Kazu Jones and the Denver Dognappers

by Shauna Holyoak

  “It’s been a hard week, and you’re sick,” she said. “No school today.”

  At first I wanted to resist, but there was no reason to go to school. March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine would be upset about the mission, and without any more clues, we would be unable to plan another one.

  I nodded at Mom. Right now I just wanted to bury myself under the covers and forget what had happened. I was done with detective work. Every mission we planned failed, and now Genki’s safety might depend on me quitting forever.

  Mom bent toward me and kissed my forehead. The gesture made me want to crawl into her lap and cry.

  “Would you like some mugicha with your breakfast?” she asked. “It’ll chase away the fever.”

  I nodded. Mugicha was a roasted barley tea popular in Japan. In the winter Mom served it warm, and she prepared some every time I was sick.

  “Well,” she said. “You get some rest, and I’ll put a pot of mugicha on.”

  After taking my temperature—99.9—Mom went to the kitchen to make tea, and I got up to grab a lighter blanket from the floor. A manila folder dropped from my hoodie, and I bent to pick up the single sheet of paper that had slipped out.

  It was a list, numbered one to eleven. Scratchy sentences written in what looked like another language matched the handwriting on the folder’s label: Processes and Procedures. In my frightened flight home hours earlier, I had forgotten about the folder, which was bent in the middle from me sleeping on it.

  Shoving the folder under the bed, I wrapped myself in the thin flannel throw and curled into a ball, the familiar smell of Genki stinging my eyes.

  Mom knocked on my door before opening it enough to poke her head inside my room. “Are you awake?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Your friends are here to check on you.” Usually Mom was strict about sick days, not allowing anyone to visit in case I was either faking or contagious. It seemed all rules were disregarded once a lousy dognapper swiped your puppy.

  “They’re here now?” I didn’t have anything to say to them. The mission had failed, and our dogs were still gone.

  “All three of them.”

  I almost wished Mom’s sick rule still applied. “Okay,” I said, my voice low and hoarse.

  They marched in with their arms to their sides and shoulders slumped. Mom eyed us cautiously as she backed out of my room, shutting the door softly behind her.

  “Hey, Kazu,” March said. “I brought your homework.” He set a folder on the edge of my bed.

  “Thanks?” Did he not know me? The last thing I wanted on a sick day was my homework.

  CindeeRae’s hands were clasped in front of her. “I’m sorry it didn’t go well last night.”

  “Okay, okay,” Madeleine interrupted, taking a step forward in her black-and-red soccer socks. “We feel bad that you’re sick, or whatever. But we still need to figure out where the dogs are.”

  The envelope rested beneath my bed, with information that was probably related to the case. It would be a lie to say we didn’t have any more clues, nowhere to look for the holding location. But risking another mission could put Genki in danger, and so far none of our missions had been successful. It seemed the only thing we were good at was getting into more trouble.

  I shrugged. “What can we do? We don’t know where they’re keeping the dogs, and the police already don’t believe us about Crowley, so what’s the use?”

  Madeleine’s lips tightened into a thin line and her eyes narrowed. “We can’t give up.”

  “Look.” CindeeRae stepped forward in an attempt to referee the situation. “We just thought you should know that my aunt said they’re zeroing in on some guy. She couldn’t really give me details, but she said he’d been reported for suspicious behavior already. Maybe they’re onto Crowley?”

  Before last night, that information would have been exciting. But now that Crowley had threatened Genki, I couldn’t put his life in any more danger by helping the police or participating in another klutzy mission.

  “We should just let the police do their jobs.” I couldn’t meet any of their eyes. “It’s what they do, right? Find the bad guys.”

  “But what if our dogs are long gone by then?” CindeeRae’s stage voice was back, but this time she definitely wasn’t acting.

  I pulled the covers closer to my neck. “I should probably get some sleep. I’ll see you guys tomorrow?”

  CindeeRae and Madeleine held fisted hands at their sides. What did they expect from me? I had done everything we could so far to save the dogs. It wasn’t my fault it hadn’t worked. There was nothing left to do.

  My cheeks flushed as I remembered the envelope under my bed. Well, they didn’t have to know about that.

  The girls stomped from my room, and March stayed back in the clutter, looking down at my floor. “I understand, Kazu,” he said without looking up. “It’ll be okay. You’ll all get your dogs back.”

  Once March left, I pulled the envelope from its hiding spot and rolled onto my side, curling around our only clue like it was a floatie and my bed the rocky ocean.

  Last summer, when we were ten, March and I sent secret messages to each other using a Caesar Shift, which is a code where you line two streams of the alphabet together. To help me decode his messages and code my own, March made a cipher wheel with two paper plates, one smaller than the other, and fastened together in the center with a paper fastener. Each circle had a line of the alphabet around the rim and by lining them up, we could create our own cipher.

  Ours had been cipher 5, which meant the inner alphabet moved five places to the left: A became V, B became W, and C became X. When I delivered papers in the morning, I would drop off my message and pick up March’s. And because only juicy messages were sent with a Caesar Shift, I learned that March’s dad had gambled away part of their tax refund playing internet poker, Maggie had a boyfriend and March had caught them kissing on the lips, and Max and Miles had flushed all their fish down the toilet in an experiment to see if they would end up in the irrigation ditch that ran through their backyard.

