The Kiskadee of Death (3 page)

A quick look was all I needed to make the positive ID, the bird's dark green plumage making the kingfisher almost invisible among the foliage at the edge of the lake.

“Yup, that's it,” I confirmed.

The bird was about two-thirds the size of the more familiar Belted Kingfisher, but like its relative, the Green Kingfisher liked to perch while hunting for food in ponds and streams. Not only that, but the bird was generally found only in the southern half of Texas and southeast Arizona, making it the newest addition to my life list of birds.

It was another score for our trip. Texas was being very good to me.

“You see it?” I asked Luce, watching the bird through my binoculars.

“Got it,” she answered.

“What? What else are you seeing?” asked the woman in the little group we'd joined. She was at least a foot shorter than I was and had to crane her neck back to see me from under her straw hat's wide brim.

I pointed across the water.

“A Green Kingfisher,” I said. “Look left of the Yellow-crowned Night Heron that just picked something out of the water, then up about six feet to that big fork in the tree. The Green Kingfisher is another couple feet left of that, at about ten o'clock.”

A moment of silence engulfed the group of birders while they all trained their binoculars on the spot.

“There it is,” said another of the men. He, too, had a straw hat on, I noticed, but it sat atop white hair reaching the collar of his colorful shirt. “See it?”

The two other birders each affirmed the sighting.

“Thank you,” said the woman in the straw hat. “That bird blends in too well for my old eyes to pick out. I never would have seen it on my own. Thank goodness you happened along.”

“No problem,” I replied, continuing carefully to scan the opposite shore through my binoculars. I wondered if there were any other park specials hiding along the shore.

“Is that an overturned canoe?” Luce asked. She was apparently looking at the same thing I'd just focused on. “And… an alligator sunning next to it?

“Correct on both counts, my dear,” I said. “I guess that definitively answers your earlier question, too.”

The alligator opened his reptilian eyes and I got a good look at the beast's broad head. I continued to study the canoe behind him, wondering where it had come from on the little lake and why someone had left it overturned. A second later, I lowered my binos and used the corner of my shirt to wipe the lenses clean before raising the glasses back to my eyes.

Crap.

I wasn't seeing a smudge on my lens, after all.

That really was a man's hiking boot sticking out from beneath the end of the canoe.

A boot attached to a leg.

“I'm on vacation,” I muttered. “I don't have time for this.”

I laid my binoculars on my chest and turned to the group of birders beside me.

“Does anybody have cell phone reception out here? Because we need to call the park office and the police,” I announced. “I think we've just added a dead man to today's park list.”

 

 

Chapter Two

T
hank you for your calm reaction when you realized you'd stumbled on another body,” Luce said to me an hour or so later as we sat down at a table on the park's observation deck.

“I live to serve,” I responded half-heartedly, “though acting as a dead person locator service is not one of my preferred job descriptions. Especially when I'm supposed to be on vacation,” I added pointedly.

Luce patted my hand and continued.

“You did good, Bobby,” she reassured me. “Given the ages of those birders, we may have had a couple of heart attacks on our hands if, instead, you'd yelled ‘Call the cops! That's a dead body!' I mean, you and I have been down this road before, adding a dead man to our birding lists, but for these folks,” she nodded at the elderly birders on the deck, “I'm sure it's a novel experience.”

“I sure hope so,” I muttered. “I'd hate to have to tell the next generation of birders that they should consider taking courses in forensics before they venture out into the field.”

Although that was exactly what I'd started to think might be a good idea for myself.

With my body count now up to eight over the last few years, I was beginning to harbor the suspicion that maybe I was in the wrong business with my job as a high school counselor. The idea of making a career out of searching for bodies was not one that filled me with excitement, though I had to admit, I could generally depend on finding more avian rarities when I was trying to help the police solve a murder case than I ever could manage from my tiny broom closet of an office at Savage High School. If I had my career planning to do over again, I'd for sure look at double majoring in forensics and natural history.

Today's body, we learned, belonged to Birdy Johnson, Buzz Davis's birding buddy. After our 911 call to the local authorities, a flock of park personnel had descended on us at Alligator Lake, quickly followed by a swarm of the Weslaco city police and a squad of emergency vehicles. One of the park maintenance men had put a small boat in the water and ferried the police chief across the lake to the abandoned canoe. Upon their approach, the alligator slipped off into the water and sought a quieter shore for sunning, leaving them gator-less access to the scene.

Within minutes, the two men were back on our side of the lake with grim faces and an ID of the dead man.

“It's Birdy Johnson,” the police chief announced to the assembled group. “I need all you folks who found the body to follow me back to the observation deck to give statements while our forensics team processes the scene. The rest of you need to clear out and give my guys space to do their jobs.”

“What happened?” Rosalie, the volunteer naturalist we'd met on the deck, asked, tears brimming in her eyes and lips trembling. “I just saw him a few hours ago.”

