Case of the Glacier Park Swallow

by Anastasio, Dina

  But the third letter was the oddest of all.

  “I discovered your swallow number 45,” it said. “And I watched it for a long time. It seemed tired, but managed to flap its wings. But it couldn’t get off the ground. The ring on its leg seemed to be causing problems, and seemed heavy, so I took it off, and at that point the bird flew away. I am enclosing the ring.”

  Juliet turned the envelope upside down and shook the ring out into the palm of her hand. She had never held a band before, so she didn’t know if this one was heavier than other bands, but it seemed much too heavy for a tiny swallow to carry.

  She turned it over and over in her hand and examined it carefully, until something began to come to her as concepts often do, beginning with a tiny thought, and then another, and another, until all the little thoughts had grown into a whole.

  Something was wrong.

  The band was too heavy.

  The edges of the band had been soldered together.

  There were seams along the top and the bottom of the band.

  The band consisted of two pieces of light metal soldered one on top of the other.

  Juliet pried open the seams with her jackknife until they came apart. Then, when they had been separated she called Max to her and said, “Look, Max. Look at this. Someone’s created an envelope out of this band, and he’s put something inside it.”

  Max sat back and looked up at her with eyes filled with tolerance and curiosity.

  “He’s filled this band with sand, Max. And he’s put too much into it. Either this guy’s very smart, or very dumb.

  She thought about the sand and the bald eagle and the May postmark all day long. She walked around the city, shifting the pieces back and forth, trying to put them into some kind of order, and by the time she and Max returned to the bed and breakfast she had fashioned them into a wall that she thought would stand.

  But there was one hole left to fill, and the piece that belonged there was being held by the man in the grey cap.

  Interspersed with the bird reports was a letter with his name on it. She looked up his address in the phone book.

  “Get ready,” she said to Max. “Tomorrow we’re going to visit Mr. James Dinkins, and I’m going to need you to sniff out some answers.”

  Max seemed to understand. He came to her and jumped up and put his front paws on her shoulders and buried his head in her hair.

  “You’re a good dog, Max,” she whispered. “And we make a very nice team.”

  12. THE APARTMENT

  She woke up very early the next morning, fed Max, then ate her breakfast alone in the dining room. She was just finishing when the rest of the guests began to come downstairs, and she left as quickly as she could because she didn’t want to speak to them.

  She wanted to find James Dinkins, the man in the grey cap and shoes the same size as her own.

  She found the apartment building easily, but she couldn’t work up the courage to go inside.

  She wanted to get into the apartment when he wasn’t there. His light was on so she knew he was still inside, and when the light went off and he finally did come out, she was too frightened to go in.

  At eleven she locked the doors of the jeep. “Bark if he comes back,” she said to Max, and then she went upstairs. The door to the apartment was locked, as she knew it would be, but she was good at jumping locks, and she unlocked it easily.

  The place was a mess. There were papers everywhere, and charts all over the walls, and piles of letters on the kitchen table and the desk and the floor in the bedroom. There were two computers in the living room, several gadgets that she didn’t recognize, and two cellular phones, one large and one tiny.

  The letters were all from people who had found Dinkins’ birds.

  She moved on to the charts. The first one had a heading that said SWALLOW. The second one said GEESE. The third one said SWAN. And the fourth one said EAGLE. Along the top of each of the charts were dates, starting with January 1, and down the sides were the numbers 1–100. In each of the tiny boxes there was the name of a place.

  The dates probably indicated when the birds had left Canada, and the numbers identified the birds. Dinkins must have held some of the birds back, because some had left in January, a few had left in February and March, some in April and May, thirty in the summer, and the rest in the fall.

  The place names must be the locations where the birds came down.

  So it had been Mr. Dinkins who had been implanting and controlling the birds’ behavior. She wondered if he had a partner on the other side of the border.

  She heard Max bark then and she jumped away from the window so that she could not be seen. She waited a moment, and then peeked out.

  The man with the cap was standing beside the jeep. He was staring at Max, and Max was against the window, barking frantically.

  As Juliet watched, the man stepped back from the jeep slowly and hesitated, as if he was thinking, and then he turned and looked up at the window. Juliet stepped backward and froze by the wall, and when she looked again a few minutes later he was gone, the door of the jeep was open, and Max was gone too.

  Her chest tightened and her eyes filled with tears. When she could breathe again, she tried to think. Where, she wondered, would a man like Dinkins take Max? She didn’t know Edmonton, but maybe there was something about the man himself that would tell her.

  She wondered where he was keeping the birds. They had to be somewhere.

  She went to the computer, punched into it, and tried the files one by one until she found the first reference to “the farm.” There were other references as well, and after the sixth one she knew that the farm was the place where the birds were kept. She wrote down the address and ran out of the apartment.

  When she was halfway down the stairs she remembered something, and she went back and picked up the small phone and put it into her pocket, just in case.

  She went downstairs to the front desk and asked directions to the farm. Then she climbed into the jeep and drove there as fast as she could.

