A Murder of Crows (22 page)

“Mr. White?”

“Sara?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Are you shooting tomatoes at that truck?” Sara Schiller asked, her eyes wide and a grin spreading over her face. “And here I thought you were such a dud! Wait till I tell everyone back at school!”

“I … I … no!” I told her, stammering around my surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” she asked back. “It looks to me like you’re helping this old guy fire tomatoes at a truck. Isn’t that, like, illegal or something?”

“Bob! I need more ammunition!”

I set the crate on the ground near Vern’s feet, and took Sara’s arm to pull her over to the iron bench.

“Sara, you don’t know what’s going on here. And you don’t need to know,” I quickly added. “What are you doing in Spinit?”

“I’m on fall break, Mr. White. I don’t have to answer to you,” she retorted.

Splat! Splat! Splat!

More tomatoes hit the pink pickup.

Arlene screamed at Vern.

Boo crossed his arms over his big chest and leaned back against Betty’s big plate window. He said something to Arlene, but I couldn’t hear it.

Arlene stopped shouting and glared at Boo. A moment later, her green foam beginning to slide off her face and onto the blue-striped apron that covered her front, she yelled a single word to Vern.

“Yes!”

Vern lowered his bazooka and frowned at me.

“Shoot,” he complained, “I still had another crate of tomatoes to get rid of. Tillie’s going to throw a fit if she has to can any more tomatoes.”

“Is that Mr. Metternick over there?” Sara asked, looking across the street. “Wow. I didn’t know he had abs like that. You can’t tell with those dress shirts and ties he wears at school.”

She stared at Boo another minute.

“Wow,” she said again, then turned to me. “Is it too late to transfer into one of his classes this term?”

“Sara,” I said, “Why are you here?”

She shrugged. “I felt like taking a drive.”

“To downtown Spinit?”

“I’ve already been to Wisconsin,” she reminded me.

I opened my mouth to tell her to go home, when she suddenly became very focused on what was going on across the street. I followed her glance and saw another man speaking with Boo and Arlene. He was almost as tall as Boo and just as muscular. I could practically feel the rush of hormone waves rolling off Sara.

“Let me guess,” I said. “That’s Noah Knorsen, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she breathed, completely mesmerized by Noah’s presence. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

I waved my hand in front of her eyes, but she didn’t even blink.

“At the count of three, you will act like a chicken,” I intoned.

Sara cocked her head at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Just wondering,” I told her. “I wanted to see if I could be the Amazing Mr. Wist. The hypnotist who came to school the other day.”

Sara gave me another odd look. “I skipped school during the assembly. You are so weird, Mr. White.”

“Gee, Sara, thanks,” I said. “That means a lot coming from a high school student who’s a habitual delinquent and happens to be stalking a man twice her age.”

“He is not twice my age,” she insisted. She threw another glance of longing at Noah, who appeared to be helping Boo calm Arlene down. A note of disillusionment crept into her voice. “Is he?”

“He’s old enough to be your father, Sara.”

Okay, that might have been a lie, but the math could work. If Noah was in his early thirties as I guessed him to be, he was chronologically old enough to have fathered a child who would now be sixteen. Heck, I was old enough to be Sara’s dad, for that matter.

That was a terrifying thought.

“For all you know, maybe he drinks Metamucil every morning,” I threw in for good measure.

Sara was silent for a moment, apparently considering what I’d said.

“Eeuw,” she decided. She gave Noah one last stare, then sighed. “Okay, I’m going home now. I can probably find something better to do in Savage than look at old guys.”

I was about to agree when I noticed something about Noah Knorsen that had me staring at him with almost the same intensity Sara had exhibited.

Except I wasn’t admiring his abs.

I was studying the sweatshirt he was wearing. It was dark green, and it had the logo for the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum on it.

My brain flashed back to Sunday morning at the Arb.

Just before we found Sonny Delite’s body, Luce and I had encountered a man on the path. He’d been going in the opposite direction, away from where Sonny was doing his dead scarecrow imitation. The guy had been big, I remembered, and he was wearing the same Arb sweatshirt as Noah Knorsen had on now.

