The Boreal Owl Murder (16 page)

I took a curve a little on the fast side, and Knott braced his arm against his door.

“Why would someone kill an owl researcher?” I asked, my eyes back on the road. “Yeah, Rahr could be difficult, but murder? The man studied birds. I mean, birding is a great hobby. It’s safe, fun, always in season, and you get to be outside. What’s not to love? For cripe’s sake! I spend the end of every summer out at the state fair, promoting birding as the perfect way to enjoy and appreciate the rich natural diversity of the great state of Minnesota. And now, one of the country’s most distinguished ornithologists gets whacked while he’s out birding. It isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the hobby, John. Just the opposite—who wants a hobby that can get you killed?”

“NASCAR drivers?”

I couldn’t stop a smile. “Besides them. Sorry. I guess the stress is getting to me.”

“No apology needed.”

I glanced over at him. He wasn’t looking too happy himself.

“I take it the meeting with Ellis wasn’t productive.”

“Nada. Zip. He says he spent Friday at home, getting ready to leave on Saturday. His dad was hospitalized early that morning, and he got the call shortly afterward. The hospital and phone records concur. We only talked half an hour. He had some meeting to go to.”

Neither of us said anything for a couple of minutes.

“I know the feeling, Bob. I feel like time’s running out on me, too. Almost a week after the fact and no arrest. Doesn’t look good for the detective in charge.”

“That’s why I figured we needed another approach here,” I said. “You’re right. We’ve got to be missing something else—besides the murderer.”

“Yeah, I know,” Knott agreed. “But you’ve got to admit, Ellis and Alice make some good suspects. They’ve got opportunity, motive—maybe—and means. I’d bet either one of them could have taken on Dr. Rahr. Ellis is a brick house, and Alice looks pretty strong.”

“Ellis’s motive would be?”

“Revenge for past slights—real or imagined—and the desire for professional advancement and recognition by taking on the owl study. Publish or perish, isn’t that how it goes? Cut-throat academia.”

Exactly what Luce and I had speculated when we were playing amateur sleuths earlier in the week. Except now, it didn’t seem like playing at all. Now, the stakes were a lot higher. Knott and I were looking for a killer.

In hopes I wouldn’t be his—or her—next victim.

“And Alice?”

Knott considered, then shook his head. “Not sure, there. Like you said, she’s an odd duck. Could be anger at Rahr that he booted her out after eight years, or her infatuation with Ellis. After Ellis took off for his meeting, I went back to HR and tried to get more details about Rahr’s complaint against Alice. You were right, Bob. He’d caught her passing along his most recent research data to someone—Stan, obviously—without his consent. Or maybe she wanted to do a big favor for Ellis, thinking she could advance his career and win his affection by getting rid of Rahr. Who knows? Maybe they were even in it together.”

If that were the case, I didn’t expect their association to last very long. When I’d seen Ellis and Alice together that morning, he had seemed pretty annoyed with her. I know the last person I’d trust in a murder plot would be someone who seemed as unstable as Alice. And even after as brief an interaction as I’d had with Ellis, he did not impress me as someone who suffered fools gladly.

Which reminded me of Lily, and the showdown with Stan that was sure to come when she found out he’d been using her. He may have been some kind of professional agent, but I sure didn’t see that making any kind of difference to Lily’s way of thinking. When it came to picking a fight, Lily was an equal opportunity pugilist.

Which made another possibility pop into my head. I didn’t like it at all, but I had to cover all the bases. I kept my eyes on the road and spelled it out for Knott.

“Or maybe Alice hired her brother Stan to kill Rahr. He did admit to being a hired gun who did contract work. And he knows the forest, John. Plus he didn’t seem too surprised when he saw Rahr’s body last Saturday night. You have to wonder, don’t you? I know I’m taking a chance that he’s being honest with me, that he’s not setting me up as his next victim, but Rahr might be another matter altogether. ”

I took a quick glance at Knott. He was frowning and staring straight ahead. “Yeah,” he finally muttered. “You have to wonder about a lot of things.”

