The Boreal Owl Murder (27 page)

“Dr. Phil?”

I advised you to stay home, Bob,” Dr. Phil reminded me. “Repeatedly. But you just couldn’t stay away, could you?” His hand steady at Luce’s neck, he nodded toward Stan, who had rolled off of Montgomery. “If he moves, Luce gets the shot. It’ll stop her heart.”

“I’m not moving,” Stan said. “What do you want?”

“Get up, Margaret,” Dr. Phil ordered. “We’re going to do it right this time.”

Montgomery sat up, obviously dazed from her impact with Stan and the ground.

“This time?” My voice rasped.

“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” the doctor said, exasperation plain in his tone. “First Andrew and now this.”

He turned his attention back to Montgomery, who was now on her feet, though somewhat shaky. She took a step or two and stopped, then bent over to catch her breath, her hands on her knees.

“Margaret, there’s a cord here behind me,” Dr. Phil instructed her. “Take it and tie Bob up first. Tightly. We’ll get Mr. Commando there in a minute. For now, I just want him to lie there where I can see him.” He tightened his grip around Luce’s head. “Don’t try it, Luce. The needle’s faster than you.”

I had to look away. The feeling of complete helplessness, seeing Luce immobilized in Dr. Phil’s hold, a deadly needle at her neck, was making my head spin and my vision blur. On top of that, I couldn’t believe that Dr. Phil—a man I’d known and respected for years—was the one with the needle, and somehow involved in Rahr’s murder. In desperation, I glanced at Stan, flat on his back, staring straight up into the trees.

He didn’t look desperate at all. In fact, he was grinning, his teeth shining white in his camouflaged face.

I followed his gaze.

About thirty feet above the ground, a Great Horned Owl was poised on a limb, looking down and weaving back and forth, a behavior that allow him to pinpoint his prey all the better. He was about to grab tonight’s dinner.

And I suddenly knew why Stan was smiling.

Tonight’s dinner wasn’t a rodent.

Tonight’s target was Dr. Phil’s bush of a silver toupee. Dr. Phil was about to join Uncle Gus in a very exclusive club.

The owl spread his wings, ready to launch himself in a silent, deadly attack.

I felt the surge of pure adrenaline in my legs.

Margaret was coming toward me with the rope, but that wasn’t my concern at the moment. I prayed that both the owl and I were faster than the needle.

Another heartbeat, and the owl and I were both flying through the night.

I dove straight for Luce, wrenching her out of Dr. Phil’s grip at the very moment the enormous owl reached the doctor’s head. With a vicious swipe of his powerful, inch-long talons, the owl raked the man’s scalp, capturing the tempting toupee and leaving bloody gashes on the dome of his bald head. By the time Dr. Phil could even realize what had happened, Stan had chopped him on the neck, knocking him out, and once again had Margaret pinned to the ground.

Shaking and gasping for air, I lay in a pile of wet leaves, holding Luce as close as I could, waiting for the tremors of the post-adrenaline rush to subside. Against my neck I could feel her breath warming the chilled skin between my woolen cap and my parka collar. I wanted to hold her right there forever.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Never better. I’m having a great time. How about you?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m okay. A little shook, maybe. I’ve never been very fond of needles, and I don’t think that’s going to change in the foreseeable future.”

I stroked her back in understanding. “I can appreciate that. I’m not especially crazy about them, either. So, I guess we’re not going to take up needlepoint, huh?”

And then Stan was looming above us. “I called Knott. He’s on the way.” He pointed towards Dr. Phil and Montgomery, who were both face-down in the earth, their hands tied together with the cord Dr. Phil had pointed out to Montgomery. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“Thanks, Stan.” I pulled myself to my feet and helped Luce up. Then I offered my hand to him. “You can chase birds with me any time, buddy.”

He clasped my hand with his own. “Ditto.”

“Ssh,” Luce hissed at us. Slowly raising her hand, she pointed up into the branches over our heads. It took me a minute to see it, but once I found the intense yellow eyes staring at me, the rest of the little owl’s body became distinguishable from the surrounding blackness.

“You little devil,” I whispered.

Because, if nothing else, it had been one hell of a chase.

It was very late on Saturday night when I finally turned the key in my front door.

These weekends up north were killing me.

I really needed to rephrase that.

