The Case of the Ruined Ram Read online

  The note that the custodians had found pinned to the tree was lying on a small side table. Club CSI studied it carefully and took pictures.

  “It’s definitely handwritten,” Hannah remarked. “But the handwriting is very neat and clear.”

  “Looks as though whoever wrote it used an ordinary marker,” Corey said. “There’s nothing weird looking about the ink.”

  Principal Inverno looked at his watch. “Okay, time’s up,” he said. “Let’s get the next team in here.”

  Chapter 8

  Before the last period of the day, Hannah, Ben, and Corey met by the old trophy lockers to discuss what they’d seen in their examination of the mascot costume.

  “I think the most interesting thing we found was the stuff on the head,” Hannah said. “The little pieces of rock and glass and mud. I don’t see how those kinds of things could come out of a bonfire.”

  Sitting on the floor, Corey bounced a tennis ball against the wall and then caught it. He carried a ball in his backpack for moments like these. His coach said it was good for hand-eye coordination.

  He just thought it was fun.

  “I agree,” he said. “A fire wouldn’t put junk like that on the costume. Although maybe the janitors who found it dragged it across the parking lot or something.”

  “I did some research online during my free period,” Ben said. “The materials we found on the costume are just the sorts of things you’d commonly find in the treads of a car’s tires.”

  “Car tires?” Hannah asked. “Hold on a second.” She pulled her phone out of her backpack. She flipped through her pictures of the costume. She stopped when she got to one, and used her thumb and forefinger to expand the picture, zooming in on the area that interested her.

  “There,” she said. “I thought these marks on the head looked kind of familiar. What would you say they are?”

  Corey and Ben leaned in to look at her phone. “A tire track!” Ben said. “Good eye, Hannah.”

  “A tire track?” Corey repeated. “You mean, before the costume was tossed on the bonfire, it was run over by a car?”

  “Sure looks like it,” Hannah said.

  “Wow,” Corey said. “Someone really wanted to ruin Rocky.”

  The more they stared at the picture on Hannah’s phone, the more certain they became that they were looking at a tire track.

  “Being run over by a car would definitely explain why Rocky’s head looked squished,” Hannah noted.

  “I say it’s time to talk to the football players over at Jefferson,” Corey said, tossing his ball with his right hand and catching it with his left.

  “Why them?” Hannah asked.

  “Well,” he said, “they’ve always been my number one suspects. But now that we see this, it makes even more sense. They’re old enough to have driver’s licenses. And cars. They could have driven over Rocky, thrown him into the trunk, taken him to the rally, and when no one was looking, tossed him into the bonfire before the firefighters doused it.”

  “True,” Ben said. “But so could just about any high school student over the age of sixteen. Or any adult, for that matter.”

  “You know who I think we should talk to?” Hannah asked.

  “Who?” Corey wondered.

  “The kid who was supposed to wear the costume at the rally.”

  “Mitchell? Why him?”

  “It just makes sense,” Hannah explained. “He knows more about that ram costume than anybody. He should be the first person we talk to. Why wasn’t he at the rally? Where was he?”

  Corey nodded. Talking to Mitchell did seem like a logical move.

  “Okay, so it’s settled,” Ben said. “After school, we’ll go back to the high school to talk to Mitchell.”

  “Okay,” Corey said, “but I won’t recognize him without his ram costume on.”

  As it turned out, it wasn’t that hard to track down Mitchell. Lots of people at the high school knew which guy was Rocky the Ram.

  Getting him to talk was a little harder.

  “Look, I already talked to some kids from your class,” Mitchell complained. He was a short guy with curly brown hair and ears that stuck out from the sides of his head.

  “You did?” Corey said. “Who?”

  “I forget their names,” Mitchell said. “A big guy and a smaller guy with glasses.”

  “Ricky and Charlie?” Hannah asked, exchanging quick looks with Ben and Corey.

  Mitchell nodded. “Yeah, that sounds right. And like I told them, I have no idea how the costume ended up on the bonfire. I wasn’t even there.”

  He started to walk away, but Club CSI walked with him.

  “Why weren’t you there?” Hannah asked. “I mean, they really missed you. Everybody was asking where the mascot was. They all love the way you do Rocky the Ram.” She figured a little flattery wouldn’t hurt.

  Mitchell took the bait. “Really?” he asked. “They like how I do it?”

  “They say you’re the best Rocky ever,” Hannah continued, her fingers crossed behind her back.

  “Well,” he said, “I wasn’t there because there was no point. The costume was missing.”

  “When was the last time you saw the costume?” Ben asked.

  Mitchell paused and leaned up against a tree, thinking. “The weekend before. I wore it for the away game against Farrow High. When we got back, I put it in the storage room.”

  “Did you see it during the week between the Farrow game and the pep rally?” Corey asked.

  Mitchell shook his head. “The next time I went in the storage room to get it was the day of the pep rally. It was gone. I told one of the assistant coaches, and then I went home.”

