Chapter 1: Weirdest Crime Ever 1 WEIRDEST CRIME EVER
I was on the scene when the elephant vanished, because I’d been hired to catch a urine thief.

I realize that “detective” is an unusual job for an eighth grader. The other kids at my middle school did chores for their parents or mowed lawns for their neighbors. I solved mysteries. I hadn’t really chosen to do this; it just sort of happened. I was in the right place at the right time to crack a few cases, and word got out that I had a knack for it.

So when the Common Scents Company called me up and offered to pay me to solve a crime, I was intrigued. Up until that point, I’d been helping everyone for free. Making money to do it sounded much better—and far less sweaty than mowing lawns.

Although the crime turned out to be absolutely bizarre.

“How much do you know about the deer urine business, Teddy?” asked Tessa Claymore.

“Er… nothing,” I admitted.

It was a Friday evening in late September, and we were in Tessa’s pickup truck, jouncing along one of the dusty four-wheel-drive roads on her ranch. Like much of the Texas Hill Country, her land was covered by a scrubby forest of live oak and cedar trees, with the occasional grassy clearing or patch of prickly pear cactus. From the road, it had looked like a typical cattle ranch, although it now occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any cattle.

Tessa’s pickup was brand new. It smelled fresh and clean inside, and there were only 216 miles on the odometer.

Tessa was about my parents’ age, dressed in standard ranching garb: boots, jeans, button-down shirt, and cowboy hat. She had the dark tan of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors, and her long black hair was woven into a braid that ran down her back.

“How about you?” Tessa asked my father. Dad was along for the ride; he had driven me to the ranch as soon as I got home from soccer practice after school. I could have ridden my bike there, but it was old and only had one working gear. It would have taken me half an hour each way, and it was already getting late. The roads in the Hill Country weren’t safe after dark; they were narrow and windy, and people often drove way too fast on them. I had offered to visit the ranch the next morning, but Tessa wanted me to get started right away, so Dad had brought me.

“I’ve used urine on occasion,” Dad said.

“You’re a hunter?” Tessa asked.

“Wildlife photographer,” Dad corrected.

I suddenly realized what they were talking about. “People use the urine to lure deer?”

“And to conceal their own scent,” Tessa added. “We make a variety of products here to aid hunters in their pursuit of game.” She looked to Dad again. “Although I never considered the wildlife photographer market before.”

“It’s probably a lot smaller than the hunter market,” Dad told her. “And since I’m always working in new places, I usually make my own scents. I’m not sure that an African antelope would be attracted to urine from a Texan deer.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Tessa said. “You ought to try my Hot Mama Doe Lure next time you go on assignment. I promise you, if there’s a male with hooves close enough to smell it, he’ll come running.”

She steered around a stand of trees, and what I assumed to be the urine collection facility came into view: a large white barn that looked almost as new as Tessa’s truck. It was built into the slope of a low hill so that the end closest to us was six feet above the ground and rested on a series of struts.

Both sides of the barn were flanked by several fenced-in paddocks, each of which held dozens of white-tailed deer.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Tessa asked. She parked her truck right beside the barn and hopped out.

Dad and I did too. The moment we exited the air-conditioned cab, we were walloped by the heat.

Central Texas had suffered through a brutally hot August, and to everyone’s dismay, September was even worse. The heat had been relentless. Even though it was close to sunset, it was still ninety degrees—and the extreme humidity made it seem closer to a hundred.

I immediately felt extra thankful that my father had driven me to Tessa’s ranch. Soccer practice had been bad enough; cycling along baking asphalt roads on such a sweltering day would have been agony.

Several large air conditioners beside the barn were humming at full blast.

“Are we going inside?” I asked hopefully.

“Sure thing.” Tessa took a key ring from her pocket and led us toward the door. “If you’re gonna help me, you need to understand how the urine business works.”

Dad had recognized how new the building was too, because he said, “Looks like this is a relatively young business.”

“Yes and no,” Tessa replied. “My husband’s family has been raising cattle here for generations, but that line of work isn’t what it used to be. Meanwhile, we’d heard the urine business was lucrative. So a few years back, we decided to experiment with it. We built some pens, then got some deer and a few portable collection units.” She pointed down the hill to several specialized sheds. They all were about four feet on each side and built on wheels so that they could be moved around.

