Forensics Squad Unleashed (13 page)

Mrs. Lu is peering through one of the microscopes at a piece of human bone. “What are those little boxes?” she asks Samantha.

“You mean the rectangles, right? Those are osteons,” Samantha explains. I can tell right away that she loves talking about human remains. “They are made up of osteocytes. Osteons are present in many bones of most mammals.”

“Osteons. Osteons.” Mrs. Lu says it twice. She must like the sound of the word.

“Mrs. Lu,” Stacey says, “if you don’t mind stepping into this vat. It will only take a minute.”

Muriel is getting Leo’s footwear impressions. He is wearing bright-orange runners, which I had not noticed under his baggy white chef ’s pants. He is asking Muriel about forensics camp—and I notice he is being a lot friendlier to her than to Amelia. “It makes me wish I was a keed again,” he tells Muriel. “You say each one of our fingers has a different fingerprint? I assumed zay were all the same.”

Amelia is less talkative than her boss. When he is not looking, she rolls her eyes at him. “
It makes me wish I was a keed again
,” she whispers, imitating his accent. “If that man is so interested in keeds, he should offer healthier meal choices for the university students. In a few years from now, some of them will be having their own keeds.”

“He didn’t say he was interested in kids,” I point out. “He said he wished he could be a kid again.”

Amelia is wearing a pair of blue-and-white leather shoes that look like they came from a vintage store too. After I get her footwear impressions, she kicks the side of the plastic
vat to make sure all the sand is off. I check the impression I just took and say, “I think you might have a piece of gum or a pebble or something at the top of your right shoe.”

Amelia takes the shoe off and totters on the other leg. “You’re right about the gum. That’s kinda cool.”

Lloyd has gone to get paper and pens. “Before you go,” he tells the suspects, “Muriel would like to take handwriting samples.” He does not say anything about a spelling test, which I decide is probably a wise move. I am guessing that because English is not Leo’s or Mrs. Lu’s first language, they might have trouble spelling—and they might be embarrassed if they knew this was a spelling test. If I’m right, and one of them spells the meat you buy at a butcher shop with two
e
’s, then our case could be solved!

Muriel gives each suspect paper and a pen. They are sitting on metal stools at the long counter. I have pushed the vats with the footwear impressions over to the side. Muriel makes sure there is enough space between each suspect that they will not be able to look at each other’s answers.

“All right…” Muriel turns to me, and I know she is scrambling for what to do next. “If you could number your sheets one to ten, please. And if you could please write in cursive.”

“Cursive?” Mrs. Lu asks..

“Yes, you know—like this. With the letters linked.” Muriel scribbles her name on a sheet and holds it up to show Mrs. Lu. “The first word is…” Muriel hesitates.

“Bake,” I call out.

Leo Tessier twirls his mustache. “It’s one of my favorite words,” he says.

“Please write it with a capital
B
,” I add. It will be useful to see how the suspects write their capital
B
s, since that is how the mustard message starts out.

“Right,” Muriel says. “In fact, that’s your second word.
Right
. As opposed to left. Or wrong.”

We give them the words
hotter
(that will show us how they cross their
t
’s),
dogs
(because I am thinking about Roxie and wondering what she is up to while I am at forensics camp),
recycle
(in case Stacey is listening),
skull
(that one is for Nathaniel),
Bob
(which will give us another capital
B
to look at),
lessons
(we almost forgot that we also need to see some
s
’s) and
Montreal
(because it’s the best city in the world and it has a capital
M
).

The last word is
Meat
. Muriel explains she means the kind of meat you buy at a butcher shop.

Jonah crinkles his nose as he writes the word. Amelia sighs. Leo smiles. He must be thinking of
rôti de boeuf
. Mrs. Lu throws her pencil down on the counter when she is done.

I should get back to the fingerprinting station, but I cannot resist looking over the suspects’ shoulders to see how they have spelled
Meat
.

I am closest to Jonah. He has spelled the word correctly. Same for Amelia. I lean in to get a better view of Leo’s paper. He has spelled the word correctly too. Which leaves Mrs. Lu.

Something tells me we are coming close to solving this case.

But when I look at Mrs. Lu’s sheet, I see that she, too, has spelled the word correctly.

How can that be?

