Virgil asked him, “If you had to throw out three names—you know, if somebody put a gun to your head—who’d you say, in the traditional medicine market, might do this?”
Peck frowned, and after a moment’s thought and a couple of facial scratches, said, “Well . . . nobody. Nobody here in this area. Most of these people involved in traditional medicine, to be honest, are somewhat timid. Backwoods people, the ones who actually produce the basic flora and fauna. They’re not the kind to be sneaking around stealing tigers. They tend to be reclusive, rather than aggressive. And I’d say . . . poor. They usually don’t have a lot of resources. I couldn’t see them organizing anything like this raid on the zoo.”
“So . . .”
“I think you’re looking in the wrong direction. You want somebody who’s more confrontational, somebody who’s not afraid to go to jail. Somebody with money and lawyers. I’m thinking the anti-zoo people or animal rights people. People who lie down in front of bulldozers. Not some lady who goes mushroom hunting.”
Virgil’s phone buzzed, and he looked at the screen. Bea Sawyer, the crime-scene specialist.
He said, “I’ve got to take this.”
Peck said, “Sure, walk into the kitchen, if you want some privacy.”
—
Virgil walked into the compact kitchen and, on the way, punched up the call.
“Virgil, this is Bea. Hey, we got a hit on those prints we took off the lightbulb, believe it or not. The feds say they’re from a small-time crook named Hamlet Simonian: three convictions for burglary and one for hijacking a Best Buy truck.”
Virgil was astonished. “Convictions here? Do we have an address?”
“No, not here,” Sawyer said. “He was busted in Brooklyn, New York; Camden, New Jersey; and Glendale, California, on the burglaries, and Phoenix, Arizona, on the Best Buy truck. He’s never done any serious time and has apparently either been clean or clever for a few years now, but we’ve got lots of mug shots.”
“Bea, let me call you back in a minute. One minute.”
“I’ll be here.”
Virgil checked through his list of contacts, found the name of the people who owned the house where the tigers had been taken: the Schmidts. He poked in the number he had, and Don Schmidt answered.
Virgil: “You know anybody named Hamlet Simonian?”
Schmidt: “Never heard of him.”
“He wouldn’t have installed a lightbulb in your garage door opener?”
“I don’t think so. Let me ask Marge.” A minute later, a woman came on the line: “No. I do that. I haven’t done it for a couple years, at least. It was still working the last time we were there.”
Virgil: “Thank you.”
He called Sawyer back and said, “We got one of them. Good job. You gotta get down to the office and start cranking out mug shots for the newspapers and TV stations. I want to get this on the ten o’clock news.”
“I’m there now, I’ll get it started.”
—
Virgil walked back to the living room and said, “Something’s come up, I’ve got to go. I’d like to talk to you some more, though.”
“Well, I’m working,” Peck said. “I’m usually most available after my morning writing session, after lunch.”
“I’ll stay in touch,” Virgil said.
—
Out in his truck, Virgil called Duncan: “Jon, we got a name on the tiger theft. A Hamlet Simonian. I’m going back to the BCA to look at his file. We’ve got mug shots. If you could . . . I’d like you to get in touch with the TV stations and get this guy’s face on the air.”
“Yes! Virgie, goddamn it, you’re rolling,” Duncan said.
“Bea Sawyer’s putting the mug shots together; she’ll tell you about finding them. You need to get the TV people to put up the pictures and our phone number, in case somebody knows where this guy is living.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that. See you at the office.”
—
Winston Peck VI had handled the interview with Virgil with the aid of a double dose of Xanax, which was now leaving him feeling tired. He was stressed, scared, freaked out, but chemically calm.
He sat staring at the television for two hours, some baseball game, he was never sure which one, when Hayk Simonian called and said, “You better turn on the TV.”
“It’s on.”
“Did you see it?”
“What? I’m watching a ball game.” Maybe too much Xanax: he was having a hard time focusing.
“A teaser ad for Channel Three news. They have Hamlet’s picture; they say he stole the tigers.”
