Within fifteen minutes, the semi was a full-scale crime scene. Although FunJungle Security was mostly staffed by nitwits, Chief Hoenekker himself was extremely competent. At his behest, three officers had brought him a criminal investigation kit and then been posted around the loading dock to keep unauthorized personnel away. J.J. wanted to keep the panda’s disappearance a secret, even from his employees, so the guards told any potential onlookers that they were to steer clear of the loading dock in order to protect Li Ping’s safety. Meanwhile, Hoenekker went to work searching the interior of the trailer for clues.
Only two other people were allowed in the trailer with him. One was my father. Instead of documenting the arrival of the panda, he was now recording the scene for the investigation.
The other person was me. Hoenekker hadn’t been pleased about this, but J.J. had insisted. And when J.J. had his mind set on something, there was no talking him out of it. Especially when he could fire you. “Teddy’s had a hand in solving every major crime that’s taken place here,” he’d declared. “I’m not keeping him on the sidelines when my top vet and my panda are missing.”
The way he said it, I didn’t have much choice in the matter either. I definitely wanted to help find Doc and Li Ping, but even though I’d had some success solving crimes at FunJungle before, I was still only a kid. Being asked—or really told—to aid Hoenekker in his investigation was daunting. And yet, it didn’t seem like a good idea to say no.
So Hoenekker let me into the crime scene—although he warned me to give him space and not touch anything. Then he slipped on a pair of linen gloves and went to work.
Meanwhile, Marge desperately wanted to be a part of the investigation. Only, she was in the doghouse for letting Li Ping and Doc disappear in the first place. She stood off to the side of the loading dock while Pete Thwacker went ballistic on her. Pete didn’t lose his cool very often—staying calm under pressure was part of his job—but now it appeared that every bit of frustration he’d bottled up over the past few weeks was spewing out of him. There were probably other things he should have been doing, but at the moment, he was flipping out. “How could you lose the panda?” he screamed.
“This wasn’t my fault,” Marge said defensively.
“Then whose fault was it?” Pete demanded. “You were the only security officer on duty. This wasn’t a sightseeing trip! You had a job to do: make sure the panda got here. And guess what? There’s no panda!”
“I’m aware of that,” Marge said.
“Are you aware of how much time, energy, and money it has taken to arrange for a panda to come to FunJungle?” Pete yelled. His normally perfect complexion was now mottled red from rage. He looked like a tomato with teeth. “Are you aware how angry the Chinese are going to be? They don’t hand out pandas like they’re fortune cookies! It took us five years to negotiate getting this animal! Five years! J.J. had to call in a thousand favors. He put his reputation on the line. We spent millions building a special panda facility! And more millions on advertising and promotion. All of which doesn’t mean squat if we don’t have a freaking panda!”
Marge glanced toward J.J. McCracken, as though hoping he might come to her aid. But J.J. wouldn’t even make eye contact with her, which indicated he was as angry with Marge as Pete was. He was simply letting Pete do the dirty work. I could understand why. Pete wasn’t exaggerating what J.J. had gone through to get Li Ping. Summer had told me about the whole process. J.J. had a lot of business interests in China, and he’d had to use every one of them as leverage with the Chinese government. He’d made plenty of backroom deals and promises, and now that the panda was missing, each of those could come back to haunt him.
Even so, Marge looked so beaten down by Pete’s anger that I almost felt bad for her. Almost, but not quite. Because Marge had berated me plenty of times—and I had never really deserved it. Meanwhile, she had really messed up big now, letting the panda—and Doc—vanish on her watch. I was pretty upset with her about that myself.
Everyone else seemed equally annoyed. My mother and Summer lingered outside the truck, glaring at Marge. Dad was mostly hidden behind his camera, but I could tell he was upset too. And Hoenekker wasn’t even trying to hide his anger as he poked around the crime scene.
“How on earth did she miss all this?” he muttered.
“Miss what?” Dad asked.
“This, for starters.” Hoenekker pointed to where the lock had been on the rear doors of the semi. While the hole had been rather small on the outside of the doors, on the inside it was much larger, the size of a baseball. The metal was peeled back and scorched as though a meteor had blasted through it. “The thieves used an explosive to blow the lock off. Probably C-4, but I won’t know until we get it analyzed by a lab. I have no idea how they did it on a moving truck, but I can guarantee you, it wouldn’t have been quiet. And yet, Marge didn’t have a clue that it happened.”
