Escape Clause

5

Virgil and Best found Charvin and Moreno in a break room.

Charvin, a short thin man who looked like he might lift weights, didn’t have much to contribute, except the time frame: “I think it was right around one-thirty. I was collecting trash, and I heard the sounds, these pap pap pap sounds. I was on the other side of the zoo and I looked over toward where the sounds came from, that’s off to the west. The moon was going down, the bottom of the moon was touching the horizon. You should be able to check the time from that.”

“I was told these guns are fairly quiet… but you could hear them on the other side of the zoo?” Virgil asked.

“Sort of. I didn’t know what they were, never even thought they might be a tranquilizer gun,” Charvin said. “They were just… different sounds than what I usually hear at night. Could have been somebody doing a golf clap, like clap clap clap.”

“Three times, not two?” Virgil asked.

Charvin thought for a moment, his eyes half shut, then said, “Yeah. Three. Clap clap clap. There was some time between the sounds… maybe a minute.”

“Okay, good,” Virgil said. “Anything else?”

“Nope. I was working on the other side of the zoo, like I said, and didn’t hear anything more. There’s houses on the other side of the zoo fence and McAndrews Road is over there to the south, so there’s always some noise. I didn’t think any more about it until we found out the tigers were gone.”

They talked for a couple of more minutes, then Virgil let Charvin go, and he, Best, and Moreno walked around the animal containment areas to the edge of the tiger exhibit. A chain-link fence kept people on the path, and the tiger area itself was enclosed by a heavy black chain-link fence that Virgil estimated to be fifteen to twenty feet high.

Virgil didn’t immediately see the cut in the first fence, until Moreno pointed it out. Whoever had cut the fence had cut from the bottom up, a hole three and a half feet wide and two feet high, with the wires on the left edge left uncut so the fence could be swung open like a door.

When they left, the thieves had pushed the fence back in place and had fixed it there by taping some of the cut ends with narrow strips of silver duct tape, which were hard to see even if you knew what you were looking for.

“Anybody would miss that in the dark. Can’t blame the security guys,” Virgil said.

Best said, “They cut the hole in the tiger cage right over there.”

All three of them clambered over the pathway fence and walked to the tiger enclosure. They found the same shape hole cut in the tiger fence, but the cut ends were taped together with black duct tape.

“Somebody thought about this a lot; there was serious planning going on,” Virgil said. He got down on his hands and knees and examined the grass next to the cut, then looked up at Moreno and Best. “Take a look at this. Tell me what you see.”

The two men got down on their hands and knees and scrutinized the grass near the cut. Moreno spoke first. “There’s a line. You can barely see it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Best said. “I see it. It’s straight. Not a shoe print.”

“I think it’s a wheel,” Virgil said.

“They took them out of here on a dolly,” Moreno said.

“I think so. Keep people away from here, especially the grass. Our crime-scene people will want to take a look.” Virgil looked into the cage and asked, “Anything in there now?”

Best shook his head: “No.”

Virgil grabbed the fence and carefully pulled it free of the tape splices, not touching the tape. He told the other two not to touch it and to be careful where they put their hands, knees, and feet, and all three of them crawled into the tiger enclosure. The enclosure was a pleasant piece of rolling ground, well treed, with a small pond, but not a tiger jungle, Virgil thought. He wondered if the tigers knew the difference.

He looked at the pond and asked, “Tigers swim?”

“Yeah, they do. They’re not like house cats,” Best said.

Virgil led the way to the highest point and motioned back to the cut fence. “The tigers had to be between here and the fence; couldn’t see them from anywhere else. Which makes me wonder, how did they know the tigers would be up here?”

“I was talking to one of the keepers, not today, but a while ago, and he said tigers like to hang slightly below the top of a hill, where they’re not silhouetted, but they’re up high,” Best said. “From there, they can see and hear everything, but they’re hard to see themselves. An insider would probably know where they hung out.”

Moreno: “Only an insider would know that we were letting them stay outside on hot nights.”

They looked around a hillside, and Virgil had just said, “Okay, let’s go…” when Moreno said, “Look at this.”

He was pointing at the bottom of a tree at the top of the hill. Virgil went to look and saw a pencil-shaped dart with a furry red tail. “Dart.”

“Must have missed once,” Best said. “That’s why Charvin heard three shots.”

“Could be fingerprints,” Virgil said. “We’ll leave it for the crime-scene guys.”

