I called Dad right after leaving KoalaVille.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Near Carnivore Canyon,” I replied. Technically that wasn’t a lie. I thought my father might get upset if he knew I’d been to KoalaVille.
“Stay there,” Dad told me. “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
I hurried over to Carnivore Canyon, which was carved into a huge slab of rock close to the Land Down Under. During the summer it had been one of the most crowded exhibits at FunJungle, although today it was almost deserted. KoalaVille had siphoned off much of the attention. Plus, the really popular carnivores—the lions and tigers—had the good sense to stay indoors on cold days. Lots of smaller carnivores, like the otters and raccoons, stayed active during the winter, but for some reason, tourists didn’t care about them much.
I liked the otters, though. So I posted myself in front of their exhibit and watched them cavorting until Dad arrived five minutes later. He was out of breath, having run across the entire park—and he was on edge, which was unusual for him. Dad was generally extremely unflappable. His work as a wildlife photographer had put him in plenty of dangerous situations. He’d faced everything from great white sharks to charging grizzly bears to third-world militias. But now he was a bundle of nervous energy.
“I thought we agreed you’d stay with the crowds,” he said.
“There aren’t many crowds to stay with today,” I replied.
Dad frowned. “This isn’t a game, Teddy. You need to be careful.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
Dad hesitated a moment before answering, as though he was going to say one thing but decided to say something else instead. “I’ve just been worried about you. Come on.” He put an arm around my shoulder and steered me off the main route through the exhibit.
I followed him down a thin dirt path through the landscaping. “Where are we going?”
“To borrow a friend’s office for a bit.” Dad didn’t have an office at FunJungle. He could do almost anything he needed with a digital camera and a laptop computer, so he tended to work at home or borrow Mom’s office—when he wasn’t traveling the world on assignment.
“Is Mom coming too?” I asked.
Dad shook his head. “She really wants to, but she had another situation with Motupi.”
I nodded understanding. Motupi was a five-year-old chimpanzee with severe anger-management issues. He had recently arrived at FunJungle, and while he behaved normally most of the time, every now and then he would have massive emotional eruptions. During these, he would tear up the landscaping, threaten the other chimps, and throw anything he could get his hands on—which was usually his own poop. FunJungle employees had started calling him Furious George.
“What’d he do this time?” I asked.
“Same as usual,” Dad told me. “One second he was fine; the next he was screaming like a banshee and throwing stuff. Mom decided she can’t leave him on display with the other chimps anymore, so she’s shifting him to a holding cell until she can figure out what’s triggering this behavior. If it weren’t an emergency, she’d be here for you. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Tucked behind the otter exhibit was a security door with the standard security keypad. Dad had written the day’s code for this door on the palm of his hand. I figured whoever we were visiting must have given it to him. Dad typed it in, the door clicked open, and we entered the tunnels behind Carnivore Canyon.
Because the animal enclosures at the Canyon were built into the rock, the behind-the-scenes areas had needed to be carved out as well. The tunnel had the feel of a mine shaft and reeked of pee because all the big cats marked their territory several times a day. We passed behind the serval, bobcat, and mountain lion enclosures until we reached Carnivore Control. This was a surprisingly large room hollowed out in the rock. It was basically a man-made cave, albeit an incredibly high-tech one: There were computer monitors everywhere, providing live video feeds from the exhibits, although they could also be used to check everything from the feeding schedule to the animals’ most recent health reports. It looked like the top secret underground lair of a James Bond villain.
A single keeper sat in the midst of the monitors, busily tracking all the carnivores at once. Most keepers tended to be darkly tanned from working hours outside each day. This keeper, however, was pasty from spending so much time underground, and the blue glow from all the monitors reflected off his white skin to give him a sort of ghostly pallor. He was so riveted to a video monitor that he barely glanced up when we entered.
“Teddy, this is Arthur Koenig,” Dad said.
“Thanks for helping us,” I said.