And he’d had red hair. A whole headful of it.

My eyes jumped to Noah’s hair.

Red. Bushy.

And then I recalled one more detail about the man Luce and I had passed on the trail.

He carried a thermos of coffee.

At least, I had assumed it was coffee.

But maybe it had been tea instead … hemlock tea.

Gee, I bet someone who worked in the Education Center at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum would be able to recognize lots of plants.

Someone like Noah Knorsen, who was very recently employed at that very same Education Center until he decided to quit because Sonny Delite, whom he despised, was going to be speaking at the sustainable sources conference on Sunday.

My, my, what a lot of coincidences: Noah quitting his job at the Arb, Sonny’s death at the Arb, Gina being upset at the Arb after seeing Noah the same morning I found Sonny dead, me running into Noah on the same path at the Arb where I found Sonny dead, and Noah having two really good reasons to make Sonny dead … at the Arb.

Call me crazy, but that seemed to suggest one of two things: either the Arb was giving off a lot of really bad vibes these days, or Noah had killed Sonny … at the Arb.

And just when I thought I’d had Sonny’s murder all solved.

Maybe I was just a high school counselor.

“Yeah, Sara, that’s probably a good idea to go home,” I said, still watching Boo and Noah as they talked with Arlene across the street.

Actually, I wanted to go home, too. I needed to let Rick and the police know that I could place Noah Knorsen on the trail—literally—that led to a dead man. That should gain a reprieve for Rick as a murder suspect, though it would probably make the situation a lot worse for Gina, not to mention for her brother. Before I even did that, though, I felt obligated out of respect for Boo to share my conclusions with him about the longtime friend he regarded as a little brother.

“So, Boo, I’m going to head on back early, but before I go, I wanted to tell you that Noah’s a cold-blooded killer. Enjoy the rest of our fall break.”

Geez. Could today get any worse?

“Hey, Mr. White! Watch this!”

I turned around just in time to see Sara, with Vern’s help, sighting along the top of his refurbished bazooka.

A volley of tomatoes burst forth from the end of the barrel, landing just in front of Boo, Noah, and Arlene. Tomato juice gushed up at their clothes, Arlene yelled a few choice words at Sara, and Boo and Noah just shook their heads.

Vern clapped Sara on the shoulder with pride. “You’ve got an eagle eye, girl,” he told her. “That was a fine shot for your first try. You ever think about going into ordnance operations as a career?”

“What’s ordnance?” Sara asked.

“Weapons,” Vern said. “Ammunition, bombs, explosive devices. You come on out to my place, and I’ll show you what I’ve got. I’ll even let you try out a few, if you want.”

I watched Sara’s eyes study Vern, clearly trying to gauge the old man’s sincerity. A moment later, a slow smile spread across her face.

“Okay,” she accepted. “I think I’d like that.”

Well, that sure answered my question.

Yes, today could get worse.

Sara Schiller was going to get armed.

Chapter Twenty-Three

We made a parade back to the Metternick homestead.

Sara followed Vern’s truck in her Ford Escort, and Boo and I followed Sara. Noah had taken Arlene’s keys to run the pickup through the sole carwash in town and had promised to meet us all back at the farm within the hour.

“So what did Arlene say to you about Sonny?” I asked Boo as soon as we were on the road back to his parents’ place.

Boo shrugged. “What we had suspected. She was trying to blackmail Sonny into fixing the wind turbine deal for her parents. Apparently, he’d been leading her along—just like he did with Gina during the Henderson utility fight—and when Arlene found out, she decided he could make up for his lying to her by guaranteeing her parents got the energy lease.”

“But he couldn’t do that,” I reminded him. “They had no proof your land was critical for birds, whereas it sounds like everyone out here knew the Weebler’s property had nesting colonies on it.”

Boo nodded. “Right. So to keep Arlene quiet, Sonny kept devising ‘plans’ to disqualify our land, but none of the plans panned out, which finally tipped Arlene off to the fact that Sonny wasn’t going to fix the deal for her folks.”

“So she figured, worst case, she could blackmail him with their affair,” I filled in.

