by Stuart Gibbs
Tommy considered that for a few seconds. “Maybe not. Rocket could probably take down a bichon awfully fast. King might never have seen her coming. So I don’t think the lack of noise counts as evidence.”
“What if it was some other predator?” I asked. “There’s coyotes around here, right? Could one of those have eaten King instead?”
“That was actually my first thought.” Tommy flicked away a mosquito that was feeding off his forearm. “But this doesn’t look like a coyote kill either. A coyote would have made a mess of a bichon. There’d be pieces of it everywhere. Or at least a lot of blood. Honestly, I don’t think any animal did this. I haven’t even told you about the collar yet. My boss took it as evidence, along with the tail, but I have a photo of it.” He took out his phone and brought it up.
Summer and I leaned in to see it.
The photo showed the collar lying on the ground we now stood on. The collar was hot pink with King’s name spelled out in rhinestones. The buckle was still fastened; the collar had been torn in the back. There was a smear of blood on it, dulling some of the rhinestones.
“That’s a butt-ugly collar,” Summer observed.
“The cat bit through it?” I asked.
“That’s what it’s supposed to look like, I think,” Tommy said. “But to me, it just looks all wrong. I’m not saying the cougar wouldn’t have bitten through it, but again, there’s no sign of a struggle here. The ground’s a little scraped up, but still . . . I’d expect the cat to attack the dog fast, snap its neck maybe, and then take off with it. Not eat it here and leave the tail and the collar behind.” He paused, like he was gathering the nerve to say something. “This doesn’t look like a mountain lion attack to me so much as someone trying to make it look like a mountain lion attack.”
I surveyed the small clearing, thinking about that. My theory that Tommy Lopez might turn out to be a conspiracy nut hadn’t come true. His analysis of the crime scene all made sense. It didn’t completely explain away the possibility that a mountain lion had killed King, but it indicated that possibility was slim, at best. I was pretty convinced Tommy was right.
“And you think this was done to get the cougar declared a nuisance?” I asked. “So someone could get permission to kill it?”
“There’s lots of people around here who aren’t crazy about Rocket,” Tommy said sadly. “Ranchers who are worried she’ll kill their livestock. Hunters who just want the chance to take a cougar down. Families worried about their kids. Even the staunchest environmentalists can freak out when they find out there’s a predator living near them.”
It occurred to me that I’d had a very similar reaction when I learned about Rocket living close to me.
“And your boss isn’t backing you up on any of this?” Summer asked. “Doesn’t she believe you?”
Tommy chose his words carefully before answering. “My boss seems to be more concerned about politics than the lion.”
“How so?” I asked. As I spoke, something in the clearing caught my eye. To the side, not far from the mangled outline of the dead dog, was a tiny chunk of something white, which stood out against the brown dirt. I knelt to examine it.
“My boss would like to move to another, more powerful job someday,” Tommy explained. “And Lincoln Stone has a lot of political clout. If he doesn’t like you, he can ruin your career.”
“So your boss is willing to let an innocent cougar die if it means advancing her career?” Lily asked angrily.
“I don’t know,” Tommy replied.
“What are you looking at?” Summer asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
The white object was less than an inch long and oddly shaped. There was a perfect ninety-degree bend in it and the edges were totally straight, indicating it hadn’t formed naturally. I poked at it with a stick. Whatever it was made out of was solid but chalky.
“Looks like it came off the bottom of someone’s boot,” Tommy observed.
“Like how?” Lily asked.
Tommy lifted his foot, showing us the sole of his own boot. The tread was thick and heavily ridged. There were ninety-degree angles in many of the ridges. “Someone steps in something wet, like mud—then it dries out and gets left behind in little bits and pieces.”
Summer said, “So maybe whoever killed King left this here!”
“It’s possible,” Tommy agreed cautiously. “But there’s been a lot of other people around here since last night. Any one of them could’ve left that behind.”
“It still might be a clue, though,” Summer said.
