The Boreal Owl Murder (14 page)

“Hey, Bob.”

I slowly lowered my glasses to my chest and turned around.

It was Scary Stan.

Why was I not surprised?

“He nodded toward the lake. “Bufflehead?”

I noted that he had binos slung around his neck, too. “Yeah. What are you doing here, Stan?”

“Birding.”

“No. I mean, yeah, obviously, I can see that. But what are you doing right here, right now, while I’m here, right now?”

He looked at me with flat eyes like I was babbling. Which I kind of was doing, because I had convinced myself that Stan was not stalking me, and here he was, at Park Point, three hours north of where we both lived, alone with me on an empty shore in the middle of a Thursday morning. Not to mention that he had once again appeared soundlessly behind me, which was really starting to unnerve me. Knott couldn’t get a bead on this guy to save his soul, but all I had to do was turn around and there he was.

“Who are you?” I finally spit out.

“Stan Miller.”

“No! Stan!” I was almost shouting at him. “Who are you? I mean, really? You show up right after I find a body, you scare off a bear—maybe saving my life—you don’t exist according to the police who want to talk to you about the scene of a crime, you move like a ghost, and everyone in the MOU thinks you’re either in the witness protection program or some kind of hired gun. Plus, I have the distinct impression you are inordinately interested in my own movements, to the point of using my sister to keep tabs on me. So, what is going on here, Stan?” I got right in his face. “Who are you?”

“You’re upset.”

“Damn right! I got a death threat on my bird feeder, an anonymous phone threat at work, a dead owl on my deck, and I thought you were behind it.” I paused to catch my breath. “At least, I did until the dead owl showed up. Then I figured—I hoped—it wasn’t you.”

“It’s not me.”

“I know! So that means it’s someone else, right?” I rubbed my hand over my eyes.

“Have you told the police?”

I looked at him between my fingers. This from a man who himself refused to cooperate with the law? Who, according to those same police, didn’t even exist?

Apparently, Stan’s guessed-at talents included mind-reading, because he looked me in the eye then and said, “It’s a cover.”

Duh.

“Well, yeah,” I said, “and a darn good one, too, since all of one or two MOU members might actually believe it. Come on, Stan! Anyone who’s gone birding with you can tell you’re not just an accountant. So which is it? Are you a former hitman or CIA in rehab?”

Stan let out a sigh. “I’m a hired gun. But it’s not what you think.”

Great. Just great. My sister was dating a mercenary. Was he going to have to kill me now?

“That’s why Knott can’t find me,” he added. “Until the job I’m currently working is finished, I can’t talk with him. It might jeopardize the contract.”

“What about me? Am I jeopardizing your contract?” A sudden rush of cold hit my spine. No one knew where I was—alone on a deserted beach with a self-confessed assassin.

Did I know how to have a good time or what?

“As long as you don’t know my target, you’re not a problem, Bob.”

Gee, why didn’t that make me feel a whole lot better?

“About those threats,” Stan added, “it sounds like you’re a problem for somebody else. Could be a serious problem, too.”

For a minute or two, neither of us spoke. Stan put his binos to his eyes and gazed out at the water. “Lesser Scaup.”

I looked through my glasses and saw the duck, identifying it by its distinctive “nail” at the tip of its short, flat bill. Under other circumstances, I would have been happy to be standing here with a birder of Stan’s caliber; as it was, I was having a hard time keeping his birding skills foremost in my mind while I was, at the same time, wondering about his “other” abilities.

Were those particular abilities behind his reason for being in the woods last weekend with a rifle and a crossbow? What kind of target required that kind of armament?

Don’t ask, I told myself. Remember, you don’t want to be Stan’s problem.

“About Lily.”

Stan’s voice broke the silence.

“I am using her. At least, I was. In the beginning. But not to follow you.”

I lowered my binos and turned to look at Stan. For a split-second, I thought I saw a flicker of fear in his eyes.

“When she finds out, she’s going to kill me, isn’t she?”

I couldn’t keep a smile from spreading across my face. “You got that right.” For a second, I almost felt sorry for him; when it came to the art of payback, Lily had it down to a science. No matter who he really was, or what he was doing, Stan was going to suffer. Guaranteed.