–

They eased back through the hole in the tiger fence and climbed back over the pathway fence, careful not to touch the grooves that might have been made by a dolly or wagon. From the hole in the pathway fence, Best said, the animals were carried, or rolled, along a service road to a metal gate, where the key was used. Virgil looked at the lock and agreed that it must have been a key. “Doesn’t look like it was picked. Not a scratch on it.”

“That’s what Officer White thinks,” Moreno said.

From the gate, Best said, the tigers were probably taken out to the parking lot-they could see the lot from where they were. Virgil studied it for a while, then said, “The parking lot is the obvious spot, but what are the other options? Say they’ve got the tigers on a dolly and they’re moving them through the gate… and they want to stay on a hard surface.”

“How would they get them out from there?” Best asked. “That second camera is way out by the only entrance and nobody went in or out.”

“Once they had the tigers on a dolly, or maybe a couple of dollies, moving them wouldn’t be that hard,” Virgil said. “Where could they move them where the camera wouldn’t see them?”

Best scratched his head, then said, “Well, they could take them behind the service buildings. There’s a perimeter road over there that backs up to a regular street…”

“There’s a fence around all of it, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go look,” Virgil said.

The three of them hiked over to the far edge of the parking lot, and Moreno pointed out the adjoining street, through a screen of trees and brush. They walked along the perimeter fence, and a hundred yards up, Virgil saw the tape used to put the chain-link fence back together: “There.”

“Kiss my ass,” Best said. He looked back toward the zoo buildings: “They killed that camera because they were afraid it could see out here. Even if they didn’t come in with a truck, they were afraid that it might pick them up.”

“What happened was, they wanted the shortest line to get out of the tiger enclosure to a hard surface, which is why they had to get through that locked gate,” Virgil said, as they looked back along the line of flight. “Once they were on the road, with a tiger on a dolly, they could roll it without working too hard. Then they needed to get to a place where it was the shortest distance to their vehicle.”

–

They crawled through the hole in the perimeter fence, which led them into the backyard of a house. They trooped through the yard and around to the front, where they found a “For Sale” sign.

Virgil went to the front door, rang the doorbell, got no response, pounded on the door, then tramped through a flower bed and looked through a front window. “It’s staged,” he told the others. “I don’t think there’s anybody living here. Let’s go around back again.”

The house had a double garage, with a door leading into the backyard. The edge of the door was cracked, with a thin line of raw wood showing around the lock where somebody had used a tool to force the door. When Virgil placed his fingers against the top of the door and pushed, the door popped open. The garage was empty, but in the center of it, they saw a small dark splotch on the concrete.

“That could be blood,” Virgil said, squatting down to look at it. He’d seen blood on concrete any number of times. “Let’s move out of here without messing anything up… Stay away from the line between the door and the fence; we’ll see if we can spot any more wheel marks.”

It took a while, but they did.

“Now we know how they did it,” Moreno said, looking back at the fence line. “They loaded the cats on dollies, rolled them out of the exhibit, across the road, down here to the garage, where they probably had a truck waiting. Could even have a truck with a lift, like a moving truck.”

“They had to have scouted out the house ahead of time,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to the neighbors, see if anybody noticed any strange trucks or vans… or a truck going in the garage when it shouldn’t have been.”

“I bet your crime-scene people will be able to make something out of this,” Best said.

“I bet they won’t,” Virgil replied.

Best tipped his head: “They won’t?”

“Probably not. They’re good at collecting evidence, if there is any, but that’s usually most useful in a trial, or maybe in a real long investigation where you’re looking at hundreds of possibilities and you’re trying to eliminate some of them,” Virgil said. “But, you know, you find dolly-wheel marks-how many people have dollies in their garages? You find Nike-patterned shoe prints-how many people wear Nikes? That’s not really determinative evidence. This was well-enough planned that I don’t think we’re going to find a whole bunch of fingerprints. We might, but I doubt it.”

“How about the blood?” Best asked. “DNA…”

“DNA’s great, but that could be tiger blood, if it’s blood at all. Then if it’s human, and you really push on a critical need-to-know-right-now basis and get priority DNA examination, it’ll take you three days to get results. That’s chemistry, not bureaucracy,” Virgil said. “If it’s human blood and if the blood happens to be in the criminal database, then that’s good. But three days for processing… The way the people back in the office were talking, we might not have three days.”

