The Boreal Owl Murder (22 page)

“Yeah, having your own business is the greatest thing in the world,” he assured her, smiling. I swear he suddenly seemed taller. Not that it helped. He’d have to grow another four inches to catch up to Luce. But it did make him talkative.

“You don’t have to worry about lay-offs, job security, or catching grief for coming in late,” Thompson said. “I wouldn’t do it any other way, now. I think it would kill me to have to go back to working for someone else.”

Kill me.

All at once, previously unrelated thoughts rammed into each other in my head. Bells were ringing. Instincts were screaming. Thompson had something worth killing for.

So maybe I was a little hasty about criticizing the flattery approach.

Thompson was an outdoor guy. His livelihood was made in the woods—legally or not. Would he, I wondered, kill someone who threatened his business? Someone who could send that being-your-own-boss dream-come-true crashing down to the ground?

The topped trees Luce and I had seen last night were in the owls’ range of woods; if Rahr had stumbled on Thompson cutting trees that were protected, would Thompson have threatened Rahr—or even, possibly, had him killed—to keep his illegal business secret and intact?

Was that why Knott had no comment on the man who had turned himself in as Rahr’s murderer—because there was more than one person involved, and the case was far from closed?

Rahr’s body, however, hadn’t been found at the place we’d visited last night where we saw the topped trees. His body was at another site a long ways from there.

And then another thought crashed into what was becoming a virtual interstate pile-up in my brain. Were the trees topped where I’d found Rahr’s body?

I didn’t know. I sure hadn’t noticed last weekend, but I hadn’t been looking either. Tonight I was definitely going to check. Of course, I was feeding a huge suspicion here: Thompson was the one who had topped the trees.

And, I sternly reminded myself, even if he had, that didn’t prove he had anything to do with Rahr’s murder. Knott had a confessed killer in custody.

But if Thompson’s “work” in the forest brought him into any kind of proximity to Rahr’s research areas, then there might have been some kind of on-going territorial dispute between the men that no one else knew about. And I wouldn’t have put it past Rahr to take matters into his own hands, especially if he thought someone was deliberating trying to sabotage his work.

Which, apparently, he had, judging from our phone conversation.

And that, in turn, would explain the spiked trees.

If my emerging theory was correct, Rahr must have discovered that trees around his Boreal study sites were getting cut, and so he spiked the trees himself in an effort to stop the harvesting. In addition, he must have suspected the tree cutting was specific to his research locations. Being the secretive researcher he was, he didn’t want the DNR and the attendant media circus invading his space and disturbing the owls because of it, so he didn’t call in any complaints to the authorities. That left just one question: why, in that big forest with all those trees, did he think it was only his Boreal sites that were being targeted?

The answer was obvious: Rahr must have found a pattern of poaching at his research locations.

I knew the location of only three of his sites; certainly he had others I didn’t know about. But of the three I did know, one was topped and one was spiked. What about the third site?

Suddenly, I was anxious to get going. I wanted to see the third site while it was still light and see whether it fit a pattern—spiked or topped. I took Luce’s hand to pull her to the car, but she and Thompson were still talking.

“I have to say, though, if it weren’t for Maggie, it probably wouldn’t have happened,” Thompson was saying. “She’s the one who suggested I start my own business. Use your expertise, she said. Think creatively, she said. She’d been through job changes, too, so she knew what she was talking about.”

“What job changes?” I asked, and almost simultaneously thought,
Crap! Why did I do that?

This is, I’ve found, one of the occupational hazards of being a counselor: you form a habit of encouraging people to talk. Even when you really don’t want them to talk anymore, when what you most want is for them to shut up, go away and leave you alone, you can’t help yourself—you ask them to keep talking. Unfortunately, this same habit makes people think you’re a good listener and that you’re really interested in them when it’s really nothing more than an automatic reflex. I used to think I had invisible words—invisible to me, at least—painted on my shirt that read “Tell me your life story. I really want to know,” because people I hardly knew would tell me all kinds of personal, intimate details I wouldn’t dream of sharing with my closest friend, let alone a virtual stranger.