“So, you’re saying that your showing up at the Boreal site last weekend was a total coincidence?” I asked, hoping for a little more revelation. “You know, for some reason, I have trouble believing that.”

“Didn’t say it was coincidence,” he corrected me. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t coincidental at all for me. I planned it.” He shot me a penetrating look. “I knew there were Boreals there.”

“The annual reports,” I said. “You researched them like I did.”

“Actually, no.” He looked out at the lake again.

“Then how?”

“Inside source.”

I realized that Stan’s sentences were getting noticeably shorter again. His conversational battery was probably getting ready to self-destruct.

“What source?”

“My sister,” he said. “Alice Wylie.”

I blinked.

He was gone.

Tell me again why you didn’t tell me about your phone call with Rahr.”

Knott and I were working our way through a basket of hot, thick-cut, deep-fried onion rings, waiting for our burgers to arrive from the grill at Grandma’s Saloon. An institution in downtown Duluth since before I was born, Grandma’s had wood-plank floors and stained-glass windows that screened the busy street outside from the noon mob inside. Despite (or maybe because of) its high-fat menu, Grandma’s was always packed; even my haute cuisine queen, Luce, loved lunch at Grandma’s whenever we hit the North Shore.

After my unplanned rendezvous with Scary Stan at Park Point, I’d joined Knott at the little table he was holding for us at Grandma’s. Being the observant man that I’ve trained myself to be, I could tell he was still steaming that I had neglected to share with him my first and last, one-and-only, phone conversation with Rahr. When I tried to pick up the laminated sheet listing the day’s specials, he flattened his hand on the sheet, pinning it to the table.

“Tell me about the phone call, Bob. Now would be nice.”

So I did. I explained how I’d given up trying to contact Rahr through email, since he never responded. I told Knott that after repeated attempts, I finally caught Rahr at his office the night before Mike and I headed to Duluth to hunt the Boreals.

“He didn’t want to talk with me,” I said. “He accused me of giving out the locations of his study sites to other people, which was nuts, because that’s why I was trying to talk to him—to
confirm
the sites.”

When I’d denied it, Rahr had practically shouted at me over the phone, saying he was sick of being sabotaged by people who were supposedly on his team. Then he had hung up. The reason I hadn’t told Knott about it as soon as I realized that Rahr was the freezing victim was that I didn’t think it was important. Then, when Knott said Rahr had been murdered, I figured he didn’t need me telling him about Rahr’s long-distance temper tantrum with me, since I’d already been removed from the suspect list. It just didn’t occur to me that there might have been a lead buried in my conversation with Rahr—that something he’d tossed at me in his anger might be an important clue later in a murder investigation.
His
murder investigation.

Of course, now that I was sitting in Grandma’s with a peeved detective on the other side of the table, repeating my reason for omitting to tell him about a phone call with a man who was murdered less than twenty-four hours later, I was becoming increasingly convinced that not only had I been blindingly stupid, but also that I might be facing some kind of criminal charges because of it.

“Stupid,” Knott said, shaking his head. “That was stupid, Bob. Never not tell the police something that might relate to their investigation. Eventually they’ll find it out anyway, and that makes you look bad.”

“Yeah, I got that now,” I assured him. “Really. I do. I will never make that mistake again. Trust me.” Since he hadn’t slapped handcuffs on me yet, I was beginning to hope I still might walk out of Grandma’s a free man. “Just out of curiosity, how did you know I had talked with Rahr?”

He took another onion ring from the basket.

“I’m psychic, Bob. But no one can know. In fact, now that I’ve told you, I’ll have to kill you.”

“Give me a break.”

“I already have. You’ll notice the cuffs are in my pocket and not on your wrists.” He finished the onion ring and wiped his hand on his napkin. “Your emails and phone messages, Bob. We got Rahr’s computer and phone records, and you were all over them the last two weeks. Didn’t take a rocket scientist to track that down.”

Our burgers arrived, and he waited till the waitress was gone to lean towards me. “Plus, there’s a certain secretary at the BSB who apparently listens in on phone calls and was happy to tell me about Rahr getting in your face.”

“Let me guess. Alice Wylie.”

“One and the same. You know her?”

