“Will I get any help on this?” Virgil asked.
“I gotta tell you, man, after what happened in Iowa… probably not,” Duncan said, as he led Virgil through an unmarked door to the director’s office. “We’ve about moved everybody in the building over to the fairgrounds. Losing the tigers is bad, losing a presidential candidate would really bum everybody out. Especially if it was one of the liberal ones.”
“Great,” Virgil said. Two hours earlier, he’d been floating in a swimming hole with two good-looking naked blondes and a guy who resembled a bear. Now he was walking through what looked and felt like a bunker. “One administrative question. Why am I doing this, if Apple Valley already has a guy on it? It’s their jurisdiction.”
“Because we think it’s unlikely that this was done by Apple Valley residents or that the tigers are still around here. It’s not really an Apple Valley crime, the way we see it,” Duncan said. “The other thing is, there’s a druggie going around town kicking in back doors. He’s hitting two or three houses a day and he seems to know what he’s doing, because the cops don’t have a clue who it is. People are getting pissed, and the Apple Valley cops are getting a lot of pressure to stop him. They don’t have time for the tigers, if somebody else can do it. And it really is our problem.”
“Okay,” Virgil said. And, “Listen, Jon, I’ll do this for you, but after that thing with the dogs-I don’t want to become the BCA’s designated dogcatcher.”
“These are cats.”
“You know what I mean,” Virgil said.
“I do. And don’t worry about it, we’re not headed in that direction,” Duncan said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You get these cats back and I’ll see that you never do another animal job in your life.”
–
They were walking down a concrete hallway to the director’s office, and Virgil asked, “Anybody got any ideas about how this happened?”
“Lot of ideas, not so much evidence,” Duncan said. “They’ll tell you the details. Their head maintenance guy is in there; he seems to know the most. They found a cleanup guy, a janitor, I guess, though he works outside shoveling shit or something, who heard what might have been a couple shots from a tranquilizer gun in the middle of the night.”
–
They got to the director’s office and Duncan held the door. Virgil stepped inside to find a half-dozen people crowded into an inner office who stopped talking to look at him. Duncan bumped past him and said, “Everybody, this is Virgil Flowers, one of our very best investigators. He’ll want to hear what you-all have to say, and then, well, I’ll let Virgil take it from there.”
–
A gray-haired woman who otherwise looked like she might be in her middle thirties and who had to be Landseer, the director, said, “Welcome,” as she stood to shake hands. She introduced McCall, the board chairman, with the arty black-rimmed glasses, and two other board members, Nancy Farelly and Gina Larimore, and Dan Best, the head of maintenance, and Andy White, the Apple Valley cop.
Larimore said to Virgil, “You’re the man who broke that illegal dognapping ring down on the Mississippi.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.
“That’s a worthwhile credential,” she said. “We are desperate to get our tigers back. How long do you think it’ll take?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Anything between this afternoon and never, depending on what the thieves have done with them. If they put them in the back of a truck and are halfway to California… it could be tough.”
“Don’t say never, don’t say that,” McCall said. He was a red-faced man in a suit and dress shirt, with a two-tone blue and white collar. “We’ve got to find them, and we have to be quick about it. I know that puts pressure on you, but we can only think of three reasons for somebody to steal them.”
“Which are?” Duncan had pulled a plastic chair into the office from the outer room, and Virgil took it and sat down.
“One, it’s an anti-zoo nut,” McCall said. “Those people are mostly talk, as unpleasant as they can be. Two, it could be somebody who deals in live exotic animals-there’s a lot of that down in Texas and owning tigers is more common than you’d think. There might be five thousand privately owned tigers in the U.S. And three, and this is the worst possibility, it’s somebody who wants to sell the tiger… parts… to be used in traditional Asian medicine. Almost all the parts are used in one form or another. That would involve killing the tigers, of course.”
“Don’t say that, Bob,” said Farelly. Tears rolled down her face and she wiped them away with a tissue. “I can’t stand even to hear that.”
“We all know it’s true enough,” McCall said, scanning the other faces in the room. To Virgiclass="underline" “Here’s the thing: of the three possibilities, I’m afraid the medicine thing is the most likely. If it was exotic animal dealers, well, you can get tigers relatively cheap. You don’t need to steal them and take a chance on going to prison. Anti-zoo people probably wouldn’t go after tigers; they’d take something easier.”
“Not if they wanted to make a spectacular point,” Larimore said.
“If that’s what it is, they’ll have to go public, and we’ll get them back-and we haven’t heard a word from those people,” McCall said. “The tiger’s real value-they’re Amur tigers, and they’re rare in the wild-would be as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. They’re DNA certified as real Amurs, of course, since they were here in the zoo. If you wanted that kind of medicine, they’d be all you could ask for. As medicine, they’d be worth a lot.”
“How much?” Virgil asked.
McCall said, “All I know about that market is what I looked up on the Internet, and I have no idea of the accuracy of the estimate. The Amurs are highly valued in China and they’re on the endangered species list. Depends on your connections with the market, but two healthy certified Amurs could bring, as parts, maybe… a quarter million. That’s what I get from the Internet, anyway.”
“There’s a motive,” Duncan said.
“If that’s who’s got them, then they’re already dead or will be soon,” McCall said, turning his eyes to Virgil. “That’s why you’ve got to find them fast.”
–
Has the media been here?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yes,” Landseer said. “We did a press conference at one o’clock, but I have several requests for further interviews at four this afternoon. We’ll have to do it. They’re really the taxpayers’ animals.”
Virgil looked over at Duncan and asked, “Jon, do you know Dave the Rotten Bastard up in the attorney general’s office?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Why don’t you call him and find out the highest possible level of criminal offense he could charge with this case, and the longest possible prison term.” Virgil asked. “Then when Miz Landseer has her press conference, maybe you could step up and talk about all that.”
“What good will that do?” asked Best, the maintenance man.
“I’m hoping that it’ll scare the heck out of the thieves,” Virgil said. “Dave is a smart guy and he’ll know exactly what we want. He’ll come up with a list of crimes you won’t believe. Something like thirty years in prison, if they’re convicted. With any luck, the perpetrators will give the cats up or tell us where they’re at. If they’re planning to kill them, maybe they won’t do that.”
“That’s good-that’s very good,” McCall said. “First good thing I’ve heard. Can we get that set up in time for the press conference?”
“I can set it up in ten minutes,” Duncan said. He would not be unhappy to be on TV.