The Boreal Owl Murder (6 page)

Now that I thought about it, Lily used to tease me about my nose, along with everything else she could think of. She said it was long and turned up just at the end, like a little ski-jump. Yup, me and the Canvasback; ski-jumps unite.

Okay. When you start comparing yourself to a duck, it’s time to go home.

The day had obviously been a lot longer than I had realized.

I got back in the car. Chances were that by tomorrow, the goose and the ducks would be long gone, but I’d still post it on the MOU email list serve tonight when I got home in case someone else wanted to try to see them before they took off. Keeping up with the email was the way I’d managed to see so many birds over the years, so I wanted to return the favor to other birders. Of course, it was also the way I’d managed to not see a lot of birds, too. I couldn’t begin to count the times I’d seen a posting of a sighting, taken off to see it, and after driving for hours to get there, the bird was nowhere around.

Oh, well. That’s part of the deal when you bird. Part of the appeal of birding is the hunt, and while I still get a thrill from actually finding the bird (either by sight or sound), I have to admit the most satisfying finds are the ones that take the most work, the ones that really challenge me.

That’s why I wanted the Boreal this season so badly I could almost taste it. I knew I could find it. I knew I’d gotten close.

Just not close enough.

By the time I got home, it was almost six o’clock. A little gray-and-white Junco was hopping around on my deck, snatching up sunflower seeds that had fallen from the feeder. There weren’t any new death threats attached to it, nor were there any visible explosive devices (my imagination was having a field day with what kind of “contract work” Stan might perform), so I figured I was home free for at least another evening. My phone message light, however, was blinking. I punched it and listened while I hung up my jacket in the front hall closet.

“White. Knott here. What do you know about a group called Save Our Boreals? S.O.B. And I thought I had name problems. Call me at my home phone, will you?”

The second call was from Luce. “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is I’m Channel 5’s “Chic Chef” of the week. The bad news is I have to film the segment on Saturday, so I can’t go up north this weekend like we had planned. Can I have a rain check for the following weekend? I’d really like to get that Boreal with you. Let me know. I’ll be home after ten.”

I dialed Knott’s number. It rang once.

“Knott here.”

I tried to resist, but couldn’t.

“Are so,” I said. I heard a groan over the line. “It’s Bob White. You asked me about that S.O.B.”

“I’m listening.”

“This is what I know. Early last year, there was some talk by the Department of Natural Resources about having a lumber company come into parts of the Superior Forest and clean up areas that had too much old growth to make room for younger trees. One of the areas they were targeting was right near where the Boreal Owls nest. Practically overnight, this S.O.B. group popped up and raised such a stink about it that the DNR dropped the plan. All the information S.O.B. used in its literature came right out of Rahr’s reports, so I assume they were in bed together. Why?”

“I think the honeymoon had ended,” Knott said. “Mrs. Rahr was in my office this afternoon. She showed me a letter her husband received in February. It was a threat. Said he’d better quit giving the owl tours and bringing in all those tourists because it was, and I quote, ‘compromising the work we do to maintain the integrity of the Boreals’ habitat.’”

Rahr had gotten a threat. Gee, we could have formed a club. But his letter obviously wasn’t from Stan. Its sentences were too long.

But, holy shit! The owl tours! I’d completely forgotten about the owl tours.

Last year in early April, Rahr took small groups of birders up to his research sites to listen for the owls. His reason was to solicit more funding for his work, but I remembered reading complaints from other birders in the MOU monthly newsletter, accusing him of encroaching on the subjects of his own study. I’d never gotten up there for a tour myself because it was during softball season, and I coach the tenth grade girls’ team at school. Once the season starts, I’m pretty limited to local birding only. By the time the next newsletter was published, Rahr and the owls were old news, and the concerns of readers had moved on to other birding topics.

“One more thing,” Knott added. “We got the coroner’s report back. There were indications of head trauma. Unless Rahr deliberately banged his head repeatedly against a tree, someone else did it for him.”

I dragged my hand through my hair. This was not what I wanted to hear.

