Shadows at Predator Reef (6 page)

And landed in the water with an unheroic splash a few feet short of the motorboat. The wake from the little boat smacked me in the face as the perp got away.

The water taxi driver was in stitches when he circled back to pick me up.

“Your fare is on me, son,” he said when he finally managed to stop laughing. “That's the most entertainment I've had on the job in a long time.”

I watched the hooded figure recede into the bay until the little boat disappeared around the bend of the harbor past the old industrial docks. Was it the same person who had stolen Captain Hook? Whoever they were, if they had intentionally released Bruce into Predator Reef while Joe and I were diving, then they were guilty of attempted murder. At least I hoped it was only attempted. I still didn't know if Joe had managed to somehow make it out of the tank alive.

He must have, right? That's what I kept telling myself. If the big sand tiger shark had gotten him, there would have been blood in the water. I shuddered. He was probably hiding somewhere in the coral until it was safe to swim to the surface. He would have had plenty of air in his tank. Or maybe he made it to the surface in a different part of the reef where I couldn't see him. Unless he'd gotten stuck somewhere in the coral out of Bruce's reach . . .

Stop it, Frank! Joe is going to be okay. He has to be.

T
HOSE FEW SECONDS AFTER I
pulled the latch on the second trapdoor were terrifying. I wasn't airborne for long, but it felt like I was falling through the bottom of the world. I landed with a soggy thump a moment later. All I could see was total blackness. This must be what being blind feels like.

I quickly checked for any scrapes, cuts, or broken bones. Nope, just sore from the fall. I tried to keep calm and use my other senses to get my bearings. I could hear the muffled burble of the four hundred thousand gallons of water in the reef tank somewhere above me, and I caught a noseful of an old musty smell. Like ancient journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth old.

That's kind of what it felt like too—like I'd fallen straight through the earth into a dark underworld. At least I was alive. The dark was really starting to creep me out, though. Had I escaped from the jaws of a killer shark only to face some new horror I couldn't even see? I fumbled around until I found the dive light that was hooked to my wet suit and clicked it on. The little beam felt like a breath of fresh air for my eyes after being surrounded by all that inky nothingness. Yes! Let there be light! But where was I?

Turns out I was in a really old tunnel. The floors and walls were packed dirt reinforced by wood beams. Or, to be more precise, rotting wood beams. There were old tracks running along the floor. I shone the light back up at the trapdoor. Beside it there was a small hydraulic lift similar to the one next to Predator Reef.

Everything started to click into place.

So that was how Captain Hook had vanished—through the trapdoor hidden under the coral on the bottom of the reef exhibit, into the secret holding tank, onto the hydraulic lift, and into the underground tunnel I found myself in now. The tunnel totally explained how someone could have entered Predator Reef and abducted Captain Hook without being caught on camera. A diver could have swum up from below and never even had to poke their head out of the water.

I examined the holding tank with my flashlight. It was a brilliant piece of engineering. It was airtight, so water
couldn't enter or escape until one of the trapdoors was opened. When the top one was opened, the holding tank would fill with water from the exhibit so the diver could swim in with the turtle and then close the door, locking them safely inside, sealed off from the four hundred thousand gallons of water above. Opening the bottom trapdoor would then release the water contained in the holding tank, allowing the diver to lower the turtle with the hydraulic lift (so they wouldn't go plummeting to the floor like I had) and presumably escape with the stolen reptilian booty. If they had some kind of cart or mobile turtle tank, they could then pull it, and the five-hundred-pound giant turtle, along the old tracks to freedom.

So where was that five-hundred-pound turtle now?

The tunnel looked like it had been there forever, but if I was right about the trapdoor and the hydraulic lift, somebody had very recently put a lot of thought and effort into transforming it into an escape route. Frank totally would have geeked out over the design of it all. I just needed to find a way out so I could tell him about it.

