“Yeah. You’d get the nipples for free, but then you go to ‘the nip’ website and customize them for a dollar, so they’d look like your own, you know, with nipple rings or whatever,” she said. “He copyrighted the idea, but he doesn’t know how to code, apparently, and he hired a couple of coders who drove him right into the ground with their salaries. And when nobody bought a nipple… he was screwed.”
“You’re pulling my wiener,” Virgil said, without thinking.
“No, I tried that, and it didn’t really pay off for me,” she said.
“Hey!”
“Okay, but what I’m telling you is the truth. He tried to create a nip family thing, hoping it’d go viral and it went more like bacterial-like flesh-eating bacteria. They ate all his money.”
“Which would give him a reason to grab the cats.” Virgil and Sandy looked at each other for a few seconds, Sandy waiting, until Virgil finally said, “He’s the most interesting guy I’ve run into so far. The only one who’d seem to have the… energy… to pull this off.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean he did it-there are probably another half-million people in the Cities with his energy level,” Sandy said.
“Yeah, but he’s been outside the law with these women; he’s in financial trouble; he deals in traditional medicine; he’s got the energy.”
“Certainly worth a closer look,” she said.
9
Peck still wasn’t answering his phone, so Virgil went to his address, which turned out to be a sixty-year-old white-shingled house with a tuck-under garage in a quiet neighborhood not far from the Cathedral of Saint Paul.
Virgil banged on the door for a while and got no response, looked through the garage windows and found enough light to see that the garage was empty.
Back in his truck, he tried calling Peck again, and again got no answer. Stuck for the moment, he looked up the number Dick Ho had given him for Toby Strait, called it, and got… nothing. No phone with that number, at least, not on any network, anywhere.
Virgil next tried the number Lucas had given him and connected with Strait’s girlfriend, whose name was Inez.
“I already talked to that other cop about this, that Lucas what’s-his-name: Toby’s hiding,” Inez said. “That Knowles bitch is hunting him down, and the law knows it, and they don’t do a friggin’ thing about it. Toby’s afraid to turn on his phone because there are ways of tracking it. If somebody spoofs a number and he answers it, Knowles can figure out exactly where he’s at.”
“You really think she’s still hunting for him? She’s lucky to be walking around free,” Virgil said.
“I know she’s still hunting him. She’s told people that. You want to know something? If anybody has any idea of where Toby is, it’s probably Knowles.”
–
Well, that’s an idea, Virgil thought, and it was good from two angles: Knowles might know where Strait was hiding, and she was among the most radical of animal rights activists in the state. A lot of radical animal rights people didn’t care for zoos, so there was at least a slender possibility that Knowles might know about somebody who had taken the animals as a publicity stunt, if that’s what had happened.
Lucas had said she lived near Monticello, on the northwest edge of the Twin Cities metro area. He could probably jump the rush-hour traffic and make it up there in an hour or so. He called the BCA duty officer, asked him to find out where Maxine Knowles had been arrested, and to get the address she’d left with whatever police agency had arrested her; and to check her driver’s license and see if that matched with her bail papers.
He made it out of town ahead of the rush and was on I-94 driving north when he took the callback from the duty officer, who told him that Knowles lived eight miles out of Monticello. He’d looked at a Google Earth picture of the address, and told Virgil, “It looks like a house with a half-dozen trailers scattered around. It’s out in the sticks. I’ll tell you, Virgie, I’d call up Sherburne County and get a couple deputies to go out there with you.”
Virgil did that. He explained to the sheriff what the problem was, and the sheriff agreed to send a couple of deputies along. They’d meet in a Walgreens parking lot in Monticello, and then cross the Mississippi to Knowles’s place.
Virgil found the two Sherburne County deputies, who were named Buck and James, chatting with a couple of Wright County deputies at the Walgreens. Virgil shook hands with everybody, then ran into the Walgreens and bought a couple packs of cheese crackers and a Coke. The Wright County deputies said, “Keep your asses down,” and Virgil, Buck, and James rolled in a three-car caravan north across the Mississippi.
North of the river, they threaded their way through a skein of backroads that ended at a shabby farmstead, with that semicircle of trailers the duty officer had told him about. Behind the trailers, they could see a maze of eight-foot chain-link fences, which appeared to be much newer and in much better shape than the trailers. Two gray Subaru station wagons, one with a flat front tire, were parked in front of the cages.
They crossed a culvert into the farmyard, and within a minute or so, people began wandering out of the trailers. Virgil, out of his truck, was joined by Buck and James, and Buck whispered uneasily, “Jesus, it’s a zombie outbreak.”
A dozen people came out of the trailers, most of them dressed in ragged farm-style clothing, denim overalls and long-sleeved shirts and gum boots, both men and women; and they were old, with long badly cut hair, gone gray, and all but one or two were noticeably thin. The combination of age, hair, and spindly bodies did give them the look of zombies, Virgil thought, along with the shuffling gait that one or two of them had.
A tall, sunken-cheeked man asked, “What can we do for y’all?”
“I need to talk to Maxine Knowles,” Virgil said.
“Can I ask what for? She’s legally bailed out,” the man said.
“I’m not here about her legal problems,” Virgil said. “I actually need to talk to her about her area of expertise. I’m the cop looking for the stolen zoo tigers.”
That set off a rash of commentary among the crowd and the tall man shook his head and said, “Well, that’s a disaster. I can tell you, we don’t have them, and I don’t know who would.”
“I believe you, but I still need to talk to Maxine,” Virgil said.
The tall man looked at them for a few seconds, then pulled a cell phone from his pocket and poked in a number. After a few more seconds, he said, “Maxine, there are some police officers out in the yard looking for you. It’s about the tigers.”
He listened briefly, then hung up and said to Virgil, “She’ll be right out.”
–
Maxine Knowles came through the back door of the house, nodded to the group facing Virgil and the deputies, and said to Virgil, “I don’t know about the tigers. I hope you find them before they’re killed.” She was a tall, stocky red-haired woman wearing an olive knit blouse, black jeans, and hiking boots, who added, “I have no idea who’d take them.”
Virgil said, “Is there somewhere you and I can go to talk?”
She pushed out a lip, considering, and said, “I guess so. We could talk in the kitchen.” To the group, she said, “I think we’re okay here, everybody. Let’s get ready to feed.”
The group began to break up, some people going to their trailers, others walking out toward a couple of sheds set off to one side of the chain-link fences.
“What’s the chain link for?” Virgil asked, as he followed Knowles through the house’s mudroom and into a funky-smelling kitchen, redolent of old potatoes and overripe tomatoes.
“Our animals,” Knowles said. “We have fourteen horses, four cows, six pigs, one broken-wing crow. All rescued. We’ve got a bunch of cats and dogs, also rescued, that mostly run around loose, unless they’ve been too abused and we have to sequester them. No tigers.”