Chapter 7

Alex smiled.

"I'm glad you completed your first mission early; it'll be put down as a good record for you guys. I'm guessing you're free for the day. Maybe you should train; your Coach did inform me that you are facing your CIN some weeks away, is it?" Alex said as he brought out a document.

"Here, sign this, all of you."

Suzanne picked up the pen and signed underneath her name, the others did too, one after the other.

It was the documentation of their mission file. In it was the evidences gathered on the case and the way it was solved. Also short personal statements of themselves were written down.

"You're right; we should train." Ryan nodded curtly.

"Alright, I'll leave you to it. If there's a new mission, I'll let you know." Alex nodded at him and walked out of the empty classroom.

"Ashley what's your skill?" Ethan asked as he turned to her.

"I'll tell you in a while, but first I want to hear all the details of how Andrew solved this case," she replied as she turned to Andrew and smiled at him.

"Yeah! Me too!" Suzanne agreed, moving nearer to Andrew as well.

"Fine, but we aren't staying here very long; you know I hate explaining things to anyone," Andrew muttered in his usual bored tone.

Ashley settled on a chair quickly.

Ryan just looked out through the window, not really paying that much attention to the details of how Andrew solved the puzzle of the dog-napping. But Ethan listened eagerly.

"Well," Andrew sighed and started. "After we received the documents on the missing puppy, I researched more on Mrs Paulina, so I'd know more of her daily schedule and her personality. I wanted to know what kind of owner she was to Patches. What I gathered was that she was just a nice woman and on weekends she allowed some kids to come and play with Patches while she watched them and gave them light snacks," Andrew stood up and walked over to the board.

He drew six children; four were girls while the remaining two were boys.

He turned to look back at them.

"I found out that the six children normally played with Patches but not at the same time. Four girls, two boys...But one of the boys, Todd, moved out of the neighborhood a month ago, so I ruled him out." Andrew drew a big 'X' over one of the figures he drew on the board.

"So I researched more on the other five kids, afterall most children loved puppies and, who, when given the chance, might grow to love Patches and might want to claim her for themselves." Andrew went on with his explanation.

"I found out that out of the five kids, Betty, was one of the girls that played with Patches. Also I noticed that while the other kids lived around the neighborhood, Betty was the only one that lived far off. So how could she find time to come from her house to play with Patches?"

Andrew drew some houses and circled one.

"That means she knew someone in the neighborhood she could stay with, someone that knows her quite well; someone like her babysitter, Sally."

"That's real smart Andrew," Ethan said amazed.

Ryan scoffed from where he stood. "I bet you couldn't come to the same conclusion even if all the clues were staring at you in the face," he told Ethan.

"Why don't you come say that to my face?!"  Ethan demanded hotly as he stood up and started walking towards where Ryan was.

"Ethan shut up! Let Andrew finish his story!" Suzanne snarled at him.

He stopped walking and looked back. He relunctantly returned to his seat.

Ryan gave a bemused chuckled which made Ethan glare hard at him.

"Alright," Andrew continued, "So I checked Sally's background. It was relatively easy since she was a teen and most teens tell the social media every little thing about their personal life. She also had lots of pictures on her wall." Andrew made a face, "It was really annoying scrolling through those pictures but it was from there that I gathered the next clues I needed."

"From the pictures?" Ashley questioned, deeply concentrating.

Andrew nodded and connected his laptop to the class projector and did all the settings necessary to get it working.

"If you'll take your eyes to the screen, I'll give you a detailed explanation of what I mean," he told them.

They all looked at the projector.

A picture of Sally was already on the screen. She wore her clothes in the most exaggerated fashion. She had on shades and a black pencil jeans pants. She also wore a yellow spaghetti top underneath her designer fur coat and the purse she held in her right hand matched her fur coat as it was made from the same smooth, white fur.

"So? What about it?" Ryan asked casually, taking his gaze away briefly from the projected image on the screen to look askance at Andrew.

"Well, three days before she baby sat Betty, they went out for a walk and she took some pictures." Andrew changed the picture to what he was talking about.

Sally and Betty's grinning faces were the first things that could be seen.

Sally had squatted to Betty's height so that she could snap the two of them in a selfie. They were behind a flower shop that was built with glass so that passersby could see the types of flowers they had and patronize them.

Andrew zoomed in on the picture. "When you zoom in and look closely at the glass reflexion you'd see a faint image of a woman's legs, walking a white Scotty," Andrew said.

"True!" Ethan nodded as he made out the faint image.

"So it's possible that lady was passing by as they took their picture and they took notice of the dog," Ashley stated.

"Exactly," Andrew nodded, as he looked back at the projected images of Sally and Betty, then back at his Squad members. "And when I was researching on Betty, I found out that she was a demanding kid; it means she's used to having her own way, whatever she wanted, she had to get it, regardless of the cost. Probably Sally also noticed that trait in Betty and started drawing the nice dogs in the area to Betty's attention. Once Betty liked it, then it wouldn't be so hard to poison her mind in stealing them." He shrugged as he ended his statement.

"That's really awful," Suzanne said.

Andrew looked at her. "Betty was already used to stealing her school mates' properties; like a pencil or an eraser. It's no suprise that she agreed to Sally's devious plans," he told her.

"So what happens next?" Ashley enquired, concern lacing her voice.

Andrew returned to his laptop.

"There's a pattern here if you'll notice. In each picture Sally takes, they're mainly near a park, and dog owners chiefly take their dogs for a walk in parks, so it's relatively easy to get one unnoticed. Also, three days after every hit, Sally posts a picture where she's wearing a new fur coat. Coincidentally the colour of the fur of the dog they had earlier seen."

He brought out a chart, "The crime rate of dog-napping has increased this month from 5% to 65% as fur coats are now the latest fashion; everyone wants to wear one nowadays. And, it's relatively easy to make business out of selling dogs."

"Oh," Ashley wailed as she recalled something.

"What is it?" Ryan asked her as he looked her way.

She faced him and smiled, "Nothing much, I just remembered that at the dog shelter which I volunteered to work in, the manager always had people running a deep background check on those who wanted to adopt the dogs so they wouldn't fall into the hands of bad people that wanted to use them for shady purposes."

"Really now," Ryan said in disappointment and returned his gaze back to the scenery outside the classroom.

"Yes," she replied.