I put in twenty-five years with the Dayton, Ohio, police department, fourteen in uniform and the last eleven as a detective, and I retired in the spring of 1998. My wife gave me about three weeks before she said I had to find something to do that wasn't reorganizing her garage.

When I was a kid I read every Encyclopedia Brown book Donald J. Sobol ever wrote, a lot of them twice, sitting on the back step. You read the case, you look for the one thing that doesn't fit, and then you turn to the back of the book to see if you got it. I loved those. I think they're half the reason I became a cop.

So now I write my own. They're short. Read one in five minutes, find the clue, then check the solutions page. They all happen in Harlan Falls, Ohio, a town I put together in my head out of six or seven real ones, and Lieutenant Aguirre is about four detectives I worked with rolled into one. But the kind of mistake each crook makes is the kind I saw on the job, over and over. Most people who lie to the police don't get caught by fingerprints. They get caught by their own story.

On a Thursday night in July, somebody pried open the back door of Thomsen's Coins & Stamps on Mill Street and walked out with eleven rolls of silver dollars. Edwin Thomsen had locked up at seven. The silent alarm went off at 8:35.

Lieutenant Jasper Aguirre had a name before ten: Johnny Janik, who had tried to sell Thomsen a "rare" half dollar the week before and left the store shouting when Thomsen told him it was a phony.

At a quarter past ten, Aguirre and Detective Lupe Baez found Janik at the Starlite Lanes on the north side of town, finishing up a game with his league.

"I've been right here since a quarter after seven," Janik said, and showed them his score sheet. "League starts at seven-thirty. Ask anybody."

They asked. Some of the men on his team thought they remembered him early on. Some weren't sure. The bartender remembered selling him a beer "sometime."

That evening a thunderstorm had rolled over Harlan Falls at about ten minutes to eight and dumped rain for a solid half hour, hard enough to flood the Route 4 underpass. It had quit by twenty after eight. Two hours later the parking lot of the Starlite was still slick and shining under the lights.

"Where's your car?" Baez asked.

"Blue Buick, third row. It's been sitting there all night. I parked it and came straight in and I haven't been out since."

Aguirre went out to the lot with a flashlight. He found the Buick, crouched down by the front bumper and ran the flat of his hand across the asphalt underneath it. His palm came up wet and gritty, the same as it did when he touched the pavement in the empty space next to it. He wiped his hand on his handkerchief and went back inside.

"Mr. Janik," he said, "I think you'd better tell us where you were at eight-thirty."

How did Aguirre know Janik's alibi didn't hold water?

[ SOLUTION 99-001 ]

Harry Bernard had been building houses in Harlan Falls for forty years, and he was not happy.

"Sunday afternoon, May 16," he told Officer Shirley Dwyer. "I'm framing a garage out on Pruett Road. I knock off at one to go eat, I come back at two, and my brand-new circular saw is gone off the tailgate of my truck. Seven-and-a-quarter-inch, still had the sticker on the blade guard. I'd bought it Saturday."

He'd also gone looking for a box of deck screws that Sunday morning, he said, before work. "Went to Riverside Hardware, like always. Dark as a tomb. I forgot. Riverside's been closed on Sundays for thirty years, and it'll be closed on Sundays when they bury the man who owns it. Had to drive all the way out to the big place on the highway."

On Monday, Dwyer did some knocking on doors along Pruett Road. A woman three houses down from the job site said she'd seen a young man walking away from the garage around half past one with "something heavy in a box." She thought it was the Dykes boy from the end of the street.

Keith Dykes was twenty-five and stocked shelves at Riverside Hardware. He had a new seven-and-a-quarter-inch circular saw in the trunk of his car, sticker still on the blade guard, and he was offended at the question.

"I bought that," he said. "With my own money. Hang on." He dug in his wallet and came out with a slip of register tape, and handed it over.

It read: RIVERSIDE HARDWARE   05/16/99   1:42 PM   1 CIRC SAW 7-1/4   129.99   CASH.

"Employee discount's not on there because I forgot to ring it," Keith said. "Satisfied?"

Dwyer looked at the receipt for a long moment. Then she looked at the keys hanging on Keith's belt loop, and asked him to come down to the station.

What was wrong with Keith's receipt?

[ SOLUTION 99-002 ]

Officer Margaret Moody had been on the job eleven weeks, and she was proud of her report. She brought it to Lieutenant Aguirre before her shift ended.

"Hit and run, Tuesday evening, last week of June," she said. "Kent Myers, age sixty-two. He was driving his Oldsmobile east on Larch Street at about a quarter past eight. A red pickup came through the stop sign at Fifth and Larch without stopping and clipped his front fender, then kept right on going. Fender's crumpled, headlight's busted."

"He get a plate?"

"No, sir. He says he couldn't see a thing. Larch runs dead straight east and west through there, and he says he was driving straight into the setting sun, completely blinded. But he says he knows the truck. It's a red pickup that belongs to a Victoria Mosely, who lives on his block. He says there's been bad blood between them since she put up a fence he says is on his property. He wants her insurance company to pay for the damage, and he wants her charged." Moody flipped a page. "He was pretty worked up, sir. He walked me out back and showed me the fence. Then he went in the house and got the survey he had done in 1987, and a copy of the letter he sent her lawyer, and the letter her lawyer sent back. He says she drives that pickup like a maniac and everybody on the block knows it." She hesitated. "The truck wasn't in her driveway when I went by. I was going to go see Ms. Mosely tomorrow morning."

Aguirre took the report and read it through, slowly, the way he read everything. Then he handed it back.

"Don't bother Ms. Mosely," he said. "Go back and ask Mr. Myers what he really ran into. My guess is something in his own driveway."

What made Aguirre doubt Kent Myers's story?

[ SOLUTION 99-003 ]