The Kiskadee of Death

by Jan Dunlap

  Eddie turned off his screens and toggled a few more switches.

  “We’re all creatures of habit, Bob,” he said. “It’s just that some habits are good and some are bad. For instance,” he said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together over his ample belly, “you have a habit of finding bodies when you go birding. That’s probably a bad habit. On the other hand, I can’t look at any kind of electronic gizmo without thinking of a way to improve it. That’s a good habit. I think,” he added. “Though my wife wasn’t too thrilled that time I tried to rewire her curling iron to heat it faster. I liked the really short haircut she had to get afterwards, though.”

  I looked at the blank screens on the console.

  “And people close to us get to know our habits,” I continued, thinking about Birdy’s ill-fated valentine attempt to give Rosalie a rarity she didn’t expect to find. His gesture of reconciliation had ended with his death.

  Wow. I knew making amends with a woman could be hard, but I didn’t know it could be murder. Something to keep in mind, I supposed.

  “Hold on,” I said, a detail from a conversation bubbling up from my memory. “Buzz and Birdy were at Estero Llano every Wednesday morning checking for species. Rosalie said so. Every birder in the MOB would know their routine, right?”

  Eddie nodded slowly. “I suppose so. The MOB seem a pretty tight crew. From what I’ve seen while I’ve been here, they’re always sharing bird sightings on their phones. It’s not like some birders I’ve known, who try to keep sightings of rare birds to themselves.”

  The idea of habit and routine began to dance around in my head in relation to Birdy’s murder. “So if he’d been out setting up the sensors on Wednesday mornings, a birder who’d seen him do that on a previous Wednesday morning would know when he could catch Birdy alone,” I theorized.

  Eddie moved his hands back to his console and sat upright again in his chair.

  “Give me a minute,” he said, a hint of excitement in his voice. “You just gave me an idea.”

  He proceeded to flip another section of switches and tapped on a different set of keys on the console. A wider screen lit up before him and I realized he was looking at the rear ends of a row of cars in a parking lot.

  “The parking lot is Estero Llano’s,” he explained. “I set up a tiny video camera system to monitor the cars that parked. That’s why I was there yesterday morning—I was fine-tuning it. Marci—she’s the park superintendent—asked me if I could help them gauge how many visitors weren’t paying the admission fee once they got to the park registration area, since their receipts seemed lower than their visitor count. Visitors are supposed to register their vehicles when they pay, so she wanted to know how many vehicles didn’t match up to paid registrations.”

  He hit one more key and the license plates came into clear focus.

  “This is the parking lot Wednesday morning,” he said. “Let’s see which of the MOB might have arrived early enough to commit a murder. The chief already checked all the security tapes for the park’s perimeter, and no one was trespassing into the park that morning, so the murderer must have walked right in the front entrance.”

  He started the recording at daybreak when the park opened, and stopped it every time someone arrived, so we could get a look at the face. We hit the jackpot about fifteen minutes after sunrise.

  “Birdy and Buzz,” Crazy Eddie said as the two men climbed out of the same green Porsche I’d seen in Buzz’s garage. A moment later, I picked out Schooner and Gunnar getting out of a SUV with a Minnesota license plate, followed by Paddy Mac and his wife Poppy exiting a sedan, a small knapsack in her hand.

  “No surprises there,” I said. “Poppy, Paddy, Schooner and Gunnar were with me when I spotted the body, and I met Buzz on the park deck before I headed over to Alligator Lake, where he told us Birdy had gone.”

  Eddie continued to run the recording until I saw a classic Mustang roar into the lot and slide into a parking slot.

  “Slow down!” I said. “I think I’m going to know this one.”

  Eddie slowed the recording until a young man stepped from the car. He turned his head, scanning the parking lot and then the camera caught his face clearly.

  On the monitor, Mark Myers looked downright frantic.

  “It’s Mark,” I confirmed. “Buzz’s nephew. He was there yesterday morning.”