I shone the light down the tunnel, which just disappeared into more darkness. I looked back up at the trapdoor. Even if I wanted to go back through the holding tank, there was still a giant angry shark up there waiting for me. Plus, I'd lost my regulator and Octo backup—and there was no way I was going to chance a free swim through shark-infested water without a breathing apparatus.

“Okay, Joe,” I said to myself (the silence was really starting to get to me), “I guess we're hoofing it.” I stuffed my heavy dive gear, including my flippers, over to the side of the tunnel, though I was still wearing my wet suit and dive boots.

The tunnel went on for a few hundred yards before it started to branch off into a network of smaller tunnels to who knows where. Some of them were already caved in under a pile of rubble. I was sticking to the main tunnel.

My right foot slid out from under me, and I caught myself before I could fall. When I shone my light down at the ground to see what I had slipped on, it reflected off something white. There was a muddy piece of fabric lying in the dirt. It didn't look like much, but there was something about this particular dirty white cloth that told me it could be an important clue.

My flashlight started to flicker. Not good. It must have been damaged in the fall. If it died and I was left down there in the dark, that tunnel was going to turn into my tomb. Time to get moving. I stuffed the cloth in my dive belt to examine more closely once I made it back to daylight. If I made it back to daylight.

After a few minutes I reached an intersection, branching left and right. I shone my light left—another endless tunnel into darkness—and right, where it looked like there might be, just maybe, a glimmer of daylight at the end of the tunnel. Right it was.

Right turned out to be the right call. A few minutes later,
I climbed a rickety ladder and found myself in the boiler room of an abandoned warehouse. I looked around for any sign that Captain Hook had been there. There was nothing. The thief must have smuggled the turtle out of one of the other tunnels.

I made my way out onto the dock and took a deep breath, grateful to be out of the musty tunnel and back aboveground in the fresh air. Unfortunately, the air aboveground wasn't much better. A potpourri of fish guts and diesel fumes greeted me. I looked around and realized the aromas must have been coming from the old cannery a few lots down and a passing container ship.

That's when I spotted Frank on the water taxi.

I don't know who was more shocked when we saw each other, Frank or me. I must have looked pretty funny, jumping up and down on the dock in my wet suit, waving my arms like a crazy person. Man, was it good to see him again. After the run-in with the shark and stumbling around in the tunnels, I hadn't been sure I'd get another chance.

Once Frank had disembarked from the boat, I brought him up to date on everything that had happened since Bruce had so rudely interrupted our underwater investigation of Predator Reef. Then he filled me in on his chase with the hooded perp.

“Um, I didn't want to tell you this,” Frank said when he finished. “But Aly kind of makes sense as a possible suspect.”

“No way, dude,” I said. “Aly wouldn't have—”

But then I stopped and thought about it for a second.

“She did conveniently disappear right before someone released Bruce, and I guess she would have had access to the shark tank.”

“And earlier today she was wearing the same kind of baggy aquarium hoodie as the perp I chased,” Frank said. “I didn't get close enough to tell if it was a guy or a girl, but we can't rule out the possibility it was her.”

“Ugh,” I said, closing my eyes. Could the girl I liked actually want me dead? Why does this have to happen every time? Whenever I like a girl, one of our cases never fails to gum things up.

“Any other ideas who it could have been?” I asked, hoping he'd give me the name of someone I wasn't interested in dating. “Or how Aly might tie in with the tunnel under the aquarium?”

“No idea, but I bet the tunnel you found is from the Underground Railroad like the one the history museum is giving tours of across town,” he said excitedly. “They've only excavated a few hundred feet of that one, but they think there may have once been a whole network of them. Imagine, a hundred and fifty years ago, escaped slaves could have made their way to freedom through the same tunnel you were in.”

Yep, trust my bro to give a history lecture at a time like this.

“If the one across town is a part of the same network of tunnels as the ones I found, then the thief could have taken Captain Hook anywhere in Bayport,” I said.

