The Case of the Ruined Ram Read online

  “They help get water off your tire, so you won’t slip. The spaces in a tire also give the lug somewhere to expand when the weight of the car is on it. They help reduce heating and even tire noise.”

  He stood up. “So every tire designer has his theories about the best combination and pattern of lugs, grooves, and sipes to give you the best traction and durability.”

  Hannah held up her phone with the tire print picture on it. “And what can you tell us about the tire that made this print?”

  Bob peered at the picture again. “It’s hard to say. For one thing, there’s nothing in the picture to tell me what size the print is.”

  Hannah silently chided herself for not thinking of that when she took the picture. She should have put a ruler next to the tire print before snapping the photo. Next time . . .

  “But it looks like a fairly ordinary car tire,” he continued. “Nothing special. Not a high-performance tire, or a mud and snow tire. If I had to guess the brand, I’d say . . . Acme Value Tires. But that’s just a guess.”

  He waved a hand toward the hundreds of tires in the store. “You’re welcome to look at our tires and see if you can find a match.” He grinned. “Might take a while, though.”

  “No, thank you,” Ben said. “But that’s a good idea. We have a few specific cars we could check to see if they match.”

  Chapter 15

  Hannah was nervous. When she’d agreed to take pictures of Steve’s tires on Sunday afternoon, it had seemed like it would be easy. But now as she approached his house, she felt butterflies in her stomach.

  Why were they bothering to take pictures of Steve’s tires, anyway? Hadn’t they agreed that the Viking’s handwriting standard didn’t match the note? That the note was written by someone who was right-handed and that Steve was left-handed?

  Ben and Corey had thought they needed to be thorough. Corey called it “covering all the bases.” Ben had called it “gathering as much evidence as possible.” Hannah was starting to think of it as “a scary waste of time.”

  Steve had said his car wasn’t parked in front of the house along the street. He’d said it was parked in back. She hoped that was where he always parked it. If it was parked out front, she wouldn’t know which one it was.

  Hannah couldn’t cut through the yard. Someone might see her through a window. And that would be bad.

  She walked around the block to the alley. She’d noticed that Steve’s house was the fourth house from the end. She walked up the alley to the fourth house, trying to look casual. Her cell phone was in her hand.

  What if the car was locked in a garage? But she was in luck. There was a carport with two cars parked under it. One was shiny and new. The other was old and dented. Steve had called his car a “beater.”

  She ducked down behind the car. Snapped pictures of both back tires with her camera. Got up and walked quickly away before anyone noticed.

  Mission accomplished.

  Corey had no problem taking pictures of Mr. Powell’s tires. His car was parked behind his studio. Mr. and Mrs. Powell were nowhere around. He was probably in his studio, and she was probably in the house. Easy.

  But now he was looking for Mitchell’s house. Ben had found the address and written it down for him. Corey was walking along an unfamiliar street, checking the addresses, looking for number 514 . . .

  He didn’t even know if Mitchell had a car. When they’d talked to Mitchell, they hadn’t been focusing on the tire print yet. So they hadn’t asked Mitchell whether or not he had a car.

  Corey figured he’d just go to the house, find the cars, and take pictures of all their tires with his camera, which took much better pictures than his phone.

  That reminded him. He’d love to get a new phone.

  Focus! He went back to scanning the house numbers. Aha! There it was! Number 514!

  Luckily, there weren’t any cars parked on the street out front, so he wouldn’t have to take pictures of all of them.

  But he would have to go behind the house. It was in the middle of the block. He didn’t really want to walk all the way around.

  He quickly slipped through the neighbor’s yard. No one yelled at him. So far, so good.

  Corey found an open garage with two cars parked inside. He ducked down and started taking pictures of the tires with his camera.

  But then he heard the back door of the house open and close.

  Not knowing where to hide, he slid under one of the cars.

  He heard someone entering the garage. If they got in the car, he’d have to crawl out before they started the engine. They’d be sure to see him. That would be very awkward.

  He saw a pair of legs walk back and forth and then pause in midstride, as if the person attached to the legs was looking for something. Corey’s imagination began to run wild as he wondered what he would do if the person stayed in the garage for a long time. How long could he stay hidden under a car? Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was really just a few moments, the legs started moving again, and the person headed toward a garbage container. From his vantage point, Corey could see that the legs wore women’s pants and gym shoes.

  Corey heard the garbage container open. Whoompf! The person dropped a trash bag into the container. Bam! The lid to the container dropped back down.

  The feet walked out of the garage. And back into the house.

  Corey breathed a huge sigh of relief. He finished taking pictures of the two cars’ tires and then got out of there as fast as he could, brushing dirt off his clothes as he ran.

  Ben thought his assignment was the hardest: taking pictures of cars parked at Jefferson High School.

  But somehow it didn’t seem right for Hannah to do it. And he understood why Corey didn’t want to get in trouble with football players since he was a football player himself.

  Of course, Ben didn’t want to get in trouble with football players, either.

  There weren’t too many cars in the parking lot today. Ben hoped most of them belonged to the football players, who were there for practice on this weekend afternoon.

