The Boreal Owl Murder (12 page)

He laughed. “Tell Maryann that. I’m making points being here this weekend, but I want to run up the score big-time, so I can do that long birding weekend with the MOU out in Blue Mounds in May.”

That was one of my favorite trips, too. The prairie in the southwestern part of the state would be blooming then and the Dicksissels and Blue Grosbeaks easy to find. Mike wished me luck on hunting the Boreal, and I hung up the phone.

I got off the sofa and walked over to the sliding doors to my deck and looked out. A very bright full moon illuminated the woods and pond that stretched beyond my yard. Even through the glass, I could hear the clear hoots of the Great Horned Owl that lived behind me.

Whoo-whoo-whoo. Whoo-whoo
.

In my head, I listened again to the rising flute-like notes of the Boreal Owl’s call:
who, who, who who-who-who-who
.

Would I find him this weekend?

I sure hoped so, since the mating season was half over, and my window of opportunity for this year was shrinking by the day. Make that by the night. If I didn’t get him this weekend, I only had two more weekends—four nights—left. And next year, there wouldn’t be a new report from Rahr to help me scout locations.

Unless Ellis stepped in.

Was it just bad timing that Ellis showed up in Duluth shortly before Rahr’s murder?

Or was it perfect timing?

I closed the drapes across the glass doors.

Whack!

Something had hit my sliding door. Hard. I pulled the drapes open again and looked out at the deck.

A bloody Great Horn Owl was laying about a foot from the door.

My phone rang. I picked it up.

“Stay home,” a voice hissed into my ear.

Snow was lightly falling as I left the cities behind me and headed north on I-35 to Duluth. I’d set the alarm for five o’clock, thinking I’d beat the morning traffic rush that could gridlock commuters for hours. As a result, I made great time and cleared the northernmost suburbs within an hour of leaving my house. Granted, I’d checked my rear-view mirrors more frequently than I usually do, but since I hadn’t once spotted a car or truck that was marked with a “We’re tailing you” billboard, I was feeling pretty confident that my escape from Savage was unobserved. As long as the snow continued to melt as soon as it hit the pavement, my plan to make it to the university by mid-morning would hold. If the temperatures fell, however, and the highway iced, I could be in for a long, and very slow, drive to the North Shore.

As it was, the snow stopped south of Pine City, and the traffic was surprisingly light. Usually when I headed north in the winter, the road was filled with skiers and snowmobilers going up for a weekend of playing in the snow. In the summer, it was packed bumper-to-bumper with campers, boaters, tourists, and vacationers.

This morning, though, it was too early for weekend drivers, and most of the cars I passed seemed to be business travelers making the Twin Cities-Duluth trek. Before I realized it, my lead foot had gotten heavier, and I was cruising at eighty-five miles an hour.

Someone else, however, did realize it and wanted to share that little bit of information with me.

Lights flashing, the highway patrol cruiser pulled me over.

“Morning. You in a rush, sir?”

The state trooper at my window was a woman I didn’t know. That surprised me—not that the trooper was a woman, but that I didn’t know this particular trooper. Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of quite a few members of the highway patrol since I spend so much time behind the wheel chasing birds. In fact, I’m probably one of the few people in Minnesota to have been issued speeding tickets in every single county of the state.

Another dubious honor, I know.

“No, Officer,” I responded. “My mistake. I wasn’t paying attention to my speed.”

I didn’t tell her the reason was because I was thinking about a dead owl on my deck and the fact that I was now sure Scary Stan was not behind the threats because if I knew nothing else about Stan, I knew for a fact he wouldn’t kill a bird. Which, of course, had led me back to the conclusion that I had not wanted to reach yesterday: that someone else was making a new hobby of threatening me. Remembering both Alan’s remarks about ecoterrorists and Montgomery’s interview on the television, I’d decided the most likely suspects were some fringe S.O.B. sympathizers. That also seemed to fit with what Knott had said about Dr. Rahr’s threatening letter. So all I had to do was add personal vigilance and an impenetrable forcefield to my strategy for finding the Boreals and I should be just fine.