“What?”
“I don’t know how they got it, but he’s gonna have to run for it. If he can make it out to Dad’s place in Glendale, they can fix him up with a fake ID. He’s gonna need some cash. You got cash?”
“I could give him a couple of thousand, maybe,” Peck said. “How did this happen? How did they find him?”
“I don’t know. Shit happens. Anyway, I’ll tell him to come over to your place,” Simonian said. “He’s at the Olive Garden in Coon Rapids; he could be there in a half hour.”
“What about his license plates? If a cop spots his car . . .”
“Like I said, man, shit happens. Not real likely, though.”
—
Peck hung up and looked at his watch: two minutes to ten o’clock. He sat through a bunch of ads, then the news came up, Three at Ten, and the first thing on the news was a mug shot of Hamlet Simonian, taken by the Phoenix police, followed by another one, taken by the Brooklyn cops. The Brooklyn shot wasn’t so good, having been taken when Simonian was younger and fatter with short hair, and shiny with what appeared to be sweat.
The Phoenix photo nailed him, might have been taken by National Geographic: “Our Survey of Cheap Hoods.”
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
The problem with the Simonians was that they got caught. He’d known that, from his talks with old man Zhang. Zhang had said that they could lift heavy weights, they could butcher a tiger, but they had the IQs of small rocks. They were that kind of guy, but their job in the tiger theft was so simple that Peck hadn’t worried too much. He should have.
Hamlet had always seemed to be the bigger liability, because he didn’t think. About anything. Peck didn’t know exactly how the police had identified him, but it would turn out to be something thoughtless and stupid.
Hayk, on the other hand, was a sixty-watt bulb, compared to Hamlet’s backup light, but Hayk had an honor problem. Almost any little thing could turn out to be a stain on his honor and would require revenge. He’d get his revenge and then the cops would come, and they’d take him away and fingerprint him, and everything he was wanted for would then come up on their computer screens.
Peck still needed Hayk for processing the tigers, at least for a while, but he didn’t need Hamlet anymore. He thought about it and started to sweat himself, but eventually went out to the garage, pulled a junk box out of the way, and dug the nylon bag out from behind it.
Inside the bag was the dart gun they’d used on the tigers. Still had two darts . . . didn’t make much noise.
He thought about it some more, exactly how this would work. He put the gun back in the nylon bag twice, and twice took it back out. Eventually, he left it sitting on the hood of the Tahoe, ready to go.
—
Hamlet Simonian didn’t make it in a half hour, leaving Peck in a constant and prolonged state of agitation that even another Xanax couldn’t help. Finally, an hour after his brother called, Hamlet Simonian pulled into Peck’s driveway. Peck had been waiting impatiently behind the access door to the garage and popped it open when Simonian got out of the car.
“Where in hell have you been?” Peck hissed. He checked the street: almost all the houses were dark. “You were supposed to be here hal
f an hour ago.”
Peck backed into the garage as Simonian walked up to the door. “Shut the goddamn door,” Peck said.
Simonian stepped inside the dimly lit garage, pushed the door shut, and said, “Dark in here. Where are you?”
Thut!
The dart hurt. Simonian looked down at his chest, could make out the syringe sticking out of his shirt, right through the left nipple. “You motherfucker!” he screamed.
The garage was dark, but there was enough ambient light coming in through the back access door that he could see Peck, in his white shirt, crouched behind the hood of the Tahoe. Simonian yanked the syringe out of his chest and threw it on the floor, then lurched down the side of the truck and around the nose. Peck had run down the opposite side, and now stood at the back of the truck, waiting for Simonian to fall down: there was enough sedative in the syringe to knock out an eight-hundred-pound tiger.
Simonian pursued him. They did two laps around the truck before Simonian failed to make a turn and crashed into the outside wall, where Peck had hung some garden tools. He bounced off the wall, fell on the floor. A shovel fell on his head. Peck, afraid that he might be faking, waited for a minute or two, peering over the hood of the car, then reached out, grabbed a rake off the wall, and used the handle to prod Simonian. Simonian didn’t even moan.
