“I have to thank you for this,” Sir Gideon Parrot said as we stepped ashore on Cracker Island. “We have nothing comparable in Britain, except perhaps the Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland. But the weather there is generally abominable.”
“I think it can be pretty bad here too, in the winter month,” I said. But this August day was beautiful, with a clear sky showing only the occasional vapor trails of high-flying jets bound across the pacific.
We were greeted at the Cracker Island dock by Seb Wrankler, a fiftyish man with a gray beard who walked with a little limp and was the company’s caretaker on the island. “Hello there,” he said, shaking our hands. This your first visit to Cracker Island?”
I explained that I’d been there previously but hadn’t really had a chance to look around. “We’re looking forward to a week of peace and quiet.”
“Well, you might not get much of that,” Wrankler said. “Police boats been around a lot.”
“How come?”
“Been some killings on the various islands. Bad for business.”
“What sort of killings?” Gideon asked. I could see his curiosity was
aroused.
“Madman, most likely. But you got nothing to worry about here, long as you don’t go roaming about alone after dark.”
“When did all this start?” I asked him. A suspicion was beginning to take shape in the back of my mind.
“Well, the first killing was around the end of June, but it didn’t cause much of a stir. They thought it might have been done by a big bird of some sort.” As he talked, Wrankler picked up our bags and started along the path to the guest cottage.
“A bird?” Gideon was fully piqued now. “How is that possible?”
“The victim was a young man who’d obviously been drinking too
much and had fallen asleep on one of the small beaches. There were no footprints but his own leading to the spot. They thought a buzzard might have attacked him, believing he was dead.”
“Are there buzzards in these parts?” I asked.
“Oh, we get some turkey vultures up this way in the summer, though not usually over the water. Could have been some big gulls for that matter. The face and head were pretty badly cut up.”
“But what actually lulled him?” Throat was cut.”
“By a bird?”
“Well, stranger things have happened. And as I said, this was only the first of the killings.”
The guest cottage was nicely decorated with watercolor paintings of the area. There were two big beds, along with a writing desk, a bathroom, and plenty of closet space. All the comforts of home, and not a mention of the corporation that was paying for everything.
“After you get settled in, come over to the main lodge,” Seb Wrankler said. “I’ll whip you up something to eat.”
“He seems friendly enough,” I remarked after Gideon and I were alone.
Gideon sniffed. “He’d never replace an English butler, but I suppose he’ll do. We’ll know better after we sample his food.”
As I unpacked and hung my things in the closet I said, “You know something, Gideon, I’ll bet they invited us to spend a week up here so you could investigate these local murders. It wouldn’t be very good for the corporate reputation to have someone killed while vacationing here. They couldn’t hire an official detective and run counter to the police investigation, but they could invite the two of us up here in hopes you could help.”
“I doubt if my fame has spread this far,” Gideon said, though he well knew that his recent successes had been widely reported in the press. An hour later, as the sun was dropping low in the western sky, we strolled over to the main lodge. There was a large room with a mixed decor—everything from moose heads to model planes—and scattered tables that could be grouped for dinners and meetings. Wrankler was in the kitchen when we entered and he called out, “Make yourselves comfortable. I’m just getting supper.”
Over plates of tastily prepared salmon from local waters, I asked Wrankler for more information about the local killings. “What happened after the first one?”
“Well, it all died down in a couple of weeks, as those things will. But then around the middle of July a young woman sunbather was killed in the same manner, just before dark. She was camping with her husband at one of the state parks—there are several on these islands—and suddenly he heard her screams from the beach area. He ran there and found her face cut up and her throat cut, just like the first one. There was no one else in sight and no other footprint but the victim’s own.”
“Did he see any birds?”
“Oh, they asked him that. There were a few gulls and some boats, but nothing close by. They talked to some bird expert at the university, you know, and he said it would have to be a bird with a very strong, sharp beak—like a parrot, I guess. But I suppose you know
all about them, Mr. Parrot.”
Gideon bristled, as he always did when his name was pronounced that way. “The t is silent, the accent is on the o.”
“That sounds French. I thought you were English.”
“William the Conqueror was both,” Gideon pointed out, bringing a puzzled frown and silence from Wrankler.
“How many killings have there been so far?” I asked.
“Three. The last one was two weeks ago, on one of the Canadian islands about ten miles from here. Same thing. A man alone on the beach, this time at night again, attacked and killed. No witnesses, no footprints but the man’s. The Canadian police have been working with our people ever since, but they’ve turned up no leads.”
“What were the names of the victims?” Gideon asked. “Is that important?” I wanted to know.
“It could be. There was a famous serial murder in Britain some time back in which the killer followed the letters of the alphabet— A, B, C.”
SebWrankler went into his little office and returned with a bunch of newspaper clippings. I flipped quickly through them, calling out the names and other information. “First victim was Ross Farley, age 24, of Seattle. That was on June 28th. Then on July 14th, Mari Quinn, 29, of Portland, Oregon. And on July 25th, Pierre King, age 47, of Vancouver, Canada.”
