A Murder of Crows (9 page)

“Clearly,” he commented. “That’s going to be one heck of an omelet.”

He began to flap his own arms at the students.

“Shoo!” he cried, expertly herding them out the door in practiced moves. Cackling all the way, the students scattered out of the locker room with Boo close on their heels.

I wished I had my camera with me. I could see the headline now in the supermarket tabloid: “Former wrestling star pursues students in high school locker room.”

Ha. Take that, Mr. Lenzen. I’m not your only public relations nightmare.

I caught up with Boo and the students as he funneled them into the office of our school nurse, Katy the Trauma Queen.

“Thanks, you two,” Katy greeted us, her perennial smile cranked up to its usual megawatt force.

She indicated the row of seven students now happily squished next to each other on the single cot in the office.

“Aren’t they just the cutest things you’ve ever seen?” she said. She picked up the candy jar from her desk and poured out a handful of little Tootsie Rolls, which she then passed out to the students.

“This room usually smells like sweat and vomit when I have this many kids in here at once,” Katy continued, “but I swear these kids smell more like a barnyard. Horse manure and chicken droppings. I wonder if that hypnotist gave us all some subliminal suggestions while we were watching the show? Wouldn’t that be a kick?”

“Speaking of the Amazing Mr. Wist, where is he?” I glanced around Katy’s small domain.

She pointed her finger towards the door and the hallway beyond. “He’s resting in Lenzen’s office. I’m guessing our fearless leader is reminding our assembly presenter that the school is not legally liable for any injuries he may have sustained when he was attacked by a student who thought he was a rooster defending the coop. Especially since the hypnotist was the one who caused said student to think he was a rooster.”

“We have insurance like that?” Boo asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I assured him. “It’s in the fine print of the school policy.”

Katy laughed. “I bet you it will be now, if it wasn’t before. I think Lenzen has the school district lawyer on speed dial. Speaking of which,” she added, turning to me. “I heard you found another body. Are you trying to give Lenzen a heart attack, or what?”

“Ah, I see that Officer Rick has made the rounds,” I replied.

I turned to Boo and gave him a look loaded with warning. “Do not trust our school police officer with anything you don’t want to be made public,” I cautioned him. “The man has a mouth the size of the Mississippi.”

Boo was silent for a moment, obviously registering my unspoken message that I was aware of his secret identity.

“Okay,” he slowly agreed. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

Satisfied that Katy and Boo had the situation under control, I returned to my office to find the big mouth himself pacing outside my door. Before I could say a word, though, he grabbed my upper arm and pulled me into my office, shutting the door quickly behind us.

“Gina’s involved,” he blurted out.

“With you, I know,” I told him. “I thought that was a good thing.”

“Not with me,” he said, then shook his head. “No, I mean she is involved with me, but she’s involved with the investigation now, too, and that’s going to put me in a really awkward position, if not an impossible one.”

He raked his fingers over his head. His anxiety rippled through the air.

“Rick, what are you talking about? What’s going on?”

“Sonny Delite,” he said. “The murder investigation. Gina’s involved.”

Chapter Eight

“Gina Knorsen? Our child development teacher?”

Rick dropped into my visitor’s chair. “Yes, Gina. Our child development teacher. The love of my life.”

“The love of your life? Aren’t you moving a little fast here, Stud?” I asked him. “Yesterday she was the ‘I’ve got a feeling about her’ woman, and today she’s the love of your life?”

He gave me a look of pure despair. “Bob, Gina was the last person Sonny Delite called before he died.”

I let out a low whistle and dropped into my own chair behind my desk. “Well, that’s … not good,” I finished lamely.

“Not good? We’re talking terrible, Bob,” Rick corrected me. “I walked back to her classroom with her after the assembly broke up, and when we got there, there was a detective waiting to talk with her. I said he could say whatever he wanted in front of me, but when he told Gina they’d found her phone number on Sonny’s cell, and that the call was made at 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning, I excused myself from the conversation.”

“Conflict of interest?” I suggested.

