Globe Tracers 1: The Case of Thomas Crain

Chapter 14: Finding the Rat

I stumbled off the bus. My mind was half gone from having to listen to Jessica's choir of off-key children singing a song she invented on the fly for ten or twenty minutes... don't ask how that happened... I don't know.

Looking around the school I surveyed what must have been the playground. It was like a miniature amusement park, though I doubted one could get MUCH amusement out of such primitive equipment. The children around us started moving towards a building not far from us. Some ran full speed, bursting through the glass doors of the one-story structure, while others chatted for a while with their friends. I watched as several buses dropped off more and more children. I looked around for adults. There were a few older people here and there, but they were like some five or six goats in a sea of lambs. "What are they gonna herd them like sheep?" I asked. "Is it really a good idea to put this many little kids together- I mean young as they are and all?"

"Probably not," said Jessica with a half-smile. "One or two could wander off completely unseen..."

I was concerned but quickly filed the concern away, after all, these people were still around, so their systems for child care couldn't be as crazy as they looked. "Let's go," I said, taking out our DNA tracer.

"I do wanna know what they learn about in school when they're so young."

To be honest, there was not a single cell in my brain that was even slightly curious about that. They were so young I doubted half these little people could even read, let alone were they on a learning level that could challenge me. "Probably something stupid," I shouted, already heading for a patch of grass across from the playground. The tracer indicated this was the latest trace of young Thomas in the area. I looked around the field and surrounding roads. "This is the last place he was. No one here has a trace of him on them later than about nine days ago. Guess that rules out the bus drivers."

"Good guess," said Jessica next to me.

"Ya think? Well here's another one. Even if our perp does return to the scene of the crime, he probably doesn't frequent it. He's probably gonna come around sometime when there's less activity or at least something to watch, like the cops checking around."

"So we gotta stakeout for a while eh?"

"Somehow," I said, scratching my head and looking around.

"We could just go to a class."

"My guess, nothing they're learning is even close to our level. You hear how half the kids supposedly my age talk? We'll stick out like sore thumbs in there. We won't even know where we're going. Are you out of your mind?"

"Kinda."

I smiled. "Yeah, walked into that one. If our experience on the bus is any indication, putting you in a small space with a lot of kids isn't exactly a recipe for subtlety. Remember we're trying to keep a low profile right?"

"Yeah... did it already occur to you that I'm a really bad partner for that kind of thing?"

"At some point, I figured it out," I said with a nod and lowered eyebrows. "Look, let's just hide in those bushes over there."

(***)

Jessica and I hid in the bushes in a small forested area across from the school. Our small stature made it easier to hide in low vegetation, but I was still nervous about our brightly colored clothing. I started to wonder if we would have been better camouflaged in our birthday suits. Heck... aside the embarrassment, everything around us was so filed down and comfy, even outside, we could do it.