The Boreal Owl Murder (9 page)

“You said he’s an adjunct professor?” I asked Anna.

“Yes, he says he got his doctorate at Cornell last year and started teaching in Duluth just this January.” She scanned his letter. “He says he was stunned to hear of the death of his former mentor, Dr. Rahr, but feels it would be ‘an honor and fitting memorial to continue his work without interruption.’ What do you think?”

I thought I would call Knott as soon as I got home. Had he heard about this guy? Bradley Ellis? Or was it Ellis Bradley? Whichever it was, he was right there in Duluth, for crying out loud. And he knew all about the owl research. He even knew Rahr
. I had to believe Knott was checking him out. But I was still going to call.

“I think someone should talk to this fellow first,” Dr. Phil said. “We want to get an idea about his background, his expertise. That’s our usual procedure for making grants, and that shouldn’t change.” Then he shook his head. “But that takes time, and the Boreals aren’t going to be available for more than another few weeks. I don’t see funding happening this year, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’m going to Duluth on Thursday,” I said, the words practically popping out of my mouth. “I could talk to him.”

I could. And while we were chatting about his credentials for continuing the research, I could also ask him more about his history with Rahr. Maybe he’d even say something important that I could pass along to Knott, something that Ellis might be too careful to say to the detective, but not so careful about saying to a fellow birder. Maybe he’d incriminate himself. Maybe I could make a citizen’s arrest.

Then again, if Ellis was the killer, and I confronted him about it, maybe he’d just pound my head into an office wall and leave me for dead. “It happens a lot up here,” he’d tell the police. “People pounding their heads against things until they kill themselves. Cabin fever, I guess.”

Jim and Dr. Phil both narrowed their eyes at me. I shrugged.

“I’m going to be up there looking for the owls,” I told them. “I—uh—got a couple personal days to use, so I’m going up. I’ll see if I can talk with Ellis, and I’ll let you know what I think.”

If I lived through it, that was.

“Gee, Bob, that would be great,” Anna said.

Dr. Phil caught my eye, his eyebrows raised in question. “In light of what we were discussing before the meeting, Bob, are you certain you want to be up there birding right now? It sounds like there might be some—ah—concerns about personal safety in the forest. I don’t want you to put yourself in any kind of potentially volatile situation.”

Jim agreed. “Phil has a point. Maybe this isn’t the right time to pursue this. The Boreals will still be there next year. And we’d have more time to evaluate this Ellis fellow.”

Bill, however, wasn’t convinced. “I think we’re overreacting to Rahr’s death,” he told the two men. “It was an isolated incident. One of those odd, awful things that just happens. A random act of violence—isn’t that what they call it? I can’t imagine it had anything to do personally with Dr. Rahr or his research. He was, tragically, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I, for one, hate to see us miss even one season of monitoring the owls. We all know how quickly habitat can change. And remember how close we came to losing ground when the DNR was talking about allowing some logging. If it weren’t for that S.O.B. group, we’d already be looking at a reduced territory for the study. I say we stay on top of this. Let’s have Bob talk with Ellis, and if he approves, I say we give Ellis the funding.”

“I want to do this,” I assured Jim and Dr. Phil. “I’ll be fine.”

I hoped.

I asked Anna for Ellis’s letter, and she handed it to me. I figured I’d be passing it along to Knott within the hour via email.

Was I a great junior detective or what?

Probably the “what.”

We moved on to the last topic for discussion, which was the MOU booth for the state fair in August. For the first time in five years, we had the option for relocating from the spot next to the Pig-on-a-Stick fried pork chop stand to a spot beside the Amazing Cheese Curd Palace.

“That’s a tough call,” Dr. Phil said, absolutely serious.

“Those Pig-on-a-Sticks get a lot of traffic,” Bill said.

“But everyone eats cheese curds,” Jim said.

“Who ran the booth last year?” Anna asked.

Everyone looked at me.

I held up my hands in surrender. “I confess. I ate enough pork chops to put me off pork for at least six months. But I never touched a cheese curd.”

“You’re joking,” Anna said, shocked.

“Okay, maybe not six months, but definitely two.”

“No, I mean about the cheese curds. How can you go to the fair and not eat cheese curds?”

