Forensics Squad Unleashed

by Monique Polak

  I stop on the stairs and think about what my dad just said. I know I can be harsh—and the part about needing my mom feels true too. But that only makes me mad. I hate feeling needy. Maybe that’s why I try not to show it.

  Needy. Wasn’t that the word Mason used to describe the Chihuahua on the poster? Rexford. The dog who went missing. I remember Rexford’s small sad eyes. Am I really like that?

  And then I get a brilliant idea. I take the stairs back down to the basement two at a time and throw open the door to the den. Dad has turned off the flute music and blown out the candle. He is scooping up the ashes from the incense burner.

  “You know what might help us all relax—even more than meditation? A dog!”

  Dad rubs his eyes the way he does when he is waking up in the morning. “Dogs shed,” he says. “And drool and scratch the floors. You know how fussy I am about the house.”

  “What if I’d clean up after it?” I say.

  “And who’d walk the dog?” Dad asks.

  “Uh, me, I guess. And if you and Mom wanted to, it would be a great way to get some more exercise.”

  “Tabitha is right about the exercise,” Mom says. “And a dog would be company for her, but who’d look after the dog if we’re out of town?”

  Luckily, I have an answer for that too. “We could ask the Johnsons. I bet Mason would love to look after a dog.”

  And then I have a brilliant idea. I borrow Mom’s number-one sales technique—fear. “I wasn’t thinking so much about a companion. I was thinking we could get a guard dog. For protection.”

  They do not say no. With my parents, that just might mean the answer is yes.

  SIX

  When Mason and I show up for day two of forensics camp, Samantha and Lloyd are in the lobby, looking at a poster by the elevator. Another dog has gone missing. This one is a white standard poodle named Ringo.

  I want to tell Samantha and Lloyd about the missing Chihuahua, and also that we might be getting a dog, but then the other kids turn up and there isn’t time.

  “Before we get started today, we thought we’d show you where the university cafeteria is,” Lloyd tells us. “Because it’s summer and there are fewer students in the building, the cafeteria is on summer hours through August. If you want to buy something to eat, it’s only open in the morning from seven to nine and for lunch between twelve and one thirty. It’s just down this hallway.”

  “I figured that out already,” Stacey says, sniffing the air as we follow the counselors down the hall. When I look at her, she explains, “I smell toast. My mom says I must’ve been a dog in my last life.”

  That is another opening for me to tell everyone we might be getting a dog, but Samantha is explaining stuff again. I hope I get a chance soon to tell the others my news. “A forensic scientist needs a good nose,” Samantha is saying.

  Nathaniel crinkles his nose. “Not if there are corpses around.” He is wearing another skull-and-crossbones T-shirt. I wonder if he has a collection.

  Thinking about collections makes me twirl my bracelet. The one I am wearing today has a tiny magnifying glass dangling from it.

  “How come you’re so obsessed with corpses?” I ask Nathaniel.

  “No reason.” Nathaniel does not make eye contact when he says that. Which is why I decide there must be a reason.

  “Quit bumping into me like that!” Muriel tells Nico. I thought twins were supposed to get along. After all, they shared tight quarters for nine months. But Nico and Muriel never stop squabbling.

  Nico jabs Muriel with his elbow. “You’re the one who keeps bumping into me.”

  Muriel jabs him back—a little harder than she has to.

  Lloyd slows down so he can walk between them. “So what do you guys think of Montreal?” he asks.

  “We miss seeing mountains,” Muriel says.

  “We don’t miss the rain,” Nico adds.

  I would not expect two kids who fight so much to use the word we like that.

  Mason is walking behind Nathaniel and me. “Most cafeteria food sucks,” Mason says to no one in particular. It does not seem to bother him when no one responds. Mason is low-maintenance that way. If it was me, I’d feel ignored.

  “I don’t know why they think we need to see the cafeteria,” Nathaniel grumbles. “We’re supposed to bring our own snacks and lunches. Besides, I checked the schedule online. This morning we’re supposed to learn about the case we’re solving this week. The schedule doesn’t mention anything about a cafeteria tour.”

