She looked and said, “That’s him.”
–
When Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake finished with Broda, they thanked her and started back to the truck. The cameramen had been joined by reporters who pointed their microphones at the cops and one of them asked, “No tigers in there?”
“Nothing in there,” Virgil said. “House is empty, as far as we can tell. I don’t know about tigers; we had reports of a defenestration and had to check it out.”
“Defenestration? That’s a pretty big word for a cop,” one of the reporters said.
Behind Virgil, Jenkins muttered, “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
The reporter said, “Hey, what?”
Virgil said, “Broda. He said you should interview Mrs. Broda. She’s waiting.” They all looked at Broda’s house and saw her smiling through the screen door.
–
Back in the truck, Virgil took out the cell phone number for Levon Simonian and called it. Simonian picked up on the second ring, and Virgil asked, “Listen, did Hamlet have a brother?”
After a moment of silence, Simonian said, “Hold on.”
He then muffled the microphone on his phone; Virgil could hear speech-like sounds, but couldn’t tell what was being said. A full minute later, Simonian came back on and said, “Yes. He possibly had a brother.”
“Big guy, powerful? Looked like Hamlet?”
Another few minutes of silence, then somebody in the background blurted, “Oh my God. Did something happen to Hayk?”
Virgil asked, “How do you spell ‘Hayk’? And do you have his birth date?”
He got the name and birth date, called them in to the BCA duty officer, told him to run the name, and also asked him to find a phone number for Chuck Dvorsky, the landlord of the vacant house.
The duty officer put them on hold for a moment, then came back with Dvorsky’s home phone number. Virgil called it. A woman answered and said she was April Dvorsky, Chuck’s wife. She said, “Chuck’s in El Paso, Texas, buying a Porsche 928.”
She said she did the accounting on the rental units their company owned and that the man who’d rented the Frogtown house had moved out before he moved in. “He never did put any furniture in it and then he skipped out on the lease.”
“Big guy, small guy?”
“Kinda small. Not light. Short and a little stout.”
“Has anybody else been in it since?”
“No, nobody-I mean, except to clean and get ready to offer again,” she said. “I was over there this afternoon with the cleaning crew.”
“So it’s been cleaned.”
“Yes, it has.”
Virgil asked her to stay out of the house; he was going to check to see if it would be worthwhile to have a crime-scene crew go over the place. “We can get a warrant, if you want,” he said.
“That’s okay. I’ll stay out and if you decide to send CSI, I’ll meet them there and let them in.”
“Thank you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
–
Shrake said, “Cleaned up, so probably no prints, especially since it sounds like they didn’t even live there. They rented the house to have an address where UPS would drop the dryers.”
“Yeah,” Virgil said. Virgil got on his cell phone, switched it to speaker, and called the duty officer at the BCA, who said he had a response from the FBI on the Hayk Simonian inquiry.
“He’s had a dozen arrests, mostly from working security at nightclubs around Los Angeles,” the duty officer said. “He beat up people. Sometimes, a little too much. He also did some jail time-not prison time-for receiving stolen goods. That was in Los Angeles, too. The feds picked him up on suspicion of distributing counterfeit bills in Glendale, California, but the witnesses failed to identify him.”
“Not a good guy,” Jenkins said.
“Not a good guy,” the duty officer said, “but a small-timer.”
“Let’s get the best and most recent mug shots we can find and give them to Jon Duncan,” Virgil said. “We need to get them out to the TV stations and the papers.”
“Too late for tonight,” the duty officer said. “The news is on now.”
“Yeah, but let’s try to get them out for the early morning news, run them all day tomorrow.”
–
With nothing more to do, Virgil dropped Jenkins and Shrake back at the BCA building, thanked them for their time, and drove home. On the way, Daisy Jones, the TV reporter from Channel Three, called and asked, “Why’d you go to that house? I know it wasn’t because somebody got thrown out a window. I got about two minutes before I’ve got to go on the air. Tell me.”
Virgil considered. His attitude toward information differed from the attitude of most cops. He figured if he knew something about a crime, and other cops knew it, and the crook knew it, who were they hiding the information from and why? Sometimes, there was a good answer to that question; most of the time, there wasn’t. One reason for parceling it out carefully was to get reporters obligated to you, because sometimes they knew things that you didn’t, and if they owed you, they might cough it up. And sometimes, putting information on the air, or in the papers, stirred up new information…
Daisy Jones was one of those willing to trade.
“You didn’t hear it from me,” he said.
“Of course not. Talk faster. I’ve now got one minute and forty-five seconds.”
“If the tiger thieves are processing the animals for traditional Chinese medicine, then they need to process quite a bit of meat-internal organs, gallbladders, eyes, all that. They need to dry it. That house got an order for five jerky dryers. The two men who took the delivery never really lived there-they rented it for one month, took the delivery, and disappeared.”
“That would mean that they were planning to kill the tigers. Might already have done it,” she said.
Virgil considered for another moment, then said, “Daisy, you are going to owe me big. I don’t know how you’re going to pay me back, but I’ll think of something.”
“No time, no time. Just tell me,” she said.
“Okay, you heard from local police sources and I’d appreciate it if you’d say it came from Minneapolis. One of the men seen at the house was Hamlet Simonian.”
“Oh my God, Virgil, you’ve nailed it down,” Jones said. “They’re killing the tigers or already have. I owe you big, thank you.”
Click. She was gone.
–
Virgil got to Mankato at eleven-thirty, washed his face, brushed his teeth, put a can of beer in his jacket pocket, and drove down to the Mayo.
Frankie was awake; Catrin Mattsson, Sparkle, and Father Bill were sitting next to her bed in side chairs, and the four of them seemed deeply involved in conversation. When they saw Virgil coming, Frankie said something to the others and they all stirred around and then Frankie asked, “Where you been, cowboy?”
“Trying to find those fuckin’ tigers,” Virgil said. He leaned over the bed and kissed her. “Got nothin’.”
“Now you’ve got a murder,” Mattsson said.
“Yeah, at least one.” He popped the top on the beer and told them about the missing Hayk Simonian and the Simonian justice crew.
“Interesting,” Mattsson said. “Could have two murders, with more on the way. I ought to be done down here in the next day or two at the most. If you haven’t found the tigers, ask Jon to let me help out. I’ve been working a cold case up in Isanti County and it’s not going anywhere. I don’t even think the dead woman’s from Minnesota.”
“Okay. I could use the help. It’s getting complicated,” Virgil said. He looked at Frankie: she was badly scuffed up, but the scuffing was superficial and would heal soon enough. “How’s your head?” he asked her. “I mean… headaches? Anything more about the concussion?”
“They say that looks okay,” Frankie said. “The boys were here. You’ve got to talk to Rolf. He’s been going around to bars, asking about who might have jumped me. You know he’s got a temper.”