by Stuart Gibbs
“Oh no,” I said, growing worried. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Now that Kazoo’s life was in even more danger, there was no time to waste. We all hustled back across the parking lot, through the employee entrance, and toward the administration building.
Pete Thwacker was heading up the front steps as we arrived, his press conference over. Now that the cameras weren’t rolling, he was no longer smiling. Instead he was frowning at something on his smartphone.
Mom approached him as we all entered the building. “Pete, I was wondering. Did you have a hand in hiring Kristi Sullivan to work at KoalaVille?”
“I sure did,” Pete replied, without looking up from his phone. “She’s great, isn’t she?”
In the lobby there was a great deal of security. Normally, it would have taken my family several minutes to pass, but because we were with Marge, the guards waved us through.
“Does Kristi have any sort of certification in animal care?” Mom asked.
Pete pursed his lips in thought. “I don’t believe so, but honestly, how hard is it to care for a koala? All those things do is sleep. Kristi had something that’s a lot harder to come by: stage presence.”
“You mean you hired her because she’s attractive,” Mom said.
Pete shrugged. “Studies show that interacting with attractive women greatly increases our guests’ enjoyment.”
Mom frowned. “So instead of hiring a qualified keeper, you hired a piece of eye candy.”
“Hey, it wasn’t only my decision,” Pete snapped. “A lot of people weighed in on Kristi. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have yet another crisis to deal with.”
“Besides the shark tank?” Marge asked worriedly.
“Yes,” Pete sighed. “Not nearly as bad, but still a crisis. Some moron leaked photos of our new tiger cubs to the press.” He held up his phone, displaying a picture of them. “They’re all over the Internet already. J.J.’s pitching a fit, demanding to know who’s responsible.”
Suddenly yet another mystery became clear to me. “I’d check out Arthur Koenig,” I said. “I overheard him trying to sell them the other day.”
Pete turned back to me, stunned. “You did? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t know he was talking about the pictures. I thought he might have been trying to sell Kazoo. But he was definitely doing something illegal—he said he could go to jail—and he works in Carnivore Control.”
Pete broke into a big grin. He turned to Marge. “Could you go find Arthur . . . ?”
“I’ve got other fish to fry right now,” Marge said. “But I’ll send someone else.”
An elevator pinged open in the lobby. All of us piled into it except Pete. “Thanks, Teddy!” he said. “If it’s really Arthur, I owe you big.”
Bubba turned to me and chuckled. “You’re a one-man police department, kid.”
Marge glowered at me in response.
The elevator doors were just about to shut when Tracey Boyd slipped through them. She regarded us with surprise. “What are all of you doing here?”
“Heading to the security control center,” Dad told her, and then explained my theory of how Kazoo had really been stolen one night earlier than anyone realized.
Tracey’s jaw dropped as she listened. When we reached our floor, she got off with us instead of continuing on up to her office. “I’ve got to see this for myself,” she said.
Security control was a small room. Two guards sat before a huge bank of monitors, which displayed camera feeds from all over the park. I caught glimpses of the front gates, Hippo River, the SafariLand tram loading station, and two dozen other locations. The guards reacted with surprise when we burst in. There was barely room for all of us inside.
Marge started to say something, but Tracey beat her to it. “I need to see the video from the koala exhibit the night before we think Kazoo was stolen,” she told the guards.
“The night before . . . ?” one guard repeated, confused.
“That’s right,” Tracey said. “Four nights ago. Bring it up.”
“Which cameras?” the other guard asked.
“All of them,” Tracey replied.
The guards nodded and quickly typed commands into the system. The computers that controlled all the security footage hummed busily. Within seconds, camera views from the night in question began popping up on the screens, replacing the live feeds. Soon we had all four angles of the door to the koala exhibit’s keepers’ office, as well as several other feeds showing the various locations in KoalaVille.
“Sync them up, then play them all at once,” Tracey ordered. “Starting with closing time.”
