The Boreal Owl Murder (17 page)

I hugged her again. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you.” Close encounters with a bullet can do that, I guessed. Fearing imminent death sure could, too. I mean, I’m always happy to see Luce, but this was more than happy. This was more like ecstatic. So ecstatic, I practically had her in a death grip.

“I’m beginning to get the idea, Bobby,” she wheezed. After a minute, she pushed me away. “Hey, your clothes are damp. What were you doing, wading in after the ducks on the lake?”

I kissed her one more time. “Sit down. Let me tell you how my day went.”

I kicked off my boots, stripped off my parka and sat down next to her on the bed, then filled her in on the details, starting with the note on my bird feeder and ending with the dive into the mud and the
whiz
of the bullet. When I got to the part about being someone’s clay pigeon, those Norwegian blue eyes of hers turned into ice.

“And Knott didn’t do a thing?”

“Luce, he was at the bottom of a hill. He couldn’t see anything but the slope ahead of him. The gunfire came from the other side. By the time he got to where I was, the shooter was long gone.”

“You don’t know that!” Beneath her protest, I could hear some anger creeping into her voice. “I can’t believe you guys walked back. What if you’d gotten shot at again and this time, you’d gotten hit?”

She smacked my shoulder with her fist.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“For doing such a stupid thing! I should be smacking your head. What were you thinking?”

Maybe I should have skipped telling her the shooting part. I didn’t know she’d get violent.

“And you got another ticket! I swear, I let you out of my sight for five minutes and you get in trouble.”

And then she burst into tears.

“Hey, Luce, it’s not that big of a deal,” I told her. “I didn’t lose my license.”

She tried to sock my shoulder again, but I caught her hand and pulled her close. I put my arm around her shoulders and brushed a few blonde strands off her forehead. I tried the one thing I knew would distract her.

“Want to go eat?”

She sniffed and blinked a few times to clear the tears from her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “Can we try that little bistro I told you about?”

Twenty minutes later, we were going north on the shore road to the Grand Superior Lodge’s new restaurant. It was a cloudless night, and the stars filled the sky in a way they never do in the cities; the road was unlit except by my headlights, and we passed only one car on the short drive to the restaurant.

“Are you sure this is supposed to be a good place to eat?” I asked as I drove. “They’re not exactly drawing in hordes, judging from how empty the road is.”

“It’s still pretty new,” Luce said. “And it is a week night. I’m sure they’re busier on weekends.”

Ahead of us, a deer darted across the road. I remembered the
thunk
Bambi had made last fall when he hit my car. That got me thinking about the deer hooves sitting back in my office in Savage. Was there any possibility that I had stumbled into the rifle sights of an illegal deer hunter this afternoon? I had to admit, that was a much less disturbing—albeit still dangerous—explanation for the bullet than that it had been specifically intended for me. Could it have been that Knott and I were so focused on Rahr that we had mistaken a simple poacher for a murderer?

I turned to Luce. “Do you know anything about deer hunting?”

Dumb question, I realized. Luce was a chef, not a hunter.

“Of course I do,” she answered.

I shot her a quick look of surprise. I’ve never disguised my total aversion to guns and hunting, but then, I didn’t recall her ever broaching the subject, either.

“My dad wasn’t going to let the fact that I was a girl dissuade him from sharing hunting weekends with his only child.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her smiling in the light from the car’s instrument panel. “If I can shoot it, I can cook it.”

Now there’s a recommendation for a woman. Have gun, will get dinner.

“Why?” she asked.

“Just thinking. Maybe that’s what happened this afternoon. You know—somebody hunting dinner and they almost got me instead.”

“You don’t look like a deer, Bobby. Or a stag. Trust me.”

“It’s the antlers, right? I don’t have the antlers. I guess I just can’t make that stag fashion statement, huh?”

Luce laughed, but I knew she was right. That, however, meant the shot was deliberate, which was what Knott and I had concluded. The idea that someone was watching me while I hiked in the woods was bad enough; the idea that a shooter was loose in the forest, putting innocent hikers in his rifle sights, was even worse.

And then there was the worst thought of all: that someone had tried to kill
me
in particular. Because in all that forest, there was no way that someone who wanted to shoot hikers in general had just happened to be in the same place with me and Knott. Someone was expecting me.