Since
I’d had a gun aimed at my heart not even twenty-four hours ago,
killing
was not a word I could consider using frivolously at the moment. To be honest, I was so exhausted, I didn’t think there were any words I could use at the moment, frivolous or not. I dumped my overnight bag, parka, and binos inside the door and collapsed on my living room sofa.

Luce, Stan, and I had all given statements, I’d handed over Eddie’s recorder (which did, indeed, have almost-miraculous powers of audio reproduction—we could hear every one of the Boreal Owl’s calls on it, along with every word uttered by Montgomery and Dr. Phil), and finished all the paperwork Duluth’s finest could possibly push at us. We did, however, decline to buy any tickets to the policemen’s ball as it was scheduled for next month. By then, I would be too busy with girls’ softball to make it up for the big event, and Luce had a conference to cater. Stan’s excuse was something about tax returns and April 15.

He was, after all, an accountant. Among other things.

About halfway through our stay at the station, Knott had joined Luce and me in his office. Stan had already migrated down the hall to talk to local officers about the results of his own investigation into VNT’s illicit operation. Apparently, now that his covert assignment was over, Stan wasn’t worried about anyone on the force interfering with his investigation. For a while, he could actually play well with others again.

“So, do you want to press charges against anyone?” Knott asked us. “You can take your pick—Montgomery, Thompson or Dr. Hovde. Of course, you’ll have to stand in line behind the state and Rahr’s widow, not to mention the litigation we may have pending the VNT garden business.”

“I just want to go home,” Luce answered.

I agreed. Filing charges, giving testimony, listening to lawyers and being hassled by the press was not the way I wanted to spend even the next ten minutes of my life, let alone the next twelve months. Stan might have been an ace when it came to disappearing, but I wasn’t going to fool myself that I could pull off a similar vanishing act in the face of a media spotlight. Besides, I didn’t want to vanish. I had a great life back in Savage. And now, thanks to Knott’s arrests, I could have my great life … back.

I took Luce’s hand and gave it a squeeze. She looked worn out, and I expected I wasn’t going to be winning any fresh-face awards with my tired mug, either. Nor was Knott.

“Tired?” I asked him.

“Absolutely.” He sprawled in a chair and tipped it back on its hind legs. “I like you, Bob, but this is two nights in one week that you’ve kept me up way past my bedtime. I’m sort of hoping you’ll stay in the Twin Cities for a while now. You know? Away from here?”

“That’s the plan,” I said. Now that I’d scored the Boreal, I was planning to stick close to home for the immediate future. Like, really close. As in my backyard. Maybe I’d venture out for birdseed, but that was about it.

Which reminded me of Lily’s Landscaping and VNT.

“So where does Thompson fit in?” I asked. “I mean, besides running a poaching business? Did he help Montgomery remove Rahr’s clothes? Montgomery told us they were trying to get the picker out last Friday when she heard Rahr pounding the spikes, so I assume he knew that she had killed him.”

Knott brought his chair back to the floor and reached for his cup of coffee on the desk. “Actually, Thompson didn’t know a thing about the murder until he learned about it on the radio Sunday evening.”

“No way,” I said. “How could he
not
know? He was right there trying to get the picker moved.”

Knott took a sip of the coffee. “No, he wasn’t, Bob. When Montgomery told you that
they
were working on the picker, she wasn’t referring to Thompson.”

“It was Dr. Phil,” Luce said.

Of course. At the MOU meeting, I’d even commented on his early return, and what had he replied? That he had business to attend to. And that would also explain how my mysterious threat-maker tracked me down so fast: Montgomery must have heard about the discovery of Rahr’s body on the radio and called Dr. Phil, who only had to check the MOU email to confirm that I was the birder who was planning to hunt Boreals that weekend. “He was the investor that Montgomery mentioned,” I said now. “She said they were doing some business together.”

“Did he know it was poaching?” Luce asked Knott. “I can’t believe he’d get involved in something like that. He had plenty of money.”

“
Had
, Luce. According to Montgomery, Dr. Hovde lost a bundle last summer on the stock market, so when she offered him the big returns of VNT, he didn’t quibble over details.” He took another sip from the cup in his hand. “When I explained to Montgomery that it might be a good idea to cooperate—maybe reduce prison time, for instance—she had all kinds of information for us. Including the fact that Hovde had stopped in to talk with Rahr last Thursday afternoon at the university, in hopes of getting him to suspend the study this season. The good doctor was angling for time to get the picker out of there.”

