by Jan Dunlap
“Or maybe Alice hired her brother Stan to kill Rahr. He did admit to being a hired gun who did contract work. And he knows the forest, John. Plus he didn’t seem too surprised when he saw Rahr’s body last Saturday night. You have to wonder, don’t you? I know I’m taking a chance that he’s being honest with me, that he’s not setting me up as his next victim, but Rahr might be another matter altogether. ”
I took a quick glance at Knott. He was frowning and staring straight ahead. “Yeah,” he finally muttered. “You have to wonder about a lot of things.”
We were out of the city and the road was dry. Traffic was practically non-existent into the forest during this time of year. I took a quick glance at my speedometer. I was driving just over the speed limit. Knott obviously noticed me checking my speed because he chuckled.
“You are a speed demon, aren’t you?”
I shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t mean to be. It’s just that my car speed isn’t important to me, I guess. When I’m chasing a bird, what’s important is getting to the next birding location. Location, location, location, as my—”
“Real estate agent would say,” Knott finished for me. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one, too. My mother bought a condo last month, and I thought the whole buying process was going to kill me before she finally closed on it. If her agent had said the word ‘location’ to me one more time, I was going to shoot her.”
“But it’s true for birding as well as real estate,” I explained. “Location is key. If you know where the bird showed up before, chances are better than good that you’ll find it there again.”
An old green pick-up truck zipped up behind me, then flew past in the straightaway. I caught a fleeting glimpse of letters stenciled on the driver’s right jacket sleeve: DNR. Department of Natural Resources. My old employer. Maybe my future employer if Knott didn’t get this case solved. The truck must have been going eighty-five.
“Where’s the highway patrol when you need them?” I muttered.
“So,” Knott was saying, “you think that if we know exactly where Rahr was working, we’ll find the reason he was killed there, too?” He shook his head. “We’ve already looked, Bob. We didn’t turn up anything, except spikes in the tree, a hammer, and a pair of reading glasses.”
“But maybe I’ll see it differently. You weren’t looking at it the way a birder would. That’s why I wanted to see the site in the daylight. It’s not that much further. I hope you’ve got your hiking boots on.”
We pulled into the same parking area where I’d parked last Saturday night. Forty minutes later, we were deep into the woods, slogging through muddy stretches on the trail where the warmer temperatures of the past few days had made inroads on the snow cover. The trail looked wider than I had remembered—probably the result of being tramped down by all the police personnel who must have passed this way as they secured and investigated the murder scene. In the daylight, the woods didn’t seem nearly as dense as they had that night, but now I could see how hilly this particular area was. Little ravines riddled the hillsides, some plunging sharply just off the trail, while others were barely a crack in the earth. In another two or three weeks, the snow melt would produce all kinds of flowing streams down those ravines, making the ground even spongier than it was already beginning to feel underfoot. Later on, petite ladyslippers would sprout up amidst the rocks and earth. I suspected that the investigators were grateful they hadn’t had to bring in any heavy equipment for their work, because if they had, it would probably be getting mired in mud by now.
“Are we there yet?” Knott called from behind me, about twenty yards down the slope I had just crested. Lost in thought, I had gone into my automatic hiking mode, making long strides that often left other birders behind. I stopped and turned around.
“Two more bends in the trail, I think,” I shouted back.
Something whizzed past my head, and the white pine trunk next to the trail exploded. A loud crack echoed in the woods.
“Get down!” Knott yelled.
He didn’t have to say it twice. I was already dropping into the mud and tasting dirt.
Damn! I thought. Some idiot was shooting in the forest!
And then I thought again. Double-damn! The idiot was shooting at me!
The next thing I knew, Knott was beside me, crouched, a gun in his hand.
“Are you all right? Did you get hit?”
I lifted my head and looked at him. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Bob!”
I blinked. “Maybe I should rethink the part about birding being a safe hobby?”
Knott let out a soft whistle and helped me up. I swiped snow and mud off my parka and jeans. “This has never happened to me before. Swear to God.”
“You’ve never fallen in the mud?”
I gave Knott the evil eye. He grinned.
“Being shot at,” I clarified. “I’ve never been in someone’s rifle sights before, let alone felt a bullet go by.”
Although, I reminded myself, that wasn’t entirely true. Just last weekend, Stan had fired a gun just yards from me to scare Smokey the Bear away. But that shot had been for the bear, not for me.
Hadn’t it?
Knott scanned the forest in the direction the bullet had come. “Whoever it was, is gone now. I couldn’t see anyone from where I was, down there. But up here …” He spread his arms to include the open area where we were standing. “You were a sitting duck, Bob.”
I stared at Knott. “Gee, thanks for sharing. I feel so much better.”
Actually, I wasn’t feeling better at all. My legs were feeling weak, and I thought I might throw up. Knott grabbed my arm and put his other arm around my back, bending me forward at the waist. Then he pushed his hand against the back of my neck. “Push against my hand,” he ordered.
I did, and the nausea went away. After a minute, my legs felt stronger, too. I straightened back up.
“Not fun,” I said.
