Kazu Jones and the Denver Dognappers

by Shauna Holyoak

  March’s face flushed; I have never called him a name before in front of other people. That was like best-friend code or something, and I had just broken it.

  “Sheesh.” Madeleine stood and adjusted the waistband of her athletic shorts. “Melodrama much, people?”

  “Madeleine.” CindeeRae touched her sleeve as a warning.

  “You’re a jerk,” March said to me. “I don’t know why I ever helped you, anyway.”

  He turned and stalked out of the cafeteria, my chest tightening with the sound of each foot-stomp. March was serious, and it looked like, for the first time ever, I would have to detect without him.

  “So,” Madeleine said once he was gone. “Let’s plan this mission.”

  Riding to the police station, I worried my after-school snack might return in liquid form on the backseat of the car. When I told Mom I needed to talk with a detective about the dognapping case, she had convinced Dad to take off work early and come with us. He tapped the steering wheel as he drove, and Mom hummed along to a song on the radio. They were trying too hard to act normal, and instead of looking like a family in a car, we looked like people auditioning for a commercial about a family in a car.

  I practiced the confession Madeleine and CindeeRae helped me fine-tune at lunch, gesturing with my hands as I silently moved my lips with the script. I had to distract the police from Crowley. If they showed up at his house again, Genki would be a goner, and we’d never find Crowley’s partners or their headquarters. My keen spy skills would be tested with this mission.

  Dad parked in front of the police station, and I dragged my feet as I followed them inside, wishing somehow that I could do this alone, without my parents. Instead of sitting in a dark interrogation room across from “bad cop” Officer Rhodes, like I had imagined, I found myself standing at the police-station counter with Mom and Dad, talking with Detective Hawthorne, who was in charge of the dognapper case.

  Detective Hawthorne was tall and wide, even bigger than Dad. When the police officer at the front desk paged him, the detective appeared out of nowhere and walked toward us like a steamroller. I didn’t think he would stop in time, and I imagined him barreling into the counter and breaking it like a cardboard tower. He ambled up to some cubbies along the wall, grabbed a file, and then swung back to where we stood, all in a swift series of movements that seemed choreographed. He dropped the file on the counter and shook my parents’ hands.

  “Kazuko.” He pronounced my name perfectly after Dad introduced me. Only those who had known me for a few years could actually say my name right. “How can I help you?” He smiled big enough for me to see his molars. His dark hair curled out at his collar, and the heavy stubble on his face was only visible close up.

  “A few weeks ago we talked to a police officer about the dognappings.” I coughed into my fist to clear my throat. “Some of the things I told Officer Rhodes weren’t exactly true.”

  “What?” Mom snapped.

  “It’s okay,” Detective Hawthorne said, shooting Mom a glance. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “The collar we gave you? The one belonging to Barkley? I took it off him the day he disappeared.”

  Detective Hawthorne opened the file and flipped through a few pages before responding. “Before Barkley disappeared, you were the last one to see him, right?”

  “I used to walk Barkley on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It was one of my jobs.”

  “I see.” He kept his thumb on a sheet of paper in the file, holding his place. “You must be a very responsible young lady to have a dog-walking business and a paper route.”

  “I’m saving for an iPad.” My arms started to itch, and I scratched them over my coat. Detective Hawthorne arched his eyebrows, waiting for me to continue, so I went on.

  “I let Barkley off his leash,” I said, tears pooling in my eyes because I knew I would have to tell them something even worse than the truth next. “I undid his collar and let him run down the shady path behind Pioneer Village without his leash every time I walked him. But this was the first time he had ever run away from me. I got so scared I threw the leash into the zoo garbage but kept the collar, hoping I’d still find Barkley. But I never did.”

  “And?” Detective Hawthorne prodded.

  “Mr. Crowley’s house has always been super creepy, so I thought he probably took all the dogs.” I couldn’t stop the tears dribbling from the corners of my eyes. They came down fast and dropped from my chin. “March didn’t know. I slipped the collar into Mr. Crowley’s garbage can before we searched it. And then I convinced him we should tell our parents Crowley was the dognapper.”