Our four suspects file out of the room. Amelia and Leo seem to have stopped speaking to each other altogether. “See ya later,” I hear Jonah tell Samantha. They must be friends. Mrs. Lu picks up a piece of dried plaster from the floor and drops it in the garbage can on her way out. She and my dad would definitely get along.

I take another look at Mrs. Lu’s sheet. Maybe I saw wrong.

Then I remember Samantha warning us about not trying to jam the puzzle pieces together. Is that what I have been trying to do?

We also have index cards with each suspect’s ten fingerprints. Muriel and I need to identify those two thumbprints on the paper cup. We start with Mrs. Lu’s card, but we do not get a match. “I really thought it would be her,” I tell Muriel.

It looks as if one of the thumbprints belongs to Leo. And that the other one belongs to Amelia.

“Why would both of their thumbprints be on the same cup?” Muriel wonders out loud.

“She could have passed his coffee to him. Or the other way around,” I say.

Muriel slaps the top of her head. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re the computer whiz. Which leaves me in charge of paper cups.” I take a bow, and Muriel laughs.

Stacey and Nico are at the other end of the room. “Any results yet on the footwear evidence?” I call out to them. The counselors have printed up enlarged photographs of the footprints found on the kitchen floor, and Stacey and Lloyd
are comparing those with the photos taken of the plaster of Paris casts.

“Not yet,” Stacey answers. “It’s possible that our suspect changed his—or her—shoes after committing the crime.”

“What about the handwriting?” Muriel asks Mason and Nathaniel.

The two of them are hunched over the suspects’ tests, comparing them to the photograph of the mustard message. “Notice how round Jonah’s
B
is,” Nathaniel is saying. “The
B
in the mustard message is way more angular.”

“Maybe that’s what happens when you use a mustard container for a pen,” Mason points out.

Samantha and Lloyd are circulating quietly in the lab while we analyze evidence. “You guys are making excellent progress,” Samantha tells us. “Thanks to Muriel and Tabitha’s findings, we seem to be narrowing our field of suspects. Now you are going to have to continue working as a team if you want to identify our vand—”

A low buzzing noise interrupts her. The sound is coming from Muriel’s backpack, where she keeps her cell phone.

Maybe the dognapper is phoning.

The five of us all turn to Muriel. Stacey’s hand is over her heart.

Except for the buzzing cell phone, the room has gone totally quiet.

“Don’t you want to check who’s calling?” Lloyd asks Muriel.

“Nah,” Muriel says nonchalantly. “It’s probably a telemarketer.”

Stacey drops her hand back to her side.

The buzzing has stopped, but a moment later it starts up again. Whoever it is really wants Muriel to pick up her phone.

Samantha raises her eyebrows. She must have noticed all of us turning to look at Muriel. “Is something going on here that Lloyd and I don’t know about?”

“Of course not,” Muriel says.

“No way,” I add.

“Hey, aren’t third-year forensics students supposed to know everything?” Nico asks. For once, his corny humor comes in handy. Samantha and Lloyd look at each other and chuckle. The buzzing finally stops, and the uncomfortable moment is over.

NINETEEN

I almost forget to eat my lunch because Muriel is setting up a meeting with a guy who might be our dognapper.

He wants to meet her at eight tonight at a small park on Lansdowne Avenue in Westmount.

Stacey shakes her head. “At night in some deserted park? I don’t like the sound of it.”

“Is he bringing the Chihuahua?” Nathaniel asks.

Muriel rolls her eyes. “Of course he’s bringing the Chihuahua. The reason I’m meeting him is so I can decide about the Chihuahua.”

Muriel’s phone jiggles on the picnic table when it vibrates to indicate there is a new email. “Is it him?” we all ask at the same time.

Muriel reads us the new message. “
If you decide you would like to take the dog, I will require payment in cash. It’s two hundred dollars, and the price is not negotiable. Hope that’s okay. Please confirm that you will be at the park at eight tonight
.”

“Where am I supposed to get two hundred dollars from?” Muriel asks.

“You’re not going to need the money,” Nathaniel tells her. “We’ll catch the guy before he can ask for the cash.”

Stacey pushes her baby carrots away from her snow peas. “Catch the guy? Are you nuts?” she says to Nathaniel. “What if he’s armed?”