  13. THE BARN

  As she raced through the countryside she thought about Dinkins. Who was he? What was he doing? And why? Was he in this alone, or did he have other people working with him? Was he a scientist, or was he crazy? Or was he a little of both?

  She missed Max terribly. Where was he? What had happened to him? Would he be there when she found the place?

  She pushed harder on the accelerator.

  The address was a farm on a small dirt road out in the country. She found it easily, because it was the only farm in the vicinity, and she knew it was the right farmhouse because of the footprints. There were two sets: they led from a pickup truck that was parked by the road, across a field, and up to the farmhouse. At that point the two sets of prints separated, and the dog’s pawprints went toward the woods and the bootprints led to the door of the farmhouse.

  She walked across the field in Dinkins’ prints until she came to the place where Max had run off. She stopped there for a moment, and made a decision, and continued on toward the farmhouse.

  Max was on his own now, and if he was on his own he would be fine.

  She approached the farmhouse slowly, stepping on the hard snow as quietly as possible. When she was almost to the house, a swallow swooped her, and the fact that it was still in Canada didn’t surprise her at all. Nothing about the birds that surrounded Mr. Dinkins surprised her any more.

  She hesitated and studied the swallow. Everything about it, from the way it circled protectively over the house to the way it disappeared and returned, seemed normal.

  There was only one thing wrong.

  Something, or someone, had caused it to remain in the north in the winter.

  She watched the swallow and realized that Max must have wandered quite far away, because if he was in the area he would be barking at it by now.

  The bird disappeared behind the barn, and Juliet was left alone again. She went up to the barn and stopped and stood ther
e for a long time.

  He was inside. She knew that because his bootprints went in one direction only, and he was probably waiting for her. Most likely he had seen her coming across the field, and he was ready for her.

  She was scared.

  She remembered the cellular phone and for a moment she considered calling the police. But what if she was wrong? What if she couldn’t prove anything? She didn’t have the implant with her, and maybe this swallow had just chosen to spend the winter in the north instead of flying south. It was possible. There was nothing illegal about that.

  She pushed the door open and peered inside. When she didn’t see Dinkins she went in and stopped, looked around, and breathed deeply.

  She started to cry from relief that he wasn’t there, and because she was scared that he might be hiding inside somewhere.

  After a few minutes she calmed down and looked around her. The barn was full of cages, and inside the cages were birds of all kinds. There were swallows and swans and geese and owls and eagles, and birds that Juliet had never seen before.

  She tiptoed across the barn then and looked into the cages. When she came to the woodpecker she stopped. He was watching her, staring at her with strange glassy eyes, and when she reached inside and took him out she saw that he was drugged.

  This was her proof. These birds were the evidence. She took out her phone and pushed zero, and while she waited for the operator to answer she walked over to the window on the other side of the barn.

  She looked outside and saw that there were no new footprints in the snow, and she knew for certain now that the man was still in the barn somewhere. But where?

  The operator finally answered and Juliet ran to the front door and went outside so that he couldn’t hear her. She asked the operator to contact the police and she explained how to get to the farm, and then she went back inside.

  For the first time she noticed a table at the far end of the barn, under the loft.

  She went to it, and saw that it was covered with materials used for banding birds. And then she saw the implants, and the powder. There was just a bit of it, but she had read about heroin, and seen pictures of it, and she guessed that this white powder was heroin.

  Suddenly she understood everything. The sand inside the two pieces of metal had been for a practice run. The man had been smuggling heroin across the borders, or maybe he was getting ready to.

  Her heart began to beat very fast. She was scared now. She was very scared. She knew she should leave and hide in the woods like Max until the police came, but she was angry, too, and it was the anger that kept her there.

  She didn’t care if he heard her any more. She went to the cages and opened the doors, one by one, and stood back as the birds that weren’t too badly drugged flew out of the cages and up into the barn.

  She raced to the door then, and opened it, and some of the birds flew outside and up into the sky. But there were still about fifty left in the barn, and it was strange to watch them flying around up there together. She shooed most of them out and watched as they disappeared.

  And still there was no sign of Mr. Dinkins.

  She heard Max then. He was barking somewhere far away, probably at the birds, and then the sound of his barking sounded closer and closer, and then she realized that he was barking at a car.

  She knew that it must be the police.

  And still there was no sign of Mr. Dinkins.

  The two policemen came inside and Juliet explained about the birds, and the implants.

  “I think he’s smuggling heroin,” she said.

  One of the policemen went to a cage and took out a drugged swallow and examined it and said, “This one isn’t full of heroin.” And Juliet said, “I know. That’s a tranquilizer.”

  “You’ll have to come with us,” the policeman said.

  Juliet motioned toward the door, and when they were outside she whispered, “He’s in there.”

  “How do you know?” the taller one asked.

  Juliet pointed at the footprints, but the policemen didn’t seem to understand.

  “The prints,” she said. But they still didn’t get it.