Dad snapped a few photos of the hole.
On the loading dock, Mom tried calling Doc’s cell phone, which she’d been doing every two minutes since learning he’d disappeared. I could tell from the look on her face that this call, like all the others, had gone straight to Doc’s voicemail. “Still no answer on Doc’s phone,” she reported.
“You’re wasting your time,” Hoenekker told her. “Whoever snatched him weren’t amateurs. We’re not gonna hear squat from Doc until they want us to.”
He moved on to the panda’s cage, which was set along the driver’s-side wall at the rear of the truck, where it would have been easiest to get Li Ping in and out. The cage was twelve feet long and six feet wide, which would have given Li Ping plenty of room, although this only left us a two-foot gap to squeeze past it along the opposite wall.
Transporting a panda—or any zoo animal—was a complicated task. You couldn’t explain to an animal that it was going to be in an unfamiliar confined space, like a truck or an airplane, for hours, if not days. So if you simply tried to move the animal without any preparation, it would stress out. (Sometimes they could even die from the anxiety.) To prevent this, the keepers had to prepare the animals for travel. In Li Ping’s case, this had taken six months of training.
The first step had been to get Li Ping used to being in a cage. The keepers in San Diego had trained her to go inside one for increasingly long periods of time by rewarding her with treats like apples and yams. Then they practiced lifting her in the cage with a forklift and moving it to a simulation of the truck, where she would be transferred to the somewhat larger cage inside. The actual truck was sent to San Diego a month ahead of the move, and Li Ping spent that time getting used to it.
However, once Li Ping was comfortable in the truck, there was still plenty left to coordinate. The timing of her delivery had been planned down to the minute. It was no mistake that the drive had been done overnight; the idea was to be on the roads when the fewest other drivers were—and thus, the least chance of an accident. Plus, it would also be significantly cooler in the truck at night than during the day. (Giraffes were particularly tricky to deliver, since they were so tall; they needed special trucks with holes in the roof to stick their necks through, and the routes they took had to be carefully planned to avoid any low bridges.)
By all accounts, though, Li Ping had handled her truck training perfectly. Short of the traffic delay at the end, the trip had gone exactly as planned.
Except for the part where the panda and Doc had vanished.
The panda cage was empty, save for a scattering of bamboo bits and a large plastic ball, which Li Ping had probably been given to keep herself stimulated.
The gate of the cage was aimed toward the rear doors of the trailer. It had been locked with another dead bolt and then wrapped with a padlocked chain for good measure. The chain now dangled loosely, two of the thick links snapped open, while the dead bolt had been ripped apart. “Looks like the thieves used bolt cutters and a crowbar,” Hoenekker observed. He didn’t seem to be sharing information with me so much as talking things through to himself, trying to make sense of how the crime had played out. “Quieter than blowing the bolt off, but it would have taken quite a bit longer. Maybe a few minutes.”
“So why didn’t they just blow it open, the same as the back door?” I asked.
Hoenekker gave me a disappointed look. “You can’t figure that one out yourself, Sherlock?”
I thought about it, then came up with an idea. “Because blowing stuff up is dangerous?”
“That’s one reason. The back of this truck is an enclosed space. Not a great place for an explosion, no matter how controlled it is. Our kidnappers didn’t want to hurt themselves.”
“Or the panda,” I suggested.
Hoenekker considered that, then shrugged noncommittally and turned to my father. “Jack, can you get some photos of this?”
“Sure thing,” Dad agreed. “Just the gate?”
“Start with that and then, heck, you might as well get anything that seems of interest. There’s no such thing as too many crime-scene photos.”
Dad nodded in agreement, then set to work. The inside of the truck flickered with the blasts of his flash.
Back on the loading dock, Marge was still pleading her case to Pete. “I don’t see why everyone’s so angry at me. What about the drivers? They were right there with me the whole time.”
“Their job was to drive the truck,” Pete informed her. “Your job was to protect it.”