Or at the very least, alive.

Since when did birding become a survival sport?

“I drive this road a lot,” I told the trooper, “and I just went on automatic, I guess.”

“Automatic speeding?”

I smiled.

She didn’t.

She checked my license and insurance card, went back to her car to write the ticket, then came back and handed it to me. Before I could get back on the road, though, she showed up at my window again.

“Are you that bird guy they told me about? I saw your plates, but it didn’t click till I got back to my car.”

She was referring to my vanity license plates. They read BRRDMAN. When I got them, I hadn’t planned on becoming a state-wide highway celebrity. Nowadays, I secretly hoped that my plate recognition was keeping my ticket tally lower, not higher. Although that didn’t seem to be the case this morning.

I nodded. “That would probably be me.”

She held her hand out to shake mine. “Then I expect I’ll be seeing you on a regular basis, Mr. White.”

I shook her hand and smiled. “In that case, make it Bob.”

This time she did smile back.

“I’m Chris. Chris Maas.” Before I could comment, she added, “What can I say? My parents thought it was a hoot. My brother’s name is Pete.”

She walked back to her cruiser. I watched her in the mirror for a second or two and then carefully pulled out onto the freeway. I set my cruise control at a sedate sixty-five. I was bummed about the ticket. My New Year’s resolution was to not get any tickets this year, and I’d only made it to late March.

Notice I didn’t say the resolution was to not speed.

Just not get any tickets.

The rest of the drive to Duluth was uneventful. No troopers, no tickets, no tails (as far as I could tell). I downed two apple fritters at a gas station in town and mentally apologized to Luce for my poor eating habits. I turned up the hill, away from the harbor, and drove to the university campus. After a minute or two of circling through the visitors’ parking lot, I found a space outside the Biological Sciences Building, or BSB, as it’s known by the locals.

Originally located in the downtown area, UMD now sits on the hill above Lake Superior, giving students both a bird’s-eye view of the water and a biting taste of the cold winds that can whip over it in the winter. In their great wisdom, the campus planners connected all the buildings with tunnels and enclosed walkways, providing tender-skinned students with protection from the frigid elements. I’d heard some of our Savage alumni who attended the school say they felt like moles for part of the year, hidden away in underground warrens, while others took advantage of the indoor environment to wear pajamas to class.

Located at the edge of campus, the BSB was the most recent addition to the university’s facilities, housing labs, classrooms, departmental libraries, and offices. As an adjunct professor of environmental studies, Ellis would have his office here.

So would the repositories of all information: the department secretaries.

If you want to know who’s in and who’s out in any college department, ask a secretary. And I don’t mean just the physical location of in and out. Secretaries know all the dynamics of office relationships. They know who’s ticked at whom, who’s doing the heavy lifting in the office, and who’s got other irons in the fire. Besides juggling a hundred clerical and administrative tasks, good secretaries learn to identify the moods of the people they work with and often notice details others overlook.

And that was why the first person I was looking for this morning was a secretary, preferably one who knew both Rahr and Ellis. Since both men were based in the BSB, I was hoping I might pick up some helpful insights into their working relationship from the department secretaries. Okay, maybe even a little dirt. I had, after all, promised my fellow MOU board members that I would check on Ellis’s credentials—just because he personally wasn’t available didn’t preclude my obtaining some information.

I mean, it’s not like I was snooping, exactly.

Close, but not exactly.

And if a secretary told me something I thought Knott might like to know, there was nothing wrong with passing it along, right?

Especially if it got me back in Knott’s good graces. I knew I was skating on thin ice since I’d neglected to tell him about my phone call with Rahr. At the time, I just hadn’t thought it would help. Now, I realized it was a major error in judgment.

I locked the car and walked to the building. The air was brisk and felt great after a morning of driving. The weather had turned. Unlike the previous weekend I’d spent freezing in the woods, the air was spring-like—instead of closing my throat against the cold, I wanted to drink it in. Without a doubt, Old Man Winter was starting to lose his grip on Minnesota’s North Shore.