“No obvious connections there,” Gideon admitted. “And the dates don’t correspond to the full moon or anything else I can think of.” He went back to his dinner.
This salmon is awfully good,” I said, finishing the last of it. “You catch it yourself?”
Wrankler nodded. I go out in the boat, catch what I can. The corporation is generous with money, but every little bit helps.”
“It must get lonely here.”
“No. Most weeks someone’s around. And I can always go over to one of the other islands.”
We were cleaning up after dinner, talking about plans for the following day, which were to include a boat tour around the islands, when we heard a pounding on the door. Seb rose to answer it, looking concerned.
A woman stumbled in. She was dressed in jeans and a faded blouse. “Hel—help me,” she stammered. “My husband’s been killed!” I was on my feet at once. “What happened?” She was dazed with shock, barely able to speak. “Over on Cabot Island—”
“That’s the next one,” Seb told us.
“Something killed him on the shore. Just like those others!”
“You’ve got to show us where,” Seb Wrankler said, taking her by
the arms. “Did you call the police? The Coast Guard patrol?”
She shook her head. “No telephone or radio. We’re staying at a friend’s cottage and the phone is disconnected.”
“Let’s start across in my boat,” Wrankler said. “I’ll radio the Coast Guard on the way.”
It was dark now and a breeze had come up over the water. We climbed aboard Wrankler’s cabin cruiser and started across about a mile of open water, leaving the woman’s little outboard beached on our shore. She was regaining her composure and told us her name was Maeva Armstrong. Her husband Frank, a Seattle engineer, had brough
t her along for a few days of fishing and camping. He’d gone out after supper to relax on the narrow strip of beach and when he didn’t return, she went looking for him and found him dead.
Even in the darkness we had no trouble locating the body. After finding him dead, Maeva Armstrong had got a flare from the tent and lit it, hoping to attract help. When none came, she’d taken the boat across the water to Cracker Island. But the flare still sputtered and burned next to the body, bathing it in a bright orange glow.
Wrankler maneuvered his craft into the shallow water near the flare and tossed an anchor to the shore. We waded the last few feet through the cool shallow water.
Frank Armstrong lay on his back by the flare, his face and throat cut by some sharp instrument. I tried to imagine a bird’s claws or beak doing such damage. It seemed possible but highly unlikely. Wrankler had radioed for help on the way across, and we saw the lights of the Coast Guard craft already turning in toward shore.
“Are these your footprints?” Gideon asked the woman.
She nodded, turning away from the body. The only prints were those of the dead man, and then the single track of her sandals coming up to the body, pausing, and running over to where the boat had been beached. “The killer certainly didn’t come by foot,” I said, stating the obvious.
Gideon bent to pick up something from the sand. This was by his hand,” he said, holding up a little card not much larger than a business card. On it were printed the words “The Flying Friend.” A jagged line of blue ink had been drawn through the “r” in “Friend”, so that the card now read “The Flying Fiend”.
It was one of the Coast Guardsmen who immediately identified the strange calling card. “The Flying Friend. That’s the Reverend Horace Black, an ordained minister who travels around the islands in a helicopter. He’s forever giving away Bibles with this calling card stuck in them.”
Gideon Parrot grunted and continued studying the card. “Was anything like this found with the other bodies?”
The Coast Guardsmen shook their heads. No one knew anything about it. “You might talk to Sergeant Monticello,” Wrankler suggested. “He’s coordinating the investigation for the various jurisdictions involved.”
I could see that Gideon was hooked. Whether by intention or not, the corporation had invited the very person most likely to get to the bottom of these killings. In the morning, all thoughts of a leisurely week in the sun put aside for the moment, Gideon and I found ourselves in the office of Sergeant Monticello of the Bellingham police. He was a deep-voiced man with a barrel chest and big hands. He kept moving a glass paperweight around his desk nervously as he spoke.
“You realize only the first of the killings—that of Ross Farley— took place in my jurisdiction,” he told us. “The county lines and national boundaries are a bit confusing out there among the islands, so for the time being I’m coordinating everything. If these killings keep up, though, somebody with higher rank will probably get the assignment. That’s the way it usually goes.” His flat voice carried just a trace of bitterness toward the system.
I explained how we’d happened on the body of the latest victim the previous evening, and described the card Gideon had found near the victim’s hand. Sergeant Monticello nodded, picking up a typed report from his desk. “It was all here waiting for me this morning. This is the first instance where a card or signature of any sort has been left on the scene. It could mean our killer is getting more sure of himself, or a little crazier. In either case it means more murders to come. There’d be no point in leaving that card if this was to be the last of the killings.”
“Do you know anything about the Reverend Horace Black?” Gideon asked.
“Oh, he’s a bit of a kook, flying around in his helicopter, but he’s certainly no murderer. Everyone in these parts knows him.”
“I’d like to meet him,” Gideon said. “Ask a few questions.”
Sergeant Monticello sighed. “I know you’ve got quite a reputation in London and New York, Sir Gideon, but you might be out of your territory a bit here. These aren’t any big-city killings, and you can’t use big-city techniques to go after the murderer.”
