The Boreal Owl Murder

by Jan Dunlap

  Nice office, I thought. I wished my office at school looked that nice or was even a third the size of this one. I had a desk, two burgundy plastic chairs and a file cabinet jammed against a concrete wall. Public eduction chic. This looked like a successful realtor’s showroom; in comparison, my office looked like a broom closet at the gas station.

  Come to think of it, I’ve probably seen nicer broom closets at gas stations.

  I could also see that Vern Thompson, VNT himself, was in the office.

  “The man is in,” I told Luce and got out of the car. She followed me up to the door, and I opened it for her to walk through. Thompson rose from his desk as we stepped inside, and I could see surprise register on his face as he recognized me from the Splashing Rock.

  “Mr.—uh …”

  “White,” I finished for him. “Bob White.”

  “Yes, of course. The birder.”

  We shook hands, and I introduced him to Luce.

  “Actually, I’m here on behalf of my sister,” I explained. “She owns Lily’s Landscaping in Savage and asked me to look you up since I was going to be up here for the weekend.”

  “Lily’s Landscaping. Yes, we did some business before Christmas,” Thompson said. “She took a good-sized shipment of our Christmas trees.”

  “Yup, that’s right. She was very happy with them. They were very nice trees,” I couldn’t help adding.

  Thompson smiled. “Truth in—”

  “Advertising. I know,” I nodded. “Anyway, Lily wanted me to take a look at your operation, see what you’ve got in the way of white jack pines and, I understand, a great deal on ladyslippers.”

  “Won’t you take a seat?” He gestured Luce and me over to the overstuffed chairs by the coffee table. “Can I get you something to drink? Pop? Tea?”

  “No, thanks,” Luce and I both replied as we sat down. I noticed a little display calendar on the top of the rough-cut white pine coffee table and picked it up. It had a photo of Mount Rainier on it and the words Big Timber Industries of Cascade, Washington, emblazoned across the bottom.

  “Pretty country,” I commented, replacing the calendar on the table. “Have you been out there?”

  Thompson sat on the broad arm of a chair and shook his head. “No, I haven’t. I’m a Minnesota boy. Born and raised outside Ely. How about you?”

  “Minnetonka.”

  “Luce?” Thompson asked.

  “St. Paul. Right on the Mississippi River, as a matter of fact.”

  “Near the old Ford plant?”

  “Yes,” Luce said. “Do you know it?”

  “Sure do,” Thompson grinned. “I spent ten years there in the seventies, working the assembly line. Hot, hard work. Cooped up all day around big machines and sweating buckets because there’s no way to cool off inside a big plant like that. Some days, I just knew hell had to be cooler than that. But then business was bad for a while and I got laid off, so I came back north. I liked the Cities fine, and I sure learned my way around machinery at the plant, but I guess I just missed the north woods too much. Hunting and fishing, you know. And I like working outside. Ended up working in logging till last spring.”

  I wasn’t surprised he’d been a logger. That certainly explained his muscular arms and overall good physical condition. Thompson might have been twenty years older than me, but I would have jumped at the chance to pick him for my Red Rover team on the playground.

  “This,” he said, spreading his arms out to include the office, “is my newest business venture. And a good one it is, too.”

  He laid his tanned hands on his knees. “So what can I tell you about VNT?”

  “Basically, I was hoping to see your greenhouses,” I told him.

  Of course, what I really wanted to know was if he was stealing stock off state land, but I didn’t think that was a good line for opening communications. “So, Vern, are you poaching all your product?” As strong as he appeared to be, I figured I could still take him if he threw a punch, but I wasn’t itching to prove it. Good counselors don’t provoke; they tactfully elicit. Another gem from one of my graduate classes.

  “Well, Bob, I’d sure like to do that, but actually, we don’t have greenhouses, per se. We’ve got plantings, and it’s a little tough right now to get up to our growing property, what with the heavy snow and melting we’ve had this last week. The roads are mud, at best, and I’ve already got a couple vehicles stuck up there. So I’m going to give you a rain check—make that a sun check,” he smiled, “to see it the next time you’re up this way.”

  He stood and handed me his business card, making it clear our friendly little chat had come to a rather abrupt end.

  “Sorry you made the trip out here for nothing and I can’t show you anything, but tell your sister that I can deliver all the ladyslippers she wants and she won’t find a better price or better stock anywhere. And if she wants those jack pine she talked about, well, I’ve got plenty of them, too.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got quite a piece of land for all that stock,” I commented, tucking his card into my wallet.

  “That I do,” he agreed. “That, I surely do.”

  “It’s not a wasted trip, either, Mr. Thompson,” Luce told him. “We’ve already had a good morning birding and we’re hoping to find one of those Boreal Owls tonight. Bob’s got a line on a couple possible sites, so we’re going to give them a try.”

  “Is that right?” He glanced at me and paused for a moment, like he was thinking that over. “How do you know where to look? Did you go on the owl trips last spring?”

  “No,” I answered him. “We didn’t make it up here in time. I’ve just been researching Rahr’s journal reports, and based on that information, I’ve narrowed it down to some probable nesting areas.”

  “Interesting.” He ushered us to the door. “I wondered how you—I mean, birders in general—could find those sites. They seemed fairly remote when we visited them last year on the tours. It looked to me like you’d have to be pretty highly motivated to track those owls down. There’s a lot of country up there.”

  He stepped back to let Luce go through the door first. “Well, let me know how you do. I’d be curious to know what you find. So would Margaret, probably,” he added, “being as she’s the S.O.B. director.”

  Thompson walked outside with us. I looked around the little parking area, empty except for my SUV and what I guessed was Thompson’s truck—a beat-up old olive green pick-up that could have doubled for one of the trucks we used when I worked for the DNR years ago. To my complete disappointment, however, even though I wished as hard as I could, there was not a single cherry-picker to be seen, let alone one with a stolen pine top hanging over the edge of its rusty old bucket.

  So much for wishing. Time for Plan B.

  Or, at least, it would have been time for Plan B if I’d had one.

  Which I didn’t.

  “So you’ve got a couple trucks stuck in the woods, huh?” I was back to hoping for incrimination by conversation. If he let slip that one was a cherry-picker, I was going straight to the nearest police station and asking for back-up.

  “Yeah,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’d probably still be stuck up there myself, too, if Maggie hadn’t come and given me a ride home. She’s an amazing woman.”

  “Maggie?” Luce asked.

  “Margaret,” he said. “Montgomery. She was having dinner with me last night at the Splashing Rock. Bob met her. Nice place, don’t you think? All that white pine in the dining room. I supplied it. The Splashing Rock was one of my first clients—helped me establish the business.”

  I nodded in acknowledgment, remembering the aroma of pine that lightly scented the restaurant and trying to recall details from our conversation the night before. “That’s right, she said you two met on one of Rahr’s owl trips last