Judging from the eager monologue that was now pouring from Thompson’s mouth, the invisible message on my shirt must have been flashing like a theatre marquee on opening night. Without any encouragement at all from me, he was spilling his guts.

Or rather, he was spilling Montgomery’s guts.

“Maggie hasn’t always worked in Duluth, you know,” Thompson was saying. “She’s from the West Coast. That’s where I got the Seattle calendar you were looking at—from Maggie. She was a hot shot lobbyist for the timber companies out there back in the late 1980s.” He started shaking his head. “But things went from bad to worse for logging people after the owl thing, and she said she’d had enough. That’s when she landed in Minnesota.”

Thompson paused and chuckled. “Funny, isn’t it? She moves out here and ends up on the other side of the fence.”

“What fence?” Luce asked, totally confused.

It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. All at once, I understood what Thompson was telling us.

Before she came to Duluth to defend the habitat of the Boreal Owls, Margaret Montgomery had worked for the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest … as an opponent of preserving the habitat of the Northern Spotted Owls.

In her current job, as the director of S.O.B., she was the champion of owls.

In her previous life, she had been the enemy.

So what?” Luce said as we drove back into Two Harbors. “So she switched jobs. And perspectives. People do that.”

I knew she was right. Again. People make changes for all kinds of reasons. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad people if they make a complete reversal in the causes they defend. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of convenience. Sometimes it’s a matter of enlightenment. Or, like Luce said, it’s a change in perspective.

Although at times, I was sure, it was pure self-interest.

Regardless of the reason, though, whatever lay behind Montgomery’s switch of allegiance was none of my business. For all I knew, Montgomery’s lobbying work and environmental activism were just her job, simply something she was good at, that earned her an income, and not something in which she had a personal emotional investment. I was the one who had made that assumption, and you know what they say happens when you assume—it makes donkeys out of all of us. Or, at least that’s the cleaned up version I tell my students. Maybe what really bothered me was that she looked like my mother, but this was definitely not something my mother would do: posture for pay. It felt cheap and dishonest. To my way of thinking, it gave S.O.B. a bad name to have, basically, a soldier of fortune for its director.

Okay, so maybe I should reword that.

Not the soldier of fortune part. The bad name part.

I mean, how could you get a worse name than what it already had—S.O.B.? Anyway, as far as I was concerned, this little bit of biographical revelation about its director didn’t exactly cast a glow of confidence on the credibility or sincerity of its leadership in the area of conservation.

But, as Luce proceeded to point out to me, that wasn’t my problem.

“Bobby, we didn’t come up here to validate the work of S.O.B.,” she reminded me. “We came up here to find a Boreal Owl. And check out Very Nice Trees. And the Splashing Rock. Two down, one to go. Get over it.”

“Hey!” I said. “I’m dealing with a crisis here. I’m experiencing a major paradigm shift. What I assumed was true and good isn’t necessarily so. A little sensitivity might be appropriate.”

Luce rolled her eyes. I drove in silence for about—oh—thirty seconds.

“Okay, I’m over it,” I said. I looked in my rear-view mirror and seeing the road clear, I pulled a fast U-turn in the road.

“What are you doing?” Luce grabbed the dashboard to steady herself against the sudden turn.

“We’re going up to see that third Boreal Owl site I know.”

“But it’s not dusk, yet. The owls won’t be calling now.”

I gave Luce a quick glance. “I’m not looking for the owls. I’m looking for a pattern.”

“A pattern?”

“Topped trees. Spiked trees.”

Another body?

I sure hoped not. One was already more than enough.

At which point, one last thought plowed into the still-smoldering wreck of my mental demolition derby. If I’d been shot yesterday,
I
would have been another body near a Boreal site.

Did two bodies a pattern make?

In the middle of hundreds of acres of deep woods, yet within calling distance of established Boreal Owl study sites—I’d have to give that a big thumbs up, buddy.

And then I flashed on the hillcrest where I had been a sitting duck.

It was unnaturally open. No trees.