“No, not fun,” he agreed. I thought he looked angry.
“You don’t think it was a random shot, do you?”
“Do you?”
I shook my head slowly. “This is protected land. There shouldn’t be anyone up here with a gun, let alone someone shooting it.” I looked Knott in the eye. “It makes me think we’ve got to be on to something. Something about the location.”
“I’m sure of it, now,” Knott agreed. “But I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”
He looked around again. The last bit of the day’s sun was lighting up the hillcrest where we stood. There must have been a fire here at some point, I guessed, to have cleared this space in the middle of the forest. It was getting dusky and I couldn’t make out any blackened stumps, though. Had it been logged at some point? There were plenty of old logging trails in the area, so I supposed that might have been the case.
“Let’s get out of here,” Knott said. “I don’t want to encourage another shot just in case the shooter’s still around, and I sure don’t want to be here after dark.”
That made two of us. Earlier, I had considered sticking around for nightfall to listen for the Boreal, but after being somebody’s target practice, I chucked that plan. There were other places to hunt the owl, and right now, they were looking real good to me. Places where I hadn’t found a body or gotten shot at.
“By any chance, did you tell anyone you were going to be up here this afternoon?” Knott asked as he drove my SUV towards Duluth. He’d insisted I take the passenger seat for the ride back to town, in case I got a delayed shock reaction, but I figured it was just an excuse to keep me away from the gas pedal. “A long shot, I know, but I’ve got to ask.”
I groaned at the metaphor, and he grinned brazenly.
I did. Knott was wondering, just as I was, if I’d inadvertently invited the shooter to follow me up to the Boreal trail. Since leaving home this morning, the only people I’d talked with were Ellis, Alice, Stan, and Knott. And Chris Maas, the highway trooper. Since I doubted t
he trooper had been tailing me all day, that left Ellis, Alice, and Stan. Both Ellis and Alice knew I was going to Rahr’s site this afternoon, I realized. Ellis had asked to see me after three, which would have been after his meeting with Knott. I’d told him I was coming for a look up here in the daylight. And Alice had been in the doorway, hanging on Ellis’s every word.
“Alice and Ellis,” I told Knott. “They both heard me say I was planning to come here. I’m meeting Ellis for a drink after dinner tonight. We’re supposed to talk about the study.”
“Let me know if he doesn’t show up,” Knott said. “Or if he’s surprised that you do.”
Two hours later, I walked into the room I had reserved at the hotel where I always stay when I bird in Duluth—The South Pier Inn. But as I reached for the light switch, I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Someone besides me was in the darkened room.
I froze, my hand mid-air. Across the room, a figure was silhouetted against the big window that looked out on the lake.
My heart hit my throat so fast, I gasped. Scenarios flew across my brain like geese against the moon, and none of them were nice. I wanted to leap back out of the room, but my legs had somehow solidified, rooted themselves in the carpet.
I stared at the shadow, knowing my death was upon me.
There was so much more I wanted to do in life. I wasn’t through yet.
I could almost see the headlines of the Duluth Herald: “The second birder in a week killed.”
And I was just going to stand there and let it happen.
The figure slowly spun around.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Luce said.
Chapter Fifteen
And my world began to spin as usual again. Breath came to my lungs, and my spinning brain focused on one object. Luce. I walked across the room and wrapped my arms around her, holding her tightly against me. All the horrible thoughts and fears evaporated. She made me feel safe and secure. She slid her hands around my neck, and I kissed her long and hard.
“Gee, maybe I should surprise you more often,” she whispered.
She had no idea.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were filming on Saturday.”
“Change of plans. The station called first thing this morning and wanted to film at noon, so we got it done. I decided I deserved a long weekend—with you—so here I am.”
I hugged her again. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you.” Close encounters with a bullet can do that, I guessed. Fearing imminent death sure could, too. I mean, I’m always happy to see Luce, but this was more than happy. This was more like ecstatic. So ecstatic, I practically had her in a death grip.
“I’m beginning to get the idea, Bobby,” she wheezed. After a minute, she pushed me away. “Hey, your clothes are damp. What were you doing, wading in after the ducks on the lake?”
I kissed her one more time. “Sit down. Let me tell you how my day went.”
I kicked off my boots, stripped off my parka and sat down next to her on the bed, then filled her in on the details, starting with the note on my bird feeder and ending with the dive into the mud and the whiz of the bullet. When I got to the part about being someone’s clay pigeon, those Norwegian blue eyes of hers turned into ice.
“And Knott didn’t do a thing?”
“Luce, he was at the bottom of a hill. He couldn’t see anything but the slope ahead of him. The gunfire came from the other side. By the time he got to where I was, the shooter was long gone.”
“You don’t know that!” Beneath her protest, I could hear some anger creeping into her voice. “I can’t believe you guys walked back. What if you’d gotten shot at again and this time, you’d gotten hit?”
She smacked my shoulder with her fist.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“For doing such a stupid thing! I should be smacking your head. What were you thinking?”
Maybe I should have skipped telling her the shooting part. I didn’t know she’d get violent.