I told him about my visit to the university. “But I’m not too sure about the one and the same part,” I said. “She can switch personas faster than any drama queen I’ve ever worked with at a high school. In counselor-speak, I’d say she’s got issues.”

“I don’t know about that,” Knott said, “but she’s just odd enough to set off some alarms for me.” He took a big bite of his burger, chewed and swallowed. “I checked with Human Resources at the university and—get this—I found out that Rahr wanted Alice gone. She’d been his secretary for the past eight years, but three weeks ago, he told HR to transfer her because she was—and I quote—‘manipulative, intrusive and unreliable.’ Pretty strange, coming from a man she’d worked with for eight years already. Anyway, much to HR’s relief, Alice jumped at the move to the environmental sciences department and started there on Monday.”

No surprise there. After seeing her with Ellis, I had no doubt why she had jumped. I polished off my burger and washed it down with ice water. “Settled right in, didn’t she?”

“Yup.” Knott reached for his coffee. “I guess that day off on Friday was just what she needed to make the transition.”

“Friday?”

“Friday,” Knott repeated. “It seems that weird Alice wasn’t at work. So far, I don’t know where she was.”

A piece of my conversation with Ellis popped into my head.

“When Ellis told me he left town to see his father, he started to say he left on Saturday, then he corrected himself to say Friday.” I looked directly at Knott. “He said he was confused about dates. Was it a slip of memory … or a slip of the tongue?”

“Good ear, Bob,” the detective replied. “If Ellis said he left Friday, he was feeding you a line. We checked flight lists. Ellis didn’t leave on Friday. He left on Saturday. I don’t know where
he
was on Friday, either.”

He caught the waitress’s attention and ordered us both a slice of apple pie.

“But I intend to find out. I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Ellis at two o’clock.” He took another sip of coffee. “And since we’re sharing secrets now, I’ll even tell you about the fingerprints on the hammer.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “You
got
fingerprints off a hammer in the snow?” Then I realized he hadn’t sounded exactly ecstatic. “Whose are they?”

“You’re right, I am kidding. Unfortunately. We didn’t get fingerprints off a hammer in the snow. But Mrs. Rahr identified it. The hammer belonged to her husband.”

For a minute, I didn’t say anything. The hammer was Rahr’s? Rahr was spiking trees? Alan had said that was a tactic of environmental terrorists to stop tree cutting, but Rahr’s sites were protected. That battle had already been fought. So, why was Rahr spiking trees now?

“We’ve got nothing at this point,” Knott finally sighed, frustration evident in the tone of his voice. “We’ve talked to all his associates, his friends, his wife, and all we’ve got are more questions, missing alibis, spiked trees, a hammer, and a trail that’s getting colder by the minute. And I’m not talking about the weather. Even S.O.B is taking us nowhere. We’ve run a check on all their members and we can’t trace that letter to anybody.”

To emphasize his point, he mashed the last bit of piecrust flat on his plate.

“Now I’m thinking that letter might just have been from some wacko who wanted attention and gets off on making anonymous threats to frighten people,” he said. “I talked with a detective in Minneapolis yesterday, and she said it’s not that uncommon for people involved in environmental controversies like Rahr was last spring to get letters like that from people who aren’t even connected to any of the principal players. Mrs. Rahr did say her husband seemed upset about something for the last few weeks, but he wouldn’t tell her what it was. She said every time he went up to check out his Boreal Owl sites, he came back agitated. So I keep having this gut feeling that there’s a key in the location, but I just can’t find it. If you hadn’t found him, who else would have? Who goes up there to that particular spot?”

“Well, actually, I can think of two people who might,” I said.

“Two?”

“Yeah.”

Knott held up his hand and ticked off his fingers. “Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Alice?”

“I just said Ellis.”

“No. Alice. Not Ellis.”

“The secretary?”

“She was Rahr’s secretary for eight years. She typed the reports. She had to know the sites, didn’t she?”

Of course she knew the sites. On paper. That’s what she had passed along to Stan, enabling him to find the sites for locating the Boreals. Stan was the second person I had been thinking of who knew the sites. But Alice herself in the forest? I hadn’t considered that. A scary thought, to be sure. No telling who she’d turn out to be in the middle of the night in the deep, dark woods. I seriously doubted it would be Little Red Riding Hood.