The Boreal Owl Murder

by Jan Dunlap

  Last year in early April, Rahr took small groups of birders up to his research sites to listen for the owls. His reason was to solicit more funding for his work, but I remembered reading complaints from other birders in the MOU monthly newsletter, accusing him of encroaching on the subjects of his own study. I’d never gotten up there for a tour myself because it was during softball season, and I coach the tenth grade girls’ team at school. Once the season starts, I’m pretty limited to local birding only. By the time the next newsletter was published, Rahr and the owls were old news, and the concerns of readers had moved on to other birding topics.

  “One more thing,” Knott added. “We got the coroner’s report back. There were indications of head trauma. Unless Rahr deliberately banged his head repeatedly against a tree, someone else did it for him.”

  I dragged my hand through my hair. This was not what I wanted to hear.

  “Oh—and something else. Your buddy Stan Miller? The one who lives in Mendota Heights, according to your MOU membership roster? He doesn’t exist. At least, not in any kind of data bank we can access. I thought we had a line on him the last time I talked to you, but it vanished. Into thin air. You know, Bob, I really do need to talk to him—you’ve placed him at the scene of a murder, and he just might have some good answers to the questions we’ve got hanging. Are you sure you got his name right?”

  Oh, yeah, I was sure. Scary Stan Miller. Accountant and “contract worker.” Lily White’s dinner date. Accomplished birder. Possible lunatic.

  Ghost.

  Chapter Six

  It was Tuesday, and I had been sentenced to a slow death in the media center. It was my turn to monitor the last of the sophomores taking their language skills standards tests.

  The majority of the students had completed the tests in their regular classrooms long before noon. The stragglers—a few dozen or so of them—were assigned to finish the work in the media center, supervised by me. Whereas I would have liked to kick them out of there and get them back into class, these kids had this scoped out. By stretching out their test-taking, they got a reprieve—an excused reprieve—from the classes they were supposed to be attending. Had I offered this same group of students the incentive of an early dismissal as soon as they were done with the tests, I had no doubt they’d be done in record time. Instead, they had all gone into sloth mode to while away the rest of the day in the media center.

  Supervising still let me get some work done, though. In front of me on the desk, the pile of senior graduation credit reviews I needed to plow through was slowly shrinking. I finished the one I was working on and glanced up to do a quick head count of the students around me who were still testing.

  “Mr. Whi-i-ite, can I go to the bathroom?”

  A girl dressed in a shiny low-cut sweater and ripped jeans glued to her hipbones had her elbow propped on the table next to her test. She was slowly waving her hand back and forth, back and forth, rolling her eyes at the ceiling.

  For a split second, I didn’t see the girl’s arm.

  I saw Rahr’s hand popping up in front of me.

  I shook my head to clear it.

  “I can’t go to the bathroom?” the girl drawled, leaving her mouth hanging open at the end of her request.

  I looked at the girl. It was like seeing evolution in real time. Except … backward.

  She’d taken my head shake for a “no.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Go. Please. But you have to come right back here.”

  Unfortunately.

  She slid off her chair and wandered out to the hall. On the way, she passed a table of three boys who kept insisting they weren’t finished yet. No surprise there. They were too busy napping between each question or waiting for new pathways of neurons to spontaneously form in their brains.

  Funny thing, though—they all seemed plenty alert when the girl walked by. Some neurons just work better than others, I guessed. Or was it a case of primal instincts edging out higher level thinking skills?

  Too bad the state didn’t set high school graduation standards for hormone levels. These kids could blow it away.

  By the end of the school day, I was left with just two students watching the clock and timing down to the minute when they would hand in their tests.

  Actually, the day’s assignment wasn’t that bad. It gave me a whole day to catch up on paperwork, something I never managed in my office where accessibility was critical, but completely time-consuming. That aspect of my job was also one of the reasons I took real pleasure in birding on the weekends—in contrast to constant distraction, birding was time I could spend in single-minded pursuit.

