The next morning, Club CSI walked to school together. It was a beautiful fall day in Nevada, with the sun shining.
“The more I think about it,” Corey said, “the more I think the football players over at Jefferson wrecked Rocky.”
“Just like it said on the note?” Hannah asked.
“Exactly,” Corey said. “Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct answer.”
Ben frowned. “It didn’t actually say that on the note. It just said ‘Vikings Rule.’ It didn’t say ‘We, the Jefferson High School Vikings, destroyed this costume.’”
“Okay,” Corey admitted. “But who turned out to be the culprits twenty-five years ago? The Vikings!”
“The Vikings turned out to be the culprits when it came to raiding Europe in the ninth century too, but I doubt they destroyed Rocky the Ram!” Ben said.
Corey stared at Ben. “You know,” he said, “if you ever expect to date anyone in high school, you’re going to have to stop saying things like that.”
Hannah laughed. “Hey, maybe Ben will date history buffs!”
Ben was a little embarrassed, but he smiled.
“All I’m saying is that we go talk to the football players at Jefferson to see if we can figure out whether they did it,” Corey insisted.
“Fine,” Ben said, relieved to have the subject changed from his future dating prospects. “We’ll go after school today.”
“And who knows?” Corey added. “Maybe you’ll meet some history buffs!”
Miss Hodges held up a blank piece of paper. “What can you tell me about this?”
The students in her forensic science class stared at her for a moment. What was there to say about a blank piece of paper?
“It’s a blank piece of paper?” Jennifer said, sounding more like she was asking a question than answering one.
“Yes,” Miss Hodges said. “It is a blank piece of paper. But if a CSI found this piece of paper at a crime scene, he or she would want to determine some of its specific qualities to help identify where the paper might have come from.”
She put down the piece of paper and then picked up an unopened package of paper. “For example, the wrapper on this package describes a few of the paper’s qualities.”
Miss Hodges pointed to a number on the wrapper. “See this eighty-eight?” she asked. The students nodded. “That’s the paper’s brightness. This paper reflects back about eighty-eight percent of the light you shine on it.”
She slid her finger down the package. “There’s a smaller number here that you may not be able to see: one hundred and twenty-five. That’s the paper’s whiteness. Whiteness is the shade of white that the manufacturer has made the paper by bleaching the wood pulp. There are three main shades of whiteness: balanced white, warm white, and blue white.”
Many of the students were taking notes. As Miss Hodges described the specific qualities of paper, they couldn’t help but take a closer look at the paper in the notebooks they were writing on. They’d never really thought about paper’s qualities before. It seemed as though every time you looked at a subject, no matter how small, it turned out there was a whole world of information about it. This time it was the World of Paper.
The teacher pointed to the package of paper again. “And there’s another number here: twenty. That’s the paper’s weight. Five hundred sheets of this paper—or a ream—should weigh twenty pounds.”
She looked at the students. “How thick is paper?”
“Not very,” Ryan said, getting a laugh from his friends.
“Actually, Ryan, you’re right,” Miss Hodges said. “The thickness of paper is measured by the thousandth of an inch. This measurement is called the paper’s caliper.”
She turned to the dry-erase board and wrote “caliper.” Then she turned back to the class.
“So paper has brightness, whiteness, weight, and caliper. And that’s just to start with! In the laboratory, investigators can use advanced technology to analyze all the chemicals in a piece of paper.” She paused a moment. “But why would they do that?”
Ben raised his hand. “If they could match a piece of paper from a crime scene to a pad of paper in a suspect’s home, that might help convict the suspect.”
Miss Hodges nodded. “Yes, Ben. Very good.”
She spread several different pads of paper on the table. Some had white paper and some had yellow. Some had lines and some didn’t. A couple had holes punched in the sides.
“Each of these pads of paper has a big letter printed on it. See?” She held up a pad with a large A on it. She set the pad back on the table.
Miss Hodges picked up a brown paper bag. She turned it over. Lots of small pieces of papers fluttered out.
“And each of these pieces of paper has a number printed on it,” she said. “Let’s see how well you can do without any advanced technology. Just use your eyes. Look at the pieces of paper and then write down which pad each piece came from. Match each number to a letter. You can work in your teams if you’d like.”
