The Boreal Owl Murder (3 page)

Most of the time, that’s not a problem for me. I really like kids. I want them to know I’m in their corner. I know that when I was growing up, I could have used a few more teachers’ sympathetic ears. There were lots of times I was miserable, thanks to other kids. I got teased a lot, but with a name like Bob White, what did I expect? Once it got out that I was interested in birds—okay, make that practically obsessed with them—I got “bobwhite, bobwhite!” bird calls all the time and lots of mean-spirited remarks about bird brains, eating like a bird, and heading south for the winter.

Now, I figure all the harassment I put up with while I was growing up made me into the sensitive and understanding kind of guy I am, which is one of the reasons I chose counseling for my career path. God knows it wasn’t for the money. And it sure wasn’t for the non-existent luxury office space, either. Or the mandatory lunchroom duty assignment.

Talk about human misery.

Don’t get me wrong—I love what I do. There’s nothing better than working with teenagers. Hormones notwithstanding. Plus, you get the same schedule they get—almost three months of summer off every year. And don’t forget winter break, spring break, and the occasional long weekend, too, thanks to a couple dead presidents and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hail to the Chief
and
I Have a
Dream
. I can always find a bird to chase.

This morning, though, my counseling skills were being sorely tested. I was having my own “issues”—that’s a code word we counselors like to use. It’s shorter than “self-indulgent bull crap.” I didn’t want to listen to Kim, the drama queen of the hour. For one thing, she kept repeating herself, and I’d gotten the highly complex concept the first time around: she was angry with her best friend over a boy. Big surprise. What I really wanted to say was, “Hey! Just get over it! Get your little caboose outta here and go back to class where you belong,” but I was afraid that wouldn’t fly with my boss, Mr. Lenzen, the assistant principal.

Besides, I could just hear the whine as the little caboose went out the door, “But what am I gonna DO, Mr. White?” The fact is, for some of these kids, no matter what advice I give them, or what coping skills I try to teach them, they just don’t get it. For drama queens, drama is definitely king.

The other thing that kept distracting me was that I was still seeing that hand from Saturday night pop up out of the ground. The recurring mental replay hadn’t exactly given me sweet dreams during the last twelve hours. Neither had the memory of tripping over a corpse. And, oh yeah, there was also the big hungry bear and Scary Stan in camo with loaded artillery in his hands.

But then, should all of that not be enough, I’d found a note attached to my bird feeder this morning. “
Stay out of the forest or you’re next.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love threatening notes with my morning coffee just as much as the next guy. Adrenaline and caffeine. What a combination. Definitely jump starts a Monday morning after a long weekend.

And, believe me, it had been one long weekend.

By the time Mike and I had found a phone, led the police to the body, made statements and promised to buy tickets to the policemen’s annual ice fishing fund raiser for the rest of our natural lives, it was Sunday morning. We took turns driving back home to the Twin Cities. I dropped Mike off at his place in the northern suburbs, then made it back to my town house on the south side just before noon. I filled the suet feeders hanging off my deck and passed out on my living room sofa. I woke up about six, showered, zapped a tray of frozen breaded shrimp in the microwave for dinner and listened to my phone messages.

The first was from the detective in Duluth—John Knott—who was in charge of the investigation about the body. He said there were no reports of missing grandfathers or uncles, so the Alzheimer’s theory had gone into the circular file. There were, however, a few complaints about missing husbands, which, he said, wasn’t that unusual on a Sunday morning; he said he’d be able to rule most of those out by early afternoon when the hangovers let up and the men meandered on home. He left several phone numbers and asked me to keep in touch.

The second was from my sister Lily. We don’t get along very well, but can call a truce when it’s mutually advantageous.

“Call me,” she commanded. “I have a client who wants to landscape her backyard big-time for attracting birds. Help me out with this, and I’ll keep you in birdseed for the next year.”

Ah, Lily. Never let it be said that my sister doesn’t know the power of a good bribe.