The guards dutifully obeyed. They synced the video to five o’clock. We watched as Kristi Sullivan herded the last of the tourists out of the exhibit, then went around to the office door. After only a few minutes she emerged again, having taken care of Kazoo for the evening. She zipped her winter jacket, clapped on some earmuffs, and hustled toward the employee parking lot, looking like she was in big hurry to get home.
“Oh my,” Mom gasped.
“What?” Dad asked.
“She didn’t lock the door,” Mom said.
“Back up the tape,” Tracey ordered.
The guards did. We watched again, this time in slow motion. Sure enough, Kristi exited the koala exhibit and, in her haste, didn’t bother to make sure the door closed behind her. On a normal day the door probably would have swung shut on its own, but a gust of wind caught it and prevented this. Instead the door came to rest lightly against the jamb without completely closing.
“J.J. spent millions on the security for this place,” Tracey grumbled. “And yet none of it does any good if some idiot doesn’t remember to lock the darn doors.”
I was pretty astonished myself. After all the time I’d spent trying to figure out how the thief had so cleverly outwitted the security system, it turned out that they’d simply gotten lucky. First Kristi had left the door open. And then she hadn’t noticed the crime had been committed for an entire day.
On the monitors, Kristi hurried off, unaware of the unlocked door.
But someone else was watching. Kristi wasn’t even out of sight before a figure stepped out of the merchandise tent, clutching a stuffed koala. We couldn’t see the person’s face, though. They were wearing a winter jacket with the hood pulled up to shield them from the cold. Whoever it was looked at the stuffed koala they were holding, then at the exhibit, then at the stuffed koala again. Then they approached the keepers’ office and tried the door. When it swung open easily, the thief slipped inside.
The thief didn’t seem concerned about cameras at all. In fact the idea that there might be security never appeared to occur to them. They were only inside for a few minutes, and then they emerged once again, holding Kazoo, rather than the stuffed koala.
“Holy cow,” Bubba said. “Teddy, it looks like you’re innocent.”
Mom and Dad cried out with joy.
“We told you!” Mom exclaimed to everyone.
Tracey turned to Marge, annoyed. “A twelve-year-old figured this out and you didn’t?”
Marge didn’t respond. Nor did she make any attempt to apologize for relentlessly trying to pin Kazoo’s theft on me. Instead she glared at me angrily, apparently hating me more now than she ever had before.
While I was thrilled to see Marge get dressed down and hugely relieved to be proved innocent, I was still worried about Kazoo. On the security monitors, the koala certainly wasn’t happy being taken out into the cold, and he wailed and squirmed wildly. The thief was handling Kazoo roughly in response, which made me think the koala probably hadn’t been treated well at all over the last few days.
“Can we find an angle that shows our thief’s face?” Tracey asked.
The guards ran through the various camera angles, but despite them all, the thief got lucky again. The jacket hood shielded their face perfectly. There wasn’t a single direct view. We couldn’t even get a glimpse of
hair to determine the color—or for that matter tell whether the thief was a man or a woman.
Everyone else was equally frustrated. “A dozen cameras, and there’s not one positioned to get us an ID?” Bubba sighed.
On the monitors, the thief tried to stuff Kazoo into a backpack. The koala fought back with surprising force, clawing with all four of its limbs. The thief responded in kind, angrily smacking the koala, which then sank its teeth into one of the thief’s hands. The thief recoiled in pain, though we still couldn’t get a view of the face. The thief was so focused on forcing the koala into the pack that their head was constantly angled downward.
“At least Kazoo’s really doing a job on the jerk,” Dad said.
“That’s not surprising,” Mom explained. “Koalas look so innocent; people always expect they’ll be docile. But they can be extremely aggressive. They have sharp teeth and claws, and if you back them into a corner, they’ll do what it takes to defend themselves.”
