“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?”