  “Why didn’t you stay for the rally?” Hannah asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I was embarrassed. I knew everyone would be asking me why I wasn’t dressed as Rocky the Ram, and I didn’t even know where the costume was.”

  Corey looked puzzled. “But that wasn’t your fault. We heard they don’t lock the storage room and that tons of people go in and out of the gym every day.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Mitchell said.

  “So who do you think took it?” Corey asked.

  Mitchell raised his eyebrows and held his hands out. “Everybody knows who took it! The Vikings! They said so right on that note!”

  “Couldn’t someone else have written that note?” Ben said.

  Mitchell shook his head emphatically. “The Vikings did it, just like they did twenty-five years ago. Have you heard about that?”

  The members of Club CSI nodded. “We read about it at the library,” Ben said.

  “I’m surprised you hadn’t already heard about it,” Mitchell said. “It was a huge deal back then. It’s one of the first things they tell you about when you become the mascot. It’s, like, a legend!”

  “So you think the Vikings did it again this time, just like they did twenty-five years ago,” Hannah summed up.

  “Definitely,” Mitchell said. “You know, nice costumes like Rocky the Ram cost thousands of dollars. The Vikings who did it will probably end up going to prison.”

  That seemed pretty unlikely. The three friends had never heard of anyone going to prison for destroying a mascot costume. But Mitchell seemed to believe it, so they didn’t argue with him.

  “Of course, for thousands of dollars they could make the costume a lot more comfortable,” Mitchell complained. “It’s heavy, and really hot, and it smells bad. The mascot has to jump around a lot, but they can’t just send a costume like that to the cleaner’s after every game.”

  “If it’s so awful being the mascot, why do you do it?” Hannah asked. Mitchell didn’t seem like the kind of student who was filled with school spirit.

  For the first
time, Mitchell smiled a little. “Well,” he said, “the mascot gets to hang out with the cheerleaders.”

  Corey grinned. “Ever score any dates with the cheerleaders?”

  “No,” Mitchell admitted. “Not yet. And now with the costume destroyed, my chances don’t look too good.”

  He looked at his watch. “It’s getting late. I’ve gotta get home.”

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Thanks for answering our questions.”

  “No problem,” Mitchell said. “Hope you get an A.”

  Chapter 9

  The next morning, Club CSI walked to school together. It was a beautiful fall day in Nevada, with the sun shining.

  “The more I think about it,” Corey said, “the more I think the football players over at Jefferson wrecked Rocky.”

  “Just like it said on the note?” Hannah asked.

  “Exactly,” Corey said. “Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct answer.”

  Ben frowned. “It didn’t actually say that on the note. It just said ‘Vikings Rule.’ It didn’t say ‘We, the Jefferson High School Vikings, destroyed this costume.’”

  “Okay,” Corey admitted. “But who turned out to be the culprits twenty-five years ago? The Vikings!”

  “The Vikings turned out to be the culprits when it came to raiding Europe in the ninth century too, but I doubt they destroyed Rocky the Ram!” Ben said.

  Corey stared at Ben. “You know,” he said, “if you ever expect to date anyone in high school, you’re going to have to stop saying things like that.”

  Hannah laughed. “Hey, maybe Ben will date history buffs!”

  Ben was a little embarrassed, but he smiled.

  “All I’m saying is that we go talk to the football players at Jefferson to see if we can figure out whether they did it,” Corey insisted.

  “Fine,” Ben said, relieved to have the subject changed from his future dating prospects. “We’ll go after school today.”

  “And who knows?” Corey added. “Maybe you’ll meet some history buffs!”

  Miss Hodges held up a blank piece of paper. “What can you tell me about this?”

  The students in her forensic science class stared at her for a moment. What was there to say about a blank piece of paper?

  “It’s a blank piece of paper?” Jennifer said, sounding more like she was asking a question than answering one.

  “Yes,” Miss Hodges said. “It is a blank piece of paper. But if a CSI found this piece of paper at a crime scene, he or she would want to determine some of its specific qualities to help identify where the paper might have come from.”

  She put down the piece of paper and then picked up an unopened package of paper. “For example, the wrapper on this package describes a few of the paper’s qualities.”

  Miss Hodges pointed to a number on the wrapper. “See this eighty-eight?” she asked. The students nodded. “That’s the paper’s brightness. This paper reflects back about eighty-eight percent of the light you shine on it.”

  She slid her finger down the package. “There’s a smaller number here that you may not be able to see: one hundred and twenty-five. That’s the paper’s whiteness. Whiteness is the shade of white that the manufacturer has made the paper by bleaching the wood pulp. There are three main shades of whiteness: balanced white, warm white, and blue white.”

  Many of the students were taking notes. As Miss Hodges described the specific qualities of paper, they couldn’t help but take a closer look at the paper in the notebooks they were writing on. They’d never really thought about paper’s qualities before. It seemed as though every time you looked at a subject, no matter how small, it turned out there was a whole world of information about it. This time it was the World of Paper.

