A Murder of Crows (10 page)

Another troubling thought followed on the heels of that one: according to what I’d learned from the police the last few times I’d discovered a body, murder was usually personal.

Did a 2:00 a.m. phone call qualify as personal?

Let’s be honest here. When someone calls me at two in the morning, I take it very personally. On top of that, I confess that after getting a 2:00 a.m. phone call, murder has crossed my mind a few times, too.

Unless it was a call from a birding buddy who was giving me the heads-up about a rare bird currently appearing in his or her field of vision.

Night vision, that is.

So … Sonny had called Gina … about an owl?

Yeah, right, Sherlock.

My stomach dropped a little more. Despite my own advice to Rick to trust our new Family and Consumer Science teacher, I suddenly had a very bad feeling that whatever reason Gina Knorsen had for being on Sonny’s 2:00 a.m. call list, it wasn’t a good one.

Chapter Nine

I turned off my computer and checked my office phone for messages before leaving for home. Two birders had left reports of sighting birds that were uncommon for this time of year in different Minnesota counties: a Purple Sandpiper in Swift County and a Red Phalarope in Sibley. If Rick and I were lucky, the sandpiper might stick around another few days, and we could try to see it on our way up to Morris on Thursday. Sibley County, however, was farther off the route we’d be taking, so I’d have to leave the phalarope for another season.

I sighed heavily.

So many birds, so little time.

A knock on my door caught my attention as I turned to grab my jacket from my office coatrack.

“Hey, Boo,” I said as the big guy leaned into my doorframe. “Thanks for help with the chickens today.”

“No problem,” he replied. His eyes fell to the jacket in my hand. “You got a minute?”

“Of course,” I said. I put the jacket back on its hook and gave him a smile. “What can I do for you?”

He returned my smile with his own big grin.

“Actually, I’m here to do something for you.”

Yes!
I mentally pumped my fist.
I knew it!
After our bonding experience today, Boo Metternick had decided to throw caution to the winds and trust me with his secret identity.

He was going to tell me he was the Bonecrusher.

My own smile broadened in anticipation.

“Alan said you were interested in wind energy farms,” Boo said.

The fist pump vanished in my head.

“What?”

“Alan said you were interested in wind turbines,” Boo repeated.

Yup. That’s what I’d heard the first time, all right. I was evidently going to have to find something more trust-inducing than chasing down hypnotized students together to earn the big guy’s confidence.

I let out a sigh of acute disappointment.

What did Boo Metternick have to do with wind turbines?

I realized that he was waiting for me to respond while I just stared at him like an idiot.

Luce has told me more than once it’s a good look for me, by the way. And not an uncommon one, apparently, either.

“I am interested,” I finally said, then immediately wondered what else Alan had told him.

Had my brother-in-law mentioned to Boo that my interest was connected to a homicide?

Or that I made it a habit to find the bodies of dead birders when I went out in the woods?

I was well aware that Rick squealed on me all the time, but I sure hoped that Alan hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon. It would be nice to know that at least one of my close friends could keep his mouth shut and refrain from tarnishing my reputation.

“He said you had a bet going on,” Boo informed me when I didn’t offer any further elaboration. “That you bet him that turbines killed more birds than people every year. I told Alan he lost the bet because thousands of birds are killed every year, but I only knew of twenty people who’d been killed by wind turbines in the last two decades, and three of those cases were highly questionable.”

“Questionable?” I repeated, while blood rushed from my head as I tried to keep my overactive imagination from picturing what a person might look like after going through a “questionable” death by a wind turbine.

“You all right?” Boo asked. “You look kind of white.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said weakly. “White. Bob White.”

I dropped into my chair, and Boo took a seat on the other side of my desk.

“Wait a minute,” he said, sudden realization crossing his face. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’ve never heard of anybody getting cut up by a wind turbine. That would definitely be a stomach-turner. I meant they got killed working on them while they were installing them. You know—freak workplace accidents that can happen on any large-scale construction project.”

He sat back in his chair. My vision cleared.

“Except for the three questionable fatalities,” he added. “In those cases, the guys died of heart attack or stroke, and their families insisted it was because of the turbines. The guys didn’t work on the turbines at all—they just lived in the general area and apparently told everyone that the turbines were affecting the normal functioning of their bodies. Something about an overload of vibrations or incessant humming that was interfering with their heart rates and brain waves.”

He crossed his arms over his chest.

“There was speculation that the guys might just have been nuts, too.”

I looked across the desk at Boo, suddenly aware that he’d spoken more words to me in the last few moments than he had in the last two months.

“No sliced torsos or split guts with intestines hanging out?”

Boo grimaced. “No. Oh, my gosh, no. Believe me, I never would have worked on turbines if I thought I could get caught in one. When I was a kid, I watched a doctor sew my dad’s finger back on after an accident with some equipment on the farm, and that was more than enough to convince me I didn’t ever want to come close to a spinning blade.”

“But didn’t you just say you worked on turbines?”

I felt like I was speed-dating. We were barely minutes into our conversation and I had already learned that Boo Metternick not only had a great memory for trivia, but he’d also worked with machines.

At this rate, I was going to have his phone number in less than three minutes.

Boo nodded. “I did. I spent a summer while I was in college working on wind towers in northern Iowa. All we did was put them up, though. I was on the construction crew. I never got anywhere near an operating turbine. My interest now is purely academic. Windmills make great examples of certain physics principles.”

“So I win the bet, huh?”

The bet about avian fatalities that I’d never made, that is.

I silently thanked Alan for being circumspect about my ‘interest’ in wind farms and for not sharing any more details than necessary with our new physics teacher. Becoming known as a corpse finder wasn’t my current career objective, nor did I want my weekend discovery to become the topic of the week in the staff lounge. I figured that Boo, with his own Bonecrusher skeleton in the closet, could probably relate to that same appreciation for discretion.

