“Two tigers… I’ll tell you, Officer Flowers, I have no idea who’d be able to handle that much weight in traditional medication. My total sales, if you were to weigh them, would probably come out to ten pounds of medications a year. The newspaper this morning said that the tigers weigh over a thousand pounds, together. I would think that the only way they could be sold is if somebody had a way to get them to China.”
“Alive?”
“Oh… probably not. They would probably process them in some out-of-the-way laboratory and ship the medications,” she said. “The U.S. doesn’t care so much about what goes out of here, and the Chinese are quite… flexible… about what they allow in.”
“Any other possibilities that you can think of?”
“There is one man here in Minnesota…” She was talking about the guy who bought and sold bear gallbladders, as had Monty-McCall, but she couldn’t come up with anyone else except an herbal wholesaler in Chicago and a ginseng dealer in Wausau, Wisconsin.
Virgil had a hard time looking into her eyes: the black dot on her forehead was the tiniest bit off-center, and he found himself watching it, wishing it an eighth inch to the left. He asked about Monty-McCall.
“That fraud,” Gupti-Mack sneered. “She calls herself a specialist in traditional Chinese and South Asian medicine, but I don’t think she’s ever set foot outside the United States, much less India or China. And she has that phony doctorate from some Jesus-Jumpin’-Up-and-Down diploma mill in Mississippi or Alabama. Yet she dares to compete with me, after I have put myself through a rigorous training program in both Mumbai and Beijing, with the highest authorities-”
Virgil interrupted: “Is there any real use for tigers in medicines?”
That brought her up short, and after a moment, she said, “Yes. Just as there is a real use for heroin in Western medicines. Those nostrums are not used only because of the ethical issues involved.”
“But if somebody knew they were getting real tiger pills… there’d be a market?”
She didn’t want to say it, but did: “I suppose so.”
–
What about a Dr. Winston Peck?” Virgil asked. “Do you know anything about him?”
“Winston? Well, he has an MD in Western medicine, but no longer practices. He’s an authority in traditional medicines of all kinds-Asian, Indian, Native American, and Inuit, among others. He has written two books comparing traditional and contemporary Western medications, tracing the way traditional societies have often used analogues of modern medicines well before Westerners ever discovered the modern equivalents. The Sioux, for example, used red willow bark as an analgesic, and it turns out that willow bark contains salicylic acid, which we know as aspirin.”
She went on for a while, until Virgil asked, “Have you, uh, I don’t know quite how to put this… have you heard that Dr. Peck has been involved in… unusual behavior… with women?”
She blushed, but shook her head, and Virgil thought, So it’s true. The only question was, how unusual. “I have never heard anything like that,” she said. “He’s a scholar and a medical doctor, with a good reputation in the traditionalist community.”
–
Out in his truck, Virgil dug out his iPad and Googled Peck. He found the usual mishmash of LinkedIn, Facebook, and medical conference listings, often confusing Peck VI with Peck V and Peck IV, the latter two alive only by reputation. The accumulation of Internet stuff was as boring as anything Virgil had ever read.
With no luck on the Internet, Virgil called Peck, but got an answering machine. He left a message and drove back to BCA headquarters, where he found Sandy, the BCA researcher, in her shoebox office.
“How do I find out about a guy who doesn’t have a criminal record, as far as I know, and has the most boring Internet personality ever?”
“Boring Internet personality-huh. Gotta be a crook, laying low. Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll go out on the ’net and look around.”
–
While Sandy did her search, Virgil checked with Jon Duncan, who asked hopefully, “Anything good?”
“I’m not stirring up anything I can get hold of,” Virgil said. He told Duncan about his talk at the zoo, and his conversations with Monty-McCall and Gupti-Mack.
When he finished, Duncan, who was twiddling a yellow pencil, said, “Jeez. Not much there.”
“Not yet. These are unusual people, though. I think we’re in the right area,” Virgil said.
“All right. Well, pray for rain. Anything I can do, let me know.”
Duncan, having been a field cop, knew well enough that even on important cases, sometimes nothing happened when you needed it to.
–
Virgil checked the tip line, found nothing intended for him, and called Frankie to ask about Sparkle. “Have you seen her this afternoon?”
“Yeah, she’s home. She said everybody at Castro was nice enough, but she says they hated her being there.”
“That’s okay, as long as they don’t do anything about it.”
“Sparkle says she thought a guy in a red pickup truck followed her for a while, but she lost him in Mankato. She says. Kinda freaked me out, but when I really pushed her on it, she wasn’t sure she was being followed at all. I think she expected to be, and when she saw two trucks that looked more or less alike, she got paranoid. She checked her rearview mirror all the way out here, and never saw the truck after she left Mankato.”
“Huh. Well, as long as she’s okay,” Virgil said.
“You coming home tonight?”
“Might as well. Nothing happening here,” Virgil said.
“That’s not good.”
“I’ve still got a guy to talk to…”
–
Sandy was tracking Peck through the wilds of the Internet. When Virgil went back to talk to her, he found her pounding on her keyboard. She glanced up at him, held up a hand that meant “stop” or “go away,” and he said, “I’ll get a Ding Dong. You finding anything?”
“Yes. Give me five minutes.”
Virgil got a Ding Dong from the vending machine and gave her ten minutes; he and Sandy had once had a sharply abbreviated romance and she continued to be testy with him. When the ten minutes were up, he went back to her office, where she was peering at a pale green document on-screen. She said, “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“Dr. Peck lost his license to practice medicine in Indiana when a medical board found that he’d engaged in unethical behavior with some female patients. I had to go around some circles to find it, but it turned out he’d give women with sprains or muscle pulls or other minor injuries a shot of nitrous oxide to help relax them while he was putting on a splint or a wrap, or manipulating a limb. They’d wake up feeling all funny.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. He was lucky he wasn’t charged with rape, but nobody was exactly sure they’d been penetrated. One woman thought she might have been photographed… for later use. Anyway, the fact that he was disciplined would show up on any background check, and once the details were known, there’s no way he’d ever get licensed. Not here in the States.”
“But he still calls himself a doctor.”
“Well, not exactly. He calls himself Winston Peck VI, MD. And he does have an MD,” Sandy said.
“Huh. Thank you.”
“Not done,” she said.
“More?”
“He filed for bankruptcy two years ago, two hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt, twelve thousand in assets, not counting his house and two vehicles. He had to sell a car; he kept a truck, a Tahoe.”
“What business?”
“He had an idea like emojis,” Sandy said. “He called them ‘the nip family.’ They were digital nipple images that you could customize to look like your own nipples, and they could carry messages back and forth. You’d send somebody a nipple on your iPhone, and it’d talk to their nipples, and so on.”
“Nipples.”