  I blew out a breath, unsure how I felt about the discovery, especially since I’d already dismissed the floral scrap that had led me to suspect Mark’s involvement in Birdy’s murder as a worthless clue. I looked again at the slow-moving image of Buzz’s nephew. “What was he doing there?”

  The truth was that I’d come to… well, not exactly like Mark… but at least feel some compassion for the kid after our birding walk. Sure, he had some pressing and very difficult personal issues to work through, but my gut told me he was a good kid. The possibility that our shared passion for birds could blind me to the true nature of a person was disturbing. Combined with my just-revealed inability to recognize my own wife’s need for routine, I was suddenly doubtful of what I’d always believed was one of my unique strengths: a hyper-sensitivity to others and the surroundings in which I found myself.

  It was one of the main reasons I loved birding so much: I prided myself on close attention to the little details that allowed me to identify one bird from another. That knowledge, that gift of acute observation, made me feel like I had a special connection to nature itself, almost as if nature waited patiently to reveal its mysteries to me. It was, I believed, what made me a good high school counselor, too—I was able to synthesize careful observation with knowledge and sensitivity to help my students find their way in the world, even on the occasions when the world wasn’t such a welcoming place for them to be.

  If I couldn’t trust my own abilities, my own gut, where did that leave me as a birder or counselor?

  Gutless?

  Or just tragically mistaken?

  “Well, whatever he was doing, he wasn’t killing Birdy,” Eddie said, breaking into my wallow of self-doubt. “Heck, he wasn’t there long enough to write down his license plate number, let alone get to Alligator Lake, commit a murder, and get back to the parking lot.”

  I focused on the screen, which showed Mark getting back into the Mustang within minutes after his arrival. His face looked angry. He pulled out of his parking space and zoomed out of the camera’s range, but not before I saw him thump the wheel of his Mustang in what looked like intense frustration.

  Mark hadn’t killed Birdy.

  My gut was right.

  Which meant that I was not, after all, gutless.

  Or even tragically mistaken, hopefully.

  I supposed it did mean, however, that I might have just a tiny inclination to overreact.

  Imagine that.

  The other thing I tried to imagine was what Mustang Mark was doing at Estero Llano for just those few minutes on Wednesday morning.

  Something had upset him.

  As in, really upset him.

  And then last night, Mark had been so drunk, he’d almost hit Luce in Buzz’s driveway before he announced to everyone there that, despite appearances, his uncle hated Birdy.

  For a moment, the wheels in my head spun crazily and landed on something I’d noticed last night.

  Buzz Davis had been exceptionally stoic about Birdy’s death, to the point that he was driving a lift truck around with citrus to help build a float.

  If I were grieving the death of a best friend, I don’t know that I could drive a toy truck across a carpet, let alone a lift truck that required precision and concentration.

  Mark’s accusation of his uncle came back to me: he said his uncle hated Birdy Johnson and that he was a two-faced liar.

  Why would Mark say that? Why would he think Buzz had hated his
long-time friend?

  And if it were true, could Buzz Davis not only be a popular ex-astronaut and a very rich man, but a man who had held a grudge for years until he could get away with murder?

  Payback, Mark said.

  A very drunk Mark who clearly took Birdy’s death very hard.

  And why was that? What kind of connection was there between Mark and Birdy?

  “Stick me with a fork,” I told Eddie. “I’m done. It seems like for every question your records can answer, they raise ten more. People who solve murders for a living must feel like they spend half their time on merry-go-rounds.”

  I supposed that someone could probably say the same of birders like me—we spin our wheels chasing birds all over the map, sometimes for years. But at least at the end of a birding chase, we get to add a bird to our life list.

  When you solve a murder, on the other hand, you find a killer, but it doesn’t bring anyone back to life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Given our experience the night before at the vulture roost, Eddie and I decided he’d bow out of joining Luce and me to watch the parrots flocking in Weslaco at sunset.

