“All right. Sparkle and Bill are over at the Castro factory,” Frankie said. “Probably right now. They want to talk to workers going through the gate.”
“You worried?”
“Yep. Me and Sparkle don’t see eye to eye, but I don’t want her to get hurt. Bill should give her some protection. I don’t think they’d beat up anybody with a witness around… would they?”
“I don’t know that they’d beat up anybody at all,” Virgil said. “Most companies will beat you up with lawyers and PR ladies, not with goons. Not anymore.”
“Well, this is old man Castro we’re talking about. He’s a throwback to the bad old days,” Frankie said.
“You’re sure Bill will be there?”
“Yeah, he speaks good Spanish, if Sparkle needs an interpreter.”
“Tell you what-I’ll swing by there, talk with them,” Virgil said. “If the company people see me around, maybe they’ll think twice.”
–
Virgil was on the highway at eight o’clock, listening to radio news programs out of the Twin Cities. The tigers were the first item.
“… the longer the tigers are missing, the more likely the outcome is to be tragic, according to experts on zoo thefts. We’re speaking to Dr. Randolph Bern of the American Association of Zoological Gardens. Good morning, Dr. Bern…”
Virgil didn’t think too much about the media, except to exploit them when he needed to. The media was like rain: when it was falling on your head, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Unless, of course, you were a bureaucrat, in which case you ran around in circles and threw your hands in the air and prepared statements, none of which accomplished anything.
Dr. Bern told him nothing he needed to know, so he switched to a country station and listened to Terry Allen sing “Bottom of the World,” a song he didn’t hear often enough. On the way north, he detoured off Highway 169 through Le Sueur, threaded his way across town and out into the countryside, where the Castro factory poked up like a brick thumb.
Virgil turned into the dusty parking lot and saw Father Bill leaning against the hood of Sparkle’s Mini Cooper Clubman, smoking a cigar. Virgil pulled up next to him and got out.
“Virgil,” Bill said, with his square-toothed Hemingway grin. “You look different with your clothes on.”
“Bilclass="underline" Where’s Sparkle?”
“She’s inside. Some factory… functionary… came out and asked her what she was doing, talking to people,” Bill said. “She told him, and they invited her inside to talk to the manager. I wasn’t invited.”
“She okay?”
“I hope so. She does tend to bite off more than she can chew,” Bill said.
Virgil looked at the factory, which resembled something he imagined a medieval madhouse might look like, dirty-white window frames scattered around a four-story dark brick wall, with massive chimneys belching steam into the summer air.
Down at the far end of the building, trucks were unloading produce across receiving docks, and the odor of hot pickle and rotten vegetables mixed with truck diesel fumes and the smell of the corn maturing in the surrounding fields: altogether, the familiar and not entirely pleasant perfume of industrial agriculture. The smoke from Bill’s cigar didn’t help.
“Hostile place,” he said.
“The people going in looked pretty tough-beat-up, tired. Lots of illegals, I think,” Bill said. “Mostly women, here at the factory. Most of them weren’t interested in talking to us. The ones that did said that everything was just fine. Sparkle thought maybe I should wear my collar out here, but I wasn’t comfortable doing that. Not without thinking about it for a while.”
“People look scared at all?” Virgil asked.
“No, no. They looked tired, more than anything.”
“Huh.” They stood and looked at the factory for another minute, then Virgil gave Bill a business card with his private cell number on it, and said, “If there’s any kind of trouble, call me.”
“I will. I’ve got to be to work by four o’clock, so I’ve got to be out of here before the first shift ends. I think Sparkle will be coming back alone this afternoon,” Bill said. He blew smoke, then added, “I don’t think there’ll be any trouble here, at the plant. If they give her any trouble, it’ll be away from here.”
“Well, let me know,” Virgil said. He handed Bill a second card. “Give one to Sparkle.”
–
Virgil stopped at the zoo, talked to Landseer for a few minutes to see if anything interesting had come in-e-mails with tips, ransom notes, abject confessions. Nothing had.
“I’m frightened and quite depressed,” she said. “I think the tigers may be gone forever.”
“If it goes a week, I’d agree. If we can get a hint, a crack, anything, soon, then we might be able to save them. If this is an insider job or if an insider provided keys to the tiger areas, then we need to find and locate that guy,” Virgil told her. “I know that managers don’t like to do anything that would suggest to employees that you suspect them of wrongdoing…”
“I won’t do that, not without specific evidence,” she said.
“… but what I’d like you to do is to come up with a list of people you think would be most likely to be involved,” Virgil said. “You don’t have to write anything down, do it in your head. Maybe talk it over with somebody else you trust. Then we’ll call them together, and mix in a bunch of people you’re sure are not involved… in other words, make it a big meeting. I’ll give a talk about the investigation and see if we can generate some tips.”
“In other words, you want me to put the finger on a specific group of people, but disguise it so it looks like we’re talking to everybody,” Landseer said.
“Exactly right,” Virgil said. “That way, nobody feels oppressed or anything, but at the same time, we whisper in the ear of the guilty party… or somebody who knows who the guilty party is.”
“Ethically, I’m not sure how that differs from me giving you a list of people to harass,” Landseer said.
“Ethically, there might not be any theoretical difference, but nobody gets their feelings hurt and nobody sues you. There are some practicalities involved.”
Landseer thought it over for a few seconds, then said, “I want the tigers back.”
Virgil nearly bit his tongue off as he was about to blurt, “Atta girl,” but managed to abort the reaction and said instead, piously, “I think we all do. Our ethical positions have to take into consideration the impact our decisions will have on the tigers, with whose care we are entrusted.”
“You’re a very capable bullshitter,” Landseer said.
“Thank you.”
“When do you want to do it?” she asked.
“Soon as possible,” Virgil said.
“Lunchtime. Twelve noon.”
–
Virgil continued on to BCA headquarters in St. Paul, where he spent some time with the crime-scene crew, looking at what they’d gotten. The blood spot on the floor turned out to be human blood, and fresh.
“There wasn’t much. It was a superficial layer on the concrete, not soaked in,” Bea Sawyer told him. “It looked like somebody might have cut himself and a drop of blood hit the concrete. I’m thinking it could have happened when they were handling the tigers, all those teeth and claws.”
“Think they’d need treatment?”
She shrugged. “We’re only seeing one drop. He might’ve bled all over a tiger or wrapped the cut with a hanky or something, so there might be a lot of blood that we’re not seeing. Or it could be one drop. Not enough information to tell. We’ve got it in line for DNA processing, but you know what the line’s like.”
“Yeah.” The DNA-processing line was short enough that they’d have evidence for a trial, but long enough that it wouldn’t do much for solving the case, even if they eventually got a hit from the DNA database. “Why would you think anyone would wrap a cut with a hanky?”