“No. What I want is some clue that’ll get me to the killer. And the tigers.”
“Don’t have any of those,” Ran said. “I also don’t have any chemistry back yet and won’t have until tomorrow, but I can tell you that you’re probably right on the means of death. No sign of the normal types of violence, not even defensive wounds, but I did find a small bruise next to his left nipple. When I looked closer, I could see a point of penetration that would be consistent with a wound made by a big needle. I dissected that area and found a lacuna in the underlying muscle, and bruising that would be consistent with the violent injection of a substantial quantity of fluid: almost like an inch-long blister in the muscle.”
“It’s what I thought,” Virgil said. “He was shot with a tranquilizer gun.”
“Yeah. I looked at his lungs… you don’t need the details, but it all points toward a massive dose of a fast-acting sedative. Big enough that the dose killed him. They didn’t have to finish him off with any of the conventional methods. The cheeseheads sent the whole refrigerator over. No tranquilizer dart inside, no dart was found at the scene.”
“Anything else? Anything that would help me?”
“Nope. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Underwear, socks, and Nike brand shoes. No ID-no wallet or anything, no jewelry. Fingers were all intact, got a fine set of prints, about as good as you could hope for.”
“What about the arms?” Virgil asked. “Were they cut off with a scalpel? Hacked off with an ax? Anything I could look for?”
“More like sawn off with a sharp knife. I’m thinking a butcher knife. Postmortem, of course. No effort to carefully disarticulate the shoulders. They were cut right through. Nothing particularly neat about it. From what I get from my investigators, it was probably done because the killer couldn’t fit the body in the refrigerator any other way.”
“You wouldn’t say off the top of your head that it was done by a doctor… somebody with a knowledge of human anatomy?”
“No. The way it was done, a deer hunter could have done it. Anybody who’d ever taken apart a carcass. I mean, it wasn’t sloppy, but it wasn’t so skillfully done that I’d suspect a surgeon. You looking at a surgeon?”
“No,” Virgil said. “Maybe at a regular doc.”
Ran shrugged. “Couldn’t prove it with me.”
–
Virgil sat in his truck and thought: if you had to hide a tiger-skinning operation, you wouldn’t do it in a tightly packed suburb. You’d probably want to do it where you had a piece of land around yourself, free of snoops. Like out in the countryside.
The closest big patches of rural countryside were on both sides of the St. Croix River, and Simonian had been found under a bridge over the St. Croix. And Peck had given him the name of a woman who processed animals… in Wisconsin.
Need to take a look at her, he thought.
14
Peck was lying in bed, listening to WCCO radio, when he heard the news. Hamlet Simonian had been pulled out of the St. Croix River.
“Oh, mother of God,” he groaned to the thumbtack in the ceiling. He’d used the thumbtack for meditation exercises, before he’d discovered the full efficacy of Xanax. With his luck, he thought, the thumbtack would come unglued some night and land point-down on his eyeball.
After a while, aloud, he said, “They found Hamlet. How could they find Hamlet?”
He’d managed to keep his shit together during the interview with Flowers with the help of an extra tab of the Xanax. Drugs wouldn’t help him with Hayk Simonian, not after the bullshit he’d laid on the older brother.
He’d told Hayk that Hamlet Simonian was driving back to Glendale, California, where their family came from, where he planned to hide out until the heat dissipated. When Hayk had later complained that he couldn’t reach his brother on his cell phone, Peck had told him that Hamlet had turned it off, so the cops couldn’t check his call history. He’d suggested that Hayk go to the Apple lost-phone locater service and look for the phone’s location. Hayk had done that and the phone was shown as being in Des Moines, and later, moving west from Kansas City.
Hayk had been satisfied with that and had gone back to work, drying out tiger meat. He’d planned to work most of the night, finishing the soft-tissue part of processing Artur, and then he’d move on to grinding the bones. He was probably still asleep in the farmhouse: but Hayk spent a lot of time listening to Minnesota Public Radio and when the noon news came up…
Only one thing Peck could do about that.
–
Peck went down to the garage and got the rifle out-not the tranquilizer gun, but the.308 that Hamlet had used to shoot the male tiger. Peck didn’t know a lot about guns, but he’d fired a few, knew how to load the rifle, knew how the safety worked: guns were simple machines and a child could operate them. Children often did, as illustrated by the accidental death statistics.
He left the gun unloaded and worked the bolt a few times and pulled the trigger, getting the click of the firing pin, then slipped a.308 round into the chamber, put it in the Tahoe, and headed out to the farm.
The Xanax was still at work. He was worried, even frightened, but functioning.
In the run-up to his company’s bankruptcy, he’d been handling the daily stress with Ambien at night to help him sleep, and Xanax during the day to smooth himself out. That had worked for a while. Then one night, while on Ambien and Xanax simultaneously, he’d had a couple of evening margaritas at a St. Paul bar, had gone outside, and had physically frozen on a street corner. For nearly half an hour, he’d been unable to pick up a foot to move.
Since it was St. Paul, nobody had noticed. He might have stood there for a week if something in his brain hadn’t finally broken loose, and he found himself able to walk again.
He had thrown the Ambien away, but kept the Xanax and now was rolling through the warm morning with a smooth chemical calm. He didn’t think about the consequences of what he’d done with Hamlet Simonian, or what he was planning to do with Hayk Simonian, because the consequences were simply unthinkable. The Pecks were physicians: they did not go to prison.
Were the Pecks psychopaths? He didn’t think so. Sociopaths, probably, since he had to admit that he really didn’t feel much for his fellow human beings. He even had a hard time figuring out what it would be like, feeling something for his fellow humans.
His father, he thought, was probably the same way, since he hadn’t apparently felt much for his wives or his only child. He didn’t know about Pecks IV, III, or II, but his father had owned a photograph of Peck I standing next to a wagonload of severed legs, supposedly taken during the fighting at Cold Harbor in the Civil War. Peck I was leaning on the wagon, a cigar in his hands. He was smiling.
Basically, Peck VI thought, he was carrying out an old family tradition.
–
At the farm, Hayk was up and sitting on a stump outside the barn, smoking a cigarette, wearing a wifebeater shirt and jeans. He yawned, apparently just up. Peck parked and got the gun out of the back. The safety was off, so he kept his finger away from the trigger as he carried it toward the barn.
“Gonna shoot the girl?”
“No, but you are, when the time comes,” Peck said. “I thought I better leave the rifle here. It makes me nervous having it around the house.”
“A lot of shit makes you nervous,” Simonian said. He yawned again.
“Because I think ahead,” Peck said. “You should try it sometime. How’s the drying going?”
“Should be done by tomorrow, then we can start on the girl. The testicle slices came out good. You can start grinding and bottling if you want.”
“Probably tonight,” Peck said. He could hear classical music coming from inside. Public radio. “You hear from Hamlet?”