“Oh—and something else. Your buddy Stan Miller? The one who lives in Mendota Heights, according to your MOU membership roster? He doesn’t exist. At least, not in any kind of data bank we can access. I thought we had a line on him the last time I talked to you, but it vanished. Into thin air. You know, Bob, I really do need to talk to him—you’ve placed him at the scene of a murder, and he just might have some good answers to the questions we’ve got hanging. Are you sure you got his name right?”

Oh, yeah, I was sure. Scary Stan Miller. Accountant and “contract worker.” Lily White’s dinner date. Accomplished birder. Possible lunatic.

Ghost.

It was Tuesday, and I had been sentenced to a slow death in the media center. It was my turn to monitor the last of the sophomores taking their language skills standards tests.

The majority of the students had completed the tests in their regular classrooms long before noon. The stragglers—a few dozen or so of them—were assigned to finish the work in the media center, supervised by me. Whereas I would have liked to kick them out of there and get them back into class, these kids had this scoped out. By stretching out their test-taking, they got a reprieve—an excused reprieve—from the classes they were supposed to be attending. Had I offered this same group of students the incentive of an early dismissal as soon as they were done with the tests, I had no doubt they’d be done in record time. Instead, they had all gone into sloth mode to while away the rest of the day in the media center.

Supervising still let me get some work done, though. In front of me on the desk, the pile of senior graduation credit reviews I needed to plow through was slowly shrinking. I finished the one I was working on and glanced up to do a quick head count of the students around me who were still testing.

“Mr. Whi-i-ite, can I go to the bathroom?”

A girl dressed in a shiny low-cut sweater and ripped jeans glued to her hipbones had her elbow propped on the table next to her test. She was slowly waving her hand back and forth, back and forth, rolling her eyes at the ceiling.

For a split second, I didn’t see the girl’s arm.

I saw Rahr’s hand popping up in front of me.

I shook my head to clear it.

“I
can’t
go to the bathroom?” the girl drawled, leaving her mouth hanging open at the end of her request.

I looked at the girl. It was like seeing evolution in real time. Except … backward.

She’d taken my head shake for a “no.”

“Yes,” I told her. “Go. Please. But you have to come right back here.”

Unfortunately.

She slid off her chair and wandered out to the hall. On the way, she passed a table of three boys who kept insisting they weren’t finished yet. No surprise there. They were too busy napping between each question or waiting for new pathways of neurons to spontaneously form in their brains.

Funny thing, though—they all seemed plenty alert when the girl walked by. Some neurons just work better than others, I guessed. Or was it a case of primal instincts edging out higher level thinking skills?

Too bad the state didn’t set high school graduation standards for hormone levels. These kids could blow it away.

By the end of the school day, I was left with just two students watching the clock and timing down to the minute when they would hand in their tests.

Actually, the day’s assignment wasn’t that bad. It gave me a whole day to catch up on paperwork, something I never managed in my office where accessibility was critical, but completely time-consuming. That aspect of my job was also one of the reasons I took real pleasure in birding on the weekends—in contrast to constant distraction, birding was time I could spend in single-minded pursuit.

As opposed to the multiple-minded pursuit my head had been spinning its mental wheels on since talking with Knott last night.

The dismissal bell rang just after the last tests were laid on the table in front of me. I stacked them in a box and piled my papers together.

“Hey, good-looking. Pretty please can you tell the nice man I’m not here to burn down the school?”

I turned around to find Luce standing just behind me with a security guard, who looked disgruntled. She gave me a little peck on the cheek and pulled up a chair from a neighboring table. I smiled and nodded to the guard who turned and left.

“I’m on my way to work, but these scones jumped out of my oven and cried, ‘Take us to Bobby, take us to Bobby,’ so here I am.”

She handed me a brown lunch bag that warmed my fingers and released a scent that was already making me salivate.

“What’s new at school?” she asked.

I peeked in the bag and groaned in delight. Luce had made my favorite: white chocolate raspberry. “I am your slave forever,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say,” Luce laughed, removing her coat. Today, her long blonde hair was neatly braided and wound in a coil on the crown of her head; the pale pink t-shirt she was wearing put a rosy glow in her cheeks.