  “I’m going to get enough grief from my wife for one gunshot graze,” he explained. “No way I’m looking for two. Besides,” he said, “I promised Chief Pacheco I’d stay out of sight for forty-eight hours to give him time to investigate my shooting without having to worry about me landing back in someone’s crosshairs. I’ve got a room and a bodyguard here at the base till further notice, courtesy of the chief.”

  “Aha,” I said, “that must be the reason there’s a very grim young man with an Army-issued gun standing outside your office door here. By the way,” I confided in Eddie, “I don’t think he has much of a sense of humor. When I told him he could pat me down if necessary, but that I’m ticklish, he didn’t even crack a smile.”

  Eddie waved me out of his office. “Get out of here, birdbrain. Go get your wife and seek out some of your own kind.”

  I decided to take the scenic route back to McAllen from Weslaco, so I stayed off Highway 83 and wound through residential and commercial neighborhoods that took me from the Armory through the towns of Donna, Alamo, San Juan, and Pharr back to the Birds Nest. As I drove, I replayed in my head what I’d seen on Eddie’s surveillance recordings, and tried to glean from them whatever information I could that might shed some light on Birdy’s murder.

  The fact that we had visual evidence that Mark was not inside the park prior to Birdy’s murder eliminated him as a murder ­suspect, though I still wondered what had happened to make him so angry as he tore out of the parking lot.

  Why would he have been there at all, if he was gone again so quickly?

  I ran through a list of reasons I would drive somewhere specific, then turn around and leave within minutes.

  Maybe I had laundry to drop off or pick up. That would be a quick turn-around.

  Maybe I was supposed to meet someone, then realized I was at the wrong place, or had the wrong time. I’d be back in the car in no time.

  Maybe I wanted to surprise someone, but then learned they weren’t coming. No reason to stick around in that case.

  My mind continued to remix possibilities.

  Maybe I was going to surprise someone by showing up unexpectedly with someone else… kind of like the boy who shows up at Prom with a hot date after his girlfriend dumped him at the last minute to go with some other boy.

  But Mark was alone in the parking lot, and he wasn’t wearing a tux, so I scratched the hot date/revenge scenario from my list, although…

  What if Mark had planned to surprise someone who he knew would be in the parking lot… like his uncle Buzz and Birdy, who everyone knew came to the park on Wednesday mornings… but when he got there and saw they’d already arrived and gone into the park… he left?

  Why would he leave, and not try to find them? On the recording, Mark looked angry and frustrated, like he’d missed out on something.

  Missed out.

  Why did that ring a bell in my head?

  “You’re not the only one who missed out, Rosie.”

  Buzz and the Eared Grebe he’d spotted yesterday morning!

  When we met Buzz on the deck, he told Rosie he’d texted some birders he knew, but then the bird was gone before they arrived. He’d mentioned Cynnie Scott and Birdy… was Mark another birder that Buzz had tried to reach?

  If so, that would probably explain Mark’s roaring into the parking lot. Then, if he’d gotten the text the bird was gone before he even stepped into the park, maybe he’d be so frustrated at missing the rarity, he’d just turn around and leave.

  Like he did, leaving his uncle as the only birder to see the Eared Grebe.

  If Buzz really did see the grebe…

  Not that birders were a suspicious bunch as a whole, but the fact was, a lone birder making a sighting of a rarity could seem questionable under the best circumstances. If that birder had a rocky relationship with one of the birders who missed seeing the bird…

  Would Mark think his uncle lied about seeing the grebe?

  Mark accused Buzz of being a liar, and knowing from counseling experience how messy relationships could get when alcoholism was involved, I didn’t doubt Mark had a whole list of grievances against his uncle who was trying to help him get help. For all I knew, Mark made it a habit of comparing himself to his uncle, and every time he came up short, it only added fuel to the fire that was eating away at their relationship.

  They needed help. Both of them.

  But not from me.