The thief finally managed to overpower Kazoo and cram the poor creature into the backpack. Then, keeping their head down, the thief raced off camera and vanished from view.
“I don’t believe it,” Bubba groaned. “Not a single clear mug shot in the whole batch.”
“Maybe we can still find one.” Tracey turned to the guards. “Go back over all that footage frame by frame and see if you can find anything remotely usable. And then check the feeds of every camera between KoalaVille and the main entrance. Our thief must have passed one of them.”
“That could take hours,” one guard complained.
“I don’t care!” Tracey barked. “Just do it! I want to know who took Kazoo!”
“Please,” Mom pleaded. “Do what you can. Kazoo has been without food for almost four days. He’s running out of time.”
“We’ll do our best,” the guard said. “But there’s a chance all this will come up empty. If that thief kept the hood over their face the whole time, we might never know who took Kazoo.”
My parents sadly nodded acceptance of this.
“Actually, that’s not true,” I said. “I know who did it.”
Everyone in the room turned to me, stunned.
“Who?” Tracey asked.
“Vance Jessup,” I replied.
CAPTURE
Even though I’d proved my innocence, I ended up in the back of a police car. Only now I was a guest rather than a prisoner. Bubba was at the wheel, Marge was riding shotgun, and Mom and Dad were wedged in the backseat on either side of me. Tracey Boyd had demanded that I go along to help ID Vance Jessup. This made Marge even angrier than before. She could barely even look at me. Instead she stared out the windshield, her jaw clenched so tightly I thought her teeth might shatter.
Since Vance was a minor, Bubba was still on the case, as were his fellow juvenile officers, who were following us in a second police car. Bubba had called Principal Dillnut at my middle school, who had confirmed that Vance was there. Once he’d learned of the crime, Mr. Dillnut promised to take Vance to detention immediately and keep him there until we arrived. Now we were all racing down the road toward town at ninety miles an hour, sirens wailing. It was as much fun as some of the thrill rides at FunJungle.
“Vance’s hands and fingers are all bandaged up,” I explained as we rocketed along. “I thought it was because he’d been in some fights, but Kazoo obviously did it instead. Vance’s hands weren’t hurt until after Kazoo was stolen.”
“There’s a thousand ways someone could get their fingers banged up,” Marge said grumpily. “That’s not enough to convict someone.”
“We can check under his bandages when we get there,” Dad said. “The bite marks ought to be pretty obvious.”
“And what if he claims a dog bit him instead?” Marge asked.
“Then we bring in an expert,” Mom said. “I’m sure that any of the zoo vets can tell the difference between a dog bite and a koala bite.”
“Plus, there’s other evidence against Vance,” I told Marge. “Like the tip you got to search my room for koala fur and poop. That had to be from Vance.”
“How so?” Marge asked.
“Because of when you got it,” I explained. “If someone had really wanted to frame me for stealing Kazoo, it would have made sense to call you days ago, right after the theft. But you didn’t get the tip until yesterday afternoon. Vance must have known you didn’t have any idea who he was. He was going to get away with the crime. So what’s the point of going through so much trouble to plant the evidence in my room and alert the police about it?”
Marge looked at me blankly. This obviously hadn’t occurred to her.
“He did it to settle a score with you,” Dad concluded.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “I embarrassed Vance really badly in school yesterday. He wanted to get even. That’s why he framed me, not because he was worried about getting caught.”
“What’d you do to him?” Bubba asked.
“Dunked him in the Toilet of Doom,” I replied; then I thought to add, “It was self-defense.”
Bubba laughed out loud. “I can see why he’d be embarrassed, all right.” He turned to Marge. “You recorded the call, right? We could try to do a voice match with this Jessup kid. Between that and him having bite marks on his hand, I’d say that’s all the evidence we need.”
Dad said, “It’d be better if you could just get him to own up to the crime and tell us where the koala is. We need to find Kazoo fast.”
“There’s just one thing that’s missing here,” Marge said stubbornly. “A motive. Why’d this kid steal the koala in the first place?”
