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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.”

Virgiclass="underline" “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.”