Peck moved closer: he could hear the other man breathing. The thought flashed through his mind that maybe he ought to strangle him or hit him with the shovel, but his more rational mind told him that the sedative should be enough.
So he waited: and it was. Six or seven minutes after he shot Simonian, the breathing slowed, slowed, and finally stopped.
—
While he was waiting for Simonian to show up, Peck had worked out a plan to dispose of the body. Not a great plan, but it would have to do. At the back of his garage, he had a half-sized refrigerator that he’d bought for his office, when he had an office. Stripped of the shelves, he thought he could squeeze Simonian into it.
He pulled the refrigerator to the empty garage space. He had an ice chipper leaning against the wall, a six-foot steel rod with a point on one end and a one-inch blade on the other. He used it to punch a dozen holes in the refrigerator: he didn’t want decomposition gas to float it.
—
When he was sure Simonian was dead, he turned on the garage light, dragged the refrigerator around to the back of the Tahoe, and opened the hatch. The refrigerator wouldn’t fit upright, so he laid it on its side, with the door opening down. Then he dragged Simonian around to the back of the truck, removed his iPhone and wallet, and tried to stuff the body into the refrigerator. Didn’t fit. There was space, but like a wrong piece in a jigsaw puzzle, one lump or another always stuck out—either an arm stuck out, or a knee did.
As an actual medical doctor, Peck had never been queasy about other people’s blood. He got a meat cleaver from the kitchen and cut off Simonian’s left arm at the shoulder joint. That took a while, but there really wasn’t much blood because Simonian’s heart wasn’t beating anymore, and what blood there was, he managed to contain on a garbage bag. When the arm came off, still wrapped in a shirt sleeve, he tucked it behind the body, and tried to slam the refrigerator door. Still didn’t fit, though there was empty space inside.
“Goddamnit, these guys . . .” Hamlet remained an uncooperative pain in the ass.
He cut off Simonian’s other arm, and by rearranging all the parts, managed to get the body to fit. The door kept popping open, though, and he wound up using a half roll of duct tape, wrapped around the length of the refrigerator, to keep it shut.
Now for the scary part, he thought. The garage had been private: now he’d be transporting a murdered body on the public roads. If somebody rear-ended him, he’d be spending his life in Stillwater prison.
—
He ran the garage door up, backed the Tahoe out of the driveway past Simonian’s Buick, and began sweating heavily: fear sweat, the worst kind. He drove out to I-94, then east, turned north on I-35, drove precisely at the speed limit to Highway 97, took it east to Highway 95 along the St. Croix River, and turned north again to the Osceola bridge to Wisconsin. He was familiar with the bridge from winter ski trips. There was never much traffic across it, even in daylight hours. At two o’clock in the morning, there was nothing.
Unlike his brother, Hamlet Simonian hadn’t been a large man—probably a hundred and sixty pounds. The refrigerator added fifty or sixty. Normally, it might have killed Peck to lift more than two hundred pounds out of the truck, but all he had to do was swivel it over the railing of the bridge, and let go . . . and he was so pumped with fear and adrenaline that he hardly noticed the weight. He pulled, lifted, turned, and dropped.
He heard it splash and, one minute later, did a U-turn on the bridge and headed back to the Minnesota side. Waited for the blue lights to come up. None did. He allowed himself to begin breathing again.
What he would do, he thought, was drive Simonian’s car to the basement level of a downtown parking garage, where people often left their cars for extended periods. From there, he could take a cab home. By the time Simonian’s car was found, and Hayk Simonian realized his brother was dead, Hayk Simonian would also be dead. No other choice, at this point.
He left the car in the parking garage, threw Simonian’s wallet into a sewer, after taking out $106 and all the IDs. The IDs would go through a shredder and into the garbage.
But the iPhone . . .
Early the next morning, he drove over to a FedEx store and sent the phone to a Jack in the Box in Glendale, California, by FedEx Ground.