“Are those Porta-Potties for deer?” I asked.

“That’s right. It’s pretty labor intensive to lure the deer in there one by one, but they paid off enough to make us realize urine was the future. So we built this facility last year.” Tessa unlocked the barn and led us in.

On the inside, it didn’t look much like a barn at all.

To begin with, it was clean. Every barn I had ever been in was filthy, which made sense, given that animals lived in them. The dirt floors were always littered with hay, and, more often than not, the animals had relieved themselves inside. Therefore, barns usually smelled.

But this building wasn’t merely clean; it was practically sterile.

It was a big, empty space with white walls and a white ceiling. There was a steel grating instead of a floor. And even though several dozen female deer were inside, the whole place smelled like antiseptic.

It was cooler than it had been outside, but still not quite as cold as I’d hoped. The space was too big and open. It appeared that the job of the air conditioners was to keep the deer inside from being cooked alive, rather than making the place bearable for humans.

“We rotate our does through here during the day,” Tessa explained proudly. “When they go to the bathroom, everything drops through the grating into a system I designed myself. There’s a few layers of mesh below us that filter out the feces, and then the pure, unadulterated urine flows into the collection unit.”

The deer looked extremely out of place in the industrial setting, but they seemed surprisingly content. One of them casually urinated right in front of us, as though it wanted to help demonstrate how the system worked.

I considered the entire facility. It looked like it had been expensive to build. “Exactly how lucrative is this business?”

Tessa grinned. “A single deer can earn us over twenty thousand dollars a year.”

I gaped at her in surprise, unsure if I had heard her correctly. “You get that much money for deer pee?”

“That’s right,” Tessa confirmed.

Dad whistled appreciatively.

That explains the brand-new truck, I thought.

“It’s a heck of a lot more profitable than ranching was,” Tessa reported. “Plus, urine is a great resource to harvest. It’s environmentally sustainable, cheap to make, and extremely renewable.”

Another deer urinated in front of us.

“Obviously,” Dad observed.

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

“Someone’s been stealing our urine,” Tessa said.

Only a minute earlier, I would have thought this was the most pointless crime I’d ever heard of. But now that I knew how much deer urine was worth, it made sense.

“How?” I asked.

“I’ll show you.” Tessa led us back out of the barn. I reluctantly followed her into the heat again. We headed toward the end of the barn that jutted out from the hill, passing a few of the corrals full of deer.

“Was it hard to get permits to have all these deer?” Dad asked.

Tessa laughed. “Are you kidding? The government practically begged us to take them. The state’s being overrun with deer. It’s an epidemic.”

That wasn’t exactly true. The deer population in the United States had certainly exploded, which was often attributed to a decline in the number of hunters and the fact that most predators of deer, like wolves and bears, had been exterminated in much of their range. But deer weren’t overpopulating; their numbers had simply rebounded to where they had been before European settlers arrived. For several centuries, the settlers had a devastating effect on the deer, mostly due to habitat loss rather than hunting; millions of acres of forest had been cleared and replaced with small farms. By 1900, the situation was so dire that experts feared deer might go extinct in the United States. But then, as America became more industrial, the farms were replaced by suburbs, which turned out to be surprisingly good habitat for deer, with plenty of lawns to graze on. Now there were estimated to be over thirty-five million deer in the United States, with nearly six million in Texas alone.

This led to all sorts of human–wildlife conflict issues. Deer were hosts to ticks that carried Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. They devoured expensive landscaping. And they got hit by cars a lot: over a million times a year. I’d heard most people call the spike in the deer population an epidemic, but the real problem was that an increasing number of humans were moving into deer territory. The reason so many deer were getting hit by cars wasn’t that there were too many deer, but because there were too many cars.

I didn’t say any of this to Tessa, though. It didn’t seem like a good idea to pick a fight with someone who wanted to hire me. And from what I could see, the deer on her ranch looked like they were being treated well, with ample space and food.

