A Bobwhite Killing (7 page)

But for some reason, I found myself hedging with Luce.

“I’m not sure,” I told her. “I think I need to stick around another day, maybe two. You know, see if there’s anything I can help with. Birding-related stuff. I mean, Jack was here for birding, and now there’s a group of birders here with no leader, so maybe I can help out.”

There was a beat of silence in our conversation.

I noticed I hadn’t mentioned Shana.

Luce sighed. “Okay. I suppose I can manage a few more days of wedding madness without you. I’ve got a full night at work tonight with the conference, anyway, so maybe tomorrow I’ll just turn off my cell phone, barricade the door, and pretend I’m nobody’s maid of honor.”

“That’s the woman I know and love,” I assured her. “You were scaring me there with that panicky bit.”

Luce laughed. “Yeah, it scared me too. Look, gorgeous, do me a favor. Don’t find any bodies tomorrow when you’re birding, okay? I want you back home where I can keep an eye on you and you can keep me from killing your sister before she gets married.”

“Roger on that,” I told her. “No bodies tomorrow, I promise.”

We said our good-byes and I closed the phone. I hadn’t lied to Luce: if at all humanly possible, I was not going to find a body tomorrow. Then again, I hadn’t been completely honest with her, either.

I hadn’t told her that my dead body tally for today had already risen to two.

Nor had I told her about a certain emerald-eyed woman who was not only a blast from my past, but also a suddenly betrayed and beleaguered widow I just couldn’t walk away from.

At least not tonight.

I shook my head in self-disgust. What was I doing? I loved Luce, and she deserved the whole truth. She trusted me.

So why did I have the distinct impression that if I had told Luce both of those things, the body tally would have risen to three?

Jack.

Billy.

Bob.

It sounded like the name of a country & western artist.

Throw in a truck, a broken heart, and a good bird dog and we’d have a hit on our hands.

Instead of a murder case.

I was back in the lobby, waiting for Shana and Bernie, when I remembered that I’d picked up a message at the front desk earlier. I pulled it out of my jeans pocket and unfolded the note. Scanning the paper, I saw that it was signed by Eddie. Since the Spring Valley Inn & Suites was the only hotel in town, he’d apparently deduced where I was staying for the weekend. Like I said, the man can track anything that moves.

“Bob,” the note read. “You should have told me about Jack. He was a good friend of Kami’s. The sheriff was out asking questions, and I gave her the tapes. They don’t help Kami at all. I’m going home. You know how I feel about the media.”

I did know. Eddie was independently wealthy because he had won the lottery years ago. The resulting media glare had forced him and his wife to retreat to some far north woods property where they could live quietly and anonymously. Ever since, Eddie has avoided the press like the plague. I could definitely understand his heading home if Kami suddenly found herself in the bright eye of a media storm. I also knew, though, that Eddie would never leave a job undone, so I had to assume he’d finished mending Kami’s electronic fence, which meant Nigel was safely corralled back home on the ranch.

In which case, maybe Tom and I could make another run up to that area first thing tomorrow morning, I thought, and try to do a wider search of the area for birds. It still puzzled me why Jack would have said there were Bobwhites up there when it obviously wasn’t the kind of spot the birds preferred. Heck, with all the racket those ATVs made, I couldn’t imagine any kind of creature—human or otherwise—who’d find a happy home there.

But Jack was way too good of a birder to make that kind of error.

Which could only mean he knew about a location we hadn’t found yet. A spot where there were wild Northern Bobwhites.

And if he had found it, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t, too.

What’s that old saying? “Pride goeth before a fall?”

According to my estimate, I’d already done that: taken a fall because of the pride. Okay, yes, technically, Nigel was only
one
tiger, and lions formed prides, not tigers, but he certainly humbled me when he leaped in my direction. And if it hadn’t been for Eddie’s electronic wizardry, that big cat would have been burping happily. Then, I believe, the proper phrase would be “The cat who got the canary.”

Or, to be completely accurate, the Bob White.

Wait a minute.

Could there possibly be a connection here? Bobwhites and Jack. Jack and Kami. Kami and an exotic animal sanctuary near where Jack said there were Bobwhites.