  “And the receipt?”

  “What?” I had forgotten about the receipt. Officer Rhodes had left it behind, so I figured no one else knew about it. Stupid police report.

  “The dog food receipt. Remember?”

  Mom and Dad both looked at me, their eyes all squinty. It felt as if a trap had closed on my ankle. If I confirmed it came from Crowley’s recycled newspaper bags, would he still look suspicious?

  “I don’t know where it came from,” I finally said. “Sometimes I get recycled bags from two or three houses. Crowley was one of the houses that day, but I’m pretty sure I collected bags from other people, too.”

  Detective Hawthorne’s expression was unexpectedly kind. He reached under the counter and grabbed a tissue box. I took a tissue and blew my nose, deciding it best to stay at the police station as long as possible, giving Mom time to calm down.

  “You’re a detective, right?” he asked.

  I nodded, because, duh. Although this single confession probably marked the end of my career. I was an eleven-year-old washout. No one would ever believe I was an honest detective now.

  I avoided looking at Mom, afraid her laser gaze might light me on fire. Instead I kept my eyes on Detective Hawthorne.

  “There are a few detectives out there who want to solve cases so badly, they’ll do whatever it takes,” he said. “But planting evidence is a serious offense.”

  I held the tissue to my eyes because, for the first time in my life, I was getting a lecture I didn’t deserve. The skin on my cheeks prickled, and it felt like goose bumps blossomed on my scalp.

  “Never compromise your good reputation for a rigged outcome. It’s not worth it,” he said.

  I peeked from behind the tissue and realized the lecture had somehow softened my mother’s angry edges.

  “You’re a brave girl,” Detective Hawthorne said softly. “That must have been difficult to share.”

  He thanked Mom and Dad for stopping by and walked us to the car, chatting about football and the weather, like what had happened was no big deal. He opened the back door for me and watched me climb inside, leaning down to say good-bye.

  “You’ll make a good detective someday, Kazuko.” He lowered his voice. “And just so you know, I haven’t ruled out James Crowley as a suspect yet.”

  He winked before shutting the door, and my stomach lurched.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  That night March stood on my front porch, holding out a manila envelope. “You owe me five Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.”

  I tentatively took the envelope and held it to my chest. “Did Maggie say anything about it?”

  “Just that it was a double transposition cipher like the ones used by both sides of the military in World War Two.” March tried to act bored by that information, but it was a stretch. “And also that she’s pretty sure Processes and Procedures wasn’t created by Sky Mendelson and friends.”

  “Is she gonna rat us out?”

  “No,” he said. “We gave her chocolate. The deal’s solid.”

  I stepped onto the porch with him and closed the door behind me, dropping my voice to a whisper even though my parents were watching TV downstairs. “I’m sorry I called you a guppy. But you can’t quit the case.”

  “You’re always bossing me around,” he said. “And I’ve helped you with every mission, so I sho
uld be like a partner or something, not an assistant.”

  I could be bossy, I thought, remembering how Madeleine had called me Bossy Jones at her second-grade princess unicorn birthday party. Usually I was bossy because I thought I knew the best way to gather clues or solve a case. But being confident didn’t mean I could walk all over my best friend. Or any of my friends.

  “You’re right.” I rubbed my arms as the sun began to go down. “I guess we could be partners in charge?”

  “I still think it’s dangerous.”

  “You always think it’s dangerous.”

  “True,” he said. “But usually the puzzle we’re trying to solve is bigger than the fear of solving it. Until now. Now the fear is bigger.”

  “So you still won’t work the case?”

  He rocked back on his heels and studied our porch light, a mass of cobwebs and gnats caught around it. “Maybe we could look at the decoded document first and see if it has any good clues.” His eyes cut to the envelope clasped to my chest like a shield.

  I opened the door to my house and he followed me upstairs.