“Put a couple candles on your head and you could pass for Santa Lucia,” I told her.

“Who?”

“Santa Lucia. Come on, you’re Scandinavian. You know Santa Lucia—she brings baked goodies to good little boys on her feast day in December, wearing a wreath of candles in her hair.”

“Sounds like a fire waiting to happen,” Luce sniffed. “Santa Lucia is Swedish, Bobby. I’m Norwegian. And Santa Lucia does not bring goodies to good little boys. She brings saffron buns and coffee to wake up the family.”

“So, where’s the coffee?”

She made a grab to take back the scones, but I was faster and held them out of her reach.

“What’s new? Let’s see—aside from watching thoughts struggling against all odds to be born in the heads of reluctant sophomores, not a whole lot,” I said, telling her about my day in the media center. “I did, however, get caught up on credit reviews for seniors, and I’m happy to say we will, indeed, be graduating quite a few of them in June.”

I filled her in on the latest news from Knott about the investigation into Rahr’s death that had now turned into a murder investigation.

“His head had been bashed?” she asked. “Yikes. That sounds pretty vicious, Bobby. It sounds like something that would happen in a big crowded city teeming with psychopaths, not in the peaceful pine forests of northern Minnesota. Who would attack Dr. Rahr? He was an owl researcher, for heaven’s sake.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t have a clue. But then again, why would I? It’s not like I’m the detective, here. I’m just the poor schmuck who found the body.”

“Come on, Bobby, let’s play detective,” Luce said, leaning back in her chair.

I waggled my eyebrows at her. “I’d rather play doctor.”

Luce rolled her eyes. “Pay attention. Money is supposed to be the biggest motivation for murder. At least, that’s what all the mystery novels I read say. Then it’s revenge and love, I think. Or is it revenge and jealousy? Either way, we’d better check out Rahr’s love life. Maybe he wronged some woman. Maybe he left her for the sake of his research.”

I opened the bag of scones again and inhaled.

Luce gave me a funny look.

“Therapy,” I said and closed the bag. “I had a rough day.”

And night. But I didn’t tell her that. I deliberately hadn’t mentioned to Luce about the part of my discussion with Knott about Stan Miller. The non-existent Scary Stan Miller who was dating my sister. Luce and I had had arguments before about my over-protective attitude towards Lily, and I just didn’t have the energy to get into it with her right now. After I’d hung up with Knott, I’d thought about leaving a phone message for Lily about Stan’s non-entity status, but figured she’d just delete it and refuse to speak to me. I did, however, give Lily’s telephone number to the detective, hoping he could get through to her. Hoping she wouldn’t hang up on him, too, thinking it was a friend of mine I’d put up to a prank. Nothing like trust between siblings, right? Anyway, my worrying about Lily’s poor judgment when it came to men, let alone her physical safety, had kept me awake much of the night. She might be the Mistress of Humiliation, but she is my sister.

“Focus, Bobby.”

I put the bag of scones on the desk.

“According to Knott,” I explained, “Rahr and his wife were happily married for thirty-seven years. Three kids and five grandchildren. The only time he spent away from her was the weekends he spent in the woods researching the Boreals. That’s why she didn’t suspect anything when he didn’t come home last Friday night. He usually camped on-site. He knew what the weather was like and was prepared for it. That’s why the lack of adequate clothing on his body was so weird. He knew better. Knott thinks that maybe the killer knocked Rahr out against a tree, then wasn’t sure he was dead, so he stripped him down to make sure he’d freeze to death before he could hike out for help.”

I closed my eyes, remembering a frozen corpse.

I didn’t think hiking out had been much of an option for him.

“It was below zero there last Friday, Luce—I know, I was there,” I reminded her.

Mike and I hadn’t wasted any time finding our birding spots that night, it was so bitter. We had had a nasty wind chill, too. With that kind of cold, a person could be in serious trouble within thirty minutes. Rahr couldn’t have made it out in a flannel shirt even if he had recovered consciousness after getting his head bashed. I shook my head slowly. “Whoever it was,” I concluded, “made sure Rahr wasn’t going to be talking to anybody.”