The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery)

by Boneham, Sheila Webster

  Copyright Information

  The Money Bird © 2013 Sheila Webster Boneham

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2013

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-73873801-7

  Book design by Donna Burch

  Cover illustration by Joe and Kathy Heiner/Lindgren & Smith

  Cover image: Black labrador retriever: iStockphoto.com/David Gomez

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

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  dedication

  For the retrievers who have brightened my life and my home:

  Labrador Retrievers Raja, Annie, and Lily,

  and Golden Retriever Sunny

  author note

  This is a work of fiction, so I have taken the liberty of creating a fictional bird, the Carmine Parrot, to represent the many species that suffer individually and as whole populations from wildlife trafficking and habitat destruction. The examples of smuggling mentioned in The Money Bird—tiny birds packed into curlers, primate infants carried under clothing, birds and other animals stuffed into boxes under floorboards and seats—are all too real and horrifying. So too is the worldwide slaughter of animals for their parts, which are used for everything from fur coats to traditional medicines to hair clips, jewelry, and decorative items. To learn more, I suggest you start with http://worldwildlife.org/threats/illegal-wildlife-trade, or contact the World Wildlife Fund, 1250 24th Street NW, Washington, DC 20037, (202) 293-4800.

  money bird: the last bird the dog retrieves in a retriever field trial; without this bird, the dog and handler win no money.

  one

  The man with the gun stood half hidden in chest-high brush to the west of Twisted Lake. Drake crouched a hundred yards to the east, gaze fixed, muscles twitching. The only thing obstructing my view of either was the cloud of no-see-ums whirling around my head. Daylight was dying, and the eastern bank of the lake was already lost in shadows, so I knew I wouldn’t see clearly for much longer. The breeze had all but died in the last half hour and the bright scent of day bowed to darker notes of mud and rot.

  The man, Collin Lahmeyer, tucked the 12-gauge under his right arm and picked up an orange canvas-covered training bumper with the other. He let it drop from his fist and bounce at the end of a half yard of thin nylon cord, then swung his arm and let fly toward a small island fifty yards offshore. Drake quivered as he watched. He shifted one foot forward an inch but held his ground when his partner, Tom, murmured, “Wait.”

  The cylindrical bumper stalled high in the air, vivid as blood against a bank of charcoal clouds. Drake tracked the object, his focus so tight that he didn’t so much as twitch when the shotgun’s long barrels rose and the gunman shouldered the weapon. A single blast cracked the August dusk and made my eyes blink and my shoulders tighten. I’ve been photographing field dogs in training and competition for years and I knew the shells were blanks, but every blast still somehow caught my reflexes by surprise.

  The training bumper plummeted into a tangle of goldenrod, thistle, and bindweed. Tom whispered one magic word—“Fetch!”—and Drake was gone from his side. The big dog leapt from the bank at a full-out run and was swimming before he hit water. His shoulders muscled through the light chop and his thick tail worked like a rudder to keep his heading true. He swam to the island, charged from the lake in a glittering spray, and disappeared into dense brush. Fading blossoms of ironweed jostled one another, mapping his progress. He quartered for five or six seconds, moving back and forth through the brush, searching. The wild swaying of the plants stopped, signaling that he’d found the bumper, then resumed as Drake turned back toward the lake.

  The gunner, Collin Lahmeyer, had a better view of the dog than did Tom, his owner and handler. I had the best view of all. I’m Janet MacPhail, professional photographer and lifelong cynophile. I’d been shooting the Northern Indiana Hunting Retriever Club’s practice session since late afternoon, hoping to capture some of those beautiful dogs in photos I could sell to publishers and, often, to the dogs’ proud owners. I peered through my viewfinder, up to my muck-smeared elbows in ragweed and burdock. I didn’t expect to get a decent shot against the dark water and smoldering horizon, but the zoom let me follow what my naked eye would never pick up.

  Collin gave a thumbs-up, indicating that Drake had his “bird,” the foam-filled canvas bumper, and called, “There’s your money bird!” In a field trial, the money bird is the last bird the winning dog retrieves, the one that brings home the cash prize. There was no cash here, and the bird was made of batting and canvas, but Tom Saunders looked like he might pop his buttons, if there’d been any on his faded U of Michigan sweatshirt. Tom and I had started seeing each other back in May, but we’d had only a couple of weeks before he and Drake headed off for a summer of fieldwork in New Mexico. Tom is an ethnobotanist. He teaches in the anthropology department at the local campus, but he likes to run off to exotic places to do research between terms. We’d developed quite an electronic relationship over the summer, and although I declined all invitations to head west for a visit, I had to admit that I was both thrilled and terrified to have him back in town. As I stood watching the man work with his dog in the sultry dusk, the Janet demon in my head whispered time to jump his bones. Good Janet pointed out that poor proper Collin Lahmeyer might never recover from the spectacle, and besides, the ground was soggy and the mosquitoes ravenous. Romance could wait.

