Escape Clause

4

Virgil made a hurried trip from Frankie’s farm back to Mankato, where he lived. He left Honus at the farm, and as he left, the dog stood in the driveway and barked once.

The bark was a familiar one and translated as “asshole!”

Honus stayed with Frankie and her kids when Virgil was out of town, but preferred to hang with Virgil, because Virgil had the best arm and also took him for long lazy walks, and because out in the woods, Virgil would occasionally pee on a tree, like a good dog. Honus was named after Honus Wagner, the shortstop. No grounder ever got past him, although he was occasionally fooled by pop flies.

Since he would be working in the metro area, where BCA officials might see him, Virgil traded his Creaky Boards band T-shirt for a plain black golf shirt, added a sport coat, kept his jeans, and put a quick polish on his cowboy boots. Heeding advice from his departed boss, Lucas Davenport, he got his pistol out of the gun safe in the truck and wore it, though it was uncomfortably heavy.

“Bureaucrats are afraid of guns,” Davenport had told him. “If you wear one, it gives you an edge.”

The zoo was on the south side of the metro area, seventy-five miles away. He made the trip in a comfortable hour: Jon Duncan, his new boss, said it was an emergency, so he went up with flashers and an occasional siren to move the lagging left-lane drivers, because it was not only faster, but also because it was fun.

–

Frankie called as he was headed north: “I got Sparkle and Bill settled in. Bill worries me. He’s too nice and normal for my household. He’s even made friends with Sam.”

“What’d he do, show him how to make dynamite?” Sam was Frankie’s youngest, a fourth grader, the kind of kid who’d eventually jump off the barn roof with a homemade parachute.

“Almost as bad. He showed him how to drive Sparkle’s Mini. Sam was driving it around the yard when Sparkle and I went to see what was going on. Anyway, they’re going to stay. I might spend more than a few nights at your place. Sparkle’s already gotten on my nerves.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, for one thing, you spent an unusual amount of time checking her out in the swimming hole,” Frankie said.

“Hey. A good-looking naked woman jumps in a swimming hole with you, you’re gonna check her out,” Virgil said. “That’s normal, been going on for a million years, and there’s nothing in it.”

“That’s good, because you mess around with Sparkle, you could get yourself stabbed,” Frankie said.

“She carries a knife?”

“No, but I do.”

–

The Minnesota Zoo was in the town of Apple Valley, a bedroom suburb south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Virgil left his 4Runner in a no-parking spot, flipped his “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension-Official Business” card onto the dashboard, and walked down to the main entrance. A pack of kids was playing on a couple of full-sized bronze buffalos at the end of the parking lot and Virgil nodded at a pretty mother, and down the sidewalk, more kids were playing on some bronze wolves and Virgil gave another young mother a nod.

–

Duncan was waiting for him by the admission counter. “Man, am I happy to see you,” he said. Duncan was on the tall side, with neat brown hair, thickly lashed brown eyes, and big teeth. TV cameras liked him and he liked them back. “You even got dressed up. You even got your gun. All right. They’re waiting inside.”

“Who’s they?” Virgil asked.

“Virginia Landseer, the zoo director, she’s the one with gray hair; Robert McCall, the chairman of the board, he’s got the black-rimmed arty glasses; and a couple of other rich people, a maintenance guy, and an Apple Valley investigator,” Duncan said. Duncan had been a fair street cop, but he was happier as a manager. “They were talking about wolf fetuses when I came out to look for you.”

“Will I get any help on this?” Virgil asked.

“I gotta tell you, man, after what happened in Iowa… probably not,” Duncan said, as he led Virgil through an unmarked door to the director’s office. “We’ve about moved everybody in the building over to the fairgrounds. Losing the tigers is bad, losing a presidential candidate would really bum everybody out. Especially if it was one of the liberal ones.”

“Great,” Virgil said. Two hours earlier, he’d been floating in a swimming hole with two good-looking naked blondes and a guy who resembled a bear. Now he was walking through what looked and felt like a bunker. “One administrative question. Why am I doing this, if Apple Valley already has a guy on it? It’s their jurisdiction.”

“Because we think it’s unlikely that this was done by Apple Valley residents or that the tigers are still around here. It’s not really an Apple Valley crime, the way we see it,” Duncan said. “The other thing is, there’s a druggie going around town kicking in back doors. He’s hitting two or three houses a day and he seems to know what he’s doing, because the cops don’t have a clue who it is. People are getting pissed, and the Apple Valley cops are getting a lot of pressure to stop him. They don’t have time for the tigers, if somebody else can do it. And it really is our problem.”

“Okay,” Virgil said. And, “Listen, Jon, I’ll do this for you, but after that thing with the dogs-I don’t want to become the BCA’s designated dogcatcher.”