  Mason has a one-track mind. “Now that I think about it, I have tasted some decent cafeteria food. Our school cafeteria has amazing oatmeal cookies. They’ve got raisins—and chocolate chips. Raisins and chocolate chips go really well together.”

  Samantha comes to walk beside Mason. “The pizza is pretty good at this cafeteria,” she tells him. Then she taps Nathaniel’s shoulder. “Just so you know, we’ll be assigning you your case soon enough. We just figured this is a big campus and you’d want to know your way around.”

  Am I the only one who gets tingles on the insides of my elbows when Samantha says assigning you your case?

  Everything about the Life Sciences Building is shiny and new and either chrome or white, so I am expecting more of that when Lloyd opens the double doors to the cafeteria.

  What I do not expect is for Nico to slip on the tile floor. When he does, he grabs on to Muriel, and she goes flying to the floor too. Why is the floor so slippery?

  What I also do not expect is the stench. Before, Stacey said she could smell toast. But there is no toast smell now. Instead, the air smells like rotten eggs.

  Nathaniel gags. “Did somebody croak in here?” he manages to say. For once, I do not think he is being morbid. Not that I have ever smelled a corpse, but if I did, I would not be surprised if it smelled like this.

  Mason pinches his nose. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to buy food from here,” he says in a nasal, disappointed voice.

  Stacey bends down and slides one fingertip along the tile floor, which is covered in something slick and yellow. She sniffs her finger once, twice. I can almost see her dog brain trying to identify the smell. “French-fry grease,” she says, looking up at the rest of us. “Someone must have dumped a grease trap on the floor.”

  “A what?” Nico asks.

  “A grease trap. It catches grease so the pipes don’t get clogged,” Stacey says. “My dad manages a fast-food restaurant. I’ve helped him clean out the grease trap loads of times.”

  “Now why would anyone go and dump a grease trap on the floor?” Samantha wonders out loud.

  An Asian woman wearing a white apron and a hairnet comes running out of the kitchen at the back of the cafeteria. “Someone has made terrible, terrible mess in my kitchen!” she shouts.

  Samantha grabs hold of the woman’s elbow. “Be careful, Mrs. Lu! You could slip on the floor!”

  Mrs. Lu just keeps saying, “Terrible mess,” over and over again.

  It’s Lloyd who notices that Mrs. Lu is carrying a blackened metal pan. “Where’d you get that?” he asks her.

  “I found it over there,” she says, pointing to the slippery floor. “When I came into the cafeteria.”

  Lloyd groans. “It’s the grease trap,” he says to Samantha in a low voice. “I think she washed it.”

  “Of course I washed it,” Mrs. Lu says. “The grease trap was covered in oil and greasy fingerprints. I used bleach,” she adds proudly.

  Lloyd shakes his head when Mrs. Lu mentions the greasy fingerprints. I don’t know why he cares so much about a grease trap. “All right then, let’s have a look in the kitchen,” he says to us, “and see what Mrs. Lu is so upset about.”

  The closer we come to the kitchen, the worse the smell ge
ts. Now even Stacey is pinching her nose.

  When we swing open the metal doors, we figure out where the stench is coming from.

  The giant freezer doors are wide-open, and someone has dumped food all over the counters and on the floor.

  A slab of shrink-wrapped beef and several packages of fish fillets are defrosting in gooey puddles. Someone has used mustard to write out the words Beets not Meets on the long counter. I assume whoever wrote it meant Meats. Either the person who left the message is a bad speller or writing with mustard is hard to do. Or both.

  Stacey puts her hands on her hips. “It’s too bad we can’t compost any of this,” she says. “If you compost meat and fish, you risk attracting rats.” Stacey turns to Mrs. Lu, who has followed us back into the kitchen. “Where do you keep the garbage bags?”

  “Whoa!” Lloyd extends his arm traffic-cop style again. “Not so fast!”