The third was from my girlfriend, Luce. Her last name is Nilsson, and though all the members of her family have been born on American soil for more than three generations, her dad still flies the Norwegian flag in his front yard and sings the Norwegian national anthem on holidays. But you don’t need to hear Luce singing to know she has Norwegian genes. One look at her will tell you. She could be the poster child for the women of Norway. She’s got long blonde hair, blue eyes, ruddy
cheeks, toned muscles, and stands six-feet, two-inches tall.

“Bobby,” her voice on the machine said.

Luce and Lily are the only ones who still call me Bobby, by the way. When I was little, I was Bobby to everyone. My mom says I was cute and round, with big chipmunk cheeks and a mop of dark-red hair. Now I’m tall and lean and broad-shouldered and most people have to look up at me, so I guess I don’t come across as a Bobby anymore.

Except to my sister and Luce. Lily’s excuse is that I’ll always be her little brother just because she’s older than I am, but not by much. Luce, being gorgeous and sexy (did I forget to mention that part?), doesn’t need an excuse, as far as I’m concerned. She can call me anything she wants as long as she keeps calling me.

Of course, Luce has a habit of calling people anything she wants to anyway because, besides being tall, she’s a little intimidating until you get to know her. She’s the executive chef at a very classy conference center in Chaska, the old river town west of the Twin Cities, and she’s—how do you say?—arrogant.

Not only that, but when she wears her poufy chef’s hat, she’s got to be about seven feet tall—a veritable giant. Put a boning knife in her capable hand, and it makes people nervous to be in the same room with her.

“If you’re eating that microwave crap for dinner again tonight, I’m totally disgusted,” Luce’s message went. “Did you get the Boreal? And did you try that new little bistro on the North Shore I told you about? What did you eat? How were the desserts? Call me. You know where I am.”

Yeah, I knew where she was, all right. In the kitchen. The problem we had was getting her out of the kitchen: executive chefs work afternoons and evenings. I work days. If it weren’t for Saturday and Sunday mornings, we’d hardly ever see each other

Luckily, Luce is a birder too. That’s how we met. We were both on an MOU—that’s Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union—trip to the northwest tip of the state, looking for a Northern Hawk Owl. There were about twelve of us in three cars, and she and I were crammed together in a miniscule backseat for two days, so we had lots of time to get acquainted with each other’s knees and elbows. I typically don’t meet many (make that any) beautiful thirty-something single women who even know what birding is, let alone are interested to the point of going on a birding weekend with a bunch of people who think standing in a mosquito-infested bog to see one particular bird is a peak experience, so I wasn’t about to let the opportunity slide by.

Long story short—we got the Northern Hawk Owl, and I got the woman of my dreams. She’s smart, she can cook, and she loves birds. That’s three for three, as far as I’m concerned. We bird together whenever we can, which usually means weekend mornings during the school year. If I want to go for a birding weekend, I have to find other birders, like Mike, to go with me, since it’s hard for Luce to get away overnight because of her job.

I returned her message (she was at work, of course) and said I was saving her some microwaved shrimp.

So here I was on Monday morning, my counselor game face on, giving the required sympathetic ear to today’s drama queen. I did not, however, hear a word she said.

I was too busy thinking about that corpse.

And the note.

Because obviously, they had something frightening in common: me.

Sorry, Kim. Nothing personal.

The note, though—now that was personal. Not only was it clear that the note writer knew I had found the body in the forest, but it was equally clear that the note writer knew where I lived. Neither of those things made me feel especially comfortable, but it was the message itself that made me feel the worst.

Someone was threatening my life.

Because I had found a body?

God knew, I hadn’t gone looking for one. Even though I’d read the note a hundred times already, I still felt like a bottom-dweller on the information chain: I didn’t know what was going on here. Was I being threatened because I’d found a body or because I’d been in the forest? Or was it both? If my anonymous letter writer was trying to tell me something, I was going to need some help figuring it out. Exactly what was it that I had done that had earned this very special attention? And how in the world did the letter writer, whoever it was, find out so quickly that (1) it was, in fact, me who found a dead man, and (2) my backyard address? Which could only mean that unless there was a service provider for writing and delivering personal threats speedily across the state, my note writer was right here in town.