Tommy nodded, then set down his backpack and took out a plastic evidence bag and tweezers.
“That doesn’t look like mud to me,” Lily remarked. “It’s white.”
“There can be white mud.” Tommy knelt by the small object and picked it up with the tweezers. “Places where there’s lots of limestone in the soil. And there’s plenty of limestone around here.”
I watched him closely as he carefully bagged the object. He was right about the white mud, and yet, I didn’t think that’s what the object was made of. The chalkiness of it reminded me of something else, but I couldn’t recall what.
Suddenly, someone shouted my name.
This caught all of us by surprise. We should have been far away from any other humans, let alone anyone who knew me. The voice was a young boy’s, somewhat high-pitched.
We all looked around, trying to place where it had come from.
“Teddy!” the kid called again. “Over here!”
I spotted him through the trees, downhill a bit, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. He was about ten years old and he was waving frantically for my attention. Next to him stood a younger brother, maybe seven, who looked much more shy. They were dressed for an afternoon in the woods, with hiking boots and cargo shorts and wide-brimmed hats. For some reason, both were carrying croquet mallets.
“Do you know those kids?” Summer asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. Their mom’s a keeper at the park. Works with wolves, I think.”
I had met the whole family at a barbecue one of the other keepers had thrown at our trailer park a few weeks before. There hadn’t been many other kids there, so the boys had tagged after me most of the time. One of them had impaled my soccer ball on a prickly pear cactus and ruined it. Their names were Grayson and Jason Mason. Or possibly Jason and Mason Grayson. I couldn’t quite remember.
The older one was waving much more frantically now. “Hi, Teddy!” he called. “It’s me! Grayson! Grayson Mason!”
Lily snickered at the name.
I waved back at him.
“Looks like you have a fan club,” Summer teased.
“You’re just jealous because someone recognized me for once and not you,” I teased back. Summer hated being recognized in public. She didn’t like to go out much because of it, and when we did, she always wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes.
Now that I’d seen him, Grayson was waving even more frantically. His arm was moving so wildly I feared he might bop his brother in the head.
“You should go say hi,” Summer said.
“But the crime . . . ,” I said.
“The dog’s not gonna get more dead,” Summer told me, then gave me a shove in the kids’ direction.
I headed down through the trees to the barbed-wire fence.
The Mason kids looked a lot alike, even though there were several years between them. Red hair. Lots of freckles. Perpetually sunburned skin. According to their mother they had moved there from somewhere in the northern US—Minneapolis, maybe—and were having trouble adjusting to the heat. Grayson beamed excitedly as I approached.
“Do you guys live right here?” I asked, pointing over the fence.
“Yeah,” Grayson said enthusiastically. “But it’s not really our house. We’re just renting it.”
“We’re renting the guest house,” Jason corrected quietly.
I wasn’t too surp
rised to hear this, even though my parents, as FunJungle employees, got their housing for free. The FunJungle employee trailer park wasn’t big enough to house every single employee; the free housing had been an incentive to get a famous primatologist like my mother to sign on. And frankly, the trailers weren’t that nice. They were freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer. I would have been happy to live somewhere else.
“Right,” Grayson agreed. “The guest house. But it’s plenty big for our whole family. The real house is huge. Are you here because of King? Are you investigating?”
I was taken aback by these questions—and the suddenness with which they’d been asked—until I remembered the Mason boys had been well aware of my reputation for solving crimes when they met me. Their mother had introduced me as “the kid who figured out who killed Henry.”
I thought about denying that I was there because of King, but I didn’t see much point to it. “That’s right. Did you guys see or hear anything strange last night?”
“You mean, like a mountain lion?” Grayson asked.
“Yes.”
“No,” Grayson answered. “But Mom says mountain lions can be really quiet. She also says there’s been a couple prowling around here lately.”
“A couple?” I repeated. “She’s seen them?”