“Okay, so we've solved part of the mystery. We know
how she was taken, but we still don't know who did it or where they took her.” Frank was stumped. I could see the wheels turning inside his brain. “It doesn't really help us, but there are rumors that pirates originally built the tunnels as far back as the 1600s to smuggle their plunder in and out of the port,” he said, the nerd in him unable to resist adding another chapter to the history lesson.

“I guess that would explain why there are old tracks in the tunnels, but I don't think it was pirates who took Captain Hook, even if she is named after one.” I couldn't help but laugh at the image of a bunch of pirate turtles abducting their pirate turtle captain.

“Well, at least now we know that whoever did take her must have had access to the exhibit when it was being constructed. There wouldn't have been any way to build that escape hatch after the exhibit was filled with water,” Frank said, narrowing down the suspect list.

I narrowed it down further.

“That's not all, though,” I told Frank as I pulled out the muddy piece of cloth. I'd gotten a chance to look at it a little more closely while I'd been waiting for Frank and the water taxi to reach the dock. “I found this trampled down in the dirt. I wouldn't even have seen it if I hadn't almost slipped on it.”

“What is it?” Frank asked. “A handkerchief ?”

“Not just a handkerchief,” I said, brushing it off to reveal the monogrammed initials B.V. “Mr. V's handkerchief.”

W
E BOTH FIGURED A SURPRISE
visit to Mr. V was in order. A half hour later we had changed into street clothes and hopped back aboard a water taxi headed to his mansion. When he moved to Bayport to start construction on Predator Reef, he'd bought himself a big old house right across the bay on a hill overlooking the harbor so he could see the aquarium from his back porch.

“There are only so many ways one of Mr. V's handkerchiefs could have made its way into a four-hundred-year-old tunnel,” my brother said, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Yeah. And the most obvious one was that he dropped it there a lot more recently than four hundred years ago,” I replied.

Just then my phone buzzed with a text from Big Chuck.

“I've got news about the shark that attacked you,” I told Joe after reading it. “Big Chuck says that once they finally got Bruce back in the examination tank, they discovered the reason he went all
Jaws
on us.”

“Because private detectives taste good?” Joe cracked.

“No, because someone jabbed him in the side with enough force to break through the shark's tough skin,” I said. “Someone wanted him angry. He's usually a really calm shark; he never would have gone after you like that unless he was pretty incensed.”

“You think Mr. V had something to do with that, too?”

I was quiet for a second. I didn't like the idea that Mr. V might be capable of harming an animal.

“I guess we'll see.”

When we got to Mr. V's and walked around to the front of the property, we could see news vans camped out in front of his house. I guess they didn't think we were newsworthy, because they let us walk right past. I pressed the buzzer on the mansion's big double doors. After a few minutes, the tuxedoed chauffeur who resembled Alfred from
Batman
opened the door. Like Alfred, I guess he was the butler as well as the chauffeur. He looked at us like we were a couple of unwelcome salesmen.

“Yes, how may I help you?” he said in the same strong New England accent as Mr. V and Ron. From the way they
sounded, Mr. V must have recruited everyone on his staff from the same place.

“We're here to see Mr. Valledor,” I said.

“I'm sure you are,” Alfred said. It was hard to tell if he was peering down his nose at us or if it was just the way his face looked. “Mr. Valledor is a very busy man. I don't suppose you have an appointment?”

“No, but I think he'll want to hear what we have to say,” Joe told him.

“We'll see.” Alfred sounded unconvinced. “And who might Mr. Valledor have the, ahem, pleasure of meeting unannounced?”

“You can tell him it's the Hardy boys,” I said. “He knows who we are.”

He replied by slamming the big door in our faces. He opened it again a couple of minutes later.

“Follow me,” he said.

We walked through the mansion's grand entrance hall into a large study, where Mr. V was seated with Ron Burris and Laura, the assistant we had met earlier.

“The young men you wished to see, sir,” Alfred announced.