A very scary thought.

Which, of course, made me think of Stan.

Stan lived in Mendota Heights, not even twenty minutes away from Savage. No one else in town knew about my weekend. Besides Mike and Luce, I mean. Oh, and I guess the entire Duluth Police Department—they all knew about it. But they were in Duluth. It was kind of a stretch to think that one of Duluth’s finest may have beaten a path to my backyard very early this morning to pin a threat to my feeder.

Which left me, again, with Stan.

Which meant he was taking our birding rivalry a couple shades too far. Although, if the rumors about him were true, clearing the field of opponents probably wouldn’t be such a stretch for him to consider.

And then it hit me: could the dead man have been a birder as well?

Come to think of it, why would anyone else be up in those woods in mid-March? Detective Knott had already ruled out the Alzheimer’s possibility, and certainly there were lots of more easily accessed remote places for a killer who needed a spot to dump a body, so it stood to reason that the deceased had chosen to be up there.

Before he was deceased, I mean.

At the same time, I knew that nobody actually lived there because it was federal preserve land. The woods were too thick for cross-country skiing and snowmobiles, and there were much better trails in other areas. Snow camping was possible, I supposed, but I didn’t think you typically left behind a dead person with the candy wrappers, or if you did, that you would relieve them of their outerwear first. Deer hunting season was over months ago, so hunters should be guzzling their beer at home, not in the woods north of Duluth.

That left who?

Fugitives from justice?

Jail would be a warmer choice.

Illegal immigrants from … Canada?

Perish the thought.

Space aliens?

That was New Mexico’s gig.

Birders?

Bingo.

Chasing Boreals was the only conceivable reason I could come up with for taking the plunge into that mind-numbing cold, let alone having to make the dough-boy fashion statement. Remember, you can only hear Boreals for a few short weeks during their mating season. If any other birders were hoping to add the species to their birding lists, they had to know that was the only window of opportunity for the year. Obviously, Stan had mined the old reports and come up with the same locations I had, but I couldn’t say that really surprised me. Stan was almost as obsessive as I was when it came to chasing birds.

But neither Stan nor I was the frozen corpse presently thawing in the Duluth morgue. So who else would have known the location of that particular site?

A sinking feeling started rolling in my stomach.

Who else but the man who tipped me off, albeit most unintentionally?

Dr. Andrew Rahr, Boreal researcher.

“So, then, like, I said to Lindsay, ‘You think I’m jealous? You’re the one who’s jealous. If I tried to poach on your territory, you’d kill me …’”

“Kim,” I interrupted.

She stopped talking. I waited for her to make direct eye contact with me. It took a minute or two.

“I think this is one of those things you have to be mature enough to let go,” I told her.

Drama queens love to be referred to as “mature,” I’ve found. They respond much better to that than to “you sniveling twit.”

Kim looked at me, shook her multi-colored hair extension things off her face and sighed. “Yeah, I guess I can do that, Mr. White. But so help me God, if she ever …”

“Bye, Kim,” I said, handing her a pass back to class. “I’ll see you later.”

As soon as she was gone, I picked up the phone and dialed the detective’s number in Duluth. It rang six times, then clicked.

“Knott here.”

I started to leave a message. “Detective …”

“No, I’m here,” Knott said. “It’s my name. You know. Knott. K-n-o-t-t here. Okay, so maybe I should reword that.”

And I thought I had name problems.

“This is Bob White.”

“Oh, yeah, our birding corpse-finder. What can I do for you?”

I took a deep breath. “Do you know who the dead guy is yet?” As I said it, I thought it probably sounded pretty insensitive—“the dead guy”—but Kim had already sucked up my sensitivity quota for the day.

“Do you?” Knott asked me back.

We’d already been through this drill a couple times very early Sunday morning. Every time, I’d said, “No,” because I didn’t know the guy. At the time, I hadn’t thought to make any
guesses
about his identity. Why on earth would I recognize a fellow found frozen in the woods north of Duluth?