“I could hardly be accused of using big-city techniques,” Gideon answered with a slight smile. “I merely want to ask the man a few questions. He may be above suspicion as a mass murderer, but the fact remains he possesses a helicopter—and we’re looking for a killer who seems to drop out of the skies.”
Monticello dismissed us with a wave of his hand. “Go. Talk to him if you want. Come back and see me when you’ve got the murderer.”
Horace Black was not a hard man to find. We learned that his church, a vaguely defined Protestant denomination, was located on the largest of the area’s islands, at a place called Oak Harbor. It was connected to the mainland by a bridge, and when we arrived there by rented car we saw the helicopter just settling down for a landing behind the church itself.
Gideon Parrot got out of the car and strode forward like some official greeter, welcoming Black back to his own church. The minister, wearing aviator’s goggles more suited to a World War I biplane, looked very little like a man of God, but he accepted Gideon’s welcome with good humor. “All are welcome at my church,” he said, smoothing down his long sandy hair. He was younger than I’d expected, probably still in his early thirties, with a thin mustache that heightened the sense of someone from a past era.
We followed him inside where he quickly picked two books from a shelf and handed them to us. They were Bibles bound in imitation leather and probably costing no more than a couple of dollars apiece— the sort one found in hotel-room drawers. Inside the front cover of each was a printed card reading “The Flying Friend”.
“Now what can I do for you?” Horace Black asked, sitting behind a desk piled high with unopened mail and assorted literature. “Interested in our Bible class?”
“We came about the murders,” Gideon responded. I’m investigating them on an unofficial basis.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve already been in touch with Sergeant Monticello about it. I understand one of my cards was found by the latest victim.”
“That’s correct. The word friend had been changed to—”
“Fiend. The killer is not without humor, despite his godless depravity. Of course I leave the cards everywhere on these islands. It’s like my parish, in a sense.”
“Were you recently on Cabot Island?” Gideon asked. “Yes, I’m sure I was.”
“The victim’s wife was not familiar with you.”
“Well, these summer people come and go. I may have visited the island’s previous residents and left a Bible for them.”
Gideon seemed to study the man for a moment and then said, “Of course there remains the possibility that the killer didn’t leave that calling card, that the dying man struck out the letter r himself to indicate his killer.”
“You are accusing me of murder?” The thought seemed to amuse the minister.
“Not at all. Just examining the possibilities.”
“Sergeant Monticello already examined the same possibilities. He tells me the dead man had no pen or pencil on him. He could not have altered that card before he died.”
“Then I guess I’ve been wasting your time,” Gideon admitted. “Not at all.” Black was gracious now. “Look, I have to fly over to
Glover Island. Come along with me, you two, and I’ll show you a view of these islands you’ll never see from the ground.”
It was an offer we couldn’t resist. We followed him out to the cabin of his helicopter and climbed inside. Though there were four seats we seemed a bit cramped, and when Black took off straight up, I lurched into Gideon, thrown off balance as in a suddenly rising elevator that stops and then starts again.
It was nearly noon, and the sun bathed the entire area in a soft unreal glow. The waters of the straits were unusually calm, and their mirrored surface resembled the glass in some child’s diorama from this far up. Horace Black talked without stopping, p
ointing out and naming the various islands as we passed over them. He showed us the scenes of each of the four killings, swooping low over the rocky beaches to pinpoint these and other spots of interest.
We settled down on Glover Island and watched while he delivered a carton of Bibles to a colony of summer cottages. Then we were off and flying again, “We keep hearing there could be oil under these waters,” Black told us as we glided in low over the straits. “But I guess you hear that all up and down the west coast these days. Be a shame to ruin all this beauty with a bunch of oil rigs.” He turned to look at Gideon. “That’s something I could kill for, to keep God’s land as he intended.”
“I doubt if our Flying Fiend has quite such noble motives.”
“Of course there’s always drugs.”
I saw Gideon perk up. “Drugs?”
“Sure. A lot of it comes in from Canada this way. Cocaine, heroin, pot—you name it. I see it all the time when I work with younger people.”
“Could the killings be drug-related?”
“None of the victims have been regular island residents. And you read in the papers what goes on every day in Miami. Any time there’s a rash of killings along the fringes of the country you have to consider the possibility of drug traffic. I told that to Monticello.”
“What did he say?”
“Just that he’s looking into all possibilities.”
We came in over Black’s church and dropped gently onto his landing field. It had been a pleasant scenic flight, even if it hadn’t gained us any new facts about the murders. We said goodbye to the Reverend Horace Black and drove back to the mainland.
“What do you think about his narcotics theory?” I asked Gideon.
“I think that a hollowed-out Bible would be a perfect way to deliver drugs without anybody noticing.”
We went back to the corporation’s island and tried to relax. There were no clues to the Flying Fiend except the card left with the latest victim, and that seemed to be a dead end at the moment. Seb Wrankler had one of the minister’s Bibles in the main lodge, but it certainly wasn’t hollowed-out.
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