“Even so, they didn’t hear anything either,” Marge pointed out. “I’m not the only one.”
This was a somewhat valid point. There had been two other people in the cab so that the drive could be made in one shot; a single driver would have to stop to sleep. There was a space in the back of the truck’s cab for whoever wasn’t driving to sleep or relax. It was eight feet long and four feet wide, with a narrow bed and a little TV with a DVD player and headphones.
Both drivers were sitting on the edge of the loading dock. Greg Jefferson, who’d driven the first shift, was a big, bearded bear of a man. Juan Velasquez, who’d driven the second half, was small and wiry. Both looked considerably more upset about the missing panda and veterinarian than Marge did. Now that Marge had pointed the finger at both of them, they had very different reactions. Juan grew even more upset, as though he blamed himself. He nodded and said, “That’s true. We didn’t hear anything.”
Meanwhile, Greg got angry at Marge. “We had other things on our minds,” he snarled. “Driving this truck ain’t as easy as you think. And we had an awful tight schedule to follow. You were supposed to be keeping an eye out for any trouble, not us.”
“I was keeping an eye out for trouble,” Marge said, getting her dander up. “I’m just saying, there were three of us, and none of us sensed anything was wrong. So I don’t understand why I’m the one getting raked over the coals here.”
“Because you screwed up!” Pete screamed. “In the history of epic fails, this is up there with steering the Titanic into an iceberg! We have spent the last three months telling the entire world to come here to see our panda and now we don’t have a panda for them to see!”
“We’re also missing a person,” Mom pointed out quietly.
“Yes!” Pete said quickly, in a way that indicated he had actually forgotten Doc was missing too. “There’s that as well. Do you have any idea how upset his family is going to be?”
“Speaking of which, has anyone told them?” J.J. asked.
There was an uncomfortable silence as we all realized no one had.
J.J. looked to Pete. “As our head of PR, perhaps it’d be best if you took care of that. Pronto. I believe by now Marge is aware of how badly she’s screwed up.”
Pete realized this wasn’t a suggestion so much as an order. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself, then found the closest reflective surface—a window—and smoothed his hair and tightened the knot on his tie. “You’re right, J.J. Something of this nature needs to be handled by someone competent.” He gave Marge one last nasty look and stormed off.
Behind his back, Marge made a face at him.
Hoenekker moved farther into the trailer of the semi, past the panda cage. Dad and I followed him, Dad snapping pictures the whole way.
Just beyond the cage was a full-size refrigerator. While the truck had been driving, the refrigerator had run off the electrical system, but even now it hummed, powered by a separate generator.
Hoenekker snapped on a pair of surgical gloves and opened it.
There was bamboo inside. Several sheaves of it.
“They have to refrigerate the bamboo?” I asked.
“To keep it from wilting,” Dad explained. “From what I understand, Li Ping was a picky eater. They wanted to keep her as content as possible en route.”
Hoenekker closed the refrigerator and we moved on. Since we were far from the rear doors now, there was less light, though we could still see all right. Doc’s quarters were much nicer than I’d expected. The space was about twelve feet long and eight feet wide. On the wall of the semi farthest from the rear doors—the reverse side of the truck’s cab—a flat-screen TV was mounted with a couch facing it. To the side of the couch was a small table with a lamp bolted to the top so it wouldn’t topple off if the truck made a sharp turn. Between the couch and the panda cage was a twin bed. The furniture was better quality than ours back home and seemed comfortable enough.
The only thing that looked unusual was the bed. The sheets weren’t merely rumpled; they were twisted up and partly pulled off the mattress.
“Looks like Doc was yanked out of the bed,” I observed.
Hoenekker gave me a sidelong glance. It seemed like he might have been either annoyed or impressed by my statement, but I couldn’t tell which. “Why do you say that?”
“Er . . . ,” I hemmed, now on the spot. “Because most people don’t kick the sheets off like that when they sleep. Or I don’t, at least. But if Doc was sleeping in there and someone pulled him out, maybe the sheets might have come off too.”
Hoenekker gave the tiniest of nods. “It does appear he was forcibly removed. Although, given the state of the rest of the surroundings, it doesn’t look like he put up much of a fight.” He knelt by the bed, then carefully ran his gloved hands over the sheets.
