The Boreal Owl Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

him Saturday night, Detective,” I assured him one more time. “But now I have this bad feeling I might know who he is … or was.”
    “Try me.”
    “Dr. Andrew Rahr.”
    There was a moment of silence. “Okay. You win a cigar. Now you tell me how you knew the right answer.”
    The sick feeling I’d noticed earlier in my stomach was gone, but now my heart was slowly edging down inside my chest.
    It was Rahr.
    “I got to thinking about who would be up there this time of year,” I explained to Knott. “I realized that Dr. Rahr was one of the few people who would know that particular location and have a reason to be there.”
    An image of the frozen body I’d stumbled over popped into my head. Knowing now that it was Rahr somehow didn’t make sense in that picture, though. Rahr was a seasoned professional researcher. He’d been in the Minnesota woods in March for years. He couldn’t possibly have misjudged the weather that badly.
    Could he?
    Or did he? Deliberately?
    If that were the case—if Rahr had committed suicide—then Stan was simply taking advantage of a tragic death to jerk my chain with a threatening note, to try to scare me off from finding the Boreal before he did. And if that was the real story behind the note, then Scary Stan was even lower than the rumor mill supposed.
    “White, are you still there?” Knott’s voice floated out of the phone’s receiver.
    “Yeah,” I said, realizing I’d zoned him out while I had zeroed in on other thoughts. “Just thinking.”
    “Me, too. The initial exam at the scene said cause of death was exposure, but I’m thinking that’s pretty odd, seeing as the man had been working up there for years in the cold. I’m thinking there’s something else going on here.”
    I was thinking that, too. But, unfortunately, suicidal people don’t always leave good-bye letters. And if it wasn’t suicide … I really didn’t want to think about that at all.
    I tried, instead, to focus on Knott. Though I’d just met the man the day before, I could clearly picture him, his lanky frame sprawled in his squeaky office chair. He’d be tilted back right now, staring at the ceiling thoughtfully. Mike and I had spent a couple of hours with him, most of it repeating our movements on Saturday night from the time we left our hotel after dinner to the time the police arrived at the gas station phone booth from which we’d called for help. The fluorescent overhead lights in his little office had shone constantly on his shock of jet-black hair which seemed to stick out at all angles from his head.
    And I thought I had bad hair days.
    “Rahr was obviously well-acquainted with conditions up there, seeing as he’d been doing field research for years,” Knott was saying, echoing my own thoughts. “It’s not like he was some neophyte in the woods. So why would he have been so inadequately dressed? Suicide? I don’t think so. Granted, we all go a little crazy in the winter around here, but I can think of a lot quicker ways to kill myself than freezing to death on purpose,” Knott speculated.
    Instantly, I felt some of the pressure building in my chest ease up. If Knott had discarded the suicide option, that was good enough for me.
    Of course, that left an alternative that was even less appealing.
    If it wasn’t an accident or suicide, then there was someone else involved in Rahr’s death.
    Someone who was up in the woods last weekend.
    “How well do you know that forest, White?”
    It took me another split-second to catch Knott’s train of thought. In the same instant, I realized I didn’t want to go there. In fact, I realized I’d really rather not be talking about this at all.
    I’d rather be watching for those space aliens in New Mexico.
    I’d rather have Kim back in my office, spitting drama.
    I’d even rather be in the lunchroom on duty assignment.
    Well, maybe not that.
    Knott, however, was well on his way to this particular conversational destination. In fact, he was