“Right again,” Boo said. “But when she heard that Sonny was killed, she wasn’t about to share any of that with the police because she was afraid she’d be arrested for blackmail, if not as a murder suspect herself.”

“You got all that out of Arlene just because she didn’t want your dad to coat her pickup in tomato juice?”

“No,” Boo confessed. “Although she did tell me that she just got the truck back yesterday after it was in the repair shop for the last week.”

“So she wasn’t in Chanhassen, at the Arboretum, last Sunday morning, then,” I surmised.

“No, I guess not,” he agreed. “But that’s no surprise. Arlene may be a blackmailer, but I don’t think she’s capable of planning a murder, let alone committing one. That woman can hardly plan her way out of a paper bag, and even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut about it. Case in point: Arlene told Clarissa about the phone call to Sonny’s place.”

“And Clarissa told your mom.”

“And probably every other woman in Spinit,” Boo speculated. “There are no secrets in a small town, Bob.”

“So how did you get her to confess to the blackmail?”

Boo cleared his throat. “I told her that I had some aerial photos of her truck out on the property early in the morning, and it was amazing the kind of detail you could get these days with good camera equipment. Some lenses can see right through the tarps you use over your truck bed.”

He slid me a sly smile. “And then I said it sure would be embarrassing to have everyone and his mother looking at what was going on in the back of your truck on YouTube.”

I let out a low whistle. “You are heartless, Boo Metternick. I never would have thought that of you. Murder, maybe,” I added, reminding us both of my earlier, terribly misplaced, suspicions, “but complete humiliation? Never.”

“I’m also a liar,” he admitted. “Those aerial shots I have of her truck don’t show a thing, and besides, I wouldn’t dream of making Arlene Weebler a YouTube sensation. She’s obnoxious enough already.”

“I thought you hated liars,” I said.

He’d certainly impressed me with that trait the other day in my office. When he’d leaned over my desk, I’d been tempted to whip out some pepper spray in defense, just in case he decided to literally pound that little detail into me.

“I do,” he said. “But sometimes, you’ve got to think—and act—like a liar to catch one.”

“And what about a murderer?” The words popped out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“What about a murderer?” Boo asked.

I followed Sara’s car through the last turn towards the Metternick farm.

How was I going to tell Boo that I had recognized his good friend Noah as the man I saw on the Arboretum trail just minutes before stumbling over Sonny’s body? Granted, that fact alone didn’t prove anything, but it did provide a very good reason for a close examination of Noah Knorsen as a possible murderer.

“I know you said you don’t think Noah is—responsible—for Sonny’s death, but what if there was evidence that he was involved? You said yourself that Gina was concerned about Noah being possibly involved, and that she was really upset after seeing him on Sunday morning.”

I put the car in park in front of Boo’s home. Sara and Vern were already out of their vehicles, heading towards a small barn that sat a little way back from the house. From what I could see, the two were carrying on an animated conversation. I wondered if Sara had ever shown that much interest in any classroom at Savage. We obviously weren’t offering the right subjects to our students. Instead of Art and Family Science, we should have been thinking Nuclear Devices and Vegetable Weaponry.

Boo sat in the car and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Gina wasn’t upset about something that Noah had done, Bob,” he explained. “She was upset about something he wanted to do, which was quitting his job. She told him she’d walked away from her past mistakes and that he needed to move on, too. He told her to mind her own business. Gina took it real hard, and I took her home. Noah didn’t kill Sonny, Bob.”

“So what was he doing on the path at the Arb on Sunday morning,” I blurted out, “less than five minutes away from Sonny Delite’s body? I saw him, Boo. I was there, and so was he.”

Silence filled the car.

And lingered.

I swear I could practically see the gears turning in his head as he processed what I’d told him. Then, his blue eyes slowly went icy, and his face filled with dark anger.

For a split-second, I debated who he looked more like: a furious Hulk on the verge of turning green, or a fair-haired Thor getting ready to rumble.

Either way, I didn’t think it was going to be good.

Seconds passed, and then a still-human and very angry Boo was out of the car and storming up the front porch steps.

I stepped out my side of the car and called after him.