The Boreal Owl Murder (20 page)

“Luce,” I said. “Look up at the tree tops. What do you see?”

Luce looked up again. After a moment, she whispered, “Nothing.”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “Nothing. There’s nothing there where treetops should be. Someone has cut the tops off these pines.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.”

I spun on my heel in time to see Stan, in full camouflage battle gear, fade smoothly into the forest.

“It has to be illegal cutting,” Luce insisted at breakfast the next morning.

The sun was well above the horizon by the time we’d taken a table at Amazing Grace, a little café near to our hotel. We’d gotten in so late after our trek into the woods last night, we’d slept in. Normally, when I’m on a birding weekend, I’m up before dawn and breakfast is a cup of coffee and a doughnut purchased at the gas station on my way out. To sit and enjoy a hot, full breakfast was a rare treat.

Except that I kept expecting to see Stan materialize next to me, just like he had last night in the woods. Maybe if I threw syrup on him, he wouldn’t be able to disappear. Or if he did, I’d at least see the maple footprints he’d leave behind.

To pass the time, Luce and I had decided to hunt for sea ducks this morning. An early start wasn’t necessary; the ducks would be hanging around a good part of the day as long as they found a spot along the shore of Lake Superior where the ice was out. The past two days had been unseasonably warm up here, so there was some heavy melting going on. Both yesterday and last night, I noticed some deep drifts were still in ravines and other sheltered places in the woods, but the trails themselves had been relatively snow-free. Down here, closer to the lake, the snow cover was virtually non-existent.

I took another bite of the house breakfast special—two eggs, two plate-sized buckwheat pancakes, two thick rounds of honey-cured Canadian bacon and a side of home-style hash browns—and tried again, for about the fifth time, to make plausible connections between the topped trees and … anything.

I agreed with Luce. The topping had to be illegal. Not only were those trees well within state forests, they were within the Boreal Owls’ range, and the DNR had expressly laid down a “hands-off” policy after the S.O.B. campaign last spring. Besides, if the DNR had been involved, they wouldn’t be topping trees—they would be cutting them down completely.

“Do you think it was for the lumber?” Luce asked. “If it was, I don’t think the cutter knew what he was doing. You’d think that if someone wanted free wood, they’d cut the whole tree down instead of just the top. You’d get a lot more usable wood that way. Although it did seem like quite a few trees were involved when we looked around.” She sighed and put her fork into her French toast. “Somebody obviously ended up with a bunch of very nice tree tops.”

Very nice tree tops?

I started to choke on the bite of buckwheat pancake in my mouth as I realized what those tree tops would look like.

Very Nice Trees.

Very Nice Christmas trees, to be exact.

“Are you all right?” Luce asked, looking a little alarmed as I coughed.

I nodded and took a drink of orange juice to clear my throat.

“Luce,” I finally managed to say. “We’ve been seeing what we already decided we’d see, but that’s not what’s really there.”

The voices of Kim and Lindsay were suddenly tangling together in my head, and now I was making less sense than they did even on their most articulate days.

“Luce,” I tried again. “We were on the right track when we said there weren’t any valuable animals roaming the woods that poachers would want. But we forgot about the other half of flora and fauna.”

Luce still looked confused.

“Flora,” I said. “There are very valuable plants in the woods. Plants that poachers could sell for big money. Those treetops would have made perfect Christmas trees. For some enterprising thief, it was an all-profit venture. No property costs, no overhead.” I winced at the unintentional pun. Luce poked my arm with her fork.

“Very funny, Bobby,” she said.

I was on a roll.

“If you didn’t have any expenses, and you worked alone, already owned your equipment—saws and a cherry-picker, I’d guess—then all you’d have to do is cut and sell and count up the cash. And if you sold your stock out of town to unsuspecting garden shops, they’d never question where you got so many trees. Look how much money Lily made this year from selling Christmas trees retail. And she’s got expenses to cover. The supplier makes even more, especially if his stock is … stolen.”