“And you got another ticket! I swear, I let you out of my sight for five minutes and you get in trouble.”
And then she burst into tears.
“Hey, Luce, it’s not that big of a deal,” I told her. “I didn’t lose my license.”
She tried to sock my shoulder again, but I caught her hand and pulled her close. I put my arm around her shoulders and brushed a few blonde strands off her forehead. I tried the one thing I knew would distract her.
“Want to go eat?”
She sniffed and blinked a few times to clear the tears from her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered. “Can we try that little bistro I told you about?”
Twenty minutes later, we were going north on the shore road to the Grand Superior Lodge’s new restaurant. It was a cloudless night, and the stars filled the sky in a way they never do in the cities; the road was unlit except by my headlights, and we passed only one car on the short drive to the restaurant.
“Are you sure this is supposed to be a good place to eat?” I asked as I drove. “They’re not exactly drawing in hordes, judging from how empty the road is.”
“It’s still pretty new,” Luce said. “And it is a week night. I’m sure they’re busier on weekends.”
Ahead of us, a deer darted across the road. I remembered the thunk Bambi had made last fall when he hit my car. That got me thinking about the deer hooves sitting back in my office in Savage. Was there any possibility that I had stumbled into the rifle sights of an illegal deer hunter this afternoon? I had to admit, that was a much less disturbing—albeit still dangerous—explanation for the bullet than that it had been specifically intended for me. Could it have been that Knott and I were so focused on Rahr that we had mistaken a simple poacher for a murderer?
I turned to Luce. “Do you know anything about deer hunting?”
Dumb question, I realized. Luce was a chef, not a hunter.
“Of course I do,” she answered.
I shot her a quick look of surprise. I’ve never disguised my total aversion to guns and hunting, but then, I didn’t recall her ever broaching the subject, either.
“My dad wasn’t going to let the fact that I was a girl dissuade him from sharing hunting weekends with his only child.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her smiling in the light from the car’s instrument panel. “If I can shoot it, I can cook it.”
Now there’s a recommendation for a woman. Have gun, will get dinner.
“Why?” she asked.
“Just thinking. Maybe that’s what happened this afternoon. You know—somebody hunting dinner and they almost got me instead.”
“You don’t look like a deer, Bobby. Or a stag. Trust me.”
“It’s the antlers, right? I don’t have the antlers. I guess I just can’t make that stag fashion statement, huh?”
Luce laughed, but I knew she was right. That, however, meant the shot was deliberate, which was what Knott and I had concluded. The idea that someone was watching me while I hiked in the woods was bad enough; the idea that a shooter was loose in the forest, putting innocent hikers in his rifle sights, was even worse.
And then there was the worst thought of all: that someone had tried to kill me in particular. Because in all that forest, there was no way that someone who wanted to shoot hikers in general had just happened to be in the same place with me and Knott. Someone was expecting me.
Stay out of the forest.
And only Ellis and Alice had known I was going to be there.
Ellis. A man who could aim and shoot in the winter woods well enough to compete in biathlon races.
As for Alice, I had no idea of the extent of her talents. Or, for that matter, of her personalities.
Could she somehow have been behind my threats? The idea rippled through me with a little frisson of recognition. If, as Knott had suggested, she had listened to my conversation with Rahr, she would have known I was determined to find a Boreal and that I’d keep coming back to the forest until the owls’
mating season was over. And Stan was her brother. He knew I was the one who found Rahr, and he could’ve delivered the note for her in Savage.
But I just couldn’t see him tossing the owl on my deck. He might be a hired gun, but he wouldn’t kill a bird.
Of course, Alice could know other people in the Cities as well. She could have friends there. Weird friends. Friends who would help her harass me into staying away from the woods until … what? Until her brother found a Boreal before me? Until Ellis had the survey securely in his pocket?
“What about the threatening letter Rahr received?” Luce asked, interrupting my silent speculating. She was still sorting through all the information I’d given her at the hotel. “You said Knott blew it off at first, but after you told him about your threats, and what happened to you guys this afternoon, maybe he should take another look at it, or at the S.O.B. people. Maybe there really is a wacko in the woods up there who thinks he’s protecting the owls by scaring off birders.”
I told her that Knott was on it. Actually, he and I discussed it ad nauseum on the hike back to the car after the rifle shot. The problem, Knott told me, was that his experts at the department had taken one look at my bird feeder note and were convinced that Rahr’s letter and my note were authored by two different people, based on writing style, word choice, yada, yada, yada. Short of someone claiming to have written the notes, there was no way of identifying authorship. The fact that both referred to the Boreal site was, of course, of critical interest for the investigators. However, Knott pointed out, the only information that yielded was that there was more than one person involved in making threats. And to put the icing on the resulting cake of confusion, whether either author was responsible for Rahr’s death was anyone’s guess.
Knott’s experts also agreed with the Minneapolis detective whom Knott had consulted about Rahr’s letter: people who write threatening letters about environmental concerns typically don’t progress to violent crimes against persons.
Obviously my eight-word note didn’t qualify as a letter because someone had certainly progressed to trying to commit a violent crime against me today.