We were out of the city and the road was dry. Traffic was practically non-existent into the forest during this time of year. I took a quick glance at my speedometer. I was driving just over the speed limit. Knott obviously noticed me checking my speed because he chuckled.

“You are a speed demon, aren’t you?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t mean to be. It’s just that my car speed isn’t important to me, I guess. When I’m chasing a bird, what’s important is getting to the next birding location. Location, location, location, as my—”

“Real estate agent would say,” Knott finished for me. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too. My mother bought a condo last month, and I thought the whole buying process was going to kill me before she finally closed on it. If her agent had said the word ‘location’ to me one more time, I was going to shoot her.”

“But it’s true for birding as well as real estate,” I explained. “Location is key. If you know where the bird showed up before, chances are better than good that you’ll find it there again.”

An old green pick-up truck zipped up behind me, then flew past in the straightaway. I caught a fleeting glimpse of letters stenciled on the driver’s right jacket sleeve: DNR. Department of Natural Resources. My old employer. Maybe my future employer if Knott didn’t get this case solved. The truck must have been going eighty-five.

“Where’s the highway patrol when you need them?” I muttered.

“So,” Knott was saying, “you think that if we know exactly where Rahr was working, we’ll find the reason he was killed there, too?” He shook his head. “We’ve already looked, Bob. We didn’t turn up anything, except spikes in the tree, a hammer, and a pair of reading glasses.”

“But maybe I’ll see it differently. You weren’t looking at it the way a birder would. That’s why I wanted to see the site in the daylight. It’s not that much further. I hope you’ve got your hiking boots on.”

We pulled into the same parking area where I’d parked last Saturday night. Forty minutes later, we were deep into the woods, slogging through muddy stretches on the trail where the warmer temperatures of the past few days had made inroads on the snow cover. The trail looked wider than I had remembered—probably the result of being tramped down by all the police personnel who must have passed this way as they secured and investigated the murder scene. In the daylight, the woods didn’t seem nearly as dense as they had that night, but now I could see how hilly this particular area was. Little ravines riddled the hillsides, some plunging sharply just off the trail, while others were barely a crack in the earth. In another two or three weeks, the snow melt would produce all kinds of flowing streams down those ravines, making the ground even spongier than it was already beginning to feel underfoot. Later on, petite ladyslippers would sprout up amidst the rocks and earth. I suspected that the investigators were grateful they hadn’t had to bring in any heavy equipment for their work, because if they had, it would probably be getting mired in mud by now.

“Are we there yet?” Knott called from behind me, about twenty yards down the slope I had just crested. Lost in thought, I had gone into my automatic hiking mode, making long strides that often left other birders behind. I stopped and turned around.

“Two more bends in the trail, I think,” I shouted back.

Something whizzed past my head, and the white pine trunk next to the trail exploded. A loud crack echoed in the woods.

“Get down!” Knott yelled.

He didn’t have to say it twice. I was already dropping into the mud and tasting dirt.

Damn!
I thought.
Some idiot was shooting in the forest!

And then I thought again.
Double-damn!
The idiot was shooting at
me
!

The next thing I knew, Knott was beside me, crouched, a gun in his hand.

“Are you all right? Did you get hit?”

I lifted my head and looked at him. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Bob!”

I blinked. “Maybe I should rethink the part about birding being a safe hobby?”

Knott let out a soft whistle and helped me up. I swiped snow and mud off my parka and jeans. “This has never happened to me before. Swear to God.”

“You’ve never fallen in the mud?”

I gave Knott the evil eye. He grinned.

“Being shot at,” I clarified. “I’ve never been in someone’s rifle sights before, let alone felt a bullet go by.”

Although, I reminded myself, that wasn’t entirely true. Just last weekend, Stan had fired a gun just yards from me to scare Smokey the Bear away. But that shot had been for the bear, not for me.

Hadn’t it?

Knott scanned the forest in the direction the bullet had come. “Whoever it was, is gone now. I couldn’t see anyone from where I was, down there. But up here …” He spread his arms to include the open area where we were standing. “You were a sitting duck, Bob.”

I stared at Knott. “Gee, thanks for sharing. I feel so much better.”