“She’s found tracks.” Grayson held up his croquet mallet. “That’s what this is for. Mom told us to stay together and not go far from the house, but if we do see a lion, we should make a lot of noise to scare it off, and if it comes too close, we can fight it off.” He swung the mallet like a club, trying to look tough. Unfortunately, the mallet was in bad shape. The head popped off, flew over the fence, and nearly nailed me in the face. I ducked and it sailed over my head and clonked off an oak tree behind me.
“Oops,” Grayson said.
“Don’t worry about it.” I picked the mallet head off the ground. It was old and weather-beaten, with black dye from the croquet ball smeared on the end.
Jason suddenly burst into tears. Like everything else, he did it quietly. There was barely a sound, but he was obviously very upset.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him. “Are you scared of the lion?”
He shook his head and sniffled.
“He’s upset about King,” Grayson told me, then looked to his brother. “Isn’t that right?”
Jason looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and nodded.
I handed the head of the croquet mallet over the fence to Grayson.
He shoved it back onto the handle. “King was a nice dog. We liked him a lot. Even if Mr. Stone didn’t.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“He didn’t treat King very nicely,” Grayson said. “He was always yelling at him. Calling him stupid and stuff. We could hear him all the way at our place.” He gave the croquet mallet a practice swing. The head flew off again and landed in a copse of trees on the Masons’ property. Grayson sighed sadly.
“Mr. Stone yells a lot,” Jason said softly.
“Hey!” a voice boomed from behind me. It was deep and distinctive; I recognized it immediately. Lincoln Stone was home earlier than expected. “What’d I tell you kids about coming onto my property?”
“See what I mean?” Jason asked me.
I turned around to see Lincoln Stone storming across his lawn toward us, his face mottled with anger. He was dressed in his standard good-old-boy outfit: jeans, boots, a blue button-down shirt, and a cowboy hat. His voice had a Southern twang to it. If he was really from Beverly Hills, he had gone to great lengths to hide it. He was also carrying a shotgun. It wasn’t aimed at us, but it was still scary. “This here’s my land, not yours!” he shouted. “Now, get back on the other side of that fence!”
Grayson and Jason took a few steps back, cowering in fear.
“They are on the other side of the fence,” I told Lincoln. “And they have been the whole time.”
“I’m not talking to them!” Lincoln snapped. “I’m talking to you! Get your butt back over there with your friends!”
“I’m not here with them . . . ,” I began.
“Then you’re trespassing?” Lincoln asked before I had a chance to finish. “You know what the law here says I can do to trespassers? It says I can shoot your sorry butt.”
“Whoa!” Tommy rushed out of the trees and into Lincoln’s path, waving his arms desperately. “He’s not trespassing! He’s with me!”
Lincoln stopped and glared at Tommy. He looked even more annoyed to see the Fish and Wildlife agent than he was to see me. “What on earth are you doing here with a kid? This isn’t a day care. It’s my home!”
“Teddy isn’t just any kid,” Tommy said. “He’s really smart. I brought him in to help with the investigation.”
Lincoln shifted his attention to the crime scene. He had been so focused on me and the Mason boys he hadn’t noticed everyone gathered in the trees. Now that he saw Summer and Lily, he grew even more annoyed. “Crap on a cracker, Lopez, you brought a couple of girls here too?” The way he said “girls” made it clear he meant it as an insult.
Lily bristled at this. “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.”
“Same here,” Summer said angrily.
Lincoln didn’t even bother responding to them. He kept on speaking to Tommy, like Lily and Summer weren’t even worth his time. “This isn’t a tourist attraction, it’s a crime scene!”
“And we are treating it as such,” Tommy said deferentially. “These folks are helping me gather more evidence. . . .”
“Evidence?” Lincoln exclaimed scathingly. “What more evidence do you need, you dimwit? A mountain lion ate my dog, pure and simple. It’s a blatant case of feline caninicide.”
“Caninicide?” Summer repeated.
“Yeah,” Lincoln said. “It’s like homicide, but for a dog. And that cougar’s guilty of it. So instead of poking around here, you should be out trying to find that dang cat before it eats someone else’s pet. Or a child!”
