Escape Clause by John Sandford
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.”
5
V
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.
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.”