The Boreal Owl Murder (8 page)

To a young boy, they were pure magic. I took one look at these wild, fantastic creatures, and it was all over for me.

Love at first flight, I guess you could say. Now, after all these years, and all the miles I’ve logged looking for every species in the state, birding was as natural to me as breathing.

And that reminded me of Luce bringing me scones, her breath on my cheek when she kissed me in the media center.

I loved Luce, too.

And not just because of her scones.

I drove over the bridge, and the eagles were gone, but I picked out a Red-tailed Hawk sitting on a utility cable near the highway. Below it, long yellow grasses lay matted with melting snow. The hawk dove down in predator mode, picked up a mouse for its dinner and flew off.

Talk about fast food.

Luckily, I had brought two of Luce’s scones to snack on while I drove downtown, so I wasn’t tempted to detour through any drive-through for an early dinner. I wanted to make good time and beat the worst of the traffic into town to give myself a chance to review the agenda before tonight’s meeting. As the newest member of the MOU board, I wasn’t sure yet what to expect of the evening, but I wanted to at least refresh my memory of the items that were on the table.

I was also hoping I could do a little research about Rahr, so I’d have something to offer Knott when I saw him again. If Rahr had had any enemies, I figured there was a good chance one of the longtime MOU board members would know about it, since Rahr
had a long association with the group and had even received funding for his research from us for several years. Just because the state birding community was tight didn’t mean it didn’t have its share of squabbles.

As luck would have it, Jim Petersen was the first to arrive—after me, I mean—for the meeting. He pulled up a chair next to mine in the little downstairs conference room at the Bell Museum of Natural History on the University of Minnesota campus where the MOU is headquartered.

“Bob,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Good to see you. Beautiful day, isn’t it? Did you see anything on the way in to the city? I understand the Minnesota River’s got some open water.”

I told him about the eagles and the hawk and the Canvasback and the White-fronted Goose I’d seen yesterday. As a lifelong birder and one of the founding fathers of the Minnesota birding organization, Jim was rarely unaware of what birds were in town or passing through; at somewhere around seventy-eight years old, he’d seen species in the state that I’d give almost anything to get on my Minnesota list. We talked a little more about the weather and what migrants the southerly winds might bring. Then I asked him what he knew about Dr. Rahr.

“A tragedy,” he said, shaking his head. “What is this world coming to when a man can’t even be safe birding?”

Caught by the room’s overhead lights, the rim of white hair that ringed his balding head gleamed white; it suddenly struck me that Jim resembled the eagle I’d seen on my way to the meeting—not only did he have the white head, but he had golden eyes, a sharp nose and imposing height. If he fully extended his long thin arms, they’d make a wide, though perhaps spindly, wingspan.

I wondered if he ate a lot of fish.

“I met Andrew maybe ten years ago,” Jim explained. “I was working on putting together a birding guide for the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, and he was just starting to study the Boreal Owls. It was a passion for him, you know. He was teaching at the university and spending time in the woods on his own nickel, mapping out the owls’ range and breeding habits. Back then, MOU wasn’t funding any research, so this was really his labor of love.”

“Did he ever have any assistants with him that you know of?” I asked.

That was probably expecting a lot, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. Jim had a good memory. He could tell you about birders he knew fifty years ago. Whether or not he could remember the names of researchers—whether or not he even knew the names of any researchers—I had no idea.

“Or did Rahr ever complain about someone doing similar research with the owls or talk about colleagues trying to horn in on his work?”

Jim shut his eyes and rubbed his hand over his forehead, almost as if he were trying to massage a thought into the front of his consciousness. Would it work? If it did, I was going to patent the process and sell it to the parents of sophomore sloths everywhere. I’d make a million bucks. At least.

After a moment, his eyes popped open and focused sharply on me.

“I do remember something like that, Bob. It was probably after the first year we funded Andrew. Maybe four years ago, now. He had a grad student from the university working with him, and I remember he didn’t like the boy. I asked if he wanted us to include a stipend for the boy to work with him the next year, and he said no, he didn’t trust him to do the work. I got the impression the boy had a big head, like he thought he knew better than Andrew how to conduct the study. Kind of a prima donna, I guess.”