The down side was that it meant time was running out on the Boreals’ mating season and any chances I had to find them. Though I hated to admit it, my pending suspension from work was a birding blessing in disguise if it produced my owl. If it didn’t, and Knott couldn’t convince Mr. Lenzen to take me back on Monday, then it would be only the beginning of a very long weekend—a weekend that might possibly extend into weeks, or even months.

With only partial pay.

If I was lucky.

Not this camper, I decided. I was going to set my sights on something good coming out of this weekend, even if I had to make it happen myself.

Problem was, at least two other someones apparently had their sights set on me. And to make matters worse, I really didn’t know why.

It definitely looked like lunch with Knott wasn’t exactly going to be happy hour.

I walked into the BSB lobby and looked around for a directory but couldn’t find one. Then I looked up. Suspended high above my head were large department symbols, pointing visitors down different corridors to the various departments. The symbols were hewn out of native rock. Big pieces of native rock. I couldn’t decide which was scarier: the thought that I could be squashed like a bug if one of those rocks came tumbling down, or the possibility that my tax dollars had helped pay for them.

I picked out a symbol that looked like a primitive drawing of a wave curling around the earth and hoped it meant environmental science. After following it down a wide corridor that made several turns, sure enough, I ended up … in front of a water fountain.

I retraced my steps, mentally cursing the architect who sold the university on the symbol sign posts. This time, I chose a rock that was etched with what looked like a mass of tangled worms. Or maybe it was spaghetti. If it led me to a food court, I was giving up.

Thankfully, it didn’t. A couple turns of another corridor and I found the environmental sciences department.

I had chosen wisely.

I pushed through the glass office doors. Across the room, behind a reception desk, there was an attractive, dark-haired woman. She smiled as I approached.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me a little about Bradley Ellis. I understand he’s an adjunct professor here this term.”

She dropped the pen she was holding. She leaned back in her chair.

The ground shook.

The room darkened.

Lightning cracked.

Just kidding.

But something happened because Ms. Smiling Secretary disappeared.

Ms. Furious took her place.

“Are you from the police department?” Ms. Furious shouted at me.

I took a step back from the desk.

“Because if you are, I don’t know anything more than I’ve already told you people! Dr. Ellis is out of town. His father is ill. I don’t know when he’ll return. That’s all you’re going to get. Now get out!”

I figured if I didn’t move, she wouldn’t see me. Maybe I could back up very slowly and follow the worms back out of the building. I could enter the warrens under the campus and lose myself in the pajama-clad throngs. I could drive down to the harbor. I could hide in my hotel room.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I certainly didn’t mean to upset you. I’m not a detective.”

That seemed to help a little. Not much, but a little. Ms. Furious downgraded to Ms. Seething.

“I’m here on behalf of the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union,” I told her. “Dr. Ellis sent an email saying he’d like to do some research for us.”

“Oh.”

The dark abyss closed up as suddenly as it had opened.

Ms. Smiling Secretary was back.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized to me. “It’s just been so terrible around here this week with the police asking questions, over and over, and poor Bradley—Dr. Ellis—gone to be with his father. It’s just been overwhelming, really. It reminds me of last year, when we had all those logging people in here arguing with Dr. Rahr. And all those S.O.B people, too. I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had started throwing punches. It was awful. Honestly, it was a three-ring circus in here by the time the DNR put an end to it.”

Now she was Suzy Talks a Lot.

I nodded in understanding. Actually, I was afraid to open my mouth.

Suzy picked a pen out of a glass jar on her desk, pulled a notepad in front of her, and began to write. She smiled up at me. “Now, what was your name?”

“Bob White,” I told her. “I’m a member of the MOU board. I wanted to talk with Dr. Ellis about the Boreal Owl study.”

I noticed that the pen she used had
Save Our Boreals
stamped on it. For some reason, the pen looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. I wondered if she was a member of the group, or if someone had left it behind last year during the three-ring circus.