Which was why Rahr was so defensive on the phone with me later that evening. It hadn’t just been Alice’s disclosing site locations to Stan that had alarmed Rahr; it had been Hovde’s pressuring him to drop the research.

“When Montgomery couldn’t get Thompson to retrieve the picker,” Knott continued, “she panicked and called Hovde in Florida, because she knew Rahr would find it, and she didn’t have anyone else she could turn to. Hovde hightailed it up here, tried to reason with Rahr, and when that failed, drove up to the forest with Montgomery to try to get the picker out of there.”

At which point, things really deteriorated: Montgomery heard the hammering, went crazy and attacked Rahr.

“It was Hovde’s idea to remove Rahr’s outer clothing, Bob. When he saw what Montgomery had done, he had to make a choice: try to save Rahr’s life or try to salvage his cash cow. He was a doctor; he knew the freezing temperatures could finish the job on Rahr and no one would have to know about the poaching. He tossed the clothes in the picker since they were wet with snow and told Margaret to pick them up later.” Knott stood up to leave. “Hovde didn’t want to risk even a DNA trace of Rahr to show up in his car trunk.”

“But Eddie had tape of Thompson—” I started to say, then remembered again that the tape could only attest to which drivers passed by the gate, not their destinations.

“Montgomery said he was checking on ladyslippers on the other side of Eddie’s property,” Knott explained. “And that he almost got caught in a shouting match between Ellis and Alice.”

In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about Ms. Multiple and our newly-appointed Boreal researcher. But Knott had the scoop, thanks to a very late night conversation with Alice and Ellis a few hours earlier at the station. Determined to make peace with his former mentor before he left town to visit his ailing father, Ellis had learned from the department office on late Thursday that Rahr was heading out for the Boreal sites on Friday morning. Eavesdropping as usual on the office line, Alice decided to tail Ellis up to the sites to try to make her own reconciliation with the younger professor, who’d repeatedly rebuffed her attentions. As it turned out, Ellis missed Rahr, but ran into Alice instead. Steamed by both her eavesdropping and persistent pursuit of his affections, Ellis gave up on trying to track down Rahr and took the long way back home, as did Alice.

“You know, Bob, if you hadn’t found Rahr’s body when you did, it’s possible no one would ever have known what really happened,” Knott said. “I think you must have beaten that bear to Rahr by only a matter of minutes. If you hadn’t, there might not even have been a corpse left to stumble over. Without the body, we would have had just another missing person case, not a murder.”

And I wouldn’t have gone home to find a threatening note on my bird feeder, a dead owl on my deck and the definite possibility of my career going down the drain. Not to mention the chance to get shot in the forest or trailed by a former CIA agent. Gee, all that in exchange for chasing a little Boreal Owl.

Who says birding is boring?

Another detective leaned into the doorway and handed Knott a clear plastic bag with something in it. Knott thanked him and turned back to me, smiling.

“Remember when I asked you if you knew if Rahr wore reading glasses?”

I remembered.

“These are the ones we found under his body,” he said, holding up the plastic bag for Luce and me to see its contents.

I looked at the item for only a second or two before I recognized what it was.

“Those are my mom’s reading glasses,” I said.

“They’re Montgomery’s reading glasses,” Knott corrected me. “We found them beneath Rahr’s body when we cleared the scene last Sunday morning. My guess is that they slipped out of Montgomery’s pocket while she and Hovde were removing Rahr’s outerwear.”

Looking at the glasses, I remembered seeing an identical pair in Ellis’s hands as he returned them to Alice. I glanced up at Knott.

“Yes, I know,” he said, reading my mind. “Alice had the same kind. When I saw her using them when I went back to talk with Ellis after our lunch, I thought I had an inside track for finding Rahr’s killer. Then, when you got shot, I was convinced that Ellis and she were working together, since he’d left our meeting early and had ample time to track us up there. I was in the middle of grilling them both when our local publicity hound turned himself in, but until you gave me the tape, I didn’t have a shred of evidence to connect them to last Friday when Rahr was killed.”