“These are cats.”

“You know what I mean,” Virgil said.

“I do. And don’t worry about it, we’re not headed in that direction,” Duncan said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You get these cats back and I’ll see that you never do another animal job in your life.”

–

They were walking down a concrete hallway to the director’s office, and Virgil asked, “Anybody got any ideas about how this happened?”

“Lot of ideas, not so much evidence,” Duncan said. “They’ll tell you the details. Their head maintenance guy is in there; he seems to know the most. They found a cleanup guy, a janitor, I guess, though he works outside shoveling shit or something, who heard what might have been a couple shots from a tranquilizer gun in the middle of the night.”

–

They got to the director’s office and Duncan held the door. Virgil stepped inside to find a half-dozen people crowded into an inner office who stopped talking to look at him. Duncan bumped past him and said, “Everybody, this is Virgil Flowers, one of our very best investigators. He’ll want to hear what you-all have to say, and then, well, I’ll let Virgil take it from there.”

–

A gray-haired woman who otherwise looked like she might be in her middle thirties and who had to be Landseer, the director, said, “Welcome,” as she stood to shake hands. She introduced McCall, the board chairman, with the arty black-rimmed glasses, and two other board members, Nancy Farelly and Gina Larimore, and Dan Best, the head of maintenance, and Andy White, the Apple Valley cop.

Larimore said to Virgil, “You’re the man who broke that illegal dognapping ring down on the Mississippi.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.

“That’s a worthwhile credential,” she said. “We are desperate to get our tigers back. How long do you think it’ll take?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Anything between this afternoon and never, depending on what the thieves have done with them. If they put them in the back of a truck and are halfway to California… it could be tough.”

“Don’t say never, don’t say that,” McCall said. He was a red-faced man in a suit and dress shirt, with a two-tone blue and white collar. “We’ve got to find them, and we have to be quick about it. I know that puts pressure on you, but we can only think of three reasons for somebody to steal them.”

“Which are?” Duncan had pulled a plastic chair into the office from the outer room, and Virgil took it and sat down.

“One, it’s an anti-zoo nut,” McCall said. “Those people are mostly talk, as unpleasant as they can be. Two, it could be somebody who deals in live exotic animals-there’s a lot of that down in Texas and owning tigers is more common than you’d think. There might be five thousand privately owned tigers in the U.S. And three, and this is the worst possibility, it’s somebody who wants to sell the tiger… parts… to be used in traditional Asian medicine. Almost all the parts are used in one form or another. That would involve killing the tigers, of course.”

“Don’t say that, Bob,” said Farelly. Tears rolled down her face and she wiped them away with a tissue. “I can’t stand even to hear that.”

“We all know it’s true enough,” McCall said, scanning the other faces in the room. To Virgil: “Here’s the thing: of the three possibilities, I’m afraid the medicine thing is the most likely. If it was exotic animal dealers, well, you can get tigers relatively cheap. You don’t need to steal them and take a chance on going to prison. Anti-zoo people probably wouldn’t go after tigers; they’d take something easier.”

“Not if they wanted to make a spectacular point,” Larimore said.

“If that’s what it is, they’ll have to go public, and we’ll get them back-and we haven’t heard a word from those people,” McCall said. “The tiger’s real value-they’re Amur tigers, and they’re rare in the wild-would be as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. They’re DNA certified as real Amurs, of course, since they were here in the zoo. If you wanted that kind of medicine, they’d be all you could ask for. As medicine, they’d be worth a lot.”

“How much?” Virgil asked.

McCall said, “All I know about that market is what I looked up on the Internet, and I have no idea of the accuracy of the estimate. The Amurs are highly valued in China and they’re on the endangered species list. Depends on your connections with the market, but two healthy certified Amurs could bring, as parts, maybe… a quarter million. That’s what I get from the Internet, anyway.”

“There’s a motive,” Duncan said.

“If that’s who’s got them, then they’re already dead or will be soon,” McCall said, turning his eyes to Virgil. “That’s why you’ve got to find them fast.”

–

Has the media been here?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, yes,” Landseer said. “We did a press conference at one o’clock, but I have several requests for further interviews at four this afternoon. We’ll have to do it. They’re really the taxpayers’ animals.”

Virgil looked over at Duncan and asked, “Jon, do you know Dave the Rotten Bastard up in the attorney general’s office?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Why don’t you call him and find out the highest possible level of criminal offense he could charge with this case, and the longest possible prison term.” Virgil asked. “Then when Miz Landseer has her press conference, maybe you could step up and talk about all that.”

“What good will that do?” asked Best, the maintenance man.