  I knew that Drake needed only one more qualifying run to complete his MH, his Master Hunter title, and the way this training session was going, he looked ready to me. Not that I know much about training retrievers that I haven’t gleaned from listening to friends involved in the sport. I have an Australian Shepherd myself, and we pursue other sports. I knew, though, that Drake had been entered in a Hunt Test the end of May and should have finished his Master Hunter title there, but he pulled a shoulder muscle two days before the event. Several people advised Tom to give the dog painkillers and run him anyway, and, gutsy Labrador Retriever that he was, Drake would have worked through the pain if his beloved Tom asked him to. Tom refused—a
nother feather in the cap he wore in my viewfinder. Now, after two months of R and R in the high desert, the dog appeared to be back on top of his game.

  I glanced at Tom. He was talking to a man I didn’t know while watching for Drake to reappear from the brush. I looked through my viewfinder again. Drake burst from the brush and was almost back to the water when he veered away from the lake, back toward the west side of the island. The cover there was lower and more sparse than where the bumper went down, but I still couldn’t see what he was after. He was quite a sight, though, his wet coat sparkling in the low-angled light.

  “That’s not like him,” said Tom, blowing one long, shrill blast on his whistle. Drake looked over his shoulder, his glossy black coat set off by the orange bumper in his mouth and the black-eyed Susans scattered behind him. I clicked off several more shots. Click click click. Drake held for a pair of heartbeats, then went back to what he was doing. Whatever it was, it was strictly against orders. Tom blasted the whistle again. I glanced at him, and noticed the stranger walking back toward the road, where we had all parked.

  The dog turned around and made for the water. I could no longer see the orange bumper, but he had something in his mouth. The water around him fanned into a gilded wake as he swam. Click click. As he came closer, a strip of orange canvas showed in his grip, but most of the bumper was obscured by something else. I tightened my focus and zoomed in on his face, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Fabric?

  Drake exploded onto the bank, set his burden on the grass, and shook a thousand water diamonds into flight. I clicked off a few more shots. Drake picked up the bumper and his other find, climbed the low bank, and sat six inches in front of Tom, sweeping the grass with his tail and offering up the bumper and what appeared to be a canvas bag. I swung the camera their way.

  Tom reached to take Drake’s gifts, his face aglow with love and pride. But the look was fleeting. The muscles around his eyes and jaw tightened, waking a butterfly of fear in my own chest as I wondered what had put that look on Tom’s face. I zoomed in tight on Drake’s head and sucked in a breath as I saw what Tom had seen.

  An erratic crimson trickle wound through the silvered hair of Drake’s lower jaw and fell, drop by drop, onto the darkening ground.

  two

  Tom set the bumper and the bag on a boulder, wiped the blood off Drake’s face with the hem of his sweatshirt, and checked Drake’s mouth, inside and out.

  “He seems to be fine. Maybe just jabbed himself on something. I don’t see any more blood,” said Tom, standing up and wiping his hand on his jeans.

  Drake stepped toward the canvas bag, nose working, and Tom told him to settle. The dog lay down sphinx-style in the grass, nostrils twitching, neck stretched toward the sodden object on the big rock.

  The bag was about ten by fifteen inches with a half-open zipper along one long side. It showed signs of having once been white or beige, but the bottom third was stained dark and a trail of chartreuse duck weed angled across the fabric. A shoulder strap dangled from one corner. The other end had torn free and was fringed with stray threads. Water drained from its corners, arced along the curve of the boulder, and dripped onto the clay below.

  Tom lifted the bag and turned it over and back. There was nothing distinctive about it. No writing, no logo. Tom pulled the zipper open, gave the bag a couple of shakes to throw off the bulk of the water, and peered inside. “Oh my God! Yuck!” He tried to pull the bag away, but I grabbed his hand and peered in. Tom burst out laughing and elbowed me. “Gotcha!”

  “Funny.” I elbowed him back as I pulled the bag closer and looked inside. “What’s that?” Something lay along the bottom seam. In the fading light it looked a bit like a fish bone, whitish against the rust-tinted base of the bag and thicker at one end than the other, but I doubted there were any fish with bones that big in Twisted Lake.

  Collin stepped toward Tom. “What is it?” he asked, fishing around in his pocket for something.

  Tom glanced at Collin, then at me. “Looks like a feather.”

  “A feather?” Collin and I harmonized.

  The soaked barbs were flattened against the quill and hard to make out against the stained fabric, but I could see that Tom was right. It was hard to say what color it was, but at eight or nine inches long, it came from a fairly big bird. “Weird.” I gestured toward the dark stain on the bag’s lower portion. “What do you think that stain is?”

  “There’s something else,” Tom said. “Looks like money.”

  “Money?” Collin and I were starting to sound like parrots.

