“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.”
The director was about to be fired, if office rumors were true. Since the building contained a couple of dozen professional investigators and the usual garden-variety snoops, the rumors were generally accurate.
“No help for it,” Duncan said, about calling the director.
“I thought you liked being on TV,” Virgil said.
“I do, most of the time,” Duncan said. “But I like it to be on the credit side of things, where I’m the hero. You know, I smile at the camera, show off my dimples. This is gonna be debit. Big-time debit.”
“Good luck with it,” Virgil said. “You do have the cute dimples. Here’s a tip: I’d stay away from the phrase ‘The suspect was disarmed.’”
–
Virgil left Duncan to his media problem and drove to the medical examiner’s office, a single-story gray building with all of the charm of a shoe box, built next to a Regions Hospital parking structure. The medical examiner, a chain-smoking doc named Nguyen Ran, asked, “You want to see the body?”