  As opposed to the multiple-minded pursuit my head had been spinning its mental wheels on since talking with Knott last night.

  The dismissal bell rang just after the last tests were laid on the table in front of me. I stacked them in a box and piled my papers together.

  “Hey, good-looking. Pretty please can you tell the nice man I’m not here to burn down the school?”

  I turned around to find Luce standing just behind me with a security guard, who looked disgruntled. She gave me a little peck on the cheek and pulled up a chair from a neighboring table. I smiled and nodded to the guard who turned and left.

  “I’m on my way to work, but these scones jumped out of my oven and cried, ‘Take us to Bobby, take us to Bobby,’ so here I am.”

  She handed me a brown lunch bag that warmed my fingers and released a scent that was already making me salivate.

  “What’s new at school?” she asked.

  I peeked in the bag and groaned in delight. Luce had made my favorite: white chocolate raspberry. “I am your slave forever,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s what they all say,” Luce laughed, removing her coat. Today, her long blonde hair was neatly braided and wound in a coil on the crown of her head; the pale pink t-shirt she was wearing put a rosy glow in her cheeks.

  “Put a couple candles on your head and you could pass for Santa Lucia,” I told her.

  “Who?”

  “Santa Lucia. Come on, you’re Scandinavian. You know Santa Lucia—she brings baked goodies to good little boys on her feast day in December, wearing a wreath of candles in her hair.”

  “Sounds like a fire waiting to happen,” Luce sniffed. “Santa Lucia is Swedish, Bobby. I’m Norwegian. And Santa Lucia does not bring goodies to good little boys. She brings saffron buns and coffee to wake up the family.”

  “So, where’s the coffee?”

  She made a grab to take back the scones, but I was faster and held them out of her reach.

  “What’s new? Let’s see—aside from watching thoughts struggling against all odds to be born in the heads of reluctant sophomores, not a whole lot,” I said, telling her about my day in the media center. “I did, however, get caught up on credit reviews for seniors, and I’m happy to say we will, indeed, be graduating quite a few of them in June.”

  I filled her in on the latest news from Knott about the investigation into Rahr’s death that had now turned into a murder investigation.

  “His head had been bashed?” she asked. “Yikes. That sounds pretty vicious, Bobby. It sounds like something that would happen in a big crowded city teeming with psychopaths, not in the peaceful pine forests of northern Minnesota. Who would attack Dr. Rahr? He was an owl researcher, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Yeah, I know. I don’t have a clue. But then again, why would I? It’s not like I’m the detective, here. I’m just the poor schmuck who found the body.”

  “Come on, Bobby, let’s play detective,” Luce said, leaning back in her chair.

  I waggled my eyebrows at her. “I’d rather play doctor.”

  Luce rolled her eyes. “Pay attention. Money is supposed to be the biggest motivation for murder. At least, that’s what all the mystery novels I read say. Then it’s revenge and love, I think. Or is it revenge and jealousy? Either way, we’d better check out Rahr’s love life. Maybe he wronged some woman. Maybe he l
eft her for the sake of his research.”

  I opened the bag of scones again and inhaled.

  Luce gave me a funny look.

  “Therapy,” I said and closed the bag. “I had a rough day.”

  And night. But I didn’t tell her that. I deliberately hadn’t mentioned to Luce about the part of my discussion with Knott about Stan Miller. The non-existent Scary Stan Miller who was dating my sister. Luce and I had had arguments before about my over-protective attitude towards Lily, and I just didn’t have the energy to get into it with her right now. After I’d hung up with Knott, I’d thought about leaving a phone message for Lily about Stan’s non-entity status, but figured she’d just delete it and refuse to speak to me. I did, however, give Lily’s telephone number to the detective, hoping he could get through to her. Hoping she wouldn’t hang up on him, too, thinking it was a friend of mine I’d put up to a prank. Nothing like trust between siblings, right? Anyway, my worrying about Lily’s poor judgment when it came to men, let alone her physical safety, had kept me awake much of the night. She might be the Mistress of Humiliation, but she is my sister.