  I was on vacation, or at least, that had been the plan.

  A birding vacation.

  Heck, I would have liked to see that Eared Grebe myself. It must have been a prize for Buzz, too, since he said he’d also called Cynnie Scott to come out and see it. That was a smart move, and I believed that it proved Buzz did, indeed, see the grebe, because he wouldn’t call a local legend to verify his sighting unless he really had the sighting.

  Although… every birder knew, too well unfortunately, that birds—especially rarities, it seemed—had minds of their own. Presuming that a particular bird would patiently wait for a second birder to arrive and confirm its identification was downright idiocy; fervently hoping it might wait around, or reappear later, was a much more reasonable approach. Assuring you could get that second confirmation was one of the best reasons to bird with a buddy, if you asked me.

  That, and having someone to commiserate with when you’d spent the day trying to track down a reported rarity and ended up instead with another empty tank of gas and a speeding ticket besides.

  I mean, I loved our state patrol and our outstate gas stations, but seeing less of both of them wouldn’t break my heart.

  So the fact that no one joined Buzz in seeing the Eared Grebe could beg the question, then: did Buzz really see the grebe, or was he trying to construct an alibi for himself during the time of Birdy’s murder? Once another birder arrived, it would be simple enough to tell him, or her, that the bird had just flown. It happened all the time.

  Without another birder to back him up with the bird sighting, Buzz had no alibi.

  He did, however, have a really big walking stick that looked like it could inflict some serious damage if you found yourself at the wrong end of it.

  Great. I was back to pinning a murder on Birdy’s best friend.

  On the upside, I may have hit on the explanation for Mark’s sudden arrival and departure in the parking lot at Estero Llano on the morning of Birdy’s murder. So why did I feel like I was still missing an important clue from Crazy Eddie’s recording?

  As I waited for the gate to slide open at the Birds Nest to allow me to drive onto the property, a Great Kiskadee landed on one of the bushes near the garage.

  It was not the one-eyed indivi
dual that seemed to keep turning up where we birded. I wondered if seeing the bird at Quinta Mazatlan had spooked me into considering it an omen, and that was the reason I’d spent much of the day fixated on Mark Myers as a suspect. Normally, I didn’t subscribe to superstitions and omens, and even though birds were famous for their associations with those things in folklore and legends, I tried not to judge birds by their literary reputations. I liked to see birds objectively for what they were—amazing creatures that shared my space whenever I was outside.

  And that sentiment brought me back to a consideration of the big space topic among the MOBsters: the SpaceX space port location outside Boca Chica Beach. Thanks to the chief, I knew what role Buzz had played in landing the project at Boca Chica, but I was still in the dark when it came to Birdy’s involvement. As an avionics engineer, he’d worked at NASA, according to Eddie, and I knew that the drone being tested for finding drug smugglers was his design; why Birdy had been hailed with Buzz in the photo and article about last year’s citrus parade was still a mystery.

  And whether or not it had anything to do with his death was likewise a big fat question mark for me.

  Face it, Bob, I told myself. You’re not going to figure this one out. And as long as you stay out of trouble for another forty-eight hours, you don’t have to. Bird with Luce, watch a parade, and let the chief do his job.

  That was probably the best advice I’d given myself in years.

  I just hoped I could take it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Twelve hours later, Luce and I were both still alive and well, getting ready to cross off the last bird sightings we hoped to make during our trip to the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

  After an early dinner on Thursday, we’d gone back to Weslaco to catch the nightly flocking of the Red-Crowned Parrots that Eddie had urged us to see. The birds weren’t hard to find. All we did was drive around the older neighborhoods with our windows rolled down, and sure enough, about twenty minutes before sunset, we could hear them coming from blocks away, squawking and calling. We followed the noise, and witnessed close to 125 Red-crowned Parrots coming to roost in the trees lining a residential area. The noise was almost deafening, and I hoped the people who lived there all owned stock in earplugs.