“I’m hoping that it’ll scare the heck out of the thieves,” Virgil said. “Dave is a smart guy and he’ll know exactly what we want. He’ll come up with a list of crimes you won’t believe. Something like thirty years in prison, if they’re convicted. With any luck, the perpetrators will give the cats up or tell us where they’re at. If they’re planning to kill them, maybe they won’t do that.”

“That’s good-that’s very good,” McCall said. “First good thing I’ve heard. Can we get that set up in time for the press conference?”

“I can set it up in ten minutes,” Duncan said. He would not be unhappy to be on TV.

Best asked Virgil, “Why’s the guy called the Rotten Bastard?”

Virgil said, “When he was a prosecutor in St. Paul, he had a ten-year-old crack runner shoot and kill a twelve-year-old. Dave tried to get the ten-year-old certified for trial as an adult.”

“Gosh, that is a rotten bastard,” Farelly said.

Duncan asked Virgil, “What else do you need, right now?”

Virgil looked around at the group and said, “I need to know what you think. You’re all familiar with this place. How’d they do this? Did they need special equipment to get in? Did they need night vision gear, for instance? Did they have to saw through any steel bars that would require special equipment? Somebody mentioned a tranquilizer gun… Where would they get one of those? Do you have any video cameras?”

Best, the maintenance supervisor, said, “I can answer most of that.”

“Good,” Virgil said. “Let’s talk.”

–

A maintenance worker had noticed that the tigers were missing at eight-thirty that morning, shortly before the zoo was due to open. The tigers hadn’t been missed before that because they’d spent the night in their outdoor containment-an area roomy enough that not all of it could be seen from any one place-rather than the usual indoor night containment. “I guess everybody who might have seen them thought they were on the other side,” said Best.

The maintenance worker had been dragging a broken food pallet around to a Dumpster when he noticed what seemed to be a fault in a chain-link fence. When he looked closer, he found that it had been cut through. He investigated further and found another hole cut in the fence around the tiger compound.

The man told one of the animal handlers, who checked the tiger compound and found that the animals were missing. “He was like, ‘Shit! Where are the tigers?’ He was totally freaked out, he was worried somebody had freed them, and they were running around loose.”

They called the Apple Valley cops, who’d called the local schools and had them locked down, and then had run a sweep through the area, looking for the cats. When they didn’t find them, they’d called the BCA.

–

White, the Apple Valley cop, said, “When we decided they’d been stolen, been taken, we figured the thieves had to come in from the parking lot. There’s a surveillance camera out there, but nobody monitoring it overnight. The camera spools to a hard drive, with a monthlong cache. We took a look at last night’s recording, and whoever did it knew where the camera was-it’s mounted on a light pole-and they climbed the pole from behind the camera and sprayed some paint onto the lens.”

Virgil: “You’re saying at least one of them came in on foot, messed up the camera, and then they brought in a truck or a van?”

White and Best glanced at each other, and Best shrugged, and White said, “No, that’s not what we think, not quite. I don’t know why they messed with that camera, but they did, at 1:08 in the morning. The thing is, there’s another camera that looks out on the entrance-there’s only one entrance-and they might not have known about it, because it’s not easy to see. Anyway, they didn’t mess with that one, and no cars or trucks came or went between eleven o’clock and the morning shift change.”

“You’re saying the truck was probably already here, maybe came in during a shift change, and then they waited until there was another change?” Virgil asked.

“Don’t know,” White said, shaking his head. “That seems really… not right. I really don’t know what they did. Anyway, they were here, and they probably walked up a service road, where they came to a barred gate. They needed a key to get through that. When we looked this morning, we found that it was open, unlocked, but not damaged.”

“Then there’s an insider, somewhere along the way,” Virgil said. “If the insider arrived in his truck, took out the camera…”

“They figured that out even before I got here,” White said. “There aren’t many people on the overnight and we’ve been checking them all day. They’re all accounted for. Most of them walked out to their cars with friends, and you’re not going to get two tigers in a Hyundai. We could eliminate most of the cars by looking at them. There were four trucks and we’ve been all over those, and I gotta say, they don’t look connected with this.”

White explained that three of the four trucks had open beds, and that the video camera at the front gate was mounted high enough that they could see the truck beds were empty. The fourth truck had a camper.

“I’ve talked to that guy, and I don’t think he had anything to do with it. He’s an electrician who was here to work on some lights. He showed me his truck, the back’s all built out with tools and parts and supplies. You might be able to get a tiger or two in there, if you stacked them up, but it wouldn’t be a sure thing, and it wouldn’t be an easy job. Anyway, he doesn’t seem right. Besides, he was working all night where people could see him.”

Everybody nodded, and Landseer said, “We hate to think that there was an insider involved, but if somebody unlocked that gate, there doesn’t seem to be any other possibility.”

