Disclaimer: The Sentinel belongs to UPN/Paramount and The Scifi Channel. No copyright infringement is intended and no money has changed hands.
Author's note: This story came to me while I was thinking on an entirely unrelated matter. It is based on things my Mom told me when she worked at the Amarillo Country Club. The actual events never happened, but similar incidents did, and I'll go into greater detail at the bottom of the page. That way I don't spoil the mystery. Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Blair Sandburg, newly minted detective for the Cascade Police Department, was currently in the middle of his rookie rounds, putting time in with every division of the department to give him a well rounded start and introduce him to all the captains and most of his fellow detectives. This week, he was in Robbery, and the case he was working on was baffling the man it was assigned to. The Cascade Country Club was experiencing a rash of thefts, mostly of silverware, but there were never any clues left behind. The silver always went missing from a certain cabinet, a locked cabinet, and always at a time when even the maintenence staff had gone home for the night.
Detective Blake, Blair's temporary partner, insisted that it had to be an inside job. Blair tended to agree with that assessment, since there were cameras all over the club and not one had caught anything suspicious. The perp had to know where the cameras were to be able to avoid them. But why was the thief taking so little? Only a few pieces disappeared each night. And why was he only taking the dirty silver? The thefts had gone unreported for some time, just because so little was being taken, but the cost was starting to add up, and the utensills taken were solid silver, not plated, so they could be melted down, and at the amount they were talking, it could add up to quite a pretty penny.
Blake had been working on the case for three weeks before the brass landed him with Sandburg. He didn't mind the kid, though he wondered about the fraud issue. He'd heard a lot of scuttle-butt, but he planned on making up his own mind about the character of his ride-along. He handed the CCC file to him on Tuesday. "Here, kid. Let's see what you can make of this one."
Blair looked the case over, then thought about it for about five minutes. "Forensics?"
Blake shook his head. "Nothing conclusive. A couple of stray hairs, but the club cleans the carpets nightly, so we can't ever get much. No finger prints. I can't even figure out how he's getting the drawer open enough to get anything out. The top of the cabinet is locked until they take the stuff out to clean and count it. The flap where you put in the dirties will only open an inch, and the bottom is curved, so the stuff slides under a wall onto a pressure plate that drops it into the main bin. Really, it's an ingenious device, but someone's not only managed to crack it, but to sneak past the cameras as well. And we checked. They haven't been tampered with."
"Well, can we set up our own camera? It would be at a different angle and we could make sure that no one on the staff knew about it."
Blake stared at the rookie for a moment. "God, I must be out of it! Why didn't I think of that?"
Blair just shrugged.
Three days later, they caught the thief. Blair had asked Jim to sit with him and Blake on the stake out, just to keep him awake, so he got to see the action as well. In what would soon become a department legend, the tape showed the perpetrator sneaking down the hall along the wall under the cameras toward the dirty silver bin. He slunk silently up to the bin, looked around to make sure no one was around and then crawled on top, lifted the lid and slipped inside. He fit all the way inside with ease. He was a squirrel.
All three detectives burst out laughing. They waited outside the building until the squirrel emerged and headed for his home tree. With Jim's long sight (which Blake assumed was a sniper thing), they were able to track the little beast without spooking him. They found the tree and marked it with Blair's pocket knife, then went back to the van and called it in.
The next day they came out with the president of the club, the head groundskeeper and a representative from Animal Control. Jim cracked that it was sad when you needed six men to aprehend a squirrel. The groundskeeper widened the hole in the tree, which spooked the animal and sent him running, but the AC man was ready and netted him.
Looking into the hole, the detectives were all stunned. Lining every hole and crevice of the hollow part of the tree were well-cleaned spoons, forks and knives. The AC man said, "These were from the dirty bin, right?" At the president's nod, he continued. "He was after the food, but the silver was shiny, so he kept it." In the end, when they had it all pulled out of the tree, there was over sixty pounds of silver recovered from the little thief.
If over the next month Robbery was unoffically known as the Squirrel Squad, no one complained, since all acknowleged that the litte devil had been a very clever opponent.
When my Mom worked at the Country Club here, she did indeed see squirrels running off with all kinds of things, including gym towels, spoons and food items, and my Dad once saw a squirrel climb inside a vending machine and take out a Snickers bar. Experiments on wild sqirrels in the form of obstacle courses with peanuts at the end as a reward have proved that the animals are extraordinary problem solvers. Though I don't know of any incidents where the police were involved, I'd guess that it's deffinitely possible.