“Rahr was a prima donna?”

“Not Rahr, Bob. The boy.”

“Jim, how’ve you been?”

Dr. Phil Hovde walked into the room and reached out to shake Jim’s hand and then mine. “Bob, good to see you. Beautiful day, isn’t it? Saw on the list-serve that you got a White-fronted Goose and Canvasback yesterday.”

“Yup, I did,” I said. “Welcome back, Dr. Phil. You’re back a little early this spring, aren’t you?”

Dr. Phil, a retired orthopedic surgeon, and his wife, Myrna, are snowbirds. That means they migrate south every January and February to a condo in Florida, where they can soak up sunshine instead of taking turns shoveling snow. Tanned and fit, they both look younger than their seventy-odd years, and if it weren’t for the time I saw his silver toupee fly off on a windy afternoon we shared birding, I’d think that mop of hair on his head was his own. He was, however, a dedicated birder and enthusiastic board member, so I forgave him his annual winter abandonment, along with the hairpiece. He was also rolling in dough thanks to his former medical practice and a slew of lucrative private investments. When MOU finances had run especially low at the end of last year, he’d picked up the slack out of his own generous pockets.

“Just by a week or two,” he assured me. “Myrna was missing the grandkids pretty badly, and I needed to check on some business, so here we are.”

“We were talking about Andrew Rahr,” Jim told Dr. Phil. “Do you remember when he had that grad student working with him?”

“Sure do,” Dr. Phil said. “I offered to help fund another year for that assistant, but Andrew said no way. He thought the kid was undisciplined. Had a problem with authority. Like he didn’t want to put in the hard tedious work of the actual research, but just wanted to get to the finished product instead. No guts, all glory. I think Andrew was afraid the kid would jeopardize the study.”

Dr. Phil’s face suddenly blanched under his tan. “Oh, my gosh,” he said. “You don’t think that kid was involved in Andrew’s death, do you?”

I wondered why Dr. Phil made the same connection I’d considered. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Because,” Dr. Phil said, “when Andrew turned down my offer for funding the kid to come back, I remember what he said because he was so vehement about it.”

“What did he say?”

Dr. Phil looked at me, then at Jim and back again at me.

“He said, ‘Over my dead body.’”

None of us said anything for a moment or two.

“That was four years ago,” Jim reminded us.

He was right. Four years was a long time.

Then again, I’d been chasing the Boreal for almost twenty.

Maybe four years wasn’t so long, after all.

“Do you remember the grad student’s name?” I asked.

Dr. Phil shook his head. I looked at Jim. He shook his head, too.

“Jim! Phil! Bob!”

Bill Washburn walked into the room accompanied by Anna Grieg. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

Everyone shook hands. After a minute or two of weather talk, we all took seats at one end of the long conference table. Bill works for a utilities company, and Anna is a police officer out in one of the suburbs on the east side of St. Paul. Like me, they were relatively new to the MOU board. I guessed Bill was in his late fifties and Anna about ten years younger.

When I first started birding as a kid, most of the birders I met were between fifty and seventy years old. I was the odd duck who wasn’t even in his teens. Back then, birdwatching had the reputation of being a hobby mostly for senior citizens.

In the last few decades, however, that image has really been changing as more and more people have become interested in outdoor activities, environmental issues, and observing wildlife.

These days, birders come in all ages, shapes, and sizes. The increase in birdwatchers has, in turn, fueled all kinds of related businesses, including the bird stores springing up all over the place now, special interest magazines, birding equipment catalog sales, novelty underwear, you name it. (All right, I confess—the only bird-themed underwear I’ve seen was on the sale rack at a local discounter. They were boxers, and the birds were flamingos. Glow-in-the-dark flamingos. I wonder if that would qualify for that one birder’s list of birds that woman saw while having … never mind. Where was I? Oh, yeah … the growth of a fabulous hobby.) As a result, birdwatching has gone mainstream—it isn’t just retirees hitting the birdseed anymore. In fact, it’s been the fastest growing outdoor activity in America for the last ten years.