“Conflict of everything, I’m afraid,” he moaned. “Sonny called her at 2:00 a.m.? I didn’t know she even knew Sonny, let alone that she was on his 2 a.m. call list. Gina’s not a birder, Bob. Sonny wasn’t phoning to give her a birding tip, I’m pretty sure. So why was he calling her?”

“Did you ask her?”

Rick stood back up and paced the few steps to my closed door.

“I will,” he assured me. “As soon as the detective is gone. I was at Gina’s house on Saturday night and I didn’t get home until 3:00 a.m., which means Sonny’s call came in while I was there. She must have seen it after I left.”

He slapped both of his palms on the door and leaned his head against the wood. “She knows I was at the Arboretum on Sunday. She knows I knew Sonny. She knows I’m a cop and that I have a pipeline to this investigation.”

He turned his head to look back at me. “So why didn’t she say something to me about that phone call?”

“Because it’s none of your business?”

He slapped the door again with his palms, paced back to his chair, and dropped into it again with a sigh of resignation.

“It is my business, Bob. I’m in love with her.”

“Then at least give her a chance to explain before you go jumping to the worst possible conclusions,” I scolded him. “For all you know, Sonny misdialed.”

“If only,” he muttered.

“I’m telling you, Rick,” I warned him. “If you care about this woman, you better trust her. She trusts you, doesn’t she?”

“More than you know,” he said.

“Then don’t give her a reason to doubt you. Now get back up to her classroom and stand by your woman, Stud.”

He stood up and headed for the door.

“And tell me all about it after you find out,” I added.

He looked back and smiled grimly. “Not a chance,” he told me. “From now on, ‘mum’ is my middle name.”

It took me only a second after Rick left to realize what I’d just done. If Rick was really going to keep his mouth shut, I probably wouldn’t be able to get him to confirm that Boo Metternick was the Bonecrusher when we went birding on Thursday to Morris.

Not that it mattered now. After our bonding experience rounding up student chickens, I had no doubt that our physics teacher was a man with a secret in his past—a secret that would stay buried, if Rick’s new resolution was as solid as he promised. I hoped it was, because I liked Boo. Boo was a good guy, and I’d hate to see him haunted by his history.

Unlike someone else I could mention, by the name of Sonny Delite.

Sonny’s past had done more than just haunt him, however, if his death wasn’t the result of mistaken leaf identity, a possibility which, I had to admit, had dimmed more every time I’d considered it in the course of the day. Granted, I knew I wasn’t always the brightest-eyed bird in the morning, but even if on automatic morning mode, I couldn’t imagine that anyone who knew enough to forage in the forest would pull hemlock instead of ginseng to put in their teapot.

I reached for my cold cup of coffee still sitting on the corner of my desk from this morning and froze in mid-reach.

If Sonny had been drinking poison tea just before he lay down to die, where was the empty cup?

I closed my eyes and tried to visualize exactly what I’d seen when I’d found Sonny on Sunday morning.

Bright sunlight filtering through the orange and yellow leaves still hanging on the trees. A body awkwardly propped against the foot of a big maple, black crows perched above in bared branches. Baggy blue jeans, flannel shirt, beat-up felt hat and heavy work gloves. No straw.

I paused the picture in my head and inspected the ground around the body.

No metal lip of a cup catching a glint from the sun.

No white Styrofoam cup sticking out of the carpet of fallen brown leaves.

No thermos sitting next to Sunny with a big arrow pointing to it, labeled “Hemlock.”

I opened my eyes and put my fingers on my laptop’s keyboard. I typed in “Hemlock.”

Within a second, I had a list of results, and right at the top was the official site … of Hemlock, the heavy metal band.

Gosh darn. I got rid of my leather wristbands decades ago.

Pass.

I looked at the next result listed.

The Hemlock Tavern. Located in San Francisco.

Unless it was the home of microbrewed poisons shipped overnight anywhere in the United States … another pass.

I read the third entry.

Ah, yes. Wikipedia. The best friend of every student who was looking for somewhat reliable information to slip into a poorly written research paper.

I’d learned early on during my tenure at Savage High School that the quickest way to rile any of the teachers on staff was to defend Wikipedia as an acceptable source of research. In fact, I’d instigated so many heated debates in the faculty lunchroom that Katy the Trauma Queen routinely accused me of using the Wikipedia card to raise the blood pressure of certain teachers. I assured her that I was simply doing my part to improve the American educational system by thinning the herd.

