Brooks Berry In The Case Of The Stolen Season, Page 2

  Chapter 2 - Dinner with Uncle Mike

  Brooks’ Uncle Mike was a policeman with the Wauwatosa Police Department. He was one of Brooks' favorite people and Brooks' dad's brother. Uncle Mike was really funny and really smart - very tall and in great shape. He went to the gym a lot and did some MMA fighting - if you didn't know him, he could be scary looking. He shared Brooks' ability to solve puzzles and was always asking questions. The police car pulled up in front of the house and Brooks ran up to greet it. He still loved sitting in the front seat of the patrol car and pretending to be a cop even though he was getting a bit old for it! "Anything cool happen today, Uncle Mike?" Brooks asked. "Nope, another slow day," said Uncle Mike, "just the way I like it." Brooks knew Uncle Mike was lying. He knew that he loved the action part of his job - putting bad people in jail, keeping the neighborhood where he had grown up safe but also being able to outsmart criminals.

  "Well, I take that back, we did have one interesting case. This kid was stealing bikes and putting them on Craig's List. But he was pretty clever about it - he'd take the bikes apart, paint them a different color and then swap parts, so it wouldn't look like the same bike when he was done." Brooks asked how he got caught. Uncle Mike said, "Well it was a real mystery for a while. Big rash of bike thefts and they weren't turning up anywhere. Most stolen bikes get found eventually because the guy stealing them has to sell them. But here, he was selling different bikes that didn't look the same.

  What he forgot was that most bike frames have serial numbers on them. We looked on Craig's List and found a guy who had a bunch of bikes for sale. I had one of our cadets email him to see if he could come over to see a bike. He saw the garage full of bikes in various stages of being taken apart and rebuilt. Then he looked at 2 different bikes and pretended like he was taking a picture of them to show his mom. But he was really photographing the serial numbers with his phone. The serial numbers are a set of numbers the manufacturer engraves on the bike frame. Every bike has a different one. When he came back to the station, we ran the serial numbers against our stolen bike database. I went over and arrested him. Boy, his mom was angry! I guess she should have asked him some questions when she saw 20 bikes in the garage!"

  "I know my mom would have," said Brooks. Brooks' parents were cool for the most part. But sometimes his mom was a little nosy. It wasn't that big a deal because Brooks didn't have much to hide, but you have to have some secrets from your parents - especially when you are 12!

  Uncle Mike and Brooks walked up to the house together. Uncle Mike was going to have dinner with Brooks and his family. Brooks' dad liked to barbeque outside a lot. Brooks wasn't a big fan of barbeque because he was a vegetarian. He got made fun of sometimes for that but he didn't care. He had gone to a farm once and after seeing how cool and gentle the cows were and decided he could never eat one of them. When the family had barbeque Brooks' mom made sure that he had some veggie burgers for his dad to cook for him on the grill. With some cheese and ketchup on them, you'd never know the difference. Brooks' mom was pretty cool that way, she really supported his choice to eat that way - in fact, she had been trying to become a vegetarian too, but she still slipped once in a while. But she was trying!

  As his mom served the burgers that his dad had cooked, Brooks sat down at the table outside. His dog Ripken sat by his side. Ripken was a white cattle dog who weighed about 35 pounds and sported a brown colored fur patch over one eye, on his ears and a couple more brown spots on his sides and back. He was named after Cal Ripken the Baltimore Orioles' Hall of Fame shortstop. He thought it was a cool name when he picked it out. It kept the baseball theme going in the family names! Ripken would do anything for a piece of food. His favorite trick was to put his paw on your leg while you were eating as if to remind you that he was hungry too, or if he was sitting on the couch next to you, to rest his head on your shoulder.

  His dad had turned off the grill and was sitting with Brooks and Uncle Mike. Brooks' dad was shorter than his Uncle Mike. He was about 5'11, and was a little bit overweight. He worked a lot and didn't have too much time to do things for himself. He made sure he never missed one of Brooks' baseball games though. His hair was getting a little thin on top and a little gray on the sides. He was a good dad though - he was funny and didn't give Brooks too much of a hard time - except when he deserved it.

  "So, son, it's been a while since you've had a mystery to solve! What do you have going on?" Brooks' dad was referring to what the family liked to call the Case of the Exploding Mailboxes. A bunch of mailboxes had been vandalized in Brooks' neighborhood. It started with one - the Miller Family's. Then it started happening every few days and it went on that way for about a month. Brooks didn't really notice or care until HIS family's mailbox suddenly ended up exploding one night around midnight. The next day Brooks went out and started examining it and amongst the busted up mailbox pieces were some papers with Chinese writing on it. Brooks smelled the papers and realized that they were firecrackers. Chinese firecrackers rang a bell somewhere in the back of his mind. He had thought long and hard about it. Earlier in the year he had remembered seeing a Facebook posting from one of his classmates that his dad had been to China and brought back some souvenirs including fireworks. Brooks' classmate was a good kid, but he had an older brother - Buzz - who was a bit of a troublemaker. He went back to Facebook and realized that his posting about his dad returning from China was one week before the mailbox bombing began. The timing made sense. He dug further into Buzz's Facebook postings. One simply read "BOOM" and it was the same night as one of the explosions. After doing some more investigating and an exciting late night stakeout with his Uncle Mike, the boy was arrested and charged with vandalism. Brooks was a neighborhood hero and the local paper wrote a story about him and how he had found the culprit and made the discovery. It made Brooks feel good that he was able to help out his neighborhood and from then on he decided to do everything he could to help make Wauwatosa a better place to live.