Stay out of the forest.

And only Ellis and Alice had known I was going to be there.

Ellis. A man who could aim and shoot in the winter woods well enough to compete in biathlon races.

As for Alice, I had no idea of the extent of her talents. Or, for that matter, of her personalities.

Could she somehow have been behind my threats? The idea rippled through me with a little frisson of recognition. If, as Knott had suggested, she had listened to my conversation with Rahr, she would have known I was determined to find a Boreal and that I’d keep coming back to the forest until the owls’ mating season was over. And Stan was her brother. He knew I was the one who found Rahr
, and he could’ve delivered the note for her in Savage.

But I just couldn’t see him tossing the owl on my deck. He might be a hired gun, but he wouldn’t kill a bird.

Of course, Alice could know other people in the Cities as well. She could have friends there. Weird friends. Friends who would help her harass me into staying away from the woods until … what? Until her brother found a Boreal before me? Until Ellis had the survey securely in his pocket?

“What about the threatening letter Rahr received?” Luce asked, interrupting my silent speculating. She was still sorting through all the information I’d given her at the hotel. “You said Knott blew it off at first, but after you told him about your threats, and what happened to you guys this afternoon, maybe he should take another look at it, or at the S.O.B. people. Maybe there really is a wacko in the woods up there who thinks he’s protecting the owls by scaring off birders.”

I told her that Knott was on it. Actually, he and I discussed it ad nauseum on the hike back to the car after the rifle shot. The problem, Knott told me, was that his experts at the department had taken one look at my bird feeder note and were convinced that Rahr’s letter and my note were authored by two different people, based on writing style, word choice, yada, yada, yada. Short of someone claiming to have written the notes, there was no way of identifying authorship. The fact that both referred to the Boreal site was, of course, of critical interest for the investigators. However, Knott pointed out, the only information that yielded was that there was more than one person involved in making threats. And to put the icing on the resulting cake of confusion, whether either author was responsible for Rahr’s death was anyone’s guess.

Knott’s experts also agreed with the Minneapolis detective whom Knott had consulted about Rahr’s letter: people who write threatening letters about environmental concerns typically don’t progress to violent crimes against persons.

Obviously my eight-word note didn’t qualify as a letter because someone had certainly progressed to trying to commit a violent crime against me today.

Another deer skipped across the road just ahead of my headlights. Luckily for both of us, my lead foot never dropped at night, so Bambi had plenty of time to scamper off into the bushes. The deer community would have to steal someone else’s headlights tonight.

Luce was too quiet in the passenger seat, so I decided to try to lighten the mood. “Did I ever tell you about the time my mom got accosted in the grocery store?”

She turned in her seat to face me. “The grocery store?”

I shot her a quick grin. “Yup. Right in the catsup aisle. I was there with her. I must have been about five years old. My mom had on this sweatshirt that read ‘Trust me. I’m a mother.’ This woman comes up to her and stands right in front of my mom’s shopping cart, blocking her way. She gives my mom this really mean look and says ‘I hate your shirt. The last person I would ever trust is a mother. Mine was a lying bitch.’”

“What did your mom do?” I could tell by her voice that Luce wasn’t sure if she should laugh or be appalled.

“She very politely smiled and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She turned the cart around and we went back down the aisle the way we had come. When we turned the corner to the next aisle, we both looked back, and the woman was still standing there, looking furious. ‘Let’s blow this pop-stand,’ my mom said, and she took my hand and we walked out of the store—we even left the cart sitting there right at the end of the canned soup aisle with the food we’d selected still in it. When we got home, she told my dad that buying catsup was hazardous to her health.”

Luce laughed.

“Bottom line,” I said, “is that there are all kinds of people. But very few of them are seriously homicidal. Or at least, we hope not.

“Besides, Knott and I both have the same gut instinct,” I told her, “that the scene of the crime is the key here. That’s why we went up there today. The fact that I seemed to attract a bullet there confirms our theory: somebody doesn’t want anyone wandering around that particular location. The threats I got are dependent on where I am, Luce, not who I am. Otherwise, why wouldn’t someone have tried to kill me back home in Savage? What we haven’t got, however, is the lock for the key: why. Why would anyone care so much about that particular place?”

