“Well, since you braced Peck, he knows you’re looking at him, so he probably won’t go driving out to wherever the tigers are,” Duncan said. “Maybe split between Peck and the Chinese.”
“That’s good,” Virgil said. “I need to get some sleep. I dunno. We’ll get Peck sooner or later, but I think we might have lost the tigers.”
“Ah, man. Really?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve got an idea to break Peck out, but it’s not something you want to hear about. I’ll let it go at that.”
“Okay. Keep pushing, pal,” Duncan send. “I’ll get Jenkins and Shrake wound up.”
“How are things over at the state fair?”
“Clusterfuck. Gonna be a cop every two feet,” Duncan said.
“Lucas tells me there was a cop every two feet down in Iowa, and the Purdys still touched off the bomb.”
“Not here. Not here.”
“Good luck with that,” Virgil said.
–
On the way to Mankato, Virgil called Daisy Jones, the TV reporter. “I owe you so much now, I might have to resort to sex to pay you back,” she said.
“Hold that thought. Right now I’m in a pretty intense relationship,” Virgil said.
“I was in a pretty intense relationship the last time the possibility arose, and you weren’t. I often wondered about how you worked that out,” Jones said.
“Don’t think about it. And don’t give up hope,” Virgil said. “Anyhoo… I want to be up-front with you and I’ve got something to say, but I cannot have this come back to me. I would maybe get fired.”
“I’d get fired myself before I’d give you up,” she said. “You know I’m telling the truth.”
“All right. There’s a guy in town named Winston Peck. Actually, Winston Peck the Sixth, MD. There’s a lot of stuff about him on the ’net. I’m sure he’s involved with the tiger theft and that automatically means that he’s probably involved with two murders. I don’t know if he did them himself, but he’s involved. I can give you his address in St. Paul…”
He did, and she took it down and asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to show up with a TV truck and a microphone and ask him if he stole the tigers. I want him on TV, denying it. I want his neighbors to know… I want him to crack, I want him to make a run for it.”
“Huh. So I would actually be functioning as a cop.”
“No. You have no arrest powers. You got a tip from a friendly cop and you’re just chasing it down like any reporter would. If you shared this with somebody from another station, that would be fine with me, as long as my name didn’t come up. I know you guys sometimes cover each other’s butts, no matter what anybody says about competition.”
After a moment’s silence, she said, “If I do this, I think I’ll owe you less, not more.”
“Let’s be adults for a minute,” Virgil said. “You don’t really owe me a fuckin’ thing, and you know it. We talk because we like each other and help each other out.”
“That’s true, but it’s fun to pretend. Okay, Virgie… Video at ten. Oh, I might call you for a comment.”
–
Frankie was in bed, propped up on a bunch of pillows, watching a movie on her old MacBook Pro.
“How are the ribs?” Virgil asked.
“Hurts when I torque them, cough, or laugh, so I try not to do that.”
“I’ve got a sleeping bag and an air mattress,” he said. “If you need me to sleep on the floor, I can.”
“We should be okay; you don’t usually flop around much,” she said. “Besides, this new mattress… why did we wait this long? This thing is wonderful, it’s like a cloud.”
Virgil sat on it, careful not to rock her, and told her about the day. When he finished, she asked, “What happens if this Peck sits on his ass? If there’s somebody else helping him besides the Simonians, they could be cleaning up while Peck has your attention. He does nothing. Then what?”
“That’s the worst case,” Virgil said. “I don’t need him to have a backup guy; I need him out in the open, shit-faced panicked.”
–
Virgil got his own laptop and checked on a couple of outdoors forums that he hadn’t had time to read in a couple of days, wrote a couple of quick notes, then went into the living room to watch the ten o’clock news. Channel Three led with the Peck story-Jones tried to interview him through the screen door. Peck’s face was barely visible, other than as a vaguely white oval, and he threatened to sue the TV station if they mentioned his name or used the video.
Jones mentioned Peck’s name about twenty times and even asked why he couldn’t practice medicine, and Peck slammed the door and Jones said, with one of her patented gotcha smiles, “Dr. Peck refused to answer any further questions about whether he was involved with the theft of the Amur tigers…”
Frankie had eased into the living room to watch over Virgil’s shoulders, and she said, “Man, she really screwed him, didn’t she?”
“Well, he’s a killer and a tiger snatcher,” Virgil said.
“Wonder where she got his name?”
“She’s got good sources,” Virgil said. “Lot of cops kinda like her looks.”
“And that BCA leaks like a sieve,” Frankie said, giving him a cuff on the head. She’d heard Jones mentioned before, and not in a critical way. “If you ever get appointed director, you have to stop that.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on it, the day the promotion comes through,” Virgil said.
24
After Flowers left, Peck popped a couple of Xanax and sat on his couch and tried to think it over, although the drug fogged him up for a while-enough that he later realized that he’d lost some time. He came back when the doorbell rang. Thinking it might be Flowers again and feeling simultaneously angry and chemically mellow, a confusing combination, he went to the front door and yanked it open.
An attractive thirtysomething woman was standing there, a smile on her face. He didn’t immediately pick up the microphone in her hand or the cameraman standing off at an angle. What he felt first was the heat coming through the screen door; it was like opening an oven.
The woman said something and he frowned and asked, “What?”
She repeated herself: “Dr. Peck, we’ve heard from a number of law enforcement officials that you are suspected of being involved in the theft of the tigers from the Minnesota Zoo.”
As she said that, a light came on to his left, blinding him, and he realized that he was talking to a reporter.
“That’s ridiculous! Who are you? If you make this ridiculous charge public in any way, you’d better have a very good lawyer because I will sue you for every dime you have…”
He went on for a while and then slammed the door.
–
Outside the house, Daisy Jones said to her cameraman, “That’s about it; there ain’t gonna be no more.”
“Sounded pretty fucked up, man. That was drugs talking,” said the cameraman, who’d know.
They got back in their van and started away from Peck’s house, and a block and a half down the street, she noticed a familiar Crown Vic parked at the curb.
“Pull over next to that car,” she told the cameraman, who was driving.
The cameraman pulled over next to the apparently empty Crown Vic, and Jones hopped out and walked around the back of the van and knocked on the driver’s-side window. Jenkins had slumped over onto the passenger seat, trying to hide, but now he sat up and rolled down the window and Jones said, “You can’t do surveillance from a Crown Vic, Jenkins. You need a Camry or something.”
“Don’t fit in a Camry,” Jenkins said. “You get anything hot from Peck?”
“Yeah. A hot threat to sue us.”
“You going with it?”