“This is Roger Briggs; I’m with the Pierce County sheriff’s office over in Wisconsin. We’ve got a body here, in a ditch. It’s missing its legs. Looks like they were cut off and we think it might be that guy you’re looking for, Hayk Simonian. His face was down in the water, so it’s messed up, but it resembles that mug shot you sent around and you had that other guy up north, who had his arms cut off. We think this one was shot.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Virgil said.
–
A half hour later, he stood on the side of a country road as two sheriff’s department investigators prepared to pull the plastic-wrapped body out of the ditch and up onto the road. The ditch held six or eight inches of water down among the cattail roots, and the investigators wore gum boots as they worked.
Briggs, the deputy who’d called in the discovery, stood on the side of the road and told Virgil about it.
“Found by a farm guy who lives up the road. He saw three coyotes pulling on the plastic and got to wondering about it. He chased the coyotes off and walked over to the other side of the ditch and looked down, and he could see a hand, so he called us. I was the first guy here and called for help.”
“Nothing around the body?”
Briggs shook his head. “He was pretty well wrapped up and obviously dumped here, killed somewhere else. The investigators will do the crime-scene thing here, probably send the rest of it down to Madison.”
“I’ll talk to the Madison guys,” Virgil said. “We need whatever they can get, in a hurry.”
“Talk to the sheriff. You could probably get somebody to drive the whole shootin’ match straight down, have the lab working on it by the end of the day.”
“That’d be good,” Virgil said. “If that’s Hayk Simonian in there, it’ll be the second murder. There’s a real bad guy out there.”
–
The body was plugged into the mud at the bottom of the little roadside swamp, and once the investigators had freed it, and the plastic wrapper, they slipped the body easily over to the side of the road and hoisted it up to the dry surface. A funky sulfuric odor came with it. As they were doing that, a hearse came down the road to take the body.
The coyotes had chewed into the dead man’s face, neck, and part of one upper arm. The body was naked from the waist down, although a pair of jeans was wadded up at one end of the plastic wrap, and Virgil could see the legs were missing from the hip down. Unlike the arms of Hamlet Simonian, the legs were not with the body.
The RV Simonians would not be happy. On the other hand, Hayk was apparently the same kind of asshole as his brother, Hamlet, not to be especially mourned, by Virgil, anyway. Further, he might be a hook into the information that the Simonians had, which had led them to the missing Barry King. If Virgil could get the news about Hayk to the Simonians, maybe he could blackmail them for whatever other information they might have. Something to think about.
As he was plotting, one of the Wisconsin investigators used a tongue depressor to move scraps of the plastic away from the face. There was enough left for Virgil to identify the body as Hayk Simonian.
“Yeah, that’s him.” He sighed and straightened up, said, “Tell your lab guys that they need to move some fingerprints to the feds, just to make one hundred percent sure, but that’s him.”
Briggs said, “He’s a mess. At least we know the tigers are still alive.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Yeah? How do we know that?”
Briggs: “Where do you think the legs went?”
Virgiclass="underline" “Oh… Oh, jeez.” Briggs, he thought, could be right.
A car was coming down the road toward them, saw all the red lights clogging up the roadway, paused, then pulled into a farmer’s field track, did a three-point turn, and disappeared back down the road.
Country people, Virgil thought, didn’t like even the concept of a traffic jam, temporary as it might be.
–
Winston Peck VI saw the cop cars and the flashers and thought, Uh-oh. He pulled into a farmer’s field track, did a three-point turn, and headed back the way he came. Barry King’s body was in the back of the truck. The place where he’d dumped Hayk Simonian had seemed like a good one, so he’d come back to make another deposit. Not a good idea, as it turned out.
As he headed away from the cop cars, he looked in the rearview mirror. A guy standing on the side of the road in civilian dress, tall, lanky, blond…
Was that Flowers?
Whoa! Skin of his teeth!
–
Late in the afternoon, back at the office.
Virgil had talked to an investigator with the Wisconsin DCI. They were sending an agent to the area, because of the two bodies found on the Wisconsin side of the line, but they expected Virgil to carry most of the weight.
“Wisconsin’s a dumping ground for something going on in Minnesota. If you get any indication that the tigers are on our side of the river, we’ll give you all the help we can,” the DCI guy said.
–
Catrin Mattsson called with the good news of the day: she thought she had identified the man who’d beaten up Frankie.
“It’s a guy named Brad Blankenship. Got it from a not-so-good friend of his who said that Blankenship is walking around in long-sleeve shirts when he never wears anything but T-shirts in the summer. He said that Blankenship was drinking at Waters’ Waterhole last night and his sleeve slipped up a couple of times and he could see a pretty good bandage under it. Blankenship has four previous arrests for fighting-worked as a bouncer at the Waterhole on Fridays and Saturdays when they have live music.”
“What do you want to do?” Virgil asked.
“Well, first thing, the not-so-good friend says if Blankenship did it, the other person with him was almost certainly Frederick Reeves, who they call Slow Freddie. You know that song, ‘If You’re Gonna Be Dumb, You Gotta Be Tough’?”
“Sure. Roger Alan Wade.”
“That’s apparently Slow Freddie’s life story. My source says he was in jail for theft a few years ago, and something really, really bad happened to him in there. I’m thinking rape, and it turned him mean. No smarter, but mean. It also gave him a permanent fear of being locked up, which means… we might be able to talk to him.”
“Either that, or he’ll shoot you,” Virgil said.
“I said ‘we.’ I’d appreciate some company for this talk,” Mattsson said.
“When?” Virgil asked.
“Now-as soon as you can get here.”
“All right. Things are moving like glue up here, but we’ve got a second confirmed murder,” Virgil said. “I’ll help out, but you’ve got to front the thing-I don’t want people saying I was down there working on a simple assault on my girlfriend and skipping out on a double murder.”
“I’ll front it,” she said. “Besides, by the time it gets to court, you’ll have the killers locked up, and nobody will remember the sequence of events.”
“See you in an hour and a half,” Virgil said. “Let’s meet at the hospital. I can check on Frankie and hook up with you at the same time.”
–
On the way to Mankato, Virgil decided that he really needed to get to the Simonians again. He needed to know where Hamlet Simonian’s phone might be going and how the Simonians knew to pick up Barry King. They had a source of information that was better than any he had.
Although they were no longer answering his calls, he still had one good way to contact them. He got on the phone to Daisy Jones, the TV reporter. “You’re going to owe me even more,” he said.
“Is it like Texas barbeque or leftover porridge?”
“Hamlet Simonian’s older brother, Hayk, that’s H-A-Y-K, was found murdered in a ditch over in Wisconsin. I mean, murdered and dumped in a ditch. We think he was murdered somewhere else, and that probably means here in Minnesota.”