  Using the cipher wheel March had made, I halfheartedly studied the code used in the clue I had found in Crowley’s garage, mostly because it was more interesting than the homework March had brought over. I had tried ciphers one through thirteen before my pencil lead wore down to a nub.

  The endless combinations probably extended way beyond the Caesar Shift. Crowley could have used a kazillion ciphers, shifts, and codes, and by the time we figured it all out I would be eating DineWise while paying someone to rake my leaves and push my garbage to the curb. It didn’t matter; nothing we did ever changed anything. I threw the pencil across the room, and it landed perfectly in the slot from last year’s valentines box sitting atop my dresser.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mom called me down to the dining room before lights-out. A big display sat on the table—a giant diorama for the museum exhibit she had finally started piecing together.

  She stood at the head of the table like she was ready to give a presentation to the museum board. Sometimes she practiced like this in front of Dad, and I felt very grown-up to have been invited. Mom motioned for me to take a seat, and I slid into the chair closest to her. I studied the exhibition fragments like disconnected puzzle pieces; it took a few seconds for all the parts to snap into place and make sense.

  A banner lining the top of the table read THE EXHIBITION OF ESPIONAGE AND SLEUTHING. My notebook sat in the bottom corner, open to a list of clues on the dognapping ring that I had collected from all my newspaper articles. A tri-fold poster listed spy artifacts with pictures next to each item, including a lipstick pistol, button-hole camera, an Enigma machine for deciphering code, and a hollow silver dollar for carrying secret messages. There was a chain of Post-it notes detailing a case kids could solve, with a long list of clues and where they could be found in the Case Room.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Mom said, pointing at my Sleuth Chronicle. “But
I thumbed through your notebook to see what you were up to and found myself a little inspired. I realized that a detective exhibit would probably be very exciting for kids.”

  My heart fluttered at the thought of visiting Mom’s exhibition, which would definitely be my favorite of all time.

  “I thought about what you said.” She leaned over and grabbed my notebook, flipping to a spot somewhere in the middle. “About how nothing you like is important unless I like it, too. I think you might have been right about that.” She set the notebook down in front of me.

  I looked down: was written in bold at the top of the page. Atarimae. The Japanese word that described obvious and reasonable behavior, although it also meant the kind of things people do naturally, like a reflex. I had always thought detecting was my atarimae—collecting clues and solving mysteries was like a reflex to me, like Mom’s reflex was designing fun and interactive exhibits for kids at the museum.

  Mom sat down in the chair next to me. “As I tried to understand why you like studying cases, collecting clues, and solving these crime puzzles, I realized that it was kind of exciting. And I started to wonder what it might be like if we combined the things we both felt were important. That’s when I came up with this idea for the next long-term exhibit at the exploration museum.” She leaned back and smiled. “I think it’s perfect.”

  Mom had taken all this time to understand something important to me. Even though my heart ached at the Genki-size hole in my life, I couldn’t help but smile. “I think it’s perfect, too.”

  “Would you mind being my assistant?” she asked. “We could brainstorm even more ideas—I need your investigative expertise.”

  I nodded, an airy feeling rising in my chest before I remembered Genki and the achy weight returned. Mom leaned over and pulled me into a hug. “We’re going to find Genki,” she whispered in my ear, and for a second it felt like she had squeezed all the worry right out of me. And then I imagined Genki stuck in Crowley’s dognapping van, and it flooded back.

  I studied Mom’s display, all the information on gathering clues and solving crime. Could I really give up on finding my puppy when we still had one last clue to follow? If solving crime and saving people was a reflex to me, then that reflex should be supersized when it involved Genki. The least we could do was decipher the code and call the tip line with any information we uncovered.

  I imagined my puppy curled in a ball by my feet, anxious for bedtime. He would come home soon; I would make sure of it.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  I reached March’s house fifteen minutes before the bus arrived. His mom seemed surprised to see me so early in the morning. Her short blond hair stuck out from her head in chunky spikes, and it distracted me for a second before I remembered why I was there.

  “I need to study with March,” I said.

  She pointed at the stairs, and I took them two at a time, not bothering to turn around when she asked if I had eaten yet.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  I barged into March’s room, and he jumped from the corner of his bed, where he sat loading his backpack.

  “You scared me to death, Kazu.” He closed his eyes and let out a soothing sigh while I dropped my bag in the doorway and dashed to the bed. March didn’t appear to have slept much. His face was cement gray.

  “Remember how I took this from Crowley’s garage?”

  March’s eyes snapped open, and he leaned back like I was passing him a grenade.

  “It’s coded.” I laid the sheet on his lap and pulled the cipher wheel from my notebook. “You’ve got to figure out what it means before Crowley does something bad to Genki.”

  “You were right before,” March said, his arms folded over his chest. “If we keep getting in his way, Crowley’s going to kill us.”

  “You don’t have to help, March,” I said. “I understand. But what if it were Hopper?”