“Are you looking for something?” Dad asked.
“This,” Hoenekker said suddenly. He removed a white washcloth from the snarl of sheets and stood, holding it at arm’s length from his face. I got a faint whiff of something kind of like alcohol from it.
Dad quickly snapped some photos of it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Chloroform,” Hoenekker replied. “It appears that whoever took Li Ping drugged Doc in his sleep, then made off with him, too.” Hoenekker removed a large plastic evidence bag from his jacket pocket, dropped the cloth inside, and sealed it.
Dad swept in to get some photos of the bed. I stepped back, taking everything in.
Hoenekker was right; there didn’t seem to be any signs of struggle. Doc had been moved out as easily as a sack of laundry. Besides the rumpled sheets, nothing was upset or overturned. The TV area looked as though Doc had barely used it. Someone had provided plenty of brand-new DVDs for him to watch during the long ride, but the only one he’d unwrapped was a National Geographic documentary about lions in the Okavango Delta.
In the glare of a camera flash, I spotted an oddly shaped hunk of metal on the floor near the TV. Then the light faded and the object was swallowed by shadows again. “There’s something over there,” I told Hoenekker, pointing.
The next flash illuminated it again. Hoenekker saw it, then flipped on a flashlight so we could get a better look.
It was a few interlocked pieces of metal, charred and twisted, about the size of my fist.
“It’s the dead-bolt lock from the rear doors,” Hoenekker said.
“What’s left of it, at least,” Dad added.
“The explosive blew it all the way over here?” I asked.
“That’s not too surprising,” Hoenekker told me. “C-4 is awfully powerful. Even a small bit could have sent that lock a dozen yards.”
I looked down the length of the truck, toward the rear doors. “Would an explosion like that be dangerous?”
“It could be,” Hoenekker agreed. “But the explosive would have been on the other side of the doors. The biggest threat to them would have probably been getting hit by the lock as it flew out.”
“Of course.” Hoenekker sounded like he was getting annoyed with my questions. “What’s your point?”
“They grabbed Doc out of bed,” I explained. “Why didn’t the explosion wake him up?”
Hoenekker and Dad looked to each other, like they were surprised they hadn’t thought of this. “Maybe Doc had earplugs in,” Dad suggested. “It probably would have been awfully loud in here while the truck was moving.”
“Or maybe . . . ,” Hoenekker began, but then seemed to think better of finishing the sentence.
“Maybe what?” I pressed.
Hoenekker mulled over whether to share his idea with us for a few moments. Finally, he said, “Maybe Doc knew the explosion was coming.”
“You mean, you think Doc was involved in the crime?” Dad asked, incredulous.
“No way,” I said. “Doc would never do anything like this!”
Hoenekker held up his hands, signaling us to calm down. “I didn’t say he did. I’m just thinking out loud. That’s all.”
“It sounded like you were accusing him,” I said. I would have gone on, but Dad put a hand on my shoulder, indicating I shouldn’t.
“I’m not accusing anyone,” Hoenekker told me. “Not yet. However, the evidence clearly indicates that whoever committed this crime had inside information. This truck was designed to look like ten thousand others. The timing of the delivery was kept top secret. And yet, our thieves knew exactly what truck to hit, when to hit it, and how to hit it. There weren’t very many people with that information, and Doc was one of them.”
“So was Marge,” I pointed out.
To my surprise, Hoenekker didn’t defend her. Instead, he simply admitted, “She was.”
“I still can’t imagine Doc being involved,” Dad said. “Why on earth would he help steal a panda?”
“Why would anyone steal a panda, period?” Hoenekker’s voice trailed off as he noticed something in the beam of his flashlight. A white envelope poked out from beneath the couch. It looked like it had been placed on the small table but had slid off while the truck was driving.
Dad knelt and took some pictures of it.
Then Hoenekker carefully picked up the envelope. It hadn’t been sealed, so the flap hung open, revealing a single sheet of paper inside. Hoenekker removed it, read it, then said, “Guess this answers my question.”
He then held it out so my father and I could read the message typed on it:
If you want your panda back alive, it will cost you ten million dollars. Cash.
Start getting it together.
More details to come.