“Jesus, I love those tigers,” Moreno said. He was wearing a blue LA Dodgers hat, but took it off and curled the bill in his hands. “If somebody turns them into hairballs for some Chinese hairball, I’ll shoot them myself.”

“Let’s get back,” Virgil said. “We need to get Crime Scene down here, and I need to start calling people.”

–

Crime Scene was on the way and Virgil, back at the zoo headquarters, sent them straight to the house outside the fence. He told Beatrice Sawyer, the head Crime Scene tech, about the spot of blood and the splintered door and the tape on the fences, the tracks in the dirt and the dart that waited in the tiger enclosure. “Anything you can get will help,” he said. “I have nothing that points in any particular direction.”

Then he called the real estate agent who’d listed the house for sale, told him that it had been broken into, warned him not to go into it, but asked him to meet in the driveway in an hour. The agent said he would be there: “The owners are in Moorhead-they relocated there. You want them to come back?”

“If they have any idea at all of who might know about their house… yeah, I’d like to talk to them,” Virgil said.

“I’ll call them,” the agent said.

–

Virgil called the Apple Valley police, talked to the chief, told him about the break-in at the house where the tigers had been taken, and asked him to send a couple of cops around. “Tell them to stay out of the house-the crime-scene guys are on their way. The media’s going to hear about it and we need to keep them backed off.”

“We can do that,” the chief said.

–

He took a call from Lucas Davenport, who’d been Virgil’s boss at the BCA before he got pissed off and quit. “Del called and told me they put you on this tiger hunt, and that some people think the thieves are going to kill the tigers to make Chinese medicine. That right?”

“Yeah, I’m out at the zoo now, trying to figure it out,” Virgil said. “Everybody else is protecting the state fair from the Purdys. The fact that the Purdys are dead doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

“Listen, when that Black Hole case was going on a couple years back, I interviewed a guy named Toby Strait. He lives down I-35. He sells black bear gallbladders to the Chinese. He’s right on the line between legal and illegal most of the time, and I know damn well he handles illegally shot bears during the hunting season. I don’t know that he’d handle tigers, but he might. If he doesn’t, he might know who would.”

“Lucas: I gotta talk to that guy. You got a location?”

“No, we’re up north right now, I’m working on my cabin,” Davenport said. “His phone isn’t listed anywhere, either. He keeps changing them, buying burners. I’ll be back home tomorrow and I’ll fire up my database and get a number to you.”

“Nobody has access to the database down here?”

“No. It’s on a hard drive at my house and it’s encrypted,” Davenport said.

“Get back to me as soon as you can,” Virgil said. “If people are right about the medicine thing, these guys will kill the tigers. Might already have done it, and if they haven’t, they’ll do it soon.”

“I’d go back tonight and look it up, but by the time I got home, it’d be too late to do anything,” Davenport said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

–

At zoo headquarters, the media had shown up in their vans and were setting up for the press conference. Virgil hung back, but watched Landseer, the zoo director, go through the routine-there was no information on the tigers, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was all over the case, they hoped to have the tigers back soon, etc.

Duncan took his turn under the lights, said that the attorney general had promised to prosecute the thieves to the fullest extent of the law. Duncan read a list of felonies that the perpetrators had already committed and said that upon conviction, those crimes would lead to thirty-six years in prison.

He added that since there was no market for tiger parts in Minnesota, interstate commerce was probably involved in the theft, and that Amur tigers were on the federal endangered species list. Those were federal offenses, and the FBI was sending agents to help with the case and federal charges were pending.

Landseer finished by saying, “I appeal to the people who have these animals: for the sake of the tigers and for your own sake, tell us where they are. Return them to us. If you do not, I believe you will spend the rest of your lives regretting your crime.”

Not bad, Virgil thought.

Landseer and Duncan had barely finished their statements when the TV people started tearing down lights and hurrying back to their vans, not typical behavior, in Virgil’s experience; they usually asked questions so each reporter could get his or her face on screen.

He wandered over to a cameraman he knew and asked, “What’s the rush?”

“We’re going to a crime-scene house around the block,” the cameraman said. “You wanna be on TV, I’m sure the talent would be happy to have you.”

“Nah.”

He walked back to the house where the tigers had been taken: Beatrice Sawyer was there with the BCA crime-scene truck. The neighbors, Virgil thought, had spotted the truck and had called the TV stations. The vans were setting up a block down the street, held back by two Apple Valley cops.

Sawyer was around at the back of the house, looking at the door. “Where did all the TV come from?” she asked.