The chief held up his hands and motioned for us all to move back from the edge of the pond. “I can't share anything at this point. I need everyone out of here and on the deck.”

 

I glanced around at what had grown into a small crowd of people in the aftermath of our unfortunate sighting.

Of the birders who'd been with us at Alligator Lake, the short woman with the straw hat and one of the men sat together at a table near the deck railing, quietly talking, while the remaining two fellows from our original group were listening to the instructions the local chief was giving to a crew of his deputies. Several detectives were comparing notes. Rosalie sat in a chair surrounded by other park personnel, saying nothing and wiping her eyes with a crumpled ivory handkerchief, while standing nearby, the park superintendent spoke quietly into her cell phone.

“I wonder if they've located Buzz Davis yet,” I said. “As the last one to see his friend Birdy alive, I'm sure the chief and detectives will have plenty of questions for him.”

Luce took a drink from the bottle of water she'd set on the table between us.

“I think I heard one of the park people saying he was going to go look for Buzz on the other side of the levee straight south from here,” she said, wiping a line of perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I gathered it's a good spot for Sandpipers.”

“It is,” said one of the birders who'd just been hovering near the chief and deputies.

He was the white-haired birder we'd met at the lake. “I heard that you kids are visiting from Minnesota,” he said, extending his hand to shake mine. “I'm Schooner Benedict from Duluth.”

“I'm Bob White,” I replied, “and this is my wife, Luce. We live in Savage on the southwestern side of the Twin Cities. Nice to meet you.”

“I don't know that I'd call the circumstances ‘nice,' given that we've got a dead birder on our hands,” Schooner said, “but it's always good to see another Minnesotan down here. I'm a snow bird myself. A Winter Texan, we call it.”

“So I've heard,” I said. I glanced at his wildly flowered Hawaiian shirt and the beat-up straw hat that topped his snowy white hair.

Schooner laughed.

“I know. I look more like an escapee from a Caribbean cruise ship in this get-up, but I'm really a dyed-in-the-wool North Shore boy at heart. I grew up fishing Lake Superior and hiking along Hawk Ridge in Duluth before anyone called it Hawk Ridge. Heck, when I was six years old, the only people who even knew raptors were migrating along there were the local guys who used the hawks for target practice.”

He took off his hat and held it over his heart, his face apologetic.

“I'm ashamed to say I shot at those hawks a few times, too, when I was a kid,” he confessed. “What can I say? I was young and stupid. Appreciating the hawks and eagles and all the other birds came with maturity.”

“Ah, don't let him fool you,” a raspy male voice warned us.

The voice belonged to the man who had been sitting with the straw-hat woman at the table on the deck. He, too, had been in the group at Alligator Lake, I realized. Like the woman with the hat, he was short and round, but instead of straw, the hat on his head was a cloth ball cap with the White Sox baseball team logo on it.

“He's not nearly as mature as he should be, seeing how old he is,” the newcomer said. “This guy's a dinosaur.” He elbowed Schooner in the ribs. “I'm Paddy Mac. From the Irish side of Chicago.”

He likewise wore a Hawaiian shirt, but whereas Schooner's shirt was loose and long over a thin torso, Paddy Mac's barely buttoned over his big belly. Fortunately, before I blurted out an impromptu fashion assessment, the third birder, the one with the head bandana and gray ponytail, who'd also been with us at the lake for our gruesome discovery, appeared behind Schooner and Paddy Mac. He looped his arms over the first two birders' shoulders.

“These clowns bothering you?” Bandana Man asked, leaning in towards me. He was a head taller than Schooner and Paddy Mac, his leathered face crinkled up by his grin. “I'm Gunnar,” he said. “We're talking birds, aren't we?”

I had the unmistakable sensation that this must be what it felt like to have a trio of magpies corner you, especially when all three men immediately launched into an animated discussion without any prompting from me or Luce.

“Of course,” Schooner said. “What else would we be talking about?”

“A dead body, maybe?” Gunnar suggested. “I don't know about you, but that was never on my bird list. Was it on yours?”

Schooner shook his head. “No. Can't say that it was.”

“I ran across a Native American burial mound in North Carolina once when I was birding,” Paddy Mac announced. “No one knew it was there until I found it.”

“But you didn't see any actual bodies, did you?” Gunnar asked. “As in human remains?”

Paddy Mac gasped and melodramatically placed his hand at his throat.

“Ah, no,” he said, his Irish brogue thick and exaggerated. “That would have been awful, me boy. Though I know a fella who found a skeleton when he was birding in Alaska,” he said. “It was at the bottom of a ravine. He had to report it to the state patrol, but they said they couldn't get to it for a few days since it was such a long drive from their headquarters. They told the fella they doubted the skeleton would be going anywhere, anyway, so there was no rush in retrieving it.”