  “What do you mean?” Stacey says. “This place is a disaster. We should help Mrs. Lu clean up. It won’t take long if we all pitch in.”

  “I’m afraid that would be tampering with the evidence.” I can see Lloyd is trying not to smile.

  “Tampering with the evidence?” Mason’s forehead crinkles up the way it does when he is trying to figure something out.

  “That’s right,” Lloyd says, “the evidence.” Now he’s definitely smiling.

  As usual, Samantha’s face is perfectly serious. “You know that case you guys are going to try to solve this week?” she asks us. “You just walked in on it.”

  So that’s why Lloyd got upset when Mrs. Lu told him she’d scrubbed the grease trap.

  “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” I overhear Samantha tell Mrs. Lu a few minutes later.

  Mrs. Lu hangs her head. “I’m very sorry. But when I saw how dirty that grease trap was, I forgot about the plan.”

  I understand how Mrs. Lu feels. If my dad was around, he’d have scrubbed that grease trap too.

  SEVEN

  A guy from building services shows up, talking on a walkietalkie. “I’m looking into it right now,” he assures whoever is on the other end of the line.

  “You two work for the forensics camp, right?” he says to Samantha and Lloyd. “I understand this mess has something to do with your camp, but people from two floors up are complaining about the odor. You’re going to have to get rid of that”—he grimaces when he points to the spoiled food—“now.”

  Samantha’s purple glasses have slipped down her nose. As she adjusts them, she looks straight at the building-services worker. “You’re going to have to give us an hour,” Samantha says. “Our forensic scientists in training need to document the scene before anything gets touched or moved around.”

  Samantha’s firm tone works on the guy. “Forensic scientists in training, hey? That’s a mouthful.” He checks the time on his watch. “One hour,” he tells Samantha. “But no longer than that. And you’d better open some windows—air out the place. Sheesh, does it ever stink!”

  The windows are high up, so Nathaniel, who is the tallest, goes to open the nearest one. Lloyd stops him. “Not just yet, Nathaniel. We won’t touch those windows…not before you guys have some idea how the vandal got into the cafeteria.”

  Lloyd and Samantha explain that we’ll be working in pairs, the way real forensic scientists do. One team will be responsible for taking photographs, one for taking detailed notes, and one for collecting fingerprints and miscellaneous evidence. “What’s important to remember is that this is going to be a team effort. You need to work together to solve this case,” Lloyd says. He makes a point of looking at the twins and also at Mason and me. “A positive attitude”—Lloyd directs this comment to Nathaniel—“benefits the entire team.”

  “Wanna be fingerprinting partners?” I ask Muriel. Something tells me she could use a break from her brother.

  Nico and Stacey partner up. They are cousins, and I guess Nico doesn’t mind hearing about environmental disaster, and Stacey likes corny jokes. They are going to be our note takers. Note taking is the perfect job for a person who likes lists as much as Stacey does.

  “That leaves me and you for the forensic photo team,” Nathaniel says to Mason.

  Mason looks pleased. “Sure, I’ll be your partner.”

  Nathaniel makes a noise somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. “I wasn’t asking you to be my partner. I was just saying there was only us left.”

  I nudge Nathaniel. “Hey,” I say. “Play nice.”

  Mason looks surprised that I’ve come to his defense. To be honest, I’m a little surprised myself. I know I can be hard on Mason, but it’s different in our case. We’ve got history. Nathaniel only met him this week. He hasn’t earned the right to pick on him yet.

  “All right then,” Nathaniel says to Mason. “Let’s be partners.”

  “Okay,” Mason says, and he gives Nathaniel a shy smile. Nathaniel smiles back. All that smiling bugs me, but I’m not sure why. I guess, in my own way, I’m possessive about Mason.

  Mason and Nathaniel go upstairs to the Department of Forensic Science with Samantha for supplies. Lloyd wants the rest of us to begin by looking for signs of forced entry. “Check the windows and doors. Keep your eyes peeled for anything unusual. Remember: don’t touch anything until you’ve got your gloves on. And keep those notebooks handy.”