“Press conference at the zoo-the zoo’s on the other side of the fence.”

She looked down the street at the truck, then back to Virgil. “Glad I’m not Virgil,” she said.

–

Neighborhood rubberneckers were out in force, standing on their lawns, watching the crime-scene crew moving back and forth between the van and the house. The real estate agent, whose name was Vance and who was too old and balding for his gelled hair, showed up, towed through the police lines by one of the Apple Valley cops.

Three couples had looked at the house over the past two months, he said, and he would find it hard to believe that any of them were involved in the tiger theft. “They’re all middle-aged, middle-income, pre-approved people, FICO scores in the seven and eight hundreds,” he said. “We did have an open house two weeks ago, and maybe fifteen people came, but we didn’t take names on those.”

Vance didn’t have much more. Virgil took his card and turned him over to an Apple Valley cop to escort outside the blocked-off area. He was inside the garage talking to Sawyer about the spot on the concrete, which she also thought was blood, when the cop came back with a kid.

“Kid needs to talk to you,” the cop said.

“What’s up?” Virgil asked.

The boy was maybe sixteen or seventeen, thin, had been through a couple of episodes of acne, and was carrying a skateboard. He looked at Bea, then back to Virgil, and said, “Uh, this is kinda private.”

Virgil said, “All right, let’s go outside.”

They walked around to the side of the garage and the kid said, “You can’t tell any of the people this… the neighbors.”

“Well, whattaya got?” Virgil asked.

“Last night I was up at my girlfriend’s house…” The kid nodded up the street. “We were, you know, up in her bedroom, fooling around. Her parents were down in Missouri taking her sister to college, and they weren’t supposed to get home until today. They got home last night instead. Like really late.”

“Caught you,” Virgil said.

“Nah… It sounds stupid, but I went out her window and snuck through some backyards before I went out to the street. When I went out, I saw a van coming out of this garage.”

“What kind of a van?” Virgil asked.

“A white one. Like a panel van, like bands have, with those white windows that you can’t see inside of. Pretty big van, but it could get in the garage, even with the door down. When I saw the door coming up, I kinda hid, I thought it was the Schmidts coming out and I didn’t want them to see me. They don’t like me ’cause I’m a skater, and they’re kinda narcs, you know? They’re friends with my girlfriend’s parents and they’d rat me out. They’d know where I was coming from.”

Virgil had learned from Vance, the real estate agent, that the owners of the house were named Schmidt. “You know what time this was?”

“I called my girlfriend when I got home to tell her that everything was chill and to find out if everything was chill with her. I saw on my phone that it was a little after two o’clock.”

They talked about the van some more. The kid wasn’t sure about it, but thought the van might be a Chevrolet. “I don’t know why I think that, but I do,” he said. The kid had one additional interesting fact: when the van came out of the garage, the garage door light didn’t go on. Lights always come on when a garage door goes up or down, he said.

They walked around the corner of the garage and Virgil looked up at the door-lift mechanism, which showed a white plastic cover over what should be a lightbulb. He hit the wall switch and the garage door started down, but the light didn’t come on. He stopped the door and ran it back up. Still no light. Bea Sawyer had watched him do that and said, “Somebody unscrewed the bulb?”

“I think so,” Virgil said.

“We’ll check the whole thing,” she said. “That’s a good find.”

–

Virgil and the teenager went back outside, where Virgil slapped the kid on the back and said, “You did really good. You’ve got a sharp eye and some balls to come over and tell me this. Maybe you oughta be a cop.”

The kid brightened. “You think?”

“Why not? Take a test or something, see if you got the aptitude. Talk to your school counselor, see what he thinks,” Virgil said.

“That guy’s a dick,” the kid said. “He already told me I’ll be washing dishes the rest of my life.”

“Fuck him,” Virgil said. “I hate people who tell kids things like that. You do the best you can and forget about him.”

“Okay… but listen, don’t tell anybody about, you know, sneaking out of my girlfriend’s house.”

“You’re good with me,” Virgil said.

–

When the kid was gone, escorted back through the police lines by the Apple Valley cops, Virgil called Duncan, who was caught in traffic halfway back to St. Paul. “We’re looking for a white van, blocked-out white windows, larger than standard, maybe a Chevy, no other information. The thieves could have had their own, but we need to get Sandy calling all the local rental places.”

“I’ll talk to her when I get back, if I ever get back,” Duncan said. “Sounds like you’re rolling.”