“The owls,” Luce repeated. “Someone thinks he’s protecting the owls.”

“From what?” I said, exasperated. Knott and I had been around this mulberry bush at least a hundred times on the ride back to Duluth, and we’d still come up with nothing in our berry buckets to show for the effort. “S.O.B. already got the DNR to make the sites off-limits to loggers. Birders—even groups of them—aren’t a threat to the habitat. Of all people, birders are probably the most conscientious about leaving no traces behind them. There has to be something else.”

“You know, Bob, you’re wrong about your threats not being connected to who you are.” Luce reached over and patted my thigh. “Whoever is threatening you must know you well enough to know how determined you can be when you’re chasing a bird, and that determination of yours is what’s worrying him. He’s afraid you won’t quit. You won’t stay away from the Boreals, and for some reason, that’s a very, very big problem for him. If you look at it that way, then your circle of suspects just expanded to include most of the birders in Minnesota. Your reputation precedes you, my dear.”

The car rattled a little as we crossed an old bridge over a stream leading down to the lake.

Luce was right. I was well-known to Minnesota birders, as well as state troopers.

Oh, my gosh.

My license plates.

If someone knew I was going to the Boreal site this afternoon, all he would have had to do was watch for my plates to go by. I might as well have a big neon sign on top of the car, flashing, “I’m Bob White. Follow me!”

“What?” Luce asked.

Suddenly paranoid, I was checking my rear-view mirrors, but there was no one else on the road. Then again, I wasn’t up in the forest. As long as I stayed away from the Boreals, I was safe. Apparently.

“So, what’s there?” I continued, avoiding Luce’s question. “Flora and fauna. I don’t think a deer bashed Rahr’s head, but could there have been a hunter, an out-of-season hunter, whom Rahr caught in the act? Then he killed Rahr to keep him quiet?”

“A poacher, you mean.” Luce thought it over. “I suppose it’s possible. But those are big woods. How slim a chance is it that a poacher would be in the one place Rahr would be? Or that he’d stick around to take a shot at you today? And the idea that a poacher would kill Rahr to keep from being turned in is a little extreme—remember what I said about money, revenge, and jealousy being the big motivators? It’s not like deer are valuable commodities, Bobby. I can’t imagine there’s a thriving business in deer poaching.”

I had to agree with her. This wasn’t Africa. There weren’t any animals roaming these woods that commanded a big price. Jason had gotten his deer hooves at a garage sale, for crying out loud. And, I had to admit, hearing Luce’s thinking about the subject only confirmed my own conclusions about Stan’s possible hunting status. It had occurred to me he might have been poaching with his rifle and crossbow last weekend, but, as Luce said, any poacher would be careful to steer clear of anyone else in the forest to avoid getting caught. Likewise, what killer would return to check on the body? Only a very stupid one, and I was pretty sure that was one thing Stan wasn’t.

“That’s why it makes more sense to think someone followed Rahr there,” Luce was saying. “And now, that person is trying to keep other people away, if whoever shot at you today is the same person that killed Rahr. But why? The million-dollar question, right? We just keep coming back to that.”

I nodded in the dark and took a right-hand turn into the little dirt lot next to a small building with a broad awning over the door. Beside the door, a large wooden sign in the shape of a waterfall was lit by a spotlight suspended under the eaves of the roof; in a clean script, we could read “Splashing Rock Restaurant.” I opened the door for Luce, and we both ducked our heads a little as we went in—we’ve both been in enough places with low ceilings that it’s become sort of a habit. As soon as we were inside, though, low clearance was the last thing on our minds, because the wall facing us was a floor-to-ceiling window looking right out onto Lake Superior.

“Oh, my,” Luce breathed.

The hostess took us to our table, one of only about twelve in the white pine-paneled dining room. Luce had been correct when she said the bistro was new, because the scent of the cut pine was still strong in the air. Beyond the window, Lake Superior stretched into the blackness of the night sky; the only way you could tell where the lake ended and the sky began was that below the horizon, moonlight lit up gentle crests of waves as they rocked across the lake, while above the horizon, a million stars twinkled.