Arthur waved this off without taking his eyes off the monitor. “No big deal,” he said. “Your father’s helped me plenty of times. Grab any computer you need. I can’t use them all.”
Dad and I selected a computer right next to Arthur. Now that I could see his monitor, I realized what was so fascinating. He was watching video of FunJungle’s four new Siberian tiger cubs, which were only a few days old. Siberian tigers are almost extinct, so any babies were a huge boon to the survival of the species. People around the world had been thrilled by the news of their birth. Pete Thwacker was chomping at the bit to get them on display—or at least to get photos of them in the papers—but for the time being the cubs needed rest and privacy. Most FunJungle employees hadn’t even had the chance to see them yet. The cubs were all lodged at their mother’s teats, nursing hungrily. They were so helpless; they couldn’t even open their eyes yet.
“How’re they doing?” Dad asked.
“Fantastic,” Arthur replied. “In the wild, two would have been lucky to survive, but here, all four are probably going to come through. Even the little runt there.” He tapped the screen, pointing to a cub significantly smaller than the others. His littermates kept shoving him away, but each time, he’d scramble back into the fray.
“Do they have names yet?” I asked.
Arthur shook his head. “Pete Thwacker wants to have a big contest to name them. He’s gonna milk these cubs for as much PR as he can.”
“Can’t really blame him,” Dad said. “This place needs all the good PR it can get.”
“Maybe,” Arthur grumbled, “but it’d be nice to call them something other than Cubs One, Two, Three, and Four.”
Dad grabbed two chairs for us, then pulled a DVD out of his pocket. “My pal in security copied all the footage from the camera feeds outside KoalaVille last night,” he told me. “Turns out, there’s no footage from inside the exhibit. The morons never hooked it up properly.”
I made a show of surprise, not wanting to tell Dad I knew this already. Because then I’d have to tell him how I knew, which was a conversation I didn’t feel like having quite yet. There was too much else to focus on. “Have you watched all this already?”
“No. Only a few minutes of it. But I wanted to examine the rest more closely.” Dad inserted the DVD into the hard drive, then brought up the file. It was quite large—a few hours of footage from multiple cameras—so it took a while to load. When it finally popped up, the computer screen displayed four different squares, each showing video from a different angle outside Kazoo’s exhibit. The time was digitally stamped at the bottom of each. The video quality was surprisingly good; one of the many companies J.J. McCracken owned made high-quality surveillance cameras, so he’d given himself a deal on them.
The video began at four thirty p.m. There were no tourists lined up for the exhibit, as it was supposed to be closed for the night, although lots of people were jamming the bazaar, buying Kazoo merchandise.
Dad fast-forwarded a few minutes, then slowed down the video again. At 4:43 I ran past one of the cameras, then appeared on another, then showed up at the door to the keepers’ office. My backpack dangled over one shoulder, obviously empty. I knocked, then entered Summer’s code in the keypad and slipped into the office.
“Your knowing that code raised a lot of questions in security,” Dad said. “Apparently, no one there knew J.J. McCracken had his own secret access code. Not even Marge.”
“What Marge doesn’t know could fill a library,” I said.
“Marge—and most everyone else—assumes you must have stolen the code somehow,” Dad went on. “Which indicates a lot of premeditation. Like you planned this theft well ahead of time.”
I swallowed hard, concerned. “Why doesn’t Marge just ask J.J. about the code?”
“I doubt he’d admit the truth about it,” Dad said. “Then his secret code wouldn’t be a secret anymore.”
I sighed and nodded agreement.
Dad jumped two minutes ahead in the video. Four forty-five. The last of the tourists begrudgingly filed out of the koala viewing area. Then Kristi emerged and started toward her office, but Large Marge cut her off. There was no audio on the recording, but I knew Marge was demanding to be let into the viewing area and Kristi was telling her it was pointless because I wasn’t inside. Marge grew angrier and angrier, so finally Kristi capitulated and let her in.