  I slammed my bedroom door behind us and ripped open the envelope, pulling two folded sheets from inside. Behind the original coded list was a printout with the translation. March stood next to me, his mouth moving silently as he read.

  I crumpled up the sheets and tossed them to the floor. “It’s about DineWise, not dognapping.” Without more clues we’d never find Genki.

  “What are you doing?” March picked up the sheets and smoothed them out on my bed, dropping to his knees to study them. “The fact that this doesn’t make any sense means it’s important. Why would you create some weird, nonsense list and then encrypt it so that people like us wouldn’t know what it meant?” He shook the paper at me. “This is just another code we have to break.” He had that antsy look, like his body itched all over, and he couldn’t keep still.

  March read from the printout:

  PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES

  1. Receive DineWise shipment requests from Withe.

  2. Determine course of retrieval, being sure to avoid high-traffic thoroughfares while following standard DineWise delivery routes.

  3. Delay assigned DineWise driver from retrieval route to avoid redundancy.

  4. Retrieve shipment.

  5. Hold shipment at Lewcroy Storage for 24 hours.

  6. Transfer shipment to Withe Brokerage Facility, using standard DineWise transport.

  7. Scrub storage facility per standard cleaning protocol.

  8. Hold shipment at Withe Brokerage Facility for 72 hours to prepare and repackage.

  9. Transfer shipment to buyer using downgraded DineWise vehicle.

  10. Scrub Withe Brokerage Facility per standard cleaning protocol.

  11. Scrub downgraded DineWise vehicle using standard cleaning protocol.

  I sighed. “But Crowley doesn’t own a DineWise business, right?”

  “Not that I could tell from his bank statements.” March paced the room.

  But we did find a dirty van parked in his garage, a van about the same size as the DineWise vehicles driving through our neighborhood all the time.

  March was already following my train of thought. “What if the dognapping van is a DineWise vehicle?” he asked. That was why we were such good partners.

  I took the paper from March and followed each line with my pointer finger. “This must be the list of processes and procedures Crowley and his partner use for swiping the dogs.”

  If the shipment were dogs, then Withe told Crowley which types they needed. Crowley followed a DineWise route, after delaying the real driver, and then used his own DineWise van to swipe the dog—that’s why it had been in his garage. That meant Lewcroy Storage was Crowley’s house, since we already knew he never kept a dog there for long. And he dirtied the van in order to distribute dogs to buyers, like the angry dogfighters at Magic Planet. Although, as far as I could tell, Crowley had gone a little rogue, swiping dogs like Barkley and Muffin when the van was still dirty from distribution. He was getting a little sloppy.

  March was way ahead of me. “If LEWCROY is CROWLEY,” he said, his voice squeaky with excitement, “then his partner’s name is jumbled up, too—WITHE. And where WITHE is, we’ll find doggie-holding headquarters.”

  My heart seemed to stop beating for a second, and then, when it started again, the pounding was deafening, like Crowley slamming his hand on the driver’s window.

  To find Genki, we would have to find the Withe Brokerage Facility.

  “But who’s Withe?” March asked like he was reading my mind.

  “What if it’s someone we don’t even know?” I said. “Then what?”

  March paced the room. “I’ll search Crowley’s desktop again and see what I can find. There may be an e-mail that gives his accomplice away. Withe had to communicate ‘shipment requests’ somehow, right?”

  “What should I do?” My pulse thrummed with the thought new clues, new clues, new clues.

  “Gather all the intel in the Sleuth Chronicle and bring it to school tomorrow.” March slid the translation back into the tattered envelope, which he then held under his arm. “We need a new plan if we’re going to rescue Genki before he’s ‘transferred.’”

  I could tell March had already done the math in his head. I counted it out, using my fingers when it got tricky. If Withe held the dogs for seventy-two hours, that meant we had three days after breaking into Crowley’s garage to save Genki from the partner. Today was the end of day two.

  We only had one more day.

  I squinted at the paper poking from the pages of a Harry Potter book I had grabbed from Ms. Packer’s classroom library. The thicker the book, the easier to hide something inside, I had decided.