Was Kami protecting Bobwhites along with Nigel?

Would a big cat not eat a canary?

Only in a Disney film. And since Kami’s cat was far from an animated cartoon character, I had to believe that Nigel would as soon eat a Bobwhite as share sanctuary space with it. My free association technique might work great for helping high school students come up with solutions for relationship and classroom issues, but when it came to helping me locate a birding rarity, it wasn’t exactly burning up the barn.

But it did make me wonder if Kami might know something about the Bobwhites Jack had mentioned to Tom. After all, Jack had put Bobwhites on our list for this birding weekend, and so far, I’d come up empty-handed in the places I’d looked. There had to be a place I was missing, and Kami surely knew this neck of the woods better than anybody else since she owned a large piece of it. Maybe I could chase her down first thing tomorrow and pick her brain about Bobwhites.

Unless she landed in jail on a murder charge before I could get to her.

That would be a problem.

I wondered what really happened to Jack O’Keefe. Thanks to Eddie’s tape, there was no doubt that our birding leader had been at Kami’s last night; according to Shana’s admission that Jack never got home, it also meant that Kami may have been the last person to see him alive.

If she’d shot him, then she was definitely the last person to see him alive.

Then again, Jack wasn’t the only man at Kami’s last night: Eddie’s tape proved that Billy was there, too. So what was going on, and who saw who doing what? And what reason would Kami have to kill Jack or Billy? If she and Jack had quarreled, murder was a pretty extreme measure for settling an argument. Not to mention how inconvenient it would have been for Kami to chase him down to the youth camp to do the deed. And how would that play out?

“Hey, Jack, I’m furious with you. Could you just walk down this slope and go behind the old covered wagon there? No reason. I just want to shoot a couple of bullets into your heart.”

I don’t think so.

Trying to factor in Billy, too, only made the whole mess worse. Did the sheriff think that after Kami killed Jack, she took off after Billy? Just because he’d been on her property? Valuing one’s privacy, I could understand. But to murder for it? There again, the woman must have been pretty determined to do the deed if she’d followed Billy to Mystery Cave. Or did she have a standing appointment with Billy to kill him later?

“I’m going to be busy a little while offing Jack, so could we just meet at Mystery Cave in about an hour? By that big logpile off the main trail? You’re an administrative aide, you understand how challenging schedules can be.”

Right.

Heck, if she’d planned to kill the guy, she could have just fed him to Nigel and saved herself a bunch of time, if not gas money. As someone who does a lot of driving to go birding, I certainly appreciate the price of gas and the dent it can put in my budget—it’s not like gas coupons grow on trees in Minnesota. The way the media was already painting Kami, though, she sounded less like an economizing driver and more like a serial killer on a shooting spree. True, I didn’t know Kami, but I did know Jack, and I couldn’t see him being involved with a woman who had a problem with violence.

For that matter, I couldn’t see him involved with anyone but his wife. Especially when that wife was Shana.

But I was no sheriff either, and since the two men were on Kami’s property shortly before their murders, that was enough of a link for Sheriff Paulsen to question Kami about both deaths. Obviously, I had a lot to learn about investigating murders because, from my perspective, the sheriff was making quite an assumption that the two deaths were linked to Kami. I mean, for all the sheriff knew, maybe Billy had taken off to spend the morning birding alone after doing his spying gig for Shana, and he’d just had the rotten bad luck to accidentally walk into a random bullet.

Happens all the time, right?

Not.

Which meant the deaths were linked. But whether Kami was the connection was still hard for me to swallow. Even Shana, who suspected that Jack and Kami were having an affair, immediately thought that Jack’s death had something to do with the work he’d been doing with eco-communities. She told us all that Jack had made enemies.

Although, to be one hundred percent accurate, her first comment was that she had killed him.

At the time I’d chalked it up to hysteria, but now that I recalled her exact words, I felt a ripple of unease slide up my spine.

Shana had said, “It’s all my fault.”

All?

What was Shana not telling us?

“Bob!”

I turned my head to see Renee and Mac Ackerman, two members of our birding group, walk into the lobby. Since we were all going to be having dinner together at the A&W across the street, they plopped down on the sofa next to my armchair and began to tell me what I’d missed when Shana and I had slipped out the hotel window to escape the media circus.