  He sat still, studying the document without touching it. Then, as if surrendering to a chocolate-strong urge, he grabbed the cipher wheel from my hand and began turning it slowly. “Get me a pencil.” He had that faraway look in his eye like he had stepped through a geeky portal into a new dimension, with nothing but binary code and Marvel comics.

  I grabbed a pencil from the cup on his desk and handed it to him. He scribbled letters above the code, erasing them quickly as he continued to turn the cipher wheel. After a few seconds, he chewed on the eraser and said, “There are hundreds of different codes Crowley could have used. It would take forever to crack this manually.”

  “What other choice do we have?”

  “Maggie.”

  “What about her?”

  “She has code-breaking software. The problem is, she won’t do it unless we tell her what it’s for.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “She’ll tell my parents if she thinks we’re doing something dangerous.”

  At this point, we had broken all of our rules, including the last one about avoiding anything that could get us killed. Lying to Maggie about our operation would be easy-peasy.

  “I’ll handle Maggie,” I said, offering a hand to help him stand.

  March led me to the bathroom, where Maggie leaned over the sink, spraying something foggy into her hair.

  “Hey, Maggie,” I said casually, leaning into the door frame and watching her through the mirror.

  “What do you want, Kazu?” She set the bottle down and stared at me with her glacier eyes. “You’re creeping me out.”

  “March and I were hoping you’d help us decode this stupid note Sky Mendelson and his friend were passing about March in reading.”

  “What?” March chirped behind me.

  “It’s okay, March,” I said. “Maggie gets how lame bullies can be.”

  March pinched my back, squeezing so hard I yelped.

  “What’s up with you two?”

  “Nothing,” we both said.

  “It’s just…” I folded the sheet in half. “I picked the note out of the garbage, and March is stumped, so I thought you could help.”

  She snatched the paper from my hand and looked it over. “Processes and Procedures?”

  “Weird, right?” I toyed with the slack of my backpack strap as I held her gaze.

  Her eyebrows dropped, creating a dark line of suspicion above her eyes. Then finally, like March had, she surrendered to the challenge of a puzzle unsolved. “Okay.” She shoved the paper into her back pocket and walked from the bathroom, the smell of hair spray chasing her into the hallway. “I will happily trade you one decoded note for ten Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from your Halloween stash.”

  “What?” March chirped again.

  “Deal!” I said, grabbing his arm and pulling him down the stairs and out the door.

  The bus rounded the corner toward his stop, and we both slowed down as we crossed the street, watching it pass in front of Crowley’s house. Two police cars were parked out front. As the bus looped around the neighborhood and passed Crowley’s on the way to school, we saw the cops leave, without Crowley. And without Genki.

  My mission plan was more crucial now than ever.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Madeleine leaned back in the cafeteria chair, her face set in a glare. “Why didn’t you tell us about this last night?”

  I thought they would be happy to hear about the coded sheet and the possibility of more clues, but Madeleine looked ready to battle me in a death match, and I did not have the upper-body strength for that. March fidgeted next to me.

  “You can’t keep things from us.” CindeeRae mirrored Madeleine’s body language, arms folded stiffly across her chest. “We’re a team, and we all plan missions together.”

  “Okay.” I set my Sleuth Chronicle on the table. Mom had given it back to me the night before. “Then what do you think about my idea?” I had told March about it that morning and he hadn’t said anything, which usually meant he would go along with it. The vote might be split, if it came to that
, but he would be on my side.

  Madeleine shifted in her seat, her posture softening a bit. “I don’t understand why you want to go to the police. Aren’t we trying to avoid them now, since they don’t believe you anymore?”

  This part of the plan was a hard sell; I wasn’t even sure if it would work. I placed my palms on the table and leaned over in a power pose. “The cops are onto Crowley—they were at his place this morning. The whole operation might shut down if he’s arrested, at least until Crowley’s team feel safe again. We don’t know who else is involved—or even how many there are. And because they’re so secretive, it might take the police forever to find all the dogs, if they even do. We have to keep the cops away from Crowley until we find out where they’re holding the dogs and where the dogs are sent once they leave headquarters.”

  “No way,” March blurted out. His voice was sharp and not squeaky at all. “Kazu, this is crazy! We’ve gone through garbage, trespassed in an old amusement park—where I almost got killed, by the way—and snuck into a crazy man’s garage. That’s enough. I’m done.”

  I turned to March, surprised at the tone in his voice. CindeeRae and Madeleine stared, too.

  “I’m going to the police station alone,” I said. “You won’t even have to be there.”

  “I don’t care.” He threw his hands to his side in what looked like an exaggerated shrug but meant the exact opposite. “You’re in charge, and you always demand another mission, deadlier than the ones before. But this time we will probably die. Or maybe you will or CindeeRae will or Madeleine will or I will. But someone’s going to die. And I would like to not die, and go to MIT someday!”

  He could only say that because his dog was safe. No, he would still wimp out even if Hopper were missing, too, because he was a chicken head, and I always had to beg him to help.

  “You’re such a guppy,” I said between clenched teeth.