“Well, there are, but an insider seems like the best bet,” Virgil said. “Are the keys controlled? Or are they all over the place?”

“A limited number of people have them… but there have been copies along the way, when keys got lost, so we don’t know exactly how many there really are,” Landseer said. “We know there are eight authorized keys, six people plus two spares. Unfortunately, the spares are kept where any number of people could access them. Both of them are still on their hook-I checked. If somebody took one of the spares and copied it and returned the original… we wouldn’t know it.”

–

Huh,” Virgil said. And back to Best: “Jon told me that one of your guys heard something that might have been a tranquilizer gun last night. Is that right?”

“Yeah. Joel Charvin. He’s a cleanup guy working the overnight. He was on the other side of the zoo and a tranquilizer gun isn’t loud. They’re gas-operated, so they don’t make much noise at all. Kind of a boo! sound. Nothing like a shot.”

“Like a pellet gun,” Virgil suggested.

Best nodded: “Like that. Loud as a hand clap, maybe, but not as sharp as a shot from a regular gun.”

“Does this Charvin guy know what a tranquilizer gun sounds like?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, he does. We use them from time to time,” Best said. “He doesn’t do it, but he knows what they sound like. He was on the far side of the zoo when he heard the noises, the shots. He didn’t identify them at the time as coming from a tranquilizer gun. He didn’t see anything, so he went on cleaning up.”

Virgil said, “Okay. So a couple guys cut their way through fences, shoot the tigers with a tranquilizer gun. Would they need night vision gear for that? Or is there enough ambient light?”

“Probably enough light,” Best said. “I don’t know-it can get dark in some of the corners. You sure as hell wouldn’t want to get in the cages with the tigers before you knew they were asleep.”

“Then what? They carry them out? How much does a tiger weigh?”

“A lot,” Landseer said. “Artur, that’s the male, was six hundred and forty-eight pounds at his last weigh-in. Katya, the female, was three hundred and eighty pounds.”

Virgil held up a finger. “Wait. That’s more than a thousand pounds altogether. A half ton. If they’re that heavy, they’d need some kind of mechanized equipment to get them out. Even if they had four people, they’d be humping more than a hundred and fifty pounds each, to get the male cat out. That doesn’t seem realistic.”

“I asked about that and nobody heard anything mechanized,” White said. “The holes in the fence aren’t that big. There were fourteen people here on duty at the time, nobody heard anything unusual.”

“How many were out in the area of the tiger exhibit?” Virgil asked.

“Twelve of the people are basically cleanup and maintenance; two of them are security guards and the guards circulate. They don’t have any set routes, but they cover the whole zoo a few times a night.”

“Why didn’t they see the cut fences?” Duncan asked.

“Not that easy to see, in the dark,” McCall said. “I’m not defending the guys, that’s the fact of the matter. You can go out and look for yourself.”

“I already did,” White said, “and Mr. McCall is correct. It’s hard to see.”

“I’ll take a look,” Virgil said. “The big question is, how did they move the tranquilized cats? We have to figure out how and where they took the cats out of the zoo. This place is surrounded by houses, maybe somebody has a security camera.”

Duncan said to Virgil, “The crime-scene guys have been up at that Minnetonka home invasion, but they were due back this afternoon. I’ll check with Bea, see when she can get over here.”

Virgil asked, “Does anybody know if tranquilizer guns have to be registered? Or do you need any kind of prescription or whatever for the darts? I assume the things are dangerous… you wouldn’t want somebody shooting a human being.”

“No, you wouldn’t. The dose that would put Artur to sleep would kill a human,” Best said. “The rest of it, you’d have to ask one of our vets.”

“I’d like to get one of the vets to check your stock of darts and see if they’re all accounted for,” Virgil told Landseer.

She nodded: “I’ll do that right now.”

“One more question-this might sound stupid. Is it possible that the tigers are still here in the zoo, in some unused cage or den, and the thieves plan to take them out later? I mean, if they don’t seem to have gone through the only exit…?”

Everyone sat up, looked at each other and then the director, and Landseer said, “My goodness, nobody ever asked that question. I will have the zoo searched immediately. There are a few places where they could be kept. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? To find them here?”

“Might want to tell your searchers to be careful,” Duncan said. “Wouldn’t want to unexpectedly walk in on a couple of hungry tigers.”

–

Virgil turned to Best: “Could you show me around? I’d like to talk to the guy who heard the shots last night.”

“Joel Charvin. I’ve got him standing by, and Bob Moreno, he’s the one who spotted the cut fences.”

“Let’s go,” Virgil said.

“You gotta hurry,” McCall said. “Those tigers are in a world of trouble.”