“You do win,” Boo assured me. “Although I’ve got to tell you, wind farms get a bum rap when it comes to bird mortality. Power lines kill birds more than ten thousand times as often as wind turbines—up to 174 million birds a year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And cats—both domesticated and feral—take out another couple hundred million birds every year. Compared to those numbers, the wind turbines’ toll of ten to forty thousand a year looks pretty small.”

Geez Louise. The man was a walking statistics report.

“But housecats aren’t killing Golden Eagles or Burrowing Owls,” I argued.

“Oh, so some birds are more expendable than others? No one’s going to miss a couple million robins and sparrows, but a thousand raptors rate special consideration.” He blew out a breath of disdain. “Sounds like avian discrimination if you ask me.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Put that way, the case for saving raptors did sound like species discrimination.

“Are you an ethics teacher on the side?” I asked him.

Boo laughed, his somber mood gone as quickly as it had come.

“No,” he replied. “I just like to argue. My dad always said I was born to start fights. If he said the sky was blue, I’d say it was green. If you’d said that the bird death count from turbines was inconsequential, I would have made a case for the specific bird populations affected, like the eagles and owls that you just mentioned.”

He rolled his shoulders and cricked his neck to either side.

“But here’s something else I would have added to the argument,” he continued. “Turbines aren’t just a problem for birds in the air. Studies for new wind farm locations now focus on the nesting habitat, which is often on the ground and might be disturbed by tower construction. You destroy those breeding sites, and there won’t be enough of those birds around to even consider flying near the wind turbines.”

He cracked the knuckles in both hands.

“And let’s not forget the damage to the bat population,” he added. “Those casualties are in the thousands, too. Did you know that some species of bats experience fatal internal bleeding as a result of the air pressure changes caused by spinning turbine blades?”

I studied the big man in my office. For a former seasonal construction worker, he seemed to know an awful lot about the bigger issues around wind energy.

“Who are you really, Boo Metternick?” I asked. “You’re teaching physics, you argue ethics, and now you display a keen knowledge of emerging issues in Minnesota conservation. I think you’re either campaigning for a position on the school board, or you’re an advance man for
Jeopardy!
Which is it?”

Boo laughed again.

“Neither. I’m just a farm kid from western Minnesota,” he insisted. “I grew up detasseling corn and riding a tractor on family land.”

“And wrestling steers,” I reminded him.

My bet with Alan about turbines may have been a convenient fiction, but I still had ten bucks riding on Boo being the Bonecrusher.

“That, too,” he said. “Our family has had that land for generations, but times are hard for an awful lot of small farmers, including my dad. These days, farmers have to get inventive with their crops to survive, and wind energy is a booming cash crop if you can get it.”

He stood up and smiled. “So it’s kind of become my hobby—learning everything I can about the wind energy industry so when my dad finally signs the contract to rent our family’s land to the utilities people, I’ll be reassured that he’s not only guaranteeing his retirement income, but that he’s doing the right thing ecologically.”

“And are you reassured?” I asked.

He nodded. “I will be, once the deal is done. Our land isn’t a bird breeding ground like the big parcel next to it that the energy company has been considering for rent, so that means the company should be knocking on my father’s door.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned.

“But the energy people have some consultant who keeps insisting that it’s our property that has the breeding ground, not the one next door, so my dad’s going crazy trying to prove this consultant wrong,” Boo continued. “It seems like every time Dad turns around, this consultant has more ‘evidence’ that the birds—grasshopper sparrows, I think they are—are nesting on our land, even though my dad paid out of his own pocket for ground surveys to show our land isn’t being used by the birds. And get this—it turns out that the big parcel where the sparrows
are
breeding belongs to a cousin of this consultant.”

“The plot thickens,” I commented.

“But it’s still transparent,” Boo added. “The consultant is biased. He wants the rental income from the new wind farm to go into his cousin’s bank account, and he’s willing to lie about our land to make that happen.”

He placed his palms on my desk and leaned towards me.

“I don’t like liars,” he said.

I looked at his hands spread out on my desktop. They were the size of boxing gloves. Extra-large boxing gloves.

“Me neither,” I agreed.

“You were good with the chickens today, too,” Boo said. “You could pass for a farm kid from Spinit yourself.”

The name of the town sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Seeing as I’ve driven to every corner in the state chasing birds for the last nineteen years, I wasn’t completely surprised I couldn’t recall its exact location, but I knew it would nag at me until I looked at a map.

“Spinit—isn’t that near Buffalo Ridge?”

Buffalo Ridge was a big spread of elevated land that stretched from the edge of South Dakota down through several southwestern counties of Minnesota and into northern Iowa. It was also home to one of the largest wind farms in the United States.

Because I occasionally birded in the area, I was also aware that much of the ridge was privately owned farmland, some of which was rented to the energy companies for turbine tower placement. One farmer I met told me he received an annual royalty payment of $4,000 for each turbine on his land, and that he knew of others who earned up to $8,000 per tower. The bigger spread a farmer had, the more turbines he could accommodate, and the more lease money he could earn.

If Boo’s family’s land was located on the ridge, I imagined his dad could make a pretty solid bundle of money from royalties.

As long as some consultant didn’t block the deal.

“No,” Boo corrected me. “Spinit is in the west central part of the state. It’s a tiny community in Stevens County, not far from Morris. This is a new wind farm project that my dad wants to get in on. The company wants to place turbines seventy-five acres apart to minimize wind speed loss, and my dad says that would mean seven towers on our land, with a twenty-year agreement. With that kind of annual income, he and my mom could be comfortable for the rest of their lives without having to work the farm.”

He stood back up and glanced towards my open doorway, then lowered his voice.