Dad jumped forward another few minutes. At 4:50 Marge and Kristi exited the viewing area, circled around to the keepers’ office, and went inside. Two minutes after that, Marge stormed out, looking angry, and stomped off toward the bazaar. After another three minutes, Kristi exited, having tended to Kazoo, and headed home for the night.
Dad fast forwarded again. On the screen, it grew dark as the sun set and the video shifted from full-color to a night-vision green. Dad slowed the video a final time. At 5:31, I peeked out the door and looked around furtively. When I didn’t see any security guards, I bolted for the back gate of the property.
Dad froze the video of me in mid-stride. “This is what grabbed everyone’s attention,” he said, pointing to the monitor.
My backpack was now on both shoulders. I knew it was still empty, but that wasn’t obvious in the image.
“Looks like that backpack is full,” Arthur said.
I turned, surprised to find him watching over my shoulder. “Well, it’s not.”
Arthur shrugged. “I just said it looks that way.”
I was about to tell him to mind his own business when Dad cut me off. “It does,” he said. “And that, combined with your suspicious behavior when you exited the exhibit, has raised a lot of concerns.”
“I wasn’t being suspicious,” I said defensively. “I was looking around for the security guards.”
“That’s not suspicious?” Dad asked.
I suddenly realized why he was on edge. He’d already seen the footage and he knew it made me look bad. “I was looking for them because they’d been chasing me,” I explained. “Not because I’d stolen Kazoo.”
“I know that,” Dad told me. “But we’re talking about how it appears to other people.”
“If Marge and all the other security guards were already chasing me, why would I pick that very moment to go steal Kazoo?” I asked. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Maybe not,” Dad said. “And yet all the evidence is pointing directly at you. It’s not just that they have this video of you. It’s that there’s no video of anyone else.”
The gravity of my situation suddenly sank in. I felt terrible. It wasn’t merely fear of being framed for a crime I didn’t commit. I was also ashamed. I knew my father didn’t believe I’d taken Kazoo, but one look in his eyes told me he was even more distressed by the situation than I was.
“There’s no one else at all?” I asked.
“It doesn’t look that way,” Dad said sadly. “Security scanned through the rest of the footage and didn’t see anyone else enter or leave the exhibit all night.”
“They only scanned it?” I said. “No one ever watched it in real time?”
“No,” Dad admitted. “Because that would take twelve hours, which probably seemed like a waste of time given that they already had video of you red-handed. That’s why I asked for the footage, though. I figured I could go through it more carefully and see if anything interesting crops up.”
“Now?” Arthur asked. “Sorry, but I can’t let you guys stay for twelve hours. . . .”
“I wasn’t planning on that,” Dad told him. “I’ll watch this myself at home tonight. I just wanted Teddy to see this much so he can understand what we’re up against here.” He turned to me solemnly. “You understand how bad this looks for you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Hopefully, I’ll find something else on the footage,” Dad said. “Chances are, the security guys didn’t pay very close attention to the rest of it—if they paid any attention at all. However, if I don’t find anything else—”
“You have to,” I interrupted. “Someone else took Kazoo. They have to be on the video. Security just didn’t see it.”
“I hope it’s that easy,” Dad said, though he sounded strangely pessimistic. He ejected the DVD and turned to Arthur. “Thanks for letting us use your office.”
“Don’t mention it,” Arthur said. Something struck me as odd about how he said it, though. He didn’t even look up. His eyes were riveted to his computer monitor again.
Dad sensed something was wrong too. “Arthur,” he said worriedly. “What have you done?”
“My duty as a keeper,” Arthur replied.
Dad grabbed me by the arm. “We have to get out of here, Teddy. Now!”
We ran for the exit, but we had only gone a few steps before Marge O’Malley and Bubba Stackhouse entered. The two of them filled the doorway, blocking any chance of escape. Marge dangled a pair of handcuffs from one meaty finger and gave me a big toothy grin. “Theodore Roosevelt Fitzroy,” she said proudly, “you’re under arrest.”