“I can’t believe what I just saw,” Samantha said sitting beside Ben in the back of his car.

“That couldn’t have been,” he heard one of the officers scream outside the car window.

Ben’s arms were around her, but she felt like she might faint.

“That can’t have been real. That can’t have been real,” she repeated.

The sheriff walked over to their car and knocked on the window. Ben rolled it down.

“We found the statue,” he said, “Good work, you two.”

“That can’t have been a dragon,” Samantha said again. “Tell me I didn’t just see a dragon.”

“I’m afraid you did, ma’am,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “I didn’t know they existed either. It’s news to all of us. Until now, it was just a myth. Some shifters talked about it like they existed, but no one really believed it was true.”

“I still don’t believe it, even though I saw it with my own eyes.”

The women and children were being questioned. A crane had already arrived to lift the statue of Ambrose Morgan onto a flatbed truck. It would soon be returned to the town square.

“I guess we know how they lifted the statue in the middle of the night with no one hearing or seeing anything,” Ben said.

“It’s just so unreal,” she said.

“How are you going to find it and bring it to justice?”

“We got a chopper in the sky. But the guy’s probably long gone by now. I want you two to go home and get a good night’s sleep,” Sheriff Bear said. “You’ve done enough for today.”

“Okay,” Samantha said, before climbing out of the backseat and sitting behind the wheel.

On the way down the road, she noticed one of the punks from the Midwest Mayhem group standing on the side of the road, glaring at them as they passed. She looked at him and met his glare.

“I think I know who the dragon is,” she said.

“Who?” Ben asked from the backseat.

“You know how you said the punks didn’t smell right?”

“Yeah.”

“I think one of them is the dragon.”

“You’re right!” he gasped.

“What should we do?” she asked him.

“Call the cops and tell them what you think,” he suggested.

“Sheriff Bear told us to go home.”

“But this is a good hunch. I’m going to call him now.”

She heard Ben talking on the phone in the backseat. The conversation didn’t seem to be going well.

“I know, sir. But we believe we know the identity of the dragon…Can you at least send someone out there?” Ben said into the phone. “Alright. I understand.”

“What did they say?” she asked after he hung up.

“He said they’ve thoroughly questioned Midwest Mayhem and that the shifter officers never smelled anything strange at their camp.”

“The dragon probably left the camp when police cars arrived.”

“Or he wasn’t there at the time.”

“What should we do?”

“I say we catch them ourselves.”

“Sheriff Bear won’t be happy with us,” she said.

“We can’t just let them get away with this. The only dragon known to exist is in our town, taking our founder’s statue? I want to get to the bottom of this. Don’t you?”

“Of course. What should we do?”

“Same thing we did at the wolfpack compound. Spy on them until we get the evidence we need.”

“Can we at least wait until tomorrow? I’m starving.”

“Let’s go eat and come back tonight. They’ll never suspect us.”

“Sounds like a plan. But I’m putting on three pairs of socks this time.”

When Samantha and Ben got back to his house, Ben made them turkey sandwiches from fresh rye bread slathered in his special sandwich spread. He heated up leftover beef stew from the other night. They sat at the kitchen table with sodas and potato chips.

“Where do you think the dragon came from?” she asked, as she took a bite of his delicious dinner.

“I have no idea. I didn’t know they existed until half an hour ago.”

“How could they keep it a secret so long?

“Beats me. I’ve been a shifter all my life, living in a shifter town. I would’ve thought that we’d have known something about it.”

“You didn’t know about the wolves out at Big River Falls.”

“We did know about them, we just didn’t know that they were related to the original settlers. They were just guys that nobody wanted to mess with.”

“I’m going to do some more research about Midwest Mayhem.” Samantha said, scrolling through her phone as they ate their dinner.

She tabbed over to their website and read everything she could about them. When she was satisfied there were no clues there, she continued to search the Internet for references about them.

“It looks like they were founded sometime in the early 2000’s. They started traveling the country, recording their pranks and posting them on the Internet.”

“Why would a mythical dragon be involved with a group like that?”

“Why would any shifter, for that matter?”

“Not all shifters are as good as the people in the Fate Valley Shifters Association, or the ones who helped bring an end to the Great War. Some of them are scoundrels and criminals. I read that about ten years ago, the crime rate among hyenas spiked exponentially.”

“That’s true,” Samantha said. “It still doesn’t explain where the dragon came from.

“We probably won’t find much on the Internet.” Ben took his last spoonful of soup. “If the answer was there, we would’ve known about it already.”

“I just can’t help feeling like we’ve missed something.”

“The only way we’re going to figure any of this out is by catching the guy, red-handed.”

“How are we going to catch a dragon? None of the other shifters in town can fly.”

“We aren’t going to catch him. We’ll catch him on film and then call the cops. They’ll have to catch him in human form.”

