minutes from the medical examiner’s office, more or less, and when they got there, Virgil didn’t bother to go in with the Simonians. Instead, he stood in the parking lot and briefed Jenkins and Shrake on the Frogtown address where the meat dryers had been delivered.
When he was done, Jenkins asked, “We don’t know who lives there, or even if they’re involved?”
“That’s right. Don’t start shooting until we’re sure,” Virgil said.
“Okay. But . . .”
“What?”
“What if we kick in the door and find out we’re in a roomful of tigers?” Shrake asked.
“I’ll tell you what—you shoot a tiger, you’ll have to move to Texas,” Virgil said. “Don’t wait for a moving truck or anything. Get out of the state.”
They all thought about a house full of loose tigers for a minute, then Shrake asked, “How’s Frankie?”
He told them and about Catrin Mattsson taking the case.
Shrake nodded and said, “Catrin. That’s good. The main thing is, you won’t be around to kill whoever did it.”
“If either of those guys gets killed by a BCA agent and anybody finds out that Frankie’s the girlfriend of a BCA agent . . . there’ll still be a shitstorm,” Jenkins said.
“Maybe a little less with Catrin,” Shrake suggested. Because of her history.
—
One of the Simonians who’d gone inside came reeling back through the door of the ME’s office into the parking lot, making gasping, crying sounds, his hands pressed to the sides of his head.
“Guess it was Hamlet,” Jenkins said.
All six of them were out in a minute and one said to Virgil, “They cut off his arms. They cut off his arms.”
Virgil said, “I should have warned you.”
The man said, “They cut off his arms.”
Another one agreed. “His arms, they cut them off.”
The first one asked, “What do I tell his mother? They cut off his arms?”
Shrake said, “There can be some . . . adjustments . . . in a good funeral home.”
“They cut off his arms . . .”
Virgil tried to empathize, talking quietly to the Simonians about how he’d run down the killers, devote his life to it, if necessary, but in his heart, he worried a lot more about his injured girlfriend than a dead Simonian.
The Simonian, in his view, was another asshole who’d volunteered for a Bad Thing and paid for it. Given a choice, he wouldn’t have chosen for that to happen, but neither did he really agonize over it. The other Simonians may have sensed that, turning away from him and back to each other. Their head guy gathered the others around him and said, “This cannot stand. We will avenge our brother, I promise you.”
Jenkins said, “Hey, chill out, there,” but they ignored him.
—
The Simonians never did calm down. Virgil took out his ID case, pulled out several business cards, shuffled through them, found the one he wanted, handed one to the lead Simonian, and told him to call with questions. They said they would check into a motel and the original spokesman said, “We will call you and you can call us if you find anything.” He gave Virgil what had been a blank business card, with the name Levon Simonian and a phone number written in pencil.
As they drove away from the medical examiner’s office, Jenkins said to Virgil, “Better you than me.”
“What?”
“Giving those guys your business card. They got nothing to contribute, but they’re gonna call you every fifteen minutes.”
“Don’t think so,” Virgil said.
“You saw them, how freaked out they are,” Jenkins said. “I got a hundred dollars that says they call you fifteen times a day. At least fifteen times a day.”
“You’re on,” Virgil said.
Jenkins examined him for a moment, then said, “You’re too confident.”
“Because I gave them one of Shrake’s business cards,” Virgil said.
Shrake, in the backseat, said, “What? What?”
Jenkins snorted and said to Virgil, “You’re my new role model.”
“You really couldn’t do much better,” Virgil said.
Shrake’s phone rang and Jenkins started laughing.
—
Frogtown was a low-income neighborhood in St. Paul, mostly built in the later nineteenth century for working-class families. Although a few old Victorians still spotted the neighborhood, the streets were dark and close and many of the houses were failing.
Virgil turned down one of the narrower streets, and Jenkins said, “What the fuck?”
Up ahead, not far from what Virgil supposed was the address of the target house, two white trucks were parked on the side of the street. Television trucks.
“How did they know?” Shrake asked.
“You know goddamn well how it happened,” Virgil said. “Somebody at the office tipped them off. Sandy must have mentioned it to somebody, and the word got around. I don’t think she’d have done it on purpose. Never has in the past.”
“That ain’t right,” Jenkins said. “If they were there, they’re gone—unless they’re inside waiting for us.”
“Doubt that they’d hang around,” Virgil said.
—
The address where the meat dryers had been delivered was worse than most of the houses around, a crumbling two-story with a narrow porch. Virgil stopped the truck a few houses away, and they all looked at the unlit windows of the target house until Shrake said, “Well, shit. Let’s go knock.”
“You guys got your guns?” Virgil asked.
“Does a fat dog fart?” Jenkins asked. “Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get yours.”
“You’re right,” Virgil said. “Shrake—pull up the other seat and hand me the safe.”
Shrake pulled up the backseat that he wasn’t sitting on, dug out the gun safe, and handed it to Virgil. Virgil punched in the safe’s combination and took out the pistol and the belt-clip holster.
Jenkins, watching, said, “You know, chicks don’t go for guys who carry Glocks.”
Virgil said, “Yeah, but they go for guys who carry what I’m carrying.”
“Hope you got a safety on it, whatever it is; unlike a Glock.”
“Let’s shut up now, and stop being all nervous, smile for the cameras, and go knock on the fuckin’ door,” Virgil said. “Shrake, there’s a flashlight in the door pocket. Bring it.”
They got out of the truck and Shrake muttered, “I hope a Glock can stop a tiger.”
As they walked down the street toward the target house, ignoring the TV trucks, a girl came out on
Shrake said, “Hi, honey. Listen, who lives in the house two doors up? Not the next one, but the one after that? Who lives there?”
“That’s a rent.”
“So you don’t know who lives there?”
“Nobody, now,” she said.
An older woman came to the door, carrying a dish towel, and asked, “Janey, who’re you talking to?”
“Some policemen.”
The woman looked past the girl and said, “Oh. Oh, are you the policemen? We’ve been waiting for you. The television reporters said you were on the way, but that was a long time ago.”
Shrake: “Ah, boy.”
Virgil said, “We’re going to the house on the other side of your neighbor, here. Your daughter says it’s a rental?”
“Always has been,” the woman said. “Nobody there now. They moved out a couple of weeks ago.”
“How long were they there?”
“Not long, hardly ever saw them.”
They chatted for another couple of minutes: the renters had been two men, one large and one much smaller, but who looked alike—brothers, the woman thought. “You know who’d know better? Mrs. Broda. She lives right across the street from them, the house with the porch light. She’s an old lady, she watches everything.”
—
They continued up to the target house, moving slowly, looking for any movement at all. There was none, and while Shrake and Jenkins waited on the sidewalk, Virgil climbed two steps up to the narrow board porch, looked in the mailbox—it was empty—and knocked on the door. There was no movement inside. He knocked louder, still got no movement, and the house lacked the organic feel of an inhabited place. Virgil couldn’t have explained that feeling, but a lot of cops experienced it, and it was rarely wrong.
Shrake came up on the steps and said, “Window shade’s up over here.” They walked down the porch to the front window and Shrake turned on the flashlight and they looked inside.
The place was empty: no furniture, no rugs, no nothing. They could see the corner of a small kitchen: no glasses, no soap.
“Goddamnit,” Virgil said.