Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Suspense,
Mystery & Detective,
Crime,
Mystery,
Detective and Mystery Stories,
Murder,
Minnesota,
Bird Watching,
Birding,
White; Bob (Fictitious Character),
Superior National Forest (Minn.)
already pulling into the station and climbing out of the engine.
“I’m thinking murder, White. You’re not a suspect, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
I was wondering. Maybe he could hear my heart pounding against my ribcage. A murder suspect! That was something else we never covered in graduate school.
Knott paused, and I could sense that he was trying to decide if he should say anything more. He decided to go for it.
“We can tell that Rahr had been dead for about thirty-six hours by the time you found him. We know you and your friend Mike Smith were both at work. We checked. As for your fellow birder Mr. Stan Miller, he seems to be a little slippery so far to verify his whereabouts at the time of Rahr’s death. We’re having some trouble tracking him down, actually. It appears he must be self-employed. But beyond that, I don’t have any leads. Nor do I have any experience with, or links to, this owl stuff, so whatever you can tell me would be helpful. Might give me a head start on some places to look. What do you say?”
At the moment, I was saying nothing. I was still thinking about what great fodder it would be for Mr. Lenzen at the next faculty meeting if he found out I’d been a murder suspect—even a very short-lived one.
On second thought, could I rephrase that?
I did, after all, have a death threat hanging over my head. One which, at this point, I couldn’t be completely sure was entirely fake.
So, Stan was self-employed. Doing what? Or did I really want to know the answer to that?
What I did know was that I needed things to slow down. Maybe this was a lot more than a humble school counselor like me wanted to be involved with. God knew I had enough drama in my life every day thanks to Kim, Lindsay, and my other needy charges. For some reason, the idea of getting deep into a murder investigation was just not falling into place in my mind with dress code violations and catching kids sneaking a smoke.
Then again, I couldn’t ignore the birding family connection I felt to Rahr. I’d spent months pouring over his reports, making me feel like I almost knew him personally. Certainly, I could give Knott some insight into birding and general information about it—if I knew anything he wanted. It wasn’t like I was volunteering to track down a killer and go in with guns drawn.
Right?
And as for my rivalry with Scary Stan and his low-rent attempt to intimidate me with a melodramatic threat, well, I figured that was one less thing Knott needed to hear about right now. The detective had a murder case to solve. The least I could do was answer his questions about birding.
“Okay,” I said. “What can I tell you?”
Twenty minutes later, I hung up the phone. I’d told Knott what I knew about Rahr’s research and about how difficult it was to find the owls. I told him about birders and how we all kept lists: lists of birds we saw in the state, in individual counties, all over the country and even the world. I knew birders who kept lists of birds they sighted while doing other things: “birds I saw while brushing my teeth,” or “while I was riding a tractor,” or “while hiding from my in-laws.” I’d even heard one birder say she kept a list of birds she saw while having sex. I didn’t ask who was having the sex—she or the birds; I figured I’d already gotten way more information than I wanted. Some of this stuff I had told Knott in the woods on Sunday morning, explaining why Mike and I were there. Now, knowing who the dead man was, we’d gone over it again, trying to find leads for Knott to investigate.
Then, out of the blue, something Kim had said earlier flashed into my head—something about jealousy.
I remembered that Rahr had said something about sabotage in our short phone conversation back when I was plotting my Boreal strategy. I’d chalked it up to his having a bad day, but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe he really was paranoid, and for good reason. He