The trouble started when Tim Melican's shiny white tour bus went missing from his Spenard business at the start of May.
The longtime owner of Alaska's Magic Bus Company, which rents vehicles for everything from promgoers to cruise passengers, suspected it was used as a getaway car for the theft of a propane tank from a nearby mobile restaurant. He filed a police report and went hunting for it himself.
He figured it's not easy to hide a 35-foot, 28-passenger vehicle with "Magic Bus" emblazoned on the side.
Driving down Dimond Boulevard, he spotted the bus abandoned near a trailer park. Amazed and relieved to find it, he had it re-keyed and parked it back on the same Spenard lot, ready to ferry the coming tide of summer tourists down the Kenai Peninsula and up to Denali.
Then about 10 days later, on May 11, Melican woke to again find the same tour bus missing. Who gets their bus stolen twice? He guessed the same people who had taken it before were responsible.
Then things got even weirder.
That evening, Melican got a phone call from an Alaska State Troopers dispatcher on the Kenai Peninsula.
A concerned citizen had called troopers after seeing the Magic Bus "weaving excessively" on the Seward Highway. Trooper David Chaffin pulled the bus over at Mile 92, according to an online dispatch.
The dispatcher on the phone with Melican asked if he'd leased his bus to someone who might now be driving it on the Seward Highway in a reckless manner.
Melican says he did not mince words.
"I said, officer, that is a stolen vehicle. You need to arrest that person."
It turned out the driver, identified in the trooper report as 22-year-old Matthew Brown of Anchorage, didn't have a driver's license -- much less the commercial driver's license required to operate the bus.
There were also 12 passengers inside the stolen bus. Attempts to contact Brown for this story were unsuccessful.
The driver's story, according to Melican, was that he had paid a tall guy $500 to "lease" it in order to drive some friends to Seward.
The trooper cited Brown for lacking the required driver's licenses. He wasn't arrested for vehicle theft or reckless driving.
Troopers spokesman Tim DeSpain said the officer didn't think there was sufficient evidence to arrest him. He didn't witness the reckless driving.
As for the theft, Brown's "story in the initial interview sounded credible," DeSpain said.
At some point in the encounter, Melican said he would send one of his employees down to drive the bus back to Anchorage.
"The trooper said, well can you give (the 12 passengers) a ride back to town?" Melican said. "And I said, they are not passengers, they are accomplices!"
DeSpain says the trooper didn't realize the bus was stolen when he asked about getting the passengers a ride home.
Everyone was released on the scene. They all found their own rides, DeSpain said.
Melican has the Magic Bus back. He says he appreciates and respects law enforcement but questions why the driver wasn't arrested on the scene. To him, the story doesn't add up.
"Why did they let him go?" he said. "I still can't believe it happened."
Troopers are still investigating exactly how Brown got behind the wheel of a stolen tour bus. No charges had been filed against him as of Monday.
"He may not have known he was driving a stolen bus. That is what has to be determined," DeSpain said.