I didn’t have an answer to that, other than cheese coated in crispy fat had just never appealed to me. True, I’ve eaten a lot of junk food in my time, but a guy has to draw the line somewhere.

“I don’t know,” I told Anna. “Cheese curds just aren’t high on my food radar, I guess.”

“Believe me, if our booth is next to the Curd Palace, they will be. Take it from me, Bob,” Dr. Phil said, patting his round belly. “I know what I’m talking about here. I have yet to miss a state fair.”

By the time I left the meeting, traffic was moving smoothly. I got home in about forty minutes. On the way, I thought about Rahr and Ellis.

What exactly had Ellis done to anger Rahr? Jim had suggested that the younger man might have taken shortcuts with the research, and I had no doubt that would have really ticked off Rahr, who seemed to be compulsive about protocol, judging from his annual reports. If Ellis had been guilty of that, Rahr certainly wouldn’t have given him good recommendations, though, and I couldn’t imagine that Ellis would have been able to get into Cornell’s doctorate program without them. Cornell was hot stuff in ornithology.

And now Ellis was back in Duluth, teaching. Rahr must have known about that because the university wasn’t that big. Had they talked? Argued? Locked horns?

Ellis returning to Duluth was something else that didn’t quite make sense. Sure, Duluth had an excellent university, but with a Ph.D. from Cornell? I would have thought Ellis would have landed somewhere more prestigious. A Big Ten school. Or Top Five. Or Top Twenty Places to Spend Lots of Tuition Money That Will Hopefully Get You a Really Good Job When You Graduate Schools, or whatever they called the big-gun universities. With that kind of degree in his pocket, Ellis certainly would have found more than an adjunct position. Adjuncts were academic limbo—contracts were up for grab every year. So why would a newly-minted Ph.D. stoop to an adjunct position?

To check out the academic climate before making a commitment to a particular college? To test the waters for a full professorship?

Or how about to create a job opening by edging out another professor—one who had rejected him rather nastily in the past? Exactly how deep—or deadly—did professional jealousy—or vengeance—run?

When I got home, I dug out the copies of Rahr’s research I had pored over prior to making my trip north last weekend. I had to sift back three years, but there it was—a report coauthored by Rahr and Bradley Ellis. There wasn’t anything that stood out in it, just more of the same range reporting and population analysis covered in the other reports. Ellis’s name was on it, which meant he could claim it as a publishing credit, an important credential in the academic world. If there had been discord between the two, it didn’t show in their work.

I picked up the phone and called Knott.

“Knott here.”

“Yes, you are,” I replied. I couldn’t help it.

“White? Is that you?”

“Yup. Sorry to bother you at home, Detective, but I thought I should give you a call. I’ve got a name—Bradley Ellis. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t,” Knott said. He paused. “But I tried to talk with him today. He wasn’t in. According to Rahr’s secretary at the university, Ellis had been trying to see Rahr for most of last week. He’d practically been beating Rahr’s door down, the secretary said. Unfortunately—or coincidentally, depending on how you see it—Ellis is now out of town for the week. How do you know him?”

“I don’t, but his name came up at our MOU board meeting tonight. Apparently, he wants to take up where Rahr left off studying the owls. They worked together four years ago.” Which meant that there was a better than good chance that Ellis knew the exact spot where Rahr’s body was found. “He sent one of the board members an email last night.”

“Last night?”

“That’s what she said. He’d heard about Rahr’s death and wanted to jump right in with the Boreals.”

Then it registered in my head what Knott had just said.

“He’s out of town?”

“Yeah. He had a lab class last Friday morning, but didn’t show. The secretary said he called in Monday afternoon and said he’d had to leave town suddenly because his father had had a heart attack, and he didn’t know when he’d be getting back.”

Leaving Ellis unaccounted for on Friday, the day Rahr had been killed. Now he was out of town with a seriously ill father, yet he had taken the time to contact Anna. Not to mention how quickly he had found out about Rahr’s death.

I repeated to Knott what I had heard from Jim and Dr. Phil and confirmed that Ellis and Rahr had worked and published together.

“Anything else?” Knott asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got Stan Miller’s email address for you.” I read it off to him. “He uses it all the time, so you’ve got to be able to locate him that way, don’t you?”