  “Focus, Bobby.”

  I put the bag of scones on the desk.

  “According to Knott,” I explained, “Rahr and his wife were happily married for thirty-seven years. Three kids and five grandchildren. The only time he spent away from her was the weekends he spent in the woods researching the Boreals. That’s why she didn’t suspect anything when he didn’t come home last Friday night. He usually camped on-site. He knew what the weather was like and was prepared for it. That’s why the lack of adequate clothing on his body was so weird. He knew better. Knott thinks that maybe the killer knocked Rahr out against a tree, then wasn’t sure he was dead, so he stripped him down to make sure he’d freeze to death before he could hike out for help.”

  I closed my eyes, remembering a frozen corpse.

  I didn’t think hiking out had been much of an option for him.

  “It was below zero there last Friday, Luce—I know, I was there,” I reminded her.

  Mike and I hadn’t wasted any time finding our birding spots that night, it was so bitter. We had had a nasty wind chill, too. With that kind of cold, a person could be in serious trouble within thirty minutes. Rahr couldn’t have made it out in a flannel shirt even if he had recovered consciousness after getting his head bashed. I shook my head slowly. “Whoever it was,” I concluded, “made sure Rahr wasn’t going to be talking to anybody.”

  Luce frowned. “Okay, maybe not a woman scorned. What about plain revenge? By the time the dust settled last year after the DNR and S.O.B. arm-wrestled over clearing the forest, there were lay-offs in the logging companies up there. That had to hurt quite a few workers. Maybe a terminated employee decided to pin the blame on Rahr for his job loss.”

  I had considered that angle, too, but thought it was a stretch that some laid-off logger would have taken the time to track down Rahr, follow him up to the owl sites, bang his head on a tree, then strip him down to make sure he would die because he hadn’t done a better job of killing him in the first place.

  Besides, Rahr was just a researcher. He hadn’t taken a really visible role in the controversy—nothing like the media attention S.O.B. had commanded. I thought that if a laid-off logger was looking for someone to pay back for his loss of employment, it would be someone from S.O.B., not Rahr.

  “Although,” I said, remembering the demonstration I’d seen earlier, thanks to the testing students, of the superior strength of primal instincts compared to higher-level-thinking skills, “I suppose a crime of passion is possible. In the heat of the moment, momentary insanity could rule someone’s actions.”

  But Luce’s mention of jealousy as a motive had reminded me of something else. After my counseling sessions yesterday with Kim and Lindsay, I had tried to think of who might be jealous of Rahr, and why. Late last night, a possible answer to that question occurred to me.

  Jealousy isn’t always about relationships.

  In the academic world of research, the world in which Rahr moved, jealousy could be about reputation.

  Or the lack thereof.

  As a graduate student, I had observed both subtle and outright competition between professors. Research grants were hot commodities. Those who got them, got ahead in publications and positions. Those who didn’t, didn’t. In some cases, losing out on a grant was a bump in the road of academia. Professors got over it, put their egos aside and continued to work together. In other cases, it led to major career highway reconstruction, causing some professors to leave departments because they couldn’t abide their colleagues’ crowing.

  Grants weren’t the end of the competition, either. Say a junior professor did land some funding. Even though he or she might be the team leader, a senior professor with more credentials might be assigned as overseer of the project. Then, when results were finally published, guess what? The researcher who initiated the work had to share the credit—and the glory—with the senior staffer, who may have done little more than sign off on the text.

  Finally, to add insult to injury, tenure—job security—was typically awarded to faculty members with the most publications and research credits. Promising young teachers who were already spread thin between meeting the demands of their students and the requirements of research had a tough time making the cut. As a result, you get the “publish or perish” mentality that seems to plague the world of academia.