  As he snapped pictures of the cars’ tires, he thought he probably should have come up with some sort of explanation to cover why he was doing this, just in case somebody—

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  He looked up and saw a high school kid staring at him.

  “Oh, just taking some pictures,” Ben said.

  “Of what?” the kid asked.

  “Tires,” Ben answered honestly.

  “Why?” the kid persisted.

  This was the moment when it would have been nice if Ben had thought of a good cover story.

  He just stood there for a moment.

  Then he blurted out, “For the yearbook.”

  “Oh,” said the kid, completely satisfied with this answer. “Cool.”

  In Ben’s bedroom, Club CSI started to compare their photos of tires with the picture of the tire print from the Rocky the Ram costume.

  “Why are you so dirty?” Hannah said to Corey. “I mean, even more than usual.”

  “Because Mitchell needs to clean his family’s garage,” Corey replied, brushing off more dirt.

  “Hey!” Ben said. “You’re brushing that dirt right onto my bed!”

  “Sorry,” said Corey. He picked up a wastebasket and tried to sweep the dirt from his clothes into it with his hand. Most of it went on the floor. “Um . . . got a broom?”

  “Forget it,” Ben said. “We’ve got a lot of pictures to compare. We should get going on them.”

  They settled down to the incredibly tedious business of staring at photos of tires. At first they all looked the same. But the more pictures they stared at, the more familiar they became with the patterns of the treads. What were the words Bob had used? The lugs. The gr
ooves. The sipes. They kind of sounded like names for weird bands. Soon the three friends could quickly eliminate a photo as not matching the print from the costume.

  In the end, none of the pictures matched perfectly.

  “But this one seems to be the closest,” Hannah said, holding up one of the photos they’d printed out on Ben’s printer.

  “Which one is it?” Ben asked.

  Hannah turned the picture over to read the label they’d scrawled on the back. “It’s one of the cars in Mitchell’s garage,” she said.

  All three looked at one another, thinking.

  “We should talk to Mitchell again,” Ben suggested.

  “I know where his house is,” Corey said.

  Chapter 16

  After school on Monday, Club CSI went back to Woodlands High School to see if they could find Mitchell and talk to him.

  They walked right by the site of the bonfire, so they paused to see if they might spot anything new or different. But the custodians had done a good job of cleaning up. There was no sign the bonfire had ever been there.

  As they walked across the parking lot, Corey looked around for Mitchell’s car. “Maybe you’d recognize it better if you crawled underneath,” Hannah teased.

  “Very funny,” Corey said. “I’m pretty sure I’ll know it when I see it.”

  Suddenly he pointed.

  “There it is!” he cried. Ben and Hannah looked to see where he was pointing and saw a small blue car—nothing fancy.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Ben said, “let’s see what kind of tires Mitchell has.”

  They walked over to the car. After looking around to see if anyone was watching, they knelt down to check the tires.

  “It should have the brand name on the sidewall,” Ben said.

  “‘Sidewall,’” Hannah said. “Excellent use of tire vocabulary.”

  “Thank you,” he said with a slight bow of his head.

  It was an overcast afternoon, and the name of the company that made the tires was the same color as the tire—black on black. So the brand name wasn’t obvious.

  But then Corey spotted it. The way the tire was positioned, he had to turn his head upside down to read it. “Acme Value Tires,” he said.

  “Score one for Bob,” Hannah said.

  “Excuse me,” said a voice above them. “What are you doing?”

  They looked up and saw Mitchell looking down at them. He did not look happy.

  “Oh sorry,” Corey said. “We were settling a bet.”

  “A bet? About what?”

  “Well, Ben has this thing he always claims he can do,” Corey explained, making it up as he went along. “He says he can tell what brand a tire is just by looking at it. So we were checking to see what brand the tires are on this car.”

  “Why? Is it your car?” Hannah asked innocently.

  “Yeah,” Mitchell said. “It’s my parents’. They let me use it.”

  Ben, Hannah, and Corey stood up. They stayed there by Mitchell’s car, blocking his way to the driver’s side door.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “We were wondering if we could ask you some more questions about Rocky the Ram,” Ben said.

  “Sorry,” Mitchell said. “Now’s not a good time. I’ve got a ton of homework and a test in algebra tomorrow. I’ve got to get home to study.”

  “Oh,” Ben said. “Okay.”

  They stepped out of Mitchell’s way. He started to open the door.

  “Um, would you mind giving me your e-mail address so we could just shoot you an e-mail with our questions?” Ben asked.

  Mitchell paused. “Well, I couldn’t answer your e-mail tonight. Like I said, I’ve got homework and studying to do.”

  Ben smiled his friendliest smile. “No, you wouldn’t have to answer any questions tonight. But if you wouldn’t mind giving me your e-mail address now, then we’d have it.”

  Mitchell sighed. “All right. You can type it into your phone.”

  Hannah got out her phone. But Ben said, “I thought your phone was out of charge, Hannah.”

  Hannah stood there for a second. “Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s right. I forgot to charge it up.”