Actually, I wasn’t feeling better at all. My legs were feeling weak, and I thought I might throw up. Knott grabbed my arm and put his other arm around my back, bending me forward at the waist. Then he pushed his hand against the back of my neck. “Push against my hand,” he ordered.

I did, and the nausea went away. After a minute, my legs felt stronger, too. I straightened back up.

“Not fun,” I said.

“No, not fun,” he agreed. I thought he looked angry.

“You don’t think it was a random shot, do you?”

“Do you?”

I shook my head slowly. “This is protected land. There shouldn’t be anyone up here with a gun, let alone someone shooting it.” I looked Knott in the eye. “It makes me think we’ve got to be on to something. Something about the location.”

“I’m sure of it, now,” Knott agreed. “But I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

He looked around again. The last bit of the day’s sun was lighting up the hillcrest where we stood. There must have been a fire here at some point, I guessed, to have cleared this space in the middle of the forest. It was getting dusky and I couldn’t make out any blackened stumps, though. Had it been logged at some point? There were plenty of old logging trails in the area, so I supposed that might have been the case.

“Let’s get out of here,” Knott said. “I don’t want to encourage another shot just in case the shooter’s still around, and I sure don’t want to be here after dark.”

That made two of us. Earlier, I had considered sticking around for nightfall to listen for the Boreal, but after being somebody’s target practice, I chucked that plan. There were other places to hunt the owl, and right now, they were looking real good to me. Places where I hadn’t found a body or gotten shot at.

“By any chance, did you tell anyone you were going to be up here this afternoon?” Knott asked as he drove my SUV towards Duluth. He’d insisted I take the passenger seat for the ride back to town, in case I got a delayed shock reaction, but I figured it was just an excuse to keep me away from the gas pedal. “A long shot, I know, but I’ve got to ask.”

I groaned at the metaphor, and he grinned brazenly.

I did. Knott was wondering, just as I was, if I’d inadvertently invited the shooter to follow me up to the Boreal trail. Since leaving home this morning, the only people I’d talked with were Ellis, Alice, Stan, and Knott. And Chris Maas, the highway trooper. Since I doubted the trooper had been tailing me all day, that left Ellis, Alice, and Stan. Both Ellis and Alice knew I was going to Rahr’s site this afternoon, I realized. Ellis had asked to see me after three, which would have been after his meeting with Knott. I’d told him I was coming for a look up here in the daylight. And Alice had been in the doorway, hanging on Ellis’s every word.

“Alice and Ellis,” I told Knott. “They both heard me say I was planning to come here. I’m meeting Ellis for a drink after dinner tonight. We’re supposed to talk about the study.”

“Let me know if he doesn’t show up,” Knott said. “Or if he’s surprised that you do.”

Two hours later, I walked into the room I had reserved at the hotel where I always stay when I bird in Duluth—The South Pier Inn. But as I reached for the light switch, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Someone besides me was in the darkened room.

I froze, my hand mid-air. Across the room, a figure was silhouetted against the big window that looked out on the lake.

My heart hit my throat so fast, I gasped. Scenarios flew across my brain like geese against the moon, and none of them were nice. I wanted to leap back out of the room, but my legs had somehow solidified, rooted themselves in the carpet.

I stared at the shadow, knowing my death was upon me.

There was so much more I wanted to do in life. I wasn’t through yet.

I could almost see the headlines of the Duluth Herald: “
The second birder in a week killed.
”

And I was just going to stand there and let it happen.

The figure slowly spun around.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Luce said.

And my world began to spin as usual again. Breath came to my lungs, and my spinning brain focused on one object. Luce. I walked across the room and wrapped my arms around her, holding her tightly against me. All the horrible thoughts and fears evaporated. She made me feel safe and secure. She slid her hands around my neck, and I kissed her long and hard.

“Gee, maybe I should surprise you more often,” she whispered.

She had no idea.

“What are you doing here? I thought you were filming on Saturday.”

“Change of plans. The station called first thing this morning and wanted to film at noon, so we got it done. I decided I deserved a long weekend—with you—so here I am.”