  Muriel and I peer up at the windows. We do not see any shattered glass or cut screens. Stacey has compiled a list of all the possible points of entrance into the cafeteria. She and Nico report that the doors look normal too.

  Once Samantha and the boys come back with the cameras, a box of gloves, magnetic powder, wands, tape, cue cards and brown paper bags for collecting evidence, we get down to real work.

  “Forty-nine minutes,” Lloyd tells us, “before we need to toss the meat and fish. I need the photography and fingerprinting teams over here. Don’t bother trying to get prints off the meat or the fish. The surfaces aren’t flat enough, and they’re way too wet. It’s too bad about the grease trap. You’d have got some good fingerprints there.”

  Now that they have their gloves on, Stacey and Nico are testing the handles and locks on the doors to the cafeteria, checking to see if they have been tampered with. “The locks seem normal,” Stacey calls out.

  “You could say we’ve got this part of the investigation all locked up!” This time, we are all too busy to laugh (or groan) at Nico’s joke. We are down to about forty-five minutes—and there’s still a lot to do.

  Mason and Nathaniel are photographing the spoiled food. Samantha reminds them that when they are done, they need to get to the four corners of the cafeteria for some overall shots.

  Nico and Stacey are recording information in their notebooks—the weight of the meat and fish packages and their condition. “This five-pound package of beef is completely thawed,” I hear Stacey tell Nico.

  “Good observation, Stacey!” Lloyd says. “That kind of information could help us determine what time the vandalism occurred. With no air-conditioning in here, things probably defrosted pretty quickly.”

  Maybe our noses are getting used to the smell, or maybe it is because we are so focused on our jobs, but the smell is not as gross as before.

  Muriel and I spot fingerprints on the counter and on the handle of the freezer door. “See,” I say to Muriel when two thumbprints emerge from the magnetic powder we have dusted on the edge of the counter, “these ones are both arched. There’s another thumbprint over there.” I point to a spot a few inches away. “That one goes around in a continuous circle. Let’s dust there next.”

  “Twenty-six minutes left!” Samantha calls out as she hands Muriel the tape and cards for lifting the fingerprints. Dusting for prints is not as easy as it sounds—and the time pressure makes it harder. Those first two thumbprints are nice a
nd clear, but some of the other fingerprints on the counter are already smudged, making it hard to see the tiny identifying ridge details. My hands feel hot and sticky inside the rubber gloves.

  Stacey is at the counter too, looking at the mustard words. “What about the message?” she asks Samantha. “Do you think building services will want to wash this up too?”

  “Good point,” Samantha says. “Mason! Nathaniel! We need lots of pics of the mustard message. Mid-range and close-ups, please.”

  My eyes are tearing up, so I grab a Kleenex from my pocket and blow my nose. I am about to throw the Kleenex into the garbage when I spot the mustard container. It is one of those squirt jars, making it perfect for writing with. “Hey, come see what I just found!” I call out to the others.

  Mason takes several photographs of the mustard container. Then, once Samantha gives me the go-ahead, I fish it out of the garbage. There’s a paper coffee cup next to the mustard container, so Muriel and I decide to collect that too. Muriel hands me two brown bags for collecting evidence. The counselors have already explained that it is important to store pieces of evidence separately—it is another way to avoid contamination. Muriel labels the first bag, marking the date, time and contents. Then she seals it with red tape.

  Lloyd crouches down to examine the tile floor. Because it is so oily, there are lots of footprints—including ours. “Boys!” Lloyd calls Mason and Nathaniel over. “We’ll need some photographs of the floor too. It looks to me like we might have some useful footwear evidence.” Lloyd checks the time. “Better hurry—we’re down to six minutes!”

  “Footwear evidence?” Muriel looks up from the second brown bag she is labeling. “I know fingerprints are like snowflakes—everyone’s are different. But I didn’t know footwear was important too…”

  “Footwear tells stories,” Samantha says. “And Lloyd just happens to be the forensic department’s footwear impression guy. That’s why we call him FIG for short.”