  “They all lead in one direction.” Juliet was getting nervous now, and a little bit frantic. “They all lead into the barn, and there aren’t any other prints anywhere else.”

  They looked at her suspiciously, and it occurred to Juliet that they might think that all of the footprints belonged to her.

  She had to find Mr. Dinkins.

  She went back inside and stood there, looking around, and thinking.

  He had to be in there. But where?

  She thought about the birds, and the way they behaved, and she thought that a person who spent so much time with birds might begin to think and even act like one.

  She wondered what a bird would do if it was cornered, and then she realized that he would probably sit in his nest and shiver.

  This thought led to the next thought.

  There was a nest in the barn, and it was big enough to hold a man.

  She went to the door and called Max. He came to her and waited as she climbed up the ladder to the loft. The policemen saw her and watched her climb.

  Mr. Dinkins was hiding in the corner of the loft, and he must have known it was no use, because he climbed down from his nest without saying a word.

  “I haven’t smuggled any heroin across the border,” he said. “I was going to, but I didn’t. So you can’t hold me on that.”

  “He’s right,” one of the policemen said. “But I can hold him for possession until we figure out what’s going on.”

  Juliet and Max followed the police car into Edmonton and signed some papers at the police station. By then Mr. Dinkins had identified his two partners, one of whom, it turned out, could be found in Mexico. And the other lived in Montana, directly across the Canadian/U.S. border.

  Juliet was glad when it was all over. She and Max drove back to the bed and breakfast and went to sleep, and the next morning they drove back to Montana.

  14. HOME

  That night, for the first time in weeks, she didn’t dream. She slept straight through the night and woke up feeling fine.

  She was very, very happy that it was all over.

  Or was it? She had identified all of the pieces, but no matter how much she juggled them, they still didn’t fit together.

  These things were certain: Dinkins and his friends had been drugging the birds with tranquilizers or amphetamines, most likely to control their behavior in some way.

  They were thinking of using the birds to smuggle drugs across the border.

  But maybe they were going to smuggle other things as well.

  The pieces slid into place then. She picked up the phone and called the Edmonton police, and when the detective came on the line she said, “How does this sound? Since Dinkins was controlling the behavior of the birds with drugs, he is responsible for transporting feathers across the border, and he has interfered with an endangered species, a bald eagle.”

  “I’ll call you back,” the policeman said.

  He called back an hour later. “I talked to Dinkins,” he said. “And he’s admitted it. They were not really in the smuggling business. It was more like an auxilliary smuggling business. He was in the business of controlling the behavior of birds so that they would be used later to smuggle anything from drugs to microfilm to their own feathers, and even themselves. Anyway, Dinkins will be in jail for awhile.”

  Juliet said goodbye and went up to her room. While she was dressing to go to work, she thought about the birds. The amphetamines would speed them up and make them go farther and faster than they normally would. And the tranquilizers would slow them and bring them down earlier than normal. In time, Dinkins might have been able to establish just the right drug dosage to bring the birds down exactly where he wanted them.

  Max stayed home that day. He seemed tired and listless and Juliet thought that he deserved a day in bed. She left him there, curled up on her pi
llow.

  Cam was waiting for her. “I called early this morning to see if you were back yet,” he said. “Your mother said that you were still asleep.”

  “It’s nice to be back,” Juliet said, and she smiled because it was true.

  Cam watched her and waited, and when she didn’t speak he said, “Well?”

  Juliet knew that he was waiting for her to tell him about Canada, and she didn’t mind at all. In fact, for the first time she liked the idea of sharing her news with him. Maybe it was because the case was closed and she had solved it, or maybe it was because Cam had been the only one who had known about it from the beginning.

  The only one except Max, of course.

  When she was finished telling him the story, he went and stood by the desk with his back to her. He didn’t say anything, and Juliet wondered what he was thinking. She hoped that he didn’t resent her, but when he turned she saw that he didn’t. It was something else.

  “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” he said. “I wonder how many drugged birds there were?”

  “Too many,” Juliet said. “But it’s over now. And it wouldn’t have worked anyway, not really. Birds were flying south long before man arrived on the planet, and they aren’t going to alter their course that easily.”

  Cam came back and sat beside her and said, “I think I said that I’d tell you when I couldn’t do without you, remember?”

  Juliet shrugged, and nodded, and turned away. Suddenly she felt shy, and a little afraid. She knew what he was going to say.

  “Well, I can’t do without you any more,” Cam said. “I missed having you around, and so did the animals.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I’ll be here until the spring. But I’d like to go back to Yellowstone in May.”

  Cam nodded, and they went to work. They worked side by side for the rest of the day, giving injections, examining teeth, removing splinters, and cutting toenails. It was a pleasant day, and for the first time Juliet felt like they were partners.

  Katie was waiting by the door when she came home. “Max is sick,” she said. “He won’t eat, and he just stays there on your bed and sleeps. I’ve been thinking that he might have eaten one of those tranquilizer implants.”