“This is going to be tricky,” she said.

“I know. But we’ve got to try.”

They bundled up in warm clothing and headed back out to the car, driving toward the campground where Midwest Mayhem was camped.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,” she said.

“Are you having second thoughts?” he asked. “I can take you back and spy on them myself.”

“No, I want to go,” she said, holding her cold fingers to the heater vent.

“A fire-breathing dragon is awfully dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’ll be all right. We’re just going to take pictures, remember? Then we’ll send them to the police.”

“Okay. If you’re sure.”

“I am sure. You just don’t do anything crazy like you did last time.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay. Promise?” She put up her pinky for him to pinky swear. He smiled at her from the driver seat and grabbed her pinky with his.

“Pinky swear,” he said.

He stopped the car about a quarter-mile from the campsite, and parked well out of sight from the road.

“How do you want to do this?” she asked as they sat in the dark car.

“Same as last time. You bring the camera. I’ll shift into the bear form. We’ll make sure that we stay hidden and downwind.

“Okay. We’re going to find this guy and bring him to justice.”

Ben pulled off his clothes and tossed them on the backseat of his SUV before shifting into bear form. Samantha checked her equipment and made sure everything was working properly. She even sent herself an email with pictures to make sure that her phone would transfer the images from her camera.

“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They carefully walked through the forest, skirting around the campground to come up behind it. They ducked behind a grove of thick trees downwind from the travelers’ camp. Samantha pulled out her camera and focused her long lens on the punk rockers. They seemed to be having a party. Many were drinking forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor and dancing around the campfire. Everyone was hooting and hollering.

“Why are they so happy?” she muttered to Ben under her breath.

He grunted.

“Do you think they’re happy that the wolves got arrested?” she asked.

Questions streamed through her mind and she couldn’t answer any of them. She also didn’t see any sign of the dragon.

She’d thought that Ambrose was a bad guy when she’d learned that he had an affair with her great-grandmother. But now, she thought he must be a good guy. He had bought the Big River Falls wolfpack land where their ancestors still lived today. It seemed awfully greedy to still be sore about having to move to free land. It seemed to Samantha that Ambrose had done everything he could to help them.

She didn’t know what to think. She was more confused than ever. As she focused her lens on the partying punk rockers, she saw something that made her do a double take. There was a man in a business suit, standing amongst the punk rockers. She gasped when she remembered where she’d seen him before. He was the developer who’d come into Ben’s shop and offered to buy it. She clicked a few pictures of the businessman.

“I should call the police.”

Ben nuzzled his nose into her arm encouragingly, but she knew that it wasn’t enough evidence to bring the police out here. Just because Mr. Hart was out here with a bunch of punk rockers didn’t mean that they could arrest him.

She sent Ben an image through their link, letting him know what she thought. Ben grunted in agreement. She looked away for just a second and almost missed it when it happened: Mr. Hart walked away from the partiers and shifted from his human form into a dragon.

Samantha gasped and almost didn’t get a picture of the dragon before he bounded into the dark night. But she clicked her camera as quickly as she could and got the pictures she needed to prove that the dragon was involved with Midwest Mayhem.

“I think I have what I need,” she said. “I know the identity of the dragon. And I can send proof to the police.”

They hurried back to the car as her heart pounded hard in her chest. She couldn’t believe what she’d found.

“Good job, Samantha,” Ben said as he changed back into his clothes near the car.

Samantha sent the pictures of Mr. Hart shifting into a dragon to Sheriff Bear on his direct line.

“Good work, Ms. Cooper. But I do wish that you would leave sleuthing to the professionals.”

“We’ll try harder next time.”

“We have officers on their way to Mr. Hart’s home. We’re going to take this guy down.”

“Good luck, sir.” she said, hoping that the fire-breathing dragon wasn’t too much for them to arrest.”

“They’re going to get him right now,” she told Ben as they drove.

“I guess all we can do now is go home and wait.”

“That’s the last thing I want to do. But I don’t think Sheriff Bear will take too kindly to us following them out there to watch the arrest.”

“I think we’ve probably done all we could do.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Plus, I’m exhausted. Catching bad guys is hard work.”

Ben and Samantha went home and climbed into bed. She was just about to fall asleep, when she got a call on her cell phone from Sheriff Bear.

“We got him, Ms. Cooper. It was a struggle, and a few of my officers got burned, but we have the dragon in custody. And we wouldn’t have been able to do it without your and Ben’s help.”

“Has he told you why he took the statue?” Samantha asked.

“He’s with his lawyer now and won’t say anything. But there will be a trial at Fate Valley Courthouse next week.”

“Thank you, Sheriff Bear,” she said, hanging up. Turning to Ben, she said, “There’s going to be a hearing next week. Maybe we’ll learn the rest of the story then.”