“I hope so. Right now, we need a lead badly in this case, and I’m fresh out. Is that it?”

“Well, there was one more piece of critical business at the meeting,” I told him. “We have to decide if we want the MOU booth to stay next to the Pig-on-a-Stick spot or move next to the Amazing Cheese Curd Palace.”

“Tough call,” Knott agreed. “Those Pigs are good, but everyone loves cheese curds.”

I lined up the shot and tossed the ball. It arced up, then swooped soundlessly—just like a Boreal Owl—through the basketball hoop.

“Sweet, White-man.”

Alan Thunderhawk took the ball back out to the top of the key and made a jump shot. It bounced off the rim. I went up for the rebound and landed with Alan at my back. I pivoted and got a shot off around him.

Swish.

“You can’t be this sharp at six in the morning,” Alan complained, retrieving the ball. “It’s unnatural. What do you do, mainline coffee?”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m the early bird, remember?”

Alan and I go way back. We roomed together as undergraduates at a small college in southwestern Minnesota. Then after various detours on both of our parts, we ended up working together at Savage. He’s Lakota and teaches American history. Before he got his teaching license, Alan went to the west coast and spent a few years as a community organizer and then worked for an environmentalist group. After that, he got his doctorate in political science. But he missed Minnesota and didn’t want to work in higher education, so he came home to Savage to teach.

Of course, the local school board jumped for joy to hire Alan. We’ve got quite a few students at Savage who come from the nearby Sioux community; having a Native American on the faculty was Mr. Lenzen’s public relations/equal opportunity dream-come-true. As far as our illustrious assistant principal is concerned, Alan can do no wrong.

Man, I’d like to tell him a couple stories. But Alan is my best friend, and I refuse to blow his cover.

Every Wednesday morning, Alan and I meet in the school gym for a before-work game of basketball, which almost kills him because while I am, indeed, an early riser, he’s the original night owl.

That’s not to say he’s a doormat on the basketball court at six in the morning, however. On the contrary. Alan has this competitive streak a mile wide and years of experience playing on high school and college basketball teams. I may get the jump on him in the first ten minutes when we play, but by the time we’re done, he’s wide-awake and lethal. A regular predator.

We finished the game and hit the showers in the locker room. I told him about my possibly looming suspension and outlined my plan to avoid it. He agreed that Mr. Lenzen was an anal ass and offered to jerk his chain on a regular basis while I was out.

“I’ll get the rumor mill running,” he said. “Do you want me to spread stories that he’s a closet axe murderer or a weekend cross-dresser?”

“Gee, thanks, Alan. I’m sure that’ll really help.”

“Hey, no problem,” he said. “What are friends for?”

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in my office, drinking lousy but hot coffee and eating the rest of the scones Luce had left.

“I don’t know, Bob,” Alan said, licking the last crumbs from his fingers. “You may have to bite the bullet and marry this woman. She can cook and she likes birds.”

“She worries about what I’m eating, too,” I said, reaching for another scone.

“She worries about what you’re eating?” he echoed. “White-man, this is serious stuff. What more do you want?”

Nothing, I thought. I was happy. Luce was happy. That worked for me. Did I have to want something more?

Besides steady employment.

“I’m telling you, she is one good woman,” Alan continued, pulling his still wet, shoulder-length black hair back into the ponytail he wore for class. He smiled. “If you’re not interested, I could be.”

“She likes tall men, Alan,” I said, a hint of faked condescension in my voice.

“Hey, I’m tall!” he bristled. “I’m six foot!”

“Sorry, Professor. She’s got you beat by two inches. Besides, Luce doesn’t stand in line for anyone, and when it comes to women, you’ve got a waiting list a mile long.”

Alan shrugged. “Yeah, but so far, no one’s made the cut.”

“Got a question for you, Alan,” I said, smoothly changing the subject. (That’s one of those things they teach you in counseling programs—how to direct the conversation where you want it to go. Right now, I knew I didn’t want it to go into Alan’s love life. Or lack thereof.) “When you were doing your environmental activist thing, did you ever meet people who were—well—extreme? I mean, like off the wall? Psycho? Bonafide crazies?”