At least, there weren’t trees there anymore.

Because they’d already been harvested.

Now, in my mind’s eye, I could clearly see the hillcrest again, and what I had consciously missed seeing at the time: tree stumps. While I was lying on the trail, waiting for Knott to reach me, I’d scanned around myself at eye level and seen ground-level stumps lining the trail.

Stumps of white pine.

A tree cutter had been there.

“Bobby?”

I glanced at Luce. She looked concerned.

“Are you all right? You looked kind of … glazed … for a minute.”

I breathed deeply. “I’m okay.” I reached over and patted her thigh. “Some pieces of the puzzle just fell into place. I think Rahr was on to something that had nothing to do with the owls.”

Then again, maybe it did.

In fact, maybe it had everything to do with the owls.

The location was the key, just like Knott and I had figured.

Whoever was cutting the trees had deliberately selected the remote spots where Rahr did his research, specifically because the spots were so difficult to locate, which was almost a guarantee that the poaching there would go undetected.

Unless you knew exactly where to find them. Was that why Rahr had jumped all over me in our phone call? Did he think I was directing poachers to his sites?

“Luce,” I said, getting more excited as other pieces of information now made sense to me, “someone was cutting at his study sites, and Rahr knew it. That’s why he spiked the trees—he was trying to scare off the poacher. He didn’t know who was doing it, but he suspected it was someone he had trusted. He said as much when he yelled at me on the phone that someone who was supposed to be on his side was sabotaging him.”

“Someone on his side?” She shook her head. “That’s a cast of thousands, Bobby. Colleagues at the university, S.O.B. members, the Minnesota birding community, anyone who’d gone on his owl tours. That’s not exactly a small bunch of suspects.”

I had to agree, but I doubted that many of them had logging connections, because that was what it would take to pull off this poaching. We needed to make two lists, I decided: who had logging connections and who knew the location of the sites. Without hardly thinking, I could name one person for the top of both lists: Thompson.

On the heels of that name, I realized I knew another: Montgomery.

And another: Alice.

Alice had said she’d been on a first-name basis with the logging industry people who’d lobbied Rahr. Could she have inadvertently—or not—leaked the site locations to someone looking for a lucrative, albeit illegal, sideline? Was that the person to whom Rahr caught her passing his research data, and not to Stan as I had assumed?

Ouch. There was that donkey thing again.

I tried to think of a way I might be able to whittle down the list of possible people who had not only access to the sites, but who had actually visited them in the last few months. I could only think of one way.

“I sure hope he’s home,” I said under my breath.

“Who?” Luce asked.

“It’s time to call in the cavalry,” I told her. “We’re going to Crazy Eddie’s place.”

We followed the county road west out of Two Harbors and wound up and down for about twenty-five miles. I made a right turn onto a dirt track and stopped the car in front of a rickety wire and post gate. I honked the horn twice, then tapped it three short blasts, then two more long ones.

“
Only Norwegians past this point,
” Luce read off the enormous hand-lettered sign attached to the gate. “
Others will be shot. Have a nice day
.
What is this, reclusive Scandinavian militiaman meets Minnesota nice?”

“This,” I said, “is Crazy Eddie’s place. He likes his privacy. He’ll be out in a minute. You’ll see.”

Sure enough, a couple minutes later Eddie came rolling up to the other side of the gate on what looked like a brand-new ATV. Even though he was driving slowly, every time he hit a bump in the track, the woolly ear flaps on his winter cap jumped, looking for all the world like little wings getting ready to take off. He was concentrating so hard on watching the track, I was afraid he was going to drive right through the gate, instead of opening it in a more conventional way. His long white beard drifted down his chest, and his cheeks were rosy with the cold. He was wearing an open down vest over his trademark flannel shirt, his red suspenders stretched across his rather expansive belly. At the last minute, he made a sharp turn and braked next to the gate. He flashed me a big grin and waved, then leaned over and unlatched the gate to slide it open with one hand while he had the ATV in reverse. I drove through far enough so he could close it behind us, and then I turned off the engine.