Luce laid her fork down next to her plate. “Bobby, are you thinking Lily’s trees were poached merchandise?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Lily told me she was thinking that VNT was making offers that were too good to be true. She said their price for stock was so low that she could make a real killing in profit when she turned it around and sold it to her customers. Even without extra markup. The profit margins were so high, it made her uncomfortable. But when she tried to check out the company, she couldn’t get any details. That’s why I said I’d take a look while I was here. Lily may not be big on intuition, but when it comes to business, she definitely has a sixth sense.”

It was true. Lily had an unerring instinct for business matters. She could size up the requirements and risks of a potential landscaping job and make a sound judgment faster than I could choose between two new blends of birdseed. Come to think of it, Lily was the same way with business associates: only the sharpest earned her confidence, which meant that Stan had passed the test. She’d even let him help her with her books, which, for Lily, was probably tantamount to physical intimacy. Now that I was thinking about it, I remembered that she had also mentioned to me that Stan had noticed the big profit margin from the VNT Christmas trees.

Bingo.

Stan was after my sister for her business.

Being an accountant, he knew a good thing—a profitable thing—when he saw it, and he could see that Lily’s Landscaping was poised on the threshold of small business success. As a partner, he could give up his “contract” work for steady employment; I could believe that even government agents (if Knott was right about Stan) got tired of job insecurity. All he’d have to do was wave an aggressive, well-researched, new business plan in front of Lily’s face, and the next thing you know, they’d be sharing a desk blotter.

Unless, after he’d seen the profit margins from VNT, he’d recognized an even better business opportunity and headed north to make his own appraisal of the company. In fact, maybe VNT was the target he was referring to while we were at Park Point, and the reason he didn’t want me to know was so I wouldn’t tip off Lily to his true intentions. He did, after all, admit he was using my sister; he knew he was going to pay for it, and pay dearly, but I supposed he figured the financial potential was worth it.

Wrong.

Hell hath no fury like my sister deceived.

In which case, he was probably sweating in his shorts this morning about VNT; he’d seen the sheared tree tops last night as clearly as Luce and I had. If he’d planned to use Lily as a stepping stone to a hefty income opportunity and found out instead that VNT was a front for plant theft, he was going to be out of more than just a bigger paycheck. When I told my sister about the hidden agenda behind Stan’s interest in her books, I had no doubt that the feathers were really going to fly.

I took another bite of pancake. I’d defend my sister’s honor and deal with Stan the gold digger if and when I got the goods on Lily’s shady supplier. “When we check out VNT this afternoon, I’m looking for a cherry-picker,” I told Luce. “As far as I’m concerned, that would be as good as a smoking gun.”

As long as it wasn’t pointed at me, that is.

I paid the bill for breakfast, and we headed out of town for the shore. We drove north till we got to a little turn-off I know and after parking the car, hiked along a stream that led out into Lake Superior. It was a beautiful morning: the sun was out, the sky was clear and blue, and the air had that clean fresh smell that makes you want to fill your lungs with it and take it back home to the city, where the air never smells this good. The lake was brilliant, reflecting the sun so that the whole horizon shimmered between sky and water.

We picked our way between puddles of snowmelt and soggy earth on the shore, scanning the water for sea ducks. In particular, we were hoping to find a Harlequin Duck and Long-tailed Ducks. I held up my binos to get a better look at a dark spot on the water. Luce stood next to me with her binos to her eyes, too. Her parka sleeve brushed mine. I lowered my binos and looked at her. While she studied the waves, I studied Luce.

Her cheeks were pink from walking in the cold, and strands of her blonde hair were sticking out from under her woolen cap. She was as still as I was, perfectly content to spend a cold March morning standing on the shore of Lake Superior, squinting into the distance; I was perfectly content to be standing there next to her. It occurred to me that if someone were spotting us just as we were spotting birds, we’d look like a matching pair with our puffy torsos, capped heads and raised binoculars. We could be a pair of ducks.

Mated ducks.

Some ducks mate for life, you know.

“Luce,” I blurted out. “Do you want to get married?”