“You're kidding, right?” Bandana Man Gunnar said, giving Paddy Mac a suspicious glance.

“No, it's the truth,” Paddy insisted. “The birder found a skeleton, but he never found out how it got there.”

“Speaking of which, what do you think happened to Birdy?” Schooner asked Gunnar. “Drug-runners or illegals?”

“Could have been a heart attack, for all we know,” Gunnar answered. “It wouldn't be the first time one of us old birders kicked the bucket out in the field.”

“Canoe,” Schooner corrected him. “He kicked the canoe. It was lying on top of him. He must have tripped getting out of it and it flipped over on top of him. That's the only reason the gator didn't have him for lunch. Ooh,” he cringed, “that would have been ugly.”

“Would you fellows keep it down?”

I looked behind me to find the chief standing a foot or two away. I remembered from our brief introduction earlier when Luce and I gave him our statement about sighting the corpse that his name was Pacheco—Chief Juan Pacheco of the City of Weslaco, Texas. Like a large part of the population in the area, the chief was Hispanic, and I guessed he was in his mid-thirties, which put him in the minority age bracket with me and Luce, compared to the crowd of over-sixty-five-year-olds surrounding us on the park's deck.

Luce's earlier comment that we might have had a heart attack on our hands came back to me. As a high school counselor, I've taken training with our school nurse to keep my CPR certification up to date. I'd never considered that those same skills might be a pre-requisite for birding with Winter Texans; now that I thought about the age of most of the birders we'd met since arriving in the Rio Grande Valley, I could see where some emergency medical skills might come in handy.

Not that birding with older folks was anything unusual for me. I've been birding since I could hold a bird guide in my hand, which meant that I was typically the youngest birder by at least forty years in every group until I hit my own twenties.

In the last decade or so, however, I've noticed a marked increase in the numbers of younger people getting involved with birding, which is great for birds and birders everywhere, since appreciation of our natural spaces and species benefits everyone. At the same time, the ranks of birders have been expanding with the addition of new retirees as the baby boomers invest their interest (and money) in new hobbies. And since southern Texas was a magnet for retirees, it seemed like most of the folks Luce and I had met birding since we'd arrived were well into their senior discount days.

Gee, maybe there was a new occupational niche waiting for me here along the Rio Grande—I could lead birding trips with CPR available as an add-on option.

Then again… maybe not.

You know what they say—careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. I had to admit that, at this point in my life, counseling teenage drama queens still sounded pretty good to me compared to holding unexpected CPR sessions with senior birders.

Meanwhile, the chief had moved closer to our little clutch of conversation. He planted his feet apart and took a classic policeman's stance, folding impressively muscled arms over his uniformed chest.

It occurred to me that if a wrestling match had developed between him and the alligator, I would have bet on the chief winning. And if for some reason, he hadn't been able to throw the gator with a chokehold, the lawman did carry a mean-looking gun on his hip.

I hadn't noticed one on the alligator's.

“Rosalie is pretty upset as it is, gentlemen,” Chief Pacheco told the three birders, nodding in the crying woman's direction. “In case you're unaware,” he told them, “Rosalie and the deceased were very close, so I'd ask you to respect her grief and keep your comments to yourself.”

“Sorry,” Gunnar said.

“I wasn't thinking,” Schooner chimed in.

Paddy Mac nodded. “We know Rosalie. I can't imagine how awful this is for her.”

“And,” Pacheco continued, “if you fellows want to share your theories with me, I'd be happy to have you come down to the station, and we can talk about it there, if need be. But I'm going to wait until I have the coroner's report before I start looking for suspects or speculating about what might have happened to Birdy. As far as I'm concerned, there was a very sad accident here this morning. Until my guy tells me different, I'm not jumping to any conclusions, and you guys shouldn't either. This is my department's business. Not yours.”

“You're absolutely right,” Paddy Mac said, nodding in agreement, his raspy tone turning contrite. “We beg your pardon, Chief. Our behavior has been inexcusable.”

I caught Schooner and Gunnar exchanging a glance. It struck me that they were surprised at Paddy Mac's sudden change of demeanor, but neither man said a word about it. Instead, they shrugged, mumbled a few more quiet apologies to Pacheco, and then turned away to rejoin their birding comrades near the deck's railing.

That left Luce and me alone with the chief.

“You're free to leave,” Chief Pacheco told us. “Thanks for your cooperation. And I'm sorry this happened on your vacation here. We've got a great destination for birdwatchers, and we're always happy to show off our Valley to visitors.”

A commotion on the far side of the deck interrupted our conversation, and the three of us turned in the direction of the raised voices.

“What do you mean, Birdy's dead?”

I zeroed in on the tall fellow who was angrily stamping his big antler-topped walking stick on the deck, his bushy white eyebrows raised in alarm.