Hannah was nervous. When she’d agreed to take pictures of Steve’s tires on Sunday afternoon, it had seemed like it would be easy. But now as she approached his house, she felt butterflies in her stomach.
Why were they bothering to take pictures of Steve’s tires, anyway? Hadn’t they agreed that the Viking’s handwriting standard didn’t match the note? That the note was written by someone who was right-handed and that Steve was left-handed?
Ben and Corey had thought they needed to be thorough. Corey called it “covering all the bases.” Ben had called it “gathering as much evidence as possible.” Hannah was starting to think of it as “a scary waste of time.”
Steve had said his car wasn’t parked in front of the house along the street. He’d said it was parked in back. She hoped that was where he always parked it. If it was parked out front, she wouldn’t know which one it was.
Hannah couldn’t cut through the yard. Someone might see her through a window. And that would be bad.
She walked around the block to the alley. She’d noticed that Steve’s house was the fourth house from the end. She walked up the alley to the fourth house, trying to look casual. Her cell phone was in her hand.
What if the car was locked in a garage? But she was in luck. There was a carport with two cars parked under it. One was shiny and new. The other was old and dented. Steve had called his car a “beater.”
She ducked down behind the car. Snapped pictures of both back tires with her camera. Got up and walked quickly away before anyone noticed.
Mission accomplished.
Corey had no problem taking pictures of Mr. Powell’s tires. His car was parked behind his studio. Mr. and Mrs. Powell were nowhere around. He was probably in his studio, and she was probably in the house. Easy.
But now he was looking for Mitchell’s house. Ben had found the address and written it down for him. Corey was walking along an unfamiliar street, checking the addresses, looking for number 514 . . .
He didn’t even know if Mitchell had a car. When they’d talked to Mitchell, they hadn’t been focusing on the tire print yet. So they hadn’t asked Mitchell whether or not he had a car.
Corey figured he’d just go to the house, find the cars, and take pictures of all their tires with his camera, which took much better pictures than his phone.
That reminded him. He’d love to get a new phone.
Focus! He went back to scanning the house numbers. Aha! There it was! Number 514!
Luckily, there weren’t any cars parked on the street out front, so he wouldn’t have to take pictures of all of them.
But he would have to go behind the house. It was in the middle of the block. He didn’t really want to walk all the way around.
He quickly slipped through the neighbor’s yard. No one yelled at him. So far, so good.
Corey found an open garage with two cars parked inside. He ducked down and started taking pictures of the tires with his camera.
But then he heard the back door of the house open and close.
Not knowing where to hide, he slid under one of the cars.
He heard someone entering the garage. If they got in the car, he’d have to crawl out before they started the engine. They’d be sure to see him. That would be very awkward.
He saw a pair of legs walk back and forth and then pause in midstride, as if the person attached to the legs was looking for something. Corey’s imagination began to run wild as he wondered what he would do if the person stayed in the garage for a long time. How long could he stay hidden under a car? Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was really just a few moments, the legs started moving again, and the person headed toward a garbage container. From his vantage point, Corey could see that the legs wore women’s pants and gym shoes.
Corey heard the garbage container open. Whoompf! The person dropped a trash bag into the container. Bam! The lid to the container dropped back down.
The feet walked out of the garage. And back into the house.
Corey breathed a huge sigh of relief. He finished taking pictures of the two cars’ tires and then got out of there as fast as he could, brushing dirt off his clothes as he ran.
Ben thought his assignment was the hardest: taking pictures of cars parked at Jefferson High School.
But somehow it didn’t seem right for Hannah to do it. And he understood why Corey didn’t want to get in trouble with football players since he was a football player himself.
Of course, Ben didn’t want to get in trouble with football players, either.
There weren’t too many cars in the parking lot today. Ben hoped most of them belonged to the football players, who were there for practice on this weekend afternoon.
As he snapped pictures of the cars’ tires, he thought he probably should have come up with some sort of explanation to cover why he was doing this, just in case somebody—
“Hey, what are you doing?”
He looked up and saw a high school kid staring at him.
“Oh, just taking some pictures,” Ben said.
“Of what?” the kid asked.
“Tires,” Ben answered honestly.
“Why?” the kid persisted.
This was the moment when it would have been nice if Ben had thought of a good cover story.
He just stood there for a moment.
Then he blurted out, “For the yearbook.”
“Oh,” said the kid, completely satisfied with this answer. “Cool.”
In Ben’s bedroom, Club CSI started to compare their photos of tires with the picture of the tire print from the Rocky the Ram costume.
“Why are you so dirty?” Hannah said to Corey. “I mean, even more than usual.”
“Because Mitchell needs to clean his family’s garage,” Corey replied, brushing off more dirt.
“Hey!” Ben said. “You’re brushing that dirt right onto my bed!”
“Sorry,” said Corey. He picked up a wastebasket and tried to sweep the dirt from his clothes into it with his hand. Most of it went on the floor. “Um . . . got a broom?”
“Forget it,” Ben said. “We’ve got a lot of pictures to compare. We should get going on them.”
They settled down to the incredibly tedious business of staring at photos of tires. At first they all looked the same. But the more pictures they stared at, the more familiar they became with the patterns of the treads. What were the words Bob had used? The lugs. The grooves. The sipes. They kind of sounded like names for weird bands. Soon the three friends could quickly eliminate a photo as not matching the print from the costume.
In the end, none of the pictures matched perfectly.
“But this one seems to be the closest,” Hannah said, holding up one of the photos they’d printed out on Ben’s printer.
“Which one is it?” Ben asked.
Hannah turned the picture over to read the label they’d scrawled on the back. “It’s one of the cars in Mitchell’s garage,” she said.
All three looked at one another, thinking.
“We should talk to Mitchell again,” Ben suggested.
“I know where his house is,” Corey said.