  “Yeah. Well, a piece of money. Looks like a corner torn from a bill. There are two zeroes, so I think that makes it part of a C-note.” Tom started to reach into the bag, but I caught his arm.

  “Maybe we should call someone.”

  Both men looked at me. One blurted, “Why?” and the other, “Who?”

  I wasn’t sure myself, but the last time I picked up an abandoned bag and removed its contents, it turned out to be evidence in a murder case and I spent some very uncomfortable moments explaining my actions to the police. I looked into Tom’s eyes and said, “Think about it. That little island isn’t exactly on a walking path. You wouldn’t get there by accident. And besides, this is private property, so why was anyone with a bag of feathers and money here in the first place?”

  Tom peered into the bag again. “It’s not exactly a ‘bag of feathers and money.’”

  He must have felt the sticky warm air temperature rise yet higher, because he looked at me and backpedaled. “You’re right, though, it is an odd place for anyone to be who doesn’t belong. But you could probably wade to the island from where Collin threw the bumper.”

  “You need a boat. Or you could swim,” said Collin. “There’s a drop off there. My father-in-law used to keep a diving raft out there. Safest place for kids to go in head first.”

  We stood in silence and stared at the bag for a bit, until Drake yawned loudly and snapped us out of it.

  “I’ll call Jo and see what she thinks we should do.” Detective Jo Stevens was the lead investigator when three members of our local dog-training community were murdered six months earlier. After a nerve-wracking start involving that other found bag, Jo and I had become friends. She’d know what to do.

  Collin pulled a plastic bag from the stock of poop bags in his pocket and held the open end toward Tom. “This’ll keep your car clean.”

  Tom folded the canvas a couple of times and slid it into the bag Collin held open. The water dripping from the fabric settled into the bottom crease of the plastic and I watched as it took on a distinctly pink cast. “That’s odd.”

  Collin leaned in for a closer look.

  All three of us watched the puddle forming under the canvas turn ever pinker, and I stared into Tom’s bluebird-blue eyes and said, “It’s blood.”

  “Maybe from Drake’s mouth?” asked Collin, looking at the dog.

  “It took a lot of blood to make a stain like that,” I gestured toward the bag, “and to survive the swim. If it is blood, maybe what we saw on Drake came from the bag.”

  Both men insisted that it couldn’t be blood and I was about to argue when something, more feeling than sound, made me look across the water. Drake, his sharp gaze also directed toward the island, moved up against my knee and let out a soft, un-Drake-like grumble. I scanned the vegetation beyond the faraway shoreline through my viewfinder, zooming and sharpening shrub by shrub. “There’s someone out there.”

  Collin and Tom followed my gaze. Nothing for half a minute, and then a dozen hollering crows exploded from the island’s single tree, a ghost-pale old sycamore. I turned to Tom and heard myself say, “Murder.”

  three

  Tom froze, no doubt hoping he had heard wrong.

  “What did you say?” Collin asked.

  I snapped the cap onto my lens and tried to fend off the shadow beginning to spread through my mind. “Crows. A murder of crows.” Be a good name for a group of humans
, I thought, as I smacked a humongous mosquito and peeled her corpse off the sticky veneer of bug juice and sweat on my arm.

  We walked toward the road without speaking, all three of us swatting at my deceased tormentor’s gluttonous relatives. Drake trotted close to Tom’s left knee, tail waving and tongue dripping. I envied the men’s long legs as I clambered down and through the drainage ditch that parallels the road and then fought my way through face-high weeds on the upward slope to the road.

  Tom looped the bumper’s nylon line through the wires of Drake’s crate and tied it loosely, letting the canvas-and-batting cylinder hang to dry. He tossed the plastic bag into a corner of the van bed. “Up ya go,” he told Drake, and the dog hopped into his crate and turned, tail thumping in anticipation. Tom emptied a sandwich bag of premium grain-free kibble into a stainless steel bowl and set it in the crate. He twisted the top from a beat-up water bottle, emptied half into the water bowl in Drake’s crate, and leaned back against the van’s bumper while Drake, in typical Labrador style, inhaled his dinner. “Drink?” Tom waggled the bottle at me, and swigged it empty when I declined.

  We had parked on Tappen Road, a narrow gravel lane off Cedar Canyons Road north of Fort Wayne. Heron Acres, two hundred acres of lake, woodland, and uncultivated open ground, belonged to Collin Lahmeyer’s in-laws, who let Collin and his retriever group use the place for training. This was the group’s first time back since early June. Collin’s family takes up residence in the cottage at the far end of the lake for most of the summer, and between various grandkids and granddogs racing around the lake and grounds, it gets a bit congested for training. I’d been out a couple of times in June to photograph birds, but was always early enough to be long gone before summer fun started. It was a beautiful place, but across the road a crop of McMansions was springing up with alarming speed, and Tom feared it was just a matter of time before Heron Acres felt the weight of bulldozer treads.