  Ms. Packer had kicked her heels off under the chair and crossed her nyloned feet atop her desk as she leaned back to read a book of her own. She wouldn’t suspect any student in her class of avoiding silent reading time when she was such a sucker for it herself. In fact, today she’d probably have us read for another thirty-five minutes until the bell rang.

  I studied the paper. WITHE. We knew who Crowley was, making unscrambling Lewcroy easy. But did we know who Withe was unscrambled? Even with all March’s computer hacking, we still hadn’t figured it out. Would we ever be able to?

  I tapped my pencil on the paper. WITHE. I turned the sheet over and tried unscrambling the code by creating words with each letter. ITHEW, IWETH, THIEW, THIWE, HEITW, HEWIT.

  I stopped, my mouth dropping open.

  Our music teacher, Mrs. Hewitt, had been at Sleepy Hollow with her wiener dog, Pickles, the night before Halloween, and no kids. Mom had thought that was interesting when I knew she really meant weird. What if she was only there to scope out the doggie parade and then inform Crowley which ones she needed for the next shipment? Mrs. Hewitt would make the perfect accomplice in Crowley’s dognapping ring.

  But Hewitt was spelled with two T’s, not one. Had they intentionally misspelled her code name to throw the police off even more? Or maybe this code ignored duplicate letters? Either way, I had cracked it and couldn’t wait to tell the gang.

  “Awesome,” I whispered, pumping my fist silently.

  “Shhhh!” Sammy Clover, the girl sitting behind me, leaned forward. “Some of us are trying to read, Kazuko!” Her entire face was pinched, and her shiny black hair swept toward me in two sharp points.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, snapping the book shut before Ms. Packer came over and took my paper away.

  “Be nice, Sammy.” Lana Mesker leaned into the conversation from her desk to the left of mine. “Her dog got swiped this week.”

  “How did you know that?” I asked, not whispering anymore.

  Lana shrugged. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Never break Rule #2. “Blabbermouths,” I said under my breath.

  They looked at each other like I had sworn. Ms. Packer stood at my side. Where had that woman come from? She moved like a cat!
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  “What’s going on, ladies?”

  “Nothing,” I said a little too loudly, trying to distract her as I slid the Processes and Procedures sheet from the book and back to the Sleuth Chronicle before handing her Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “Just saying that this is a very good book.” Sammy and Lana were reading again, or doing a good job pretending. “I highly recommend it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  In the cafeteria, I pulled March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine aside and whispered, “I think Mrs. Hewitt is WITHE.” Before school had started that morning, March and I briefed CindeeRae and Madeleine on the decoded Processes and Procedures document.

  CindeeRae’s eyes narrowed, and her lips tightened into a thin slit. “Where does she live?”

  “Whoa.” March held his hand out and then looked at the ceiling, puzzled, stroking his chin like it was covered with a beard.

  “She was at Sleepy Hollow the night Lenny disappeared,” Madeleine said. “She walked behind us in the puppy parade.”

  “And she’s creepy,” CindeeRae said. “Right? She’s so creepy with the singing and the ‘push your air from your diaphragm.’” She tried mimicking Mrs. Hewitt’s voice but ended up sounding more like she was talking in slow motion.

  “If Mrs. Hewitt is WITHE, we need to act fast,” I said.

  “Slow down,” March said. “We can’t jump to conclusions like this.” He met my eyes and leaned over the table. “We don’t have time to pick the wrong suspect, Kazu. If we chase Mrs. Hewitt and she’s doesn’t have Genki, our time’s up. We need more than circumstantial evidence.”

  I resisted the urge to pound the table. He was my partner, not my assistant.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Madeleine volunteered. “It’s a good way to get intel, right? You just have to ask the right questions.”

  As if she had broken through a force field, I suddenly noticed the clanking of lunch trays and the chatter of conversations around us. Our table was filling up. March and CindeeRae looked from me to Madeleine, their eyes bunching at me.