“Please, Mom, may I go? I’ll be careful.” Jonah had been sitting at an empty desk in the police department bullpen doing his homework and feeling bored. And then Fred Coombs of the Crime Scene Unit volunteered to take him on a short field trip. “I don’t like you being at homicide scenes,” Carol Bixby…

Detective Bixby sighed and looked across to her son. “You like impossible crimes. Why don’t you take a look at this?” Jonah and his mother were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, both of them working on their homework for the evening. In Carol Bixby’s case, the homework was a homicide investigation….

It was early August, one of the worst days of the heat wave, as Jonah and Sally Smith stood in the sweltering tree house in the Smiths’ backyard. They were staring at the spot by the window where the rusty telescope used to be. “Someone stole it,” Sally repeated for the third time. “My little…