And he was done, he thought, with Hamlet Simonian.
12
With the break on Hamlet Simonian, Virgil called Frankie and said he wouldn’t be making it home that night. “Something could happen up here—we’ve got this guy’s face on every TV set in the state.”
“I know, I saw him. Anyway, go ahead and stay,” she said. “Me ’n’ Sparkle and Father Bill and Rolf are playing canasta. You be careful.” Rolf was her oldest son.
“I will. See you tomorrow, probably.” He didn’t mention the afternoon chase with Maxine Knowles and Toby Strait.
Virgil bagged out at the Radisson Hotel at the Mall of America, and a few minutes after midnight, he’d been asleep long enough to be deeply annoyed when his phone rang.
The BCA duty officer: “Landlord over on West Seventh says he’s got a renter who he’s pretty sure is Simonian. He says it’s ninety-nine percent.”
“Jenkins and Shrake still out?” Virgil asked.
“Probably. It’s early for those guys.”
“Roll them over there, if you can find them,” Virgil said. “Call St. Paul, tell them to wake up the judge and get a warrant. I’ll be there in half an hour: give me the address.”
—
Shrake called him twenty minutes later, as Virgil was passing the airport. “Me and Jenkins are over on West Seventh. I hope your suspect is a dirtbag.”
“He shows all the signs,” Virgil said. “Why?”
“His apartment’s above one of those twenty-four-hour car washes. I don’t know how in the hell anybody could sleep up there. No lights on, that I can see. Anyway, it’s the kind of place only a dirtbag would wind up.”
“Where are you guys?”
“Parked on Snelling right at the bottom of the hill. We’re talking to St. Paul, they woke up Van Dyke and got him to sign the warrant, and they got a key from the landlord. They’re sending a car over.”
“Good. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
—
Jenkins and Shrake were sitting in Jenkins’s aging Crown Vic. Virgil drove up the hill, did a U-turn, and pulled in behind them. He crawled into the Crown Vic’s backseat and Shrake said, “Good thing that St. Paul cop isn’t here, he would have ticketed your rural butt for the U-turn.”
“Already been through that today,” Virgil said. He looked through the front window at the car wash. “What do you see over there?”
Jenkins pointed at a line of barred windows above the wash and said, “Nothing. No movement. The plan is, I pull the car into the car wash, which starts the noise up, to cover the approach. Then you and Shrake and Bowers go up the side stairs, kick the door, and bust Simoleon.”
“Simonian,” Virgil said. “A ‘simoleon’ is money, in obsolete British slang.”
“Whatever,” Jenkins said. “If you guys don’t fuck this up, I get a clean car on the company’s nickel and we’re heroes because we bust the tiger thief. If you do fuck it up, I should be available for backup, right after the no-spot rinse.”
“The side stairs are what? Metal? Concrete? Wood?”
“Concrete. We did a quick turnaround in the parking lot to check it out. Everything over there is concrete—it’s one solid concrete-block building. There are two apartments, front and back. He’s in Apartment One, which is at the front.”
The St. Paul cop called a minute later and said he was on his way, the warrant in hand. The landlord, he said, rented the place furnished, by the week, and Simonian had been there for three weeks. He’d told the landlord that his name was Gus Smith. “I mean, hey, somebody’s gotta be named Smith.”
—
Jenkins and Shrake were both large men, in overly sharp suits and nylon neckties. Both had thin webs of scars beneath their eyes, from being punched; both had fluorescent teeth, having had their real teeth knocked out while still young.
“We heard you had some excitement over in New Ulm this afternoon,” Shrake said, as they waited for the cop. “What happened?”
Virgil told them about the chase and the arrest of Maxine Knowles. “There’s gonna be an ocean of paperwork.”
Jenkins said, “Yeah, but at least you had some fun. Nothing good like that ever happens to us anymore. Shrake hasn’t hit anybody since, what, June?”
Shrake was probing his large ceramic teeth with a toothpick, took it out to say, “Don Carmel. Wayzata.”
Escape Clause Page 12