Simonian shook his head. “Nobody has. I called Mom, she hasn’t heard a thing. You’d think he’d call from a pay phone or something.”
“You tried to find a pay phone lately?” Peck asked.
“There’s that,” Simonian said. He stubbed the cigarette on the stump, then snapped the butt into the driveway. “Back to the salt mine.”
Peck led the way inside, which stank from the electric dryers; the temperature in the place must have been over a hundred. Peck pulled the door shut behind them. A collection of bones lay on a blue plastic tarp on the floor and a pile of tiger meat on another tarp. Simonian had pulled all the teeth and they lay on an improvised table, along with pans of dried flesh. Still carrying the rifle, Peck bent over the table, looking at what amounted to tiger jerky.
“Good,” he said. “You’re doing good here. Anybody been snooping around?”
“The mailman stopped this morning-I was out by the road and he asked if we were moving in. I told him no, we were getting the place ready to sell off. Probably take the buildings down. I told him we wouldn’t be using the mailbox or getting mail, and he went away.”
“All right,” Peck said. He looked at the tiger meat, including the defleshed, toothless skull, and said, “We’ll grind up all the bones separately, by type-keep the femurs away from everything else. Anything we’re not gonna use, we can bury out back. You ought to use a hammer and break up the skull, but keep that separate. I’m not sure, but I suspect we’ll get more for skull bones, or brain-pan bones. I’ll ask old man Zhang about that.”
“How would anybody know if it was brain-pan bones or leg bones, after it’s ground up?”
“Well, I would,” Peck said. “There are some ethical standards involved here.”
–
Simonian yawned and turned away from Peck to look at the bones, which was what Peck had been waiting for. He was five feet from the other man, and when Simonian turned, Peck lifted the rifle and shot him in the back.
Boom!
Again, the muzzle blast was deafening; and at the last second, Peck flinched, remembering the ricocheting bullet the first time the gun had been shot in the barn. He wasn’t hit this time, though, and he looked on with interest as Simonian lurched away, one step, two, and reached out toward the remaining strip of tiger bone and meat hanging from the overhead hook, turned, and gave Peck a puzzled look, then fell facedown on one of the blood-spattered tarps. Nothing dramatic happened-no last words, no struggle for life, scrabbling across the bloodstained floor.
Peck looked at the suddenly deceased for a moment, then went to the barn door, pushed it open a crack, and looked out. The barn was set well back from the road, and nobody was on the road.
So it was done.
Peck had known from the start that he’d have to get rid of the Simonians, though he’d hoped it would be later than this-now he’d have to finishing processing the tiger meat on his own. As that thought occurred to him, he felt the prickling of hair on the back of his neck, and turned to see Katya peering at him with her golden eyes. She seemed to be waiting.
“What do you want?” Peck asked the cat.
Katya stared back at him, unmoving, making no noise.
–
A pan sat inside the cage, empty. They’d known they’d want to keep the female tiger alive for a few days, until they were finished processing the male, so they’d provided a water pan. Hayk apparently hadn’t been filling it.
A hose came in from outside-Hayk had been using it to wash down the tiger carcass-and now Peck set the rifle aside and dragged the hose over to the cage, turned the nozzle on, and filled the pan through the fence. Katya didn’t move.
“It’s there if you want it,” Peck told her.
He turned to the problem of getting rid of Hayk’s body. He could back the Tahoe up to the barn door and get the body out without being seen, but getting a 240-pound body into the truck would be a problem. Three of them had struggled to get the male tiger onto a six-inch-high dolly, when they’d only had to lift a bit more than two hundred pounds each, and Hayk had lifted a lot more than his share.
Katya made a rumbling sound from her cage, and Peck glanced back at her. She hadn’t eaten in three days, probably hungry.
He turned back to the problem of moving Hayk, and then thought, Wait, a hungry tiger? He had 240 pounds of fresh meat. Hayk was heavily built, especially from the waist down and one of his legs probably weighed between forty-five and fifty pounds, if he remembered his medical texts correctly.
Removing the legs would seriously reduce the load, he thought, and all the tools for doing that were right here in the barn. Two birds with one stone. He looked at the cat.
“Got the munchies?”
Katya didn’t say anything, but lay back and watched him.
15
Roberta Patterson lived out in the countryside, in a ranch-style house with yellow siding and an oversized mailbox surrounded by dusty-looking cone flowers, out on the county road. She was getting her mail when Virgil pulled into her hosta-lined driveway. Virgil knew a man who bred hostas, but he was not confident of that man’s intelligence.
“Do I know you?” Patterson asked, as he got out of his truck, stepping carefully to avoid the hostas.
“Nope. I’m a Minnesota cop looking for the tigers,” Virgil said.
“Ah. I wondered if you’d come around here,” she said, as she thumbed through the mail. “You got some ID?”
Virgil showed her his ID and they walked up the driveway to the house, talking about what a nice day it was, and how last week’s rain had kept down the dust after a dry summer. A metal garage or work building sat behind the main house and was nearly as large as the house. Patterson said, “That’s where I work; I guess you know what I do.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know exactly how you do it,” Virgil said.
“Come on inside. You want a root beer? I just bought some.”
“That’d be good,” he said.
“Scoop of vanilla ice cream?”
“Yeah, that’d be great.”
They sat in her compact kitchen to talk; the kitchen smelled of country vegetables like carrots and onions, with just the barest undertone of soil and skunk. As Patterson put the root beer floats together, she said, “To keep it simple, I collect a variety of fauna and flora, animals and plants, and dry them and prepare them and bottle them and ship them to people who distribute them through traditional medical channels.”
She was a tall, thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed woman in her middle forties. She was wearing a white blouse with a wolf’s head embroidered into it, jeans, and hiking boots. “I get the animal parts through a local fur dealer and some from roadkill. The plants I collect myself, usually from river bottoms, and I have a patch of ground I lease from a local farmer for growing marigolds and mint and a bunch of other herbs.”
“You haven’t heard anything about the tigers?”
“No, of course not, or I would have called the police,” she said. She handed him the float in a ceramic mug. “I’d never be involved with anything like that, or anything that involved endangered animals. The animals that I use are members of the weasel family-mink, otters, martens-brought in by trappers, and I’ll get striped skunks from the same place. Or from roadkill. They’re all used for their musk. In the fall, I’ll get bear gallbladders, which are collected for the bile. Animals are a relatively small part of the business. I do a ton of herbs. That’s most of it.”
“Do you know anybody who would have heard about the tigers… if there’s anything out there to hear?”
“Honestly? If there was anything to hear, it’d probably be me,” Patterson said. “There hasn’t been a hint, so if the tigers were going to be used for medicine, I believe it has to be somebody working on his own. Or it’s not people who are going to use them for medicine. There are animal rights people…”