“Because he’s a jerk,” I said. “He does mean things all the time. He’s the kid who forced me to dump the fake arm in the shark tank the other day. He probably just saw the opportunity to cause trouble and he took it.”
Marge shook her head. “Doesn’t sound very convincing to me.”
Mom said, “You didn’t seem nearly this concerned about motive when you tried to arrest Teddy.”
“Teddy has a history of causing trouble,” Marge countered.
“But he’s never stolen anything,” Mom shot back. “I’ll bet this Vance Jessup has.” She looked to Bubba for confirmation.
Bubba nodded. “We’ve had a few run-ins. But only for little stuff. Shoplifting and such. Nothing like this before.”
I considered the crime again. It did seem a little odd for Vance to swipe Kazoo for no good reason. I had the sense that I was missing something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
My thoughts turned to the koala. If Vance had taken it, he hadn’t put much thought into the crime. He’d really succeeded by blind luck. It was doubtful that the kid had the slightest idea how to care for an exotic animal. My guess was poor Kazoo had probably suffered greatly in Vance’s hands. I wondered if he was even still alive.
We skidded to a stop in front of my middle school. The second police car parked right behind us. We all piled out and raced up the front walk.
It was lunchtime. The entire school was gathered at the windows of the cafeteria, excitedly watching the arrival of the police.
Before we even made it to the school doors, Mr. Dillnut exited, looking very worried.
“Where’s Vance Jessup?” Bubba demanded.
“Er . . . I’m not sure,” Mr. Dillnut admitted.
“What?” Bubba shouted. “I thought you put him in detention.”
“I did,” my principal replied. “But he got the jump on us. He told the proctor he had to go to the bathroom—and instead he must have fled the grounds.”
“How long ago?” Marge asked.
Mr. Dillnut tugged at the collar of his shirt uncomfortably. “I’m not sure. Up to fifteen minutes, maybe.”
Bubba grimaced. “He could be anywhere in town by now.” He turned to the other police officers. “Get over to his house and stake it out in case he shows there.”
The policemen raced back to their car and peeled out.
“He’s not g
oing back to his house,” Marge muttered. “No kid with an ounce of brains would do that.”
“That’s why the rest of us are gonna comb the town for him,” Bubba said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
I glanced back toward the cafeteria windows. “Maybe we won’t have to,” I said. “I’ll bet Vance’s friends know where he’s gone.” Without waiting for an answer, I ran toward the cafeteria.
Everyone else followed me, but I got there ahead of them. I burst into the cafeteria and instantly spotted TimJim. It wasn’t hard to find them, as they were a good six inches taller than almost anyone else in the school. Up until that moment I had always been afraid of them. But I surprised myself—and everyone else—by storming directly toward them. “I need to talk to you!” I demanded.
Xavier rushed into my path, apparently thinking I’d gone insane. “What are you doing?” he asked. “In case you’ve forgotten, these guys tried to shove your head in a toilet yesterday.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” I said, then slipped past him and yelled at TimJim. “Where’s Vance keeping the koala?”
Tim and Jim were thrown. They weren’t used to kids confronting them like this. Both did their best to play dumb. Given that they were dumb, it shouldn’t have been that hard, and yet they didn’t do a very good job of it. It was a few seconds too long before one of them could figure out what a fake innocent response might be. “What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “Vance stole Kazoo, didn’t he?”
“No,” they said at once, although it was an obvious lie.
I was about to lay into them again, but before I could, someone behind me shouted, “That’s not true and you both know it!”
I spun around to find Violet Grace there. She seemed stunned that the words had come out of her mouth. Everyone in the room suddenly turned to her. Even my parents, Marge, and Bubba regarded her with surprise. She shrank under the collective gaze, looking guilty.
“You knew about this?” I asked.
Violet averted her eyes, embarrassed. “Yes. Vance told me about the koala.”