She put her binos down and looked over the water, then turned to face me. She smiled and didn’t say anything for a minute.

“Possibly.” She paused. “Probably.” She paused again. “Eventually. But not right now.”

I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “Just checking,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed.

“Are you relieved or disappointed?” Luce asked, grinning.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“How do you do that?” I asked, wondering again how it was that she knew me so well. I’m the trained counselor, after all, and I’m supposed to be better at this kind of thing, like being intuitive and being able to hide my immediate reactions.

“I’m psychic, Bobby.”

“Right.” First Knott, now Luce. Everyone’s a comedian.

Then she laughed. “Oh, come on, your expression is a dead give-away. Maybe you can fool other people, but you can’t fool me. And you know what?” She placed her lips on mine and kissed me. Even in the cold, her lips felt warm against mine. “That’s one of the reasons I love you. You’re never anything but honest with me, and even if you weren’t, I can read you like a book. And how could I possibly resist that romantic streak of yours? I don’t know too many guys who would take me out to freeze on the shore and look at ducks and find it the right moment to bring up marriage.”

“They mate for life,” I said by way of explanation.

“I know,” Luce said. “You sweet-talker, you.”

The memory of Ellis making a pass at Luce last night popped into my head. I wasn’t the only man attracted to my girlfriend.

“What, by the way, did you find so … arresting … about Ellis last night?” I hoped I sounded casual, not too concerned—all right, jealous. “You couldn’t even talk when you met him.”

Luce thought about it for a minute.

“Well, he was certainly an attractive man, and I could say his animal magnetism was almost overwhelming.”

Not the answer I was looking for. And way more information than I wanted. The wrong kind of information.

“But that’s not what had me speechless.” Luce laid her gloved hand on my cheek. “I was so angry, wondering if he’d taken a shot at you, that it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut in a smile and not go for his jugular.”

That’s my Luce, all right. Eat your heart out, Ellis.

We looked out at the water again and decided to follow the shoreline up to a place where there was a deep, rocky cove. We thought there was a good chance we might find the ducks there, where they’d find shelter from the wind. Sure enough, as we rounded the point of the land, we saw two ducks floating in the cove. We both put up our binos to take a good look.

“Long-tailed, all right,” Luce said, smiling. “I haven’t seen one in years.”

Long-tailed ducks nest in arctic regions and typically stay out farther on the lake, so this was an excellent find for the morning. After watching the ducks for a few minutes, we hiked back to the car and drove to another spot to try for the Harlequin.

This time we didn’t even have to get out of the car. We parked at an overlook and there was a very small raft of ducks, bobbing out on the lake. Luce and I both picked up our binos to look and immediately recognized the unmistakable markings of the Harlequin Duck.

“No doubt about it,” I said. “They’ve got their white grease paint on.”

Harlequins’ faces have such distinctive white spots of coloring that you can’t miss them on the water. They’re obvious. Transparent, even.

Unlike some people I could name.

People like Vern Thompson, for instance.

Last night, he hadn’t exactly been volunteering information about his company. Granted, maybe he just wasn’t that good of a businessman and wasn’t interested in marketing while he was out on a dinner date, but I just got the sense he was being somewhat evasive. If a stranger asked Lily about her business, she’d whip out the four-color brochure and business cards so fast it would make your head spin, no matter where she was, or what she was doing.

Unless, of course, she was at a Minnesota Wild game. Then she might wait till between periods to make the sales pitch.

I put down the binos and noticed that clouds were moving in. I turned on the car radio to listen to the weather to hear what we could expect for owling tonight.

Instead we got the excited voice of a reporter.

“Breaking news here in Duluth. In a dramatic turn of events, an unidentified man has walked into the police station and confessed to the killing last weekend of owl researcher Dr. Andrew Rahr. The man, whose name is being withheld at this time, claims that he killed Rahr in defense of the primeval forest and its occupants.”

Luce and I looked at each other, speechless. After the immediate shock wore off, I shook my head and sighed. It was a looney, after all. A nut case had killed Rahr. “That sucks,” I said.