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leotard as the Bonecrusher. Besides, he’d have to hold a spear or a sword to pose for a romance novel cover, and knowing Mr. Lenzen, he’d probably insist on holding a detention pass.
    “You know who the Crusher is?” I asked, stunned. “You scum. You sat right next to me at the back-to-school meeting and listened to me and Alan guess all day long, and you didn’t tell us?”
    He held up his right hand. “I’m sworn to protect and defend, remember?”
    “Protect what? A celebrity’s identity? You don’t think a professional wrestler can protect or defend himself? Hello, Stud, the guy probably outweighs you by sixty pounds of muscle.”
    A mental picture of Boo Metternick, Savage High School’s new physics teacher and my personal pick for the mysterious Bonecrusher, popped into my head. He had to have at least a half-foot of height over Rick and a good sixty pounds, all of it hard muscle. I knew if I were in the market for a bodyguard, I’d go with Boo long before I’d choose Rick.
    Then again, I could be wrong.
    Alan was convinced that Paul Brand, our new art teacher, was the former Bonecrusher. Slim and quiet, Paul didn’t interact much with the other teachers, so no one knew much about him yet, except that he had been an especially talented hockey player in college. Rumor had it that he had actually played a year or two in the National Hockey League, but quit the ice after getting his nose repeatedly broken. Alan’s theory was that Paul put his quick reflexes and lean muscles to work as the Bonecrusher and kept himself masked so his old teammates couldn’t recognize him and razz him about defecting to professional wrestling.
    Alan was so sure of his theory, he bet me ten dollars that Paul was the Bonecrusher. Given that the remaining five new staff members were either women or men who were too old to be the former wrestler, I’d taken his wager, fairly confident that I had the winner in Boo.
    The idea that Rick had known all along, but kept his mouth shut, was not making him my favorite school police officer at the moment.
    He held up his hands in defense.
    “Truth be told, I didn’t know at the faculty meeting,” he confessed. “It was only my superior powers of detection that revealed it to me after that point in time.”
    Officer Kurt gagged on his coffee.
    I rolled my eyes.
    “All right, all right,” Rick surrendered. “I overheard Lenzen on the phone with one of his Missota Conference buddies. They were talking about the high schools hosting wrestling tournaments in the next year, and he let it slip that the Crusher was teaching at Savage.”
    I gave Rick an expectant look. “And?”
    “And what?” He gave me his best imitation of innocence.
    I briefly wondered if Officer Kurt would slap the cuffs on me for assaulting a policeman if I smacked Rick up along the side his head. Kurt did have a stun gun with him, after all.
    Now there was an idea. Maybe he’d let me borrow it to use on Rick.
    “And the real Crusher is …” I led, waiting for Rick to follow.
    “My lips are sealed,” he said, miming zipping his lips shut and tossing away the key.
    “For crying out loud,” I groaned.
    “Although,” he said, “I might be persuaded to share that bit of information with you in return for your assistance in finding a certain bird—a Ferruginous Hawk, to be exact—out in Stevens County this Thursday. Since it’ll be Fall Break at the high school, we’ve got the day off, and I figured this would be my best chance to get one for my life list, especially since there have been almost daily postings of people seeing it out there in the last week. What do you say?”
    I’d say that it takes a birder to know exactly how to bait another birder, and Rick knew that a Ferruginous Hawk was just about the biggest piece of bait he could offer me this time of the year.
    After all, I’d been following those postings as avidly as he had.
    Especially since I’d never gotten one of the big hawks on my