The students hurried to pick up the pieces of paper. They compared them to the pads and started writing down the letters that went with each number.
Some of the pieces of paper had obviously come from one of the pads—they were the same color, with the same lines and punched-out holes. But others were trickier. Corey moved one piece of paper back and forth between two pads, comparing them.
“Definitely C,” Hannah said to him, quietly.
“Really?” he asked. “I was going to go with D.”
“I was kind of thinking E,” Ben admitted.
They went with C. Hannah seemed so sure.
And when Miss Hodges gave them the answers, Hannah was right. She had a very good eye for color.
After they’d learned about paper, Miss Hodges told them a bit about ink. She talked about the different kinds of writing instruments—ballpoint pens, roller-ball pens, felt-tip markers—and the different kinds of inks they used.
Then she put her students through another exercise, trying to match marks made with different kinds of pens. A few of the inks looked the same until the students put them under an ultraviolet light. The UV rays helped them see the differences in the inks that they couldn’t see under regular light.
“Now,” she said, “let’s talk about handwriting.”
Kayla raised her hand. “Ooh, I’ve heard that you can tell a person’s personality from their handwriting.”
“That could be,” Miss Hodges said. “But that’s not really what the CSI is interested in. He or she is trying to find out who wrote the ransom note or the threatening letter or the grocery list dropped at the scene of the crime. How might a CSI do that?”
Charlie’s hand shot up.
“Yes, Charlie?”
“The investigator would compare handwriting from the suspects to the handwriting found at the crime scene,” he answered.
“That’s right. Excellent,” Miss Hodges said. “Investigators compare a suspect’s handwriting sample—called ‘a standard’—to the unidentified handwriting, hoping for a match.”
She turned back to the dry-erase board and wrote “standard.”
“There are two types of handwriting standards,” she continued, “requested and nonrequested. Which do you think is preferred?”
The class thought about this. Slowly, Hannah raised her hand.
“Yes, Hannah?”
“Nonrequested.”
“Why?”
“Because if you ask someone to give you a handwriting sample, they might try to change their handwriting so it doesn’t match,” Hannah said. “But if you could get a nonrequested sample, you could be more sure it was in the person’s real handwriting.”
“Terrific!” Miss Hodges said. “That’s exactly right.”
She went on to describe how handwriting analysts looked at each letter’s shape, size, and slant. She also talked about how to tell if a writer is right- or left-handed.
“Okay,” she said. “I want two requested standards from each of you. The first can be anything you want. Just write down a couple of sentences. For the second one, please copy this sentence.”
She turned back to the dry-erase board and wrote, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
“Can anyone tell me something interesting about this sentence?”
Corey actually knew the answer, though he didn’t remember how he knew. He thought maybe he’d heard his mother mention this sentence. Something about a typing class she took a long time ago. He raised his hand. “It has every letter in the alphabet.”
“That’s right,” Miss Hodges said. “Please just write both samples naturally. Don’t think about your handwriting. And definitely don’t try to change your handwriting between the two samples. That’ll ruin everything. When you’re done, please bring them up here. Put the ‘quick brown fox’es in this pile, and your original sentences in this pile.”
The students wrote quickly and then carried their little slips of paper up to the front table. Miss Hodges shuffled the slips (keeping them in their separate piles) and then had the students try to match the handwriting samples.
Some were easy. Jennifer, for example, had very nice, clear handwriting, so they could spot her two samples right away.
Others were not only hard to match, they were hard to read.
“Some people in this class have terrible handwriting,” Kayla complained as she stared at the slips of paper.
“We’re not here to judge the quality of the handwriting, just to match the samples,” Miss Hodges reminded them.
At the end of the period, everyone agreed it’d been another fun class, kind of like doing puzzles.
But Ben was thinking it was more than just fun. It could be very useful for figuring out who left the note on the tree near the bonfire.
Unfortunately, Charlie was thinking the exact same thing. Ben heard him say to Ricky as they were leaving, “We should get handwriting standards from the chief suspects.”
“Great idea, partner!” Ricky said, slapping him on the back.
Not if Club CSI could get them first . . .