“Got lucky,” Virgil said. “From here on out, it’s gonna get harder.”

He hung up and from behind him, Bea, who was standing on a stepladder squinting at the lightbulb in the garage door lift mechanism, said, “Hey: we got some prints.”

“Really,” Virgil said. He was interested, but not excited. “I got two bucks says they’ve got nothing to do with this.”

–

As the afternoon, then evening, wore on, Virgil walked around to all the houses on the block, introducing himself and asking about the white van, and about possible security cameras. The neighbors were cooperative, but he got nothing but the aerobic exercise.

The Apple Valley chief stopped by, found Virgil, and when Virgil told him what he was doing, offered to send a few more cops around to the nearby blocks asking the same question. Virgil took him up on it, and a half hour later, cops were interrogating people across a five-block range.

The neighborhood was intensely residential, though, and except for one insomniac who had seen a late-night white van in the neighborhood-right time, right place, but not as much information as the kid had provided-there were no surveillance cameras of the kind found on convenience stores and gas stations. None of the three churches in the neighborhood or the elementary school had cameras looking out at the street.

The crime-scene crew had finished with the garage. Bea had gotten good prints off the lightbulb and had sent digital copies to BCA headquarters, to be relayed to the FBI, and she confirmed the spot on the floor was blood, species unknown. The crew was now working along the route that the tiger thieves had taken across the zoo property, looking for anything else that might help.

Virgil walked back to Landseer’s office to watch the press conference on the evening news. He and Landseer stood together in front of the TV, and Landseer said, “We’re not missing any tranquilizer darts. They’re all accounted for, and they all have International Orange tails, not red.”

“Okay.”

The news came up, and a reporter named Daisy Jones, whom Virgil considered a possible sexual refuge if all else failed, and whom he suspected of classifying him in the same way, did a quick rundown of the investigation so far and a follow-up interview with Jon Duncan.

Duncan was smooth on camera and stacked up the threats of long prison sentences and remorseless investigation. “We will get the cats back, and we will send these jokers to prison.”

When she was done with Duncan, Jones turned back to the camera and said, “Duncan tells us that the BCA’s top investigator, Virgil Flowers, has been assigned to the tiger recovery. Flowers has been involved in a number of high-profile cases that have resulted in major convictions. Duncan said that he thought the result here would be the same-that Flowers would get the tigers back to the zoo and send the thieves to long terms at Stillwater prison.”

Landseer, who was watching the show with Virgil, said, “That’s very flattering. I’m glad to have you on the case.”

Virgil said, “Daisy never flatters without a motive. I expect she’ll be calling me in the next five minutes.”

–

He took a call a few minutes later, not from Daisy Jones, but from Frankie.

“I wasn’t kidding about sleeping over and I’m not going to wreck my back on your crappy old mattress. And I’ve had baby mattresses that smelled better. Anyway, I’m down at Slumberland and I’m buying us a new one. The question is, California king or eastern king?”

“What’s the difference?”

“California is a little longer but a little narrower,” Frankie said. “I’m thinking we go that way, because I don’t take up much space and you need the length.”

“Let’s do that, then. Will it fit in my bedroom?”

“I measured. If you get back tonight, we can give it a test drive,” she said.

“You can get it tonight?”

“I can get it in twenty minutes,” she said.

“Well… see you tonight. Before you buy it, though, talk to the manager,” Virgil, said. “Make sure it can take a vicious pounding.”

“I’ll be sure to ask,” she said.

–

Virgil got off the phone, now distracted: somehow, buying a bed with his girlfriend felt like an important step. There were, he suspected, extensive implications to the purchase, about which most women could have long consultations in coffee shops. He shuddered and called Jon Duncan.

“I’m going home,” Virgil said. “I’ll be back early tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you crash in a motel?”

“I don’t have my stuff,” Virgil said. “I left in a rush and it’s less than an hour from here anyway. I can be back before anybody wakes up tomorrow. I’ve got some household chores to do and I’ll pack up a bag in the morning.”

“Hate household chores,” Duncan said. “Two days later, you gotta do it all over again.”

“I hear you, brother,” Virgil said.

–

Later that night, a sweaty Frankie said, “Let’s do that all over again.”

“Gotta get up early,” Virgil said.

“Not before you finish the household chores,” she said.

He was about to finish the chores when an image popped up in his mind, a tall, broad-shouldered, naked blonde about to dive into the swimming hole.

Sparkle? That you?