“Relax,” Nathaniel tells her. “This guy won’t be armed. He’s a dognapper, not a serial killer.”

“I agree with Nathaniel,” Muriel says. “A serial killer would not say,
Hope that’s okay
. This guy’s polite.”

Stacey rolls her eyes. “When was the last time you hung out with a serial killer, Muriel?”

“Okay, you two, calm down,” Nathaniel says, coming to stand between the two cousins. “Stacey, you seem to be forgetting that we have a secret weapon.”

“A secret weapon?” I ask.

“Yeah, your dog. Roxie, right? Well, Roxie’s coming.”

“I told you, I don’t know if that’s—”

Nathaniel does not let me finish my sentence. “I thought we were a team,” he says, looking me in the eye.

None of us can argue with that. Not me, and not even Stacey. We might all be very different, but Nathaniel’s right—we are a team.

Stacey lives around the corner from Lansdowne Avenue. She and the twins will tell Stacey’s parents they are going to meet up for ice cream with friends from forensics camp. “I’m going to leave a note on my pillow saying where we’ve gone,” Stacey says. “In case something goes wrong.”

Nathaniel waves his hand in the air. “Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

Mason will come to my house at seven twenty. He’s going to suggest we take Roxie for a walk, and then we’ll head for the park too. We should make it there by ten to eight.

“My parents might get suspicious if they see me hanging out with you of my own free will,” I say, but Mason is too busy peeling the lid off his applesauce to be insulted.

Muriel uses Google Street View to show us what the park looks like up close, and Mason makes a sketch of it in his notebook.

“All six of us can’t show up at the same time,” Mason points out, “because if this guy really is up to no good, he might take off. I’d say there should only be a couple of us at the park. The rest need to hide out in the vicinity. Let’s zoom in to scope out possible hiding spots.”

Nathaniel says no one at his house will even notice if he slips out. I wonder what that would be like. “It’d be different if my grandpa was around,” he mutters.

We only get half an hour in the forensics lab after lunch before we have to be at the pool for afternoon swim. The footwear impressions are beginning to dry. Some spots have turned a dull gray.

We all put on our rubber gloves. Muriel and I take another look at the coffee cup.

“Can I see it?” Stacey asks. I expect another lecture about the evils of plastic, but instead she turns the cup slowly in her hand. “It’s marked 3
S
,” she says, showing us a notation someone has made in blue pen on the side of the cup.

“Maybe it’s the coffee drinker’s bra size,” Nico calls out.

“Three
S
? That’s not even slightly funny,” Muriel tells him. “Plus it shows how little you know about girls.”

“It stands for three sugars,” Nathaniel says. “That’s how my grandpa took his coffee.”

Stacey sniffs at the cup.

“What are you smelling now?” I ask her.

Her nostrils twitch like a horse’s. “Mustard,” she says.

“Well, that’s not a surprise,” Mason says. “Muriel and Tabitha found the cup next to the mustard container.”

Stacey’s nostrils twitch again. “What’s surprising is that the mustard smell is coming from
inside
the cup.”

“Let me see it,” Mason says. He is the one who spots the tiny yellow fleck on the inside of the cup. “Mustard!”

“Not so fast,” Lloyd tells us. “You’ll need to confirm that substance is really mustard. You can try breaking down the cup to look at the yellow substance and compare it with a known mustard sample.”

“But wouldn’t breaking down the cup be tampering with the evidence?” Mason asks.

We all look at Lloyd. “You have several good photographs of the coffee cup,” he says. “You’ve dusted it for prints. In some cases, evidence needs to be broken down for further examination. I’d say this qualifies as one of those cases. You with me, Samantha?”

Samantha gives Lloyd a thumbs-up. “I’m with you,” she tells him.

We use scissors to cut the cup into pieces. I can feel my heart pumping as we examine the yellow fleck under
the microscope. We are getting close to solving our case. “Definitely yellow,” Muriel says as she looks through the microscope.

Nico pushes her away so he can take a look. “It’s more like yellow-brown than yellow,” he says.

“Maybe it’s from that crusty bit at the end of the squeeze top,” Mason suggests. “Or maybe it’s just because it’s dried up.”

“Maybe it is.” I need to stop agreeing with Mason.