And, until I found Dr. Rahr’s body last weekend, I thought it was probably the safest outdoor activity.

Now, I wasn’t so sure.

Dr. Phil got the meeting underway. We ran through the minutes from the last meeting, approved them and moved on to tonight’s agenda. Anna presented suggestions for alternate ways to collect members’ dues, since our current method seemed to lack urgency, as well as effectiveness.

“The problem isn’t that people don’t have the money,” she pointed out, “it’s just that no one realizes that the date stamped on their address label is their dues date. I think if we just sent emails out as reminders, that would work better.”

“But does everyone look at email?” Bill asked.

“Everyone in MOU does,” Jim said. “Whenever I post a bird sighting, I get calls and responses for the next two days. If I miss a day of MOU email, I feel out of the loop.”

I knew just how he felt. I checked it first thing in the morning before leaving for work and again when I got home at night. In the summer, I checked it several times a day. Of course, there were always some birders who refused to share information on the Web. Rahr had been one of them. In all the years he’d worked with the owls, he had never posted any Boreal sightings. His refusal to do so was one of the reasons I finally tried speaking with him on the phone. But like I already said, that got me nowhere. At least the email system was successful in keeping other, more cooperative birders connected.

Even Stan had posted sightings via email.

“How current is our email list?” I asked Anna. I’d given Knott the residence address for Stan, but not his email address. If the detective had that, maybe he could track down Stan—make him exist again—to question him about his activities in the forest.

“Well, we have to rely on members keeping us updated,” Anna replied. “Not very reliable, but it’s all we’ve got.”

In this case, it could be enough, though. Stan used his email. I made a mental note to check through my deleted email file when I got home. I’d find one of Stan’s postings and forward his address to Knott.

An odd thought crossed my mind. Who was stalking whom, now, Stan?

“I move we use email reminders to collect dues,” Bill said, and the motion passed unanimously. “Now that we have secured our dues income, do we want to continue using some of that money to fund the Boreal Owl study?” He looked at the rest of us, his bushy eyebrows raised in question. “Does anyone know if there is going to be any more Boreal Owl study, in light of—ah—recent events?”

“Actually, we were talking about that before you got here, Bill,” Dr. Phil said, tapping his pen against the table. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone working with Dr. Rahr this year, so I’m guessing the study is suspended.”

Gee, me too, almost! I thought. Suspended, that is. My professional career down the drain. Glug, glug, glug! How was I going to support all the birds depending on my feeders? How was I going to support me?

Funny, isn’t it, how sometimes the real weight of a conversation escapes you at the time, then comes roaring back at an inopportune moment to bite you in the ass? Well, sitting there in that MOU meeting was both my inopportune moment and my ass. My livelihood was on the line! That meant I was going to have to do a lot more to save my career than just hightail it up to Duluth and sic Knott on the big bad Mr. Lenzen. For the first time, it occurred to me that I was going to have to take some real initiative in not only helping Knott solve the crime, but in helping him to actually find a killer because until he found him, it was my future that was up for grabs.

Or down the drain.

Either way, not where I wanted it. Location, location, location.

I tuned back in just as Anna unfolded a sheet of paper that she had retrieved from her purse.

“Maybe not,” she said. “I got this email last night from a man who says he worked with Dr. Rahr some years ago on the owl project, and he’s very interested in picking up the study.”

“You’re kidding,” Dr. Phil said, laying his pen down. It rolled, and I noticed it had some letters printed on it. Probably some promotional item he’d picked up somewhere. Heck, half the pens on my desk at work are advertising either an insurance company or a bank; with my salary, free pens are a perk I don’t turn down.

“Who is it?” Jim asked.

“He’s an adjunct professor at the university in Duluth, his email says. Bradley Ellis is his name.”

Jim turned to me. “I think that’s the kid,” he said, a trace of excitement in his voice. “I could never get his name straight. It sounded like two last names. Bradley Ellis, Ellis Bradley. He’s the one Dr. Rahr couldn’t wait to get rid of.”