Tessa led us down a flight of steps to the end of the barn that was set on struts. From there, we could see the substructure of the building. Beneath the foundation, a pipe sloped downward, shunting the deer urine to a clear plastic barrel that sat atop a small wooden pedestal.

The barrel was smaller than I’d expected, only big enough to hold about five gallons, and was over three-quarters full of light yellow fluid. As we approached, more urine dribbled into it from the pipe. It was all surprisingly low-tech.

“That’s it?” I asked, pointing toward the barrel. “I thought you’d need a much bigger container for the urine from so many deer.”

“Not if you want high-quality urine,” Tessa said. “If we let it collect in a big old drum and sit around for a while, it’d get stale. And the last thing anyone wants is a hundred gallons of stale urine.”

“Not that many people would want a hundred gallons of fresh urine either,” Dad whispered to me.

“Old urine makes for bad product,” Tessa explained. “We want ours to be harvested as recently as possible. So we swap that container out several times a day. Plus, a small barrel is a lot easier to carry. Five gallons of deer pee weighs over forty pounds.”

I considered the barrel as we approached. There was nothing to secure it in place. “So the thief just swiped the barrel?”

“Er… no,” Tessa corrected. “They only swiped the urine. They must have poured it into another container and then left the barrel behind.”

Dad looked at her curiously. “That seems like a lot more trouble than just taking the barrel.”

“Yes, but they bought themselves some time this way,” Tessa said. “If the barrel was gone, we would have noticed right away. But instead, they filled it back up again.”

“With what?” I asked.

Tessa flushed, embarrassed. “Lemonade.”

I nodded appreciatively. “I guess that looks the same as urine.”

“More than you’d think,” Tessa said. “They used a cheap brand that didn’t have any pulp or seeds in it. My husband didn’t even notice the difference until he was pouring it into our lure-making machine. Which was a disaster. Not only did it ruin several batches of lure, but we had to get the machine serviced, which shut us down for a week. Cost us tens of thousands of dollars. We were hoping it was a one-time thing—but last week, the thief struck again.”

I glanced at my father. I felt bad for Tessa, but at the same time, the idea that a thief was substituting lemonade for deer urine still seemed funny to me. It appeared Dad felt the same way. I could tell he was trying not to laugh.

“Luckily, we were on the alert for trouble,” Tessa went on. “My husband noticed the urine had been swapped out before he made the same mistake. We called the sheriff’s department, but they seemed to think the whole thing was a joke.”

Dad stifled his laughter and tried to look aghast. “That’s just terrible.”

“No kidding.” Tessa looked to me expectantly. “Then we thought of you. Everyone knows about all the crimes you’ve solved over at FunJungle.”

FunJungle was the biggest tourist attraction in central Texas. It was the most state-of-the-art zoo in the world, and it had a theme park as well. My mother was the chief primatologist there, while Dad was the lead photographer. We had lived in the park’s employee housing until a few weeks before, when it had all burned down after a bizarre mishap involving several boxes of discount fireworks and an agitated male kangaroo. FunJungle was renting us an apartment closer to town until new accommodations were built.

I considered the barrel of urine again. There was no security around it. No cameras. No fencing. The plastic barrel wasn’t even secured to the wooden pedestal. “Have you thought about making that harder to steal?”

“Of course,” Tessa replied. “But security’s expensive, and it’ll take a while to install. And it still won’t address the real problem, which is that someone is pilfering our urine. We want to find this yahoo, get our money back, and then send him to jail.”

I now noticed something else about the barrel of urine.

Water had beaded on the sides, like it did on a glass of cold soda on a hot day. But that didn’t make any sense, because the urine should have been even warmer than the air outside, given that it had recently come out of a bunch of live deer. Unless…

I ran to the barrel and pressed my hand against the side. It was much cooler than it should have been.

“This is lemonade,” I said. “The thief has struck again.”

Tessa gasped. “When?”

“This lemonade is still pretty cold,” I told her. “And it’s nasty hot out today. So it couldn’t have been placed here very long ago. The thief probably left just before we got here.”

Tessa’s eyes narrowed angrily.

“Find him,” she said.

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