  So, I had to wonder. Could Rahr have had a professional opponent who had taken the “perish” part of the formula to a new high, or rather, low? Was there a researcher somewhere who was so desperate for an opportunity that he decided to create one by removing Rahr?

  “That,” Luce said, “sends chills up my spine.”

  “Mine, too,” I agreed.

  Luce checked her watch and grabbed her coat. “Got to go. Soup base waits for no woman.” She leaned toward me and kissed the corner of my mouth.

  Another chill chased up my spine.

  This chill I liked.

  A lot.

  I gathered up my papers and walked Luce out of the media center.

  “Looks like I’m on my own, then, for this weekend for chasing Boreals. While you’re sweating under the studio lights, I’ll be slogging through snow.” I held Luce’s coat for her while she shrugged into it. “The wages of birdwatching, I guess.”

  Luce patted my cheek. “Poor baby. Guess I’ll just have to make it up to you later.” She trailed her fingers slowly over my lips, her blue eyes wide and laughing.

  “Promises, promises,” I said. I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and whispered, “Get out of here before I drag you into the old choir room and have my way with you.”

  Luce laughed. “The choir room?”

  I nodded. “It’s the secret love-nest of choice this year. I surprised two couples there last week. They all had passes to see their counselors but never showed up, so I went exploring. Something to do with the risers in the room, I understand. Want to find out?”

  Luce punched me in the shoulder and left.

  I walked back to my office, filed the credit reviews and checked my daily calendar. I had two hours before I was expected in downtown Minneapolis for an MOU board meeting.

  “Mr. White.”

  It was Mr. Lenzen, the assistant principal.

  “I see you have deer hooves on your desk. I assume they are the ones you confiscated from Jason Bennett?”

  As always, Mr. Lenzen was impeccably dressed in his trademark three-piece suit, trousers creased and shoes shined. He stood just outside my door, as if he couldn’t bring himself to cross the threshold into my little domain.

  I almost expected him to whip out a can of spray antiseptic.

  “Yes, they’re Jason’s,” I answered. “But he knows he can’t have them in class, so I’m keeping them quarantined here until he takes them home.”

  “They need to be removed from the building,” Mr. Lenzen corrected me. “Otherwise, they
’re an incident just waiting to happen.”

  Give me a break, I thought.

  “What kind of incident?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. “Will they rise up on their little cuticles and imbed themselves in someone’s …” But I didn’t say that either. Instead, I nodded and said I’d take care of it.

  “There’s something else I need to discuss with you.” He took a deep breath, like a swimmer about to dive into infested waters, and stepped into my office. “May I?” he asked, indicating my visitor’s chair.

  “Of course,” I replied, sitting back in my own desk chair. “What’s up?”

  He took out his handkerchief and lightly dusted the seat. It’s not like the chair is ever unoccupied long enough to attract dust, but I didn’t think, at the moment, he’d appreciate a list of its recent occupants. He sat, crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap.

  “Well, apparently, you are, Mr. White. I had a call from a Detective Knott yesterday, asking me to confirm your whereabouts last Friday noon. Needless to say, I was quite unprepared for his revelations that you had discovered a corpse over the weekend and were, of necessity, considered an initial suspect.”

  He hesitated, waiting for me to comment.

  I hesitated, waiting for him to go away.

  “I think you’re aware of how important I deem Savage High School’s public image to be,” he finally forged ahead. “We are the educational standard bearers of our community, and I expect only the highest professionalism and integrity from each and every one of our staff.”

  Yada, yada, yada. Been there, done that. I’d only heard this speech a few dozen times in the last five years—usually when a school bond issue was about to go before the voters. Since there wasn’t anything currently on the block, I had to wonder: where was he going with this?

  “As a result, I’ve decided it would be in everyone’s best interests if you took a leave of absence until this—investigation—is resolved.”

  It took a minute for what he said to sink in.

  He wanted to suspend me.

  He wanted me out of here.