“That Chuck O’Keefe sure hates Shana,” Renee reported. “He kept yelling at the sheriff, saying that Shana was a manipulative schemer, and that he wasn’t fooled by her innocent grieving widow act. He said she had more irons in the fire than anyone knew about, and he wasn’t about to let her take OK Industries away from Jack’s real family.”

“OK Industries?”

“O’Keefe Industries, Bob,” Mac clarified for me. “It’s the family empire. They’ve got interests in just about every business in the state. Mills, real estate, grocery stores, banking.”

“Jack O’Keefe came a long way from his humble origins, that’s for sure,” Renee added. “I told the reporters that when Jack was in high school, all the girls were in love with him.” A distinct red blush colored her cheeks. “Including me.”

Mac threw his arm around his smiling wife and hugged her close. “That was a long time ago.”

“Yes, it was,” Renee agreed, wiping away a tear that had crept into her eyes when she’d said Jack’s name. “But it doesn’t make it any easier to see someone you know … dead.”

She sniffed and turned away to dig into her purse for a tissue.

“Yeah, if it hadn’t been for that Ben Graham, I don’t think the sheriff would have ever gotten Chuck to calm down, let alone leave the hotel. I guess he’s an old pal of Jack’s, and he’s known Chuck since he was a baby,” Mac continued. “Anyway, as soon as he told the reporters about Jack and Kami Marsden having an affair, they could have cared less about Chuck, I think. I guess a sex scandal beats an outraged stepson when you’re looking for headlines.”

“Say that again?”

Mac looked at me for a moment in confusion. “I guess a sex scandal—“

“No, not that part,” I interrupted him. “The part about Jack and Kami Marsden.”

“You mean about them having an affair?” Renee was back in the conversation. “Apparently it was common knowledge down here in Spring Valley. The sheriff didn’t seem surprised at all when Big Ben—he’s the mayor, you know,” she added for my benefit, “mentioned it. Of course, he didn’t come right out at first and say ‘affair.’ He said they had a ‘close, personal relationship,’ but of course, everyone could figure out what he wasn’t saying. And then the sheriff told the reporters that private affairs weren’t her concern, but murder was, and that she would be talking with Kami later today. Which I guess she did, according to the radio.”

Renee sniffed one last time into the tissue in her hand. “Poor Shana. I can’t imagine how she must feel.”

“Actually, I’m pretty hungry.”

We all looked up to see Shana and Bernie standing at the edge of the lobby. Renee’s cheeks blazed a brighter red in embarrassment, and Mac quickly rose from the sofa, pulling his wife up with him.

“I think we’ll go on across the street and find a table,” he said. “See you there.”

Renee ducked her head and made a beeline for the hotel’s front doors.

I watched Shana’s green eyes follow Renee’s back out the hotel entrance and had no clue what to say.

“Too bad Renee wasn’t in such a rush this morning to get to coffee,” Bernie commented as she and Shana crossed the lobby to me. “As I recall, we waited a good half-hour for her to get back from that twenty-four hour pharmacy with her allergy prescription. If it hadn’t been for her, we could have gotten an earlier start on our birding. I mean, really, how could the woman forget her allergy medication at home when it’s allergy season? Talk about being unprepared.”

As I motioned for Shana to precede me through the hotel doors, her eyes caught mine, a hint of a smile playing around the corners of her full lips, and I immediately knew what she was thinking. Without a moment’s hesitation, I could feel my memory flying back to the summer I was sixteen and Shana Lewis was the woman of my dreams …

“Talk about being unprepared,” I’d moaned, trying not to scratch at the million mosquito bites that were welling up all over my legs and arms.

“You didn’t have to go into the swamp with me,” Shana laughed. “I told you you weren’t properly dressed, but you just couldn’t stand the thought of me getting that Louisiana Waterthrush when you haven’t been able to find it all summer, could you?” She pulled a tube of bite balm out of her backpack. “That competitive streak is going to get you into trouble, Bob, mark my words. Now turn around.”

And then she proceeded to massage the whole tube into the backs of my stinging legs. For that one short moment, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.