  The teacher pointed to the package of paper again. “And there’s another number here: twenty. That’s the paper’s weight. Five hundred sheets of this paper—or a ream—should weigh twenty pounds.”

  She looked at the students. “How thick is paper?”

  “Not very,” Ryan said, getting a laugh from his friends.

  “Actually, Ryan, you’re right,” Miss Hodges said. “The thickness of paper is measured by the thousandth of an inch. This measurement is called the paper’s caliper.”

  She turned to the dry-erase board and wrote “caliper.” Then she turned back to the class.

  “So paper has brightness, whiteness, weight, and caliper. And that’s just to start with! In the laboratory, investigators can use advanced technology to analyze all the chemicals in a piece of paper.” She paused a moment. “But why would they do that?”

  Ben raised his hand. “If they could match a piece of paper from a crime scene to a pad of paper in a suspect’s home, that might help convict the suspect.”

  Miss Hodges nodded. “Yes, Ben. Very good.”

  She spread several different pads of paper on the table. Some had white paper and some had yellow. Some had lines and some didn’t. A couple had holes punched in the sides.

  “Each of these pads of paper has a big letter printed on it. See?” She held up a pad with a large A on it. She set the pad back on the table.

  Miss Hodges picked up a brown paper bag. She turned it over. Lots of small pieces of papers fluttered out.

  “And each of these pieces of paper has a number printed on it,” she said. “Let’s see how well you can do without any advanced technology. Just use your eyes. Look at the pieces of paper and then write down which pad each piece came from. Match each number to a letter. You can work in your teams if you’d like.”

  The students hurried to pick up the pieces of paper. They compared them to the pads and started writing down the letters that went with each number.

  Some of the pieces of paper had obviously come from one of the pads—they were the same color, with the same lines and punched-out holes. But others were trickier. Corey moved one piece of paper back and forth between two pads, comparing them.

  “Definitely C,” Hannah said to him, quietly.

  “Really?” he asked. “I was going to go with D.”

  “I was kind of thinking E,” Ben admitted.

  They went with C. Hannah seemed so sure.

  And when Miss Hodges gave them the answers, Hannah was right. She had a very good eye for color.

  After they’d learned about paper, Miss Hodges told them a bit about ink. She talked about the different kinds of writing instruments—ballpoint pens, roller-ball pens, felt-tip markers—and the different kinds of inks they used.

  Then she put her students through another exercise, trying to match marks made with different kinds of pens. A few of the inks looked the same until the students put them under an ultraviolet light. The UV rays helped them see the differences in the inks that they couldn’t see under regular light.

  “Now,” she said, “let’s talk about handwriting.”

  Kayla raised her hand. “Ooh, I’ve heard that you can tell a person’s personality from their handwriting.”

  “That could be,” Miss Hodges said. “But that’s not really what the CSI is interested in. He or she is trying to find out who wrote the ransom note or the threatening letter or the grocery list dropped at the scene of the crime. How might a CSI do that?”

  Charlie’s hand shot up.

  “Yes, Charlie?”

  “The investigator would compare handwriting from the suspects to the handwriting found at the crime scene,” he answered.

  “That’s right. Excellent,” Miss Hodges said. “Investigators compare a suspect’s handwriting sample—called ‘a standard’—to the unidentified handwriting, hoping for a match.”

  She turned back to the dry-erase board and wrote “standard.”

  “There are two types of handwriting standards,” she continued, “requested and nonrequested. W
hich do you think is preferred?”

  The class thought about this. Slowly, Hannah raised her hand.

  “Yes, Hannah?”

  “Nonrequested.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you ask someone to give you a handwriting sample, they might try to change their handwriting so it doesn’t match,” Hannah said. “But if you could get a nonrequested sample, you could be more sure it was in the person’s real handwriting.”

  “Terrific!” Miss Hodges said. “That’s exactly right.”

  She went on to describe how handwriting analysts looked at each letter’s shape, size, and slant. She also talked about how to tell if a writer is right- or left-handed.

  “Okay,” she said. “I want two requested standards from each of you. The first can be anything you want. Just write down a couple of sentences. For the second one, please copy this sentence.”

  She turned back to the dry-erase board and wrote, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

  “Can anyone tell me something interesting about this sentence?”

  Corey actually knew the answer, though he didn’t remember how he knew. He thought maybe he’d heard his mother mention this sentence. Something about a typing class she took a long time ago. He raised his hand. “It has every letter in the alphabet.”

  “That’s right,” Miss Hodges said. “Please just write both samples naturally. Don’t think about your handwriting. And definitely don’t try to change your handwriting between the two samples. That’ll ruin everything. When you’re done, please bring them up here. Put the ‘quick brown fox’es in this pile, and your original sentences in this pile.”

  The students wrote quickly and then carried their little slips of paper up to the front table. Miss Hodges shuffled the slips (keeping them in their separate piles) and then had the students try to match the handwriting samples.

  Some were easy. Jennifer, for example, had very nice, clear handwriting, so they could spot her two samples right away.