  “That’s okay,” Ben said. He reached into his backpack. “Here. I’ve got a pad and a pen.” He pulled them out and offered them to Mitchell. “If you could just write down your e-mail address, and maybe when the best time for you to answer our questions might be . . .”

  But Mitchell was already getting in his car. “My phone number is listed online.”

  “Um, yeah, but—”

  “Then just call me if you have any questions,” he said. “But don’t call tonight.” He slammed his door shut, started the car, and backed out of his parking space. Then he peeled out of the parking lot.

  Club CSI watched him go.

  “That was weird,” Hannah said.

  “I was just trying to get him to write down his e-mail address so we could have a writing standard to compare to the costume wrecker’s note,” Ben explained. “I realize it would’ve been a requested standard, but I didn’t see any way we could get a nonrequested standard.”

  “I knew what you were doing,” Hannah said. “I meant Mitchell’s behavior was really weird.”

  “Yeah,” Corey agreed. “What’s the big deal with writing down your e-mail address? It’s almost like he knew you were just trying to get a sample of his handwriting to compare to the note.”

  “At this point, Mitchell is definitely suspect number one,” Hannah said.

  “I’m starting to think those VIP football tickets are as good as mine,” Corey said. “I mean, ours.”

  “We still need a handwriting standard from Mitchell,” Ben said. “But I’m inclined to agree with you.”

  Club CSI was feeling confident that they had cracked the case.

  That’s why the next day at school was such a surprise. . . .

  Chapter 17

  Class, I have an announcement,” Miss Hodges

  said at the beginning of forensic science. “The Rocky the Ram mystery has been solved!”

  Hannah, Ben, and Corey looked at one another, shocked. They were pretty sure Mitchell had ruined the costume, but they still needed more evidence, so they hadn’t said anything to Miss Hodges yet.

  And now she was announcing that the case was closed.

  “There go my VIP tickets,” Corey murmured. He didn’t even bother to correct himself and say “our VIP tickets.” The contest was over, and they’d lost.

  “Who did it?” Jennifer asked eagerly.

  “And who solved it?” Kayla added.

  “There’s been a confession,” Miss Hodges said. “Another note was left pinned to the tree at the high school.”

  She held up a piece of white poster board. “It says, ‘We burned Rocky. We’re sorry. GO VIKINGS!—The Vikings Football Team.’”

  Miss Hodges set the note down on the front table. “So the football players at Jefferson High School committed the arson.”

  Ricky Collins’s hand shot into the air. “Miss Hodges?” he said. “You forgot to mention that it was our team that found the note—me and Charlie. So we won the contest, right?”

  Hannah spun around in her seat to face Ricky. “Finding a confession isn’t solving a mystery. You didn’t use forensic science. You just got lucky!”

  “Sometimes luck is what makes all the difference in solving a case,” Ricky said. “Right, Miss Hodges?”

  “Sometimes,” Miss Hodges admitted. “As for whether you actually won the contest, I’m still debating that issue.”

  “It wasn’t just luck,” Charlie said. “We found the note because we were at the high school investigating. We wanted to check out the crime scene a
gain.”

  Ben thought to himself that Charlie and Ricky had definitely provided some tough competition to Club CSI.

  “Plus, we did use forensic science,” Charlie continued. “Before we turned the new note over to Miss Hodges, we used handwriting analysis to see if it matched the old note.”

  “And did it match?” Corey asked.

  Charlie smiled, nodding. “It sure did. The results were conclusive.”

  Ben silently disagreed. He didn’t believe the investigation had come to its full conclusion. “Has the football team been questioned?” he asked.

  “I told Principal Inverno about the new note first thing this morning,” Miss Hodges said. “And he called Principal Hall at Woodlands High School. Principal Hall communicated with the principal at Jefferson High School immediately. All three principals are convinced that the football team burned Rocky the Ram, so the team members will be held responsible.”

  “That was always the rumor,” Ryan said. “That the Vikings did it.”

  “But rumors aren’t facts!” Corey protested, even though he himself had thought for quite a while that the Vikings had destroyed the costume.

  “Maybe not,” Ricky said. “But it’s a fact that my partner and I found a signed confession. Case closed. I’ll wave to you from my VIP seat at the games, losers!”

  Miss Hodges repeated that she hadn’t yet made up her mind about whether Ricky and Charlie had won. She set the matter aside and began the day’s lesson in forensic science.

  After class, Hannah, Corey, and Ben stuck around to talk to Miss Hodges. She was putting away the materials the students had used in that day’s activities.

  “Miss Hodges, we were wondering if you could do us a small favor,” Hannah said.

  “Sure,” the teacher replied brightly. “What is it?”

  “Could you ask that tire expert you know in Las Vegas to compare two pictures of tire marks for us?” Hannah asked. “We could e-mail the photos to him.”

  Miss Hodges stopped putting materials away. She looked confused. “Tire marks?” she asked. “Weren’t those part of your Rocky the Ram investigation? That case is closed. Why would you want a tire expert to look at your photos now that the case is over?”