Having no objection myself to using the online site, I began to read about hemlock. About two-thirds of the way through the posted information, I found what I was looking for: seizures could begin in fifteen minutes and turn fatal within a few hours of drinking a hemlock-infused concoction. If medical help was immediately available, activated charcoal could be administered to help block the stomach’s absorption of the toxin while anticonvulsant drugs might prevent additional seizures which could result in respiratory, kidney, or cardiac failure.

Good to know. The next time I unknowingly drank hemlock, I’d be sure to do it within shouting distance of an emergency room.

But the last paragraph on the page stopped me cold, because it claimed that hemlock had a sharp scent, one that was readily recognizable by people who were knowledgeable about wild plants.

People, I supposed, like Sonny, who knew the forests and fields. Those folks wouldn’t mistakenly pick and brew hemlock, because even if the leaf looked like ginseng, it sure didn’t smell like it.

Nor would the tea.

Unless you added some real ginseng, or other potent flavor, to the hemlock.

Deliberately.

With full knowledge.

The unavoidable truth hit me like a sledgehammer.

Someone had poisoned Sonny.

I pulled out my cell to call Rick, then remembered he was probably upstairs, either talking to Gina or still waiting for the detective to leave.

Gina.

She’d had a phone call from Sonny just hours before he was poisoned.

A faint alarm went off in my head. For some unexplained reason, Gina and the word ‘poison’ were connected in my thoughts.

What the heck?

I frantically searched my memory for all the conversations I’d had with Gina during the faculty workshops. We’d talked about her teaching stint in the inner-city. She’d told me about the one year she’d worked at a charter school and how much she loved it. We’d compared notes about our favorite camping spots around Minnesota: I liked Blue Mounds State Park near Luverne, and she preferred Itasca State Park, home to the Mississippi head waters. Clearly, she was very knowledgeable about nature and enjoyed a variety of outdoor activities, but to the best of my memory, she hadn’t once brought up the subject of harvesting and brewing hemlock.

I tried to recall what Rick had said about her. She had a fire pit, she knew the constellations of the night sky, and he had a feeling about her.

That probably described half of the women he’d ever dated.

Rick had a thing for fire pits.

He’d also known about the flour babies, because Gina had told him he could be the child protection officer and …

Safety.

Child safety.

The ever-truant Sara Schiller had reported that her child development class covered a unit on safety, including a warning about poisonous plants at the playground. On the crazy, highly unlikely, chance that Sara had actually been in class for the entire unit, she would know if Gina Knorsen was familiar with hemlock. For all I knew, Gina gave each of her students a laminated plant identification card to help prepare them for their eventual responsible parenting duties, which included keeping their kids from ingesting marbles, nails, and poisonous substances.

Like hemlock.

And if Gina Knorsen could readily recognize hemlock, who was to say that she couldn’t also have picked some on one of her camping trips?

You know … just to have on hand in case she needed to provide a visual aid for a class lesson on child safety.

Or to poison someone.

My stomach dropped.

I’d just remembered the name of the charter school where Gina had worked: the Minnesota New Country School.

It was located in Henderson, the same place where Sonny had bitterly fought the utility company over the power line project.

Then I remembered something else Gina had told me during faculty workshops. The same year she’d taught at the charter school, her brother shared her apartment with her while he waited for a construction job that never came through.

A construction job with the local utility company.

Then, at the end of the school year, Gina had given up the job she loved and moved to the Twin Cities so her brother could find work.

Crap.

If Gina knew that Sonny was behind the reason her brother had remained unemployed and the reason she’d decided to leave the New Country School, then she probably wasn’t one of Sonny’s biggest fans. And given the amount of publicity that had surrounded the whole utility line debate, there was no way Gina wouldn’t know about Sonny’s role in defeating the project, unless she’d been living in a sealed bubble, which I highly doubted. Minnesota might have some interesting architectural landmarks and structures scattered around the state, but if Henderson had bubble housing, it was news to me.