General Science: Case of the stolen skull

There were no two ways about it. I took her call 'cause I needed the money. The case was dirtier than a first grader's backpack and twice as heavy. The broad that hired me told me a couple a thugs took her skull, and I ain't talking about the one sitting on her shoulders neither. Seems she's into studying bones, and a couple of years backs some students gave her a horse skull they found. Now it was missing, and the only clues I had were four sets of prints and a pile of white powder.

Called in a favor with a buddy of mine downtown and he ran the prints and came up with a list of suspects with records so clean you could eat off of them. An English teacher, Devra Lehman, Asaf, the owner of the local toy store, the damsel in distress herself, Rebecca Perlin, and her husband, Danny Sadinoff. Each one had his own strange connection to a specific white powder: Devra to corn starch, Asaf to sugar, Danny to baking soda, and Rebecca to salt.

I let the boys in the lab take a crack at it. They tested the powder with more chemicals than you'd find in a package of Osem soup nuts. Then they looked at it under the microscope and checked if in solution it could conduct electricity. They compared the results to some similar cases they had a while back, and the answer was clear as day.

That science teacher must have thought I was some chump – turned out she was right. It was her and that other broad, the English teacher. One was in it for the thrill, the other for the spelling mistakes. Me, I had bigger fish to fry.