Tommy reddened around the ears, though I couldn’t tell if this was due to embarrassment or anger. He did an impressive job of restraining himself, though. “Mr. Stone,” he said calmly, “it’s imperative that we don’t make a mistake here. . . .”
“I’ll tell you what’d be a mistake,” Lincoln said, getting right in Tommy’s face. “Saying one more word to me. Unless it’s ‘Yes, sir.’ Because I can call up your boss right now and have you busted down so low you’ll have to look up to look down. ¿Comprendes, amigo?”
Although Lincoln hadn’t said anything overtly racist to Tommy, there was something mocking in the way he said the last two words that certainly seemed to be disdainful of the fact that Tommy was Latino.
Tommy stayed right where he was, glaring hatefully at Lincoln. He looked like he wanted to punch Lincoln Stone in the nose. And Lincoln looked like he wanted Tommy to try; he was spoiling for a fight, and my guess was, he probably wouldn’t fight fair.
Lily placed a hand on Tommy’s arm. “Let’s go,” she said.
Tommy kept his eyes locked on Lincoln’s, but it was evident that Lily had gotten through to him. His glare softened and he seemed to come back to his senses. “All right.”
“That’s right,” Lincoln taunted. “Listen to your girl there. Sounds like she actually has some sense to her.”
Tommy didn’t take the bait this time. He broke his stare-off with Lincoln and turned toward where we’d parked. “Come on, kids. We’re going.”
Lily, Summer, and I fell in behind him as he led the way around the house and back toward the car.
Lincoln wasn’t the kind of guy who’d just let us walk away without getting in a last taunt, though. “Lopez, next time I see your sorry butt, you’d better be holding a warrant to hunt that lion.” He cocked his shotgun to punctuate his point.
None of us looked back. It seemed best not to reward his behavior with any more attention. The same way we were told to handle bullies at school.
I did look toward the
Mason boys, though, intending to wave good-bye. But both of them had run off during our showdown with Lincoln. I couldn’t blame them.
“I can’t believe it,” Summer said under her breath. “I thought his whole dirtbag image was an act for television. But he’s an even bigger jerk in real life.”
“I’ve met a lot of bad people,” Lily added. “And that guy is definitely in the running for the worst. I’ll bet he killed his own dog just so he could have an excuse to shoot Rocket.”
I wondered if that was possible. “Even if he didn’t, he obviously doesn’t want us investigating this anymore. We probably aren’t going to be able to come back here.”
“We won’t,” Tommy agreed. “But we can manage. I’ve taken tons of photos of the crime scene.”
“I took a bunch too,” Summer said, then cast a sideways glance at the giant log cabin. “Looks like Lincoln has lots of security cameras around this property. Has anyone looked at the footage? Maybe the killer is on there.”
I looked at the house. Sure enough, there were several security cameras mounted prominently under the eaves of the roof, aimed all around the house. They were much bigger than they had to be, which I figured meant that Lincoln wanted people to see them. Most of the time, the mere existence of cameras was enough to deter thieves. Though they wouldn’t deter a mountain lion.
“I didn’t even notice those,” Tommy said, sounding annoyed at himself. “That’s a good idea.”
“Lincoln Stone should have known about them,” Summer said. “He didn’t suggest looking at the footage?”
“If he did, I didn’t hear about it,” Tommy replied.
“That’s because he’s the killer,” Lily said, then looked to Tommy. “I told you these kids would be helpful.”
Tommy gave her a shy, appreciative smile. “Yeah, you did.”
As we neared Tommy’s pickup, I glanced back across the property. Lincoln Stone had walked out of the trees to a place where he could keep an eye on us. He was watching us like a hawk, making sure we were getting right into the truck and leaving. He had the shotgun tucked under his arm and a disdainful look on his face.
I shuddered. I didn’t know if Lincoln could have killed his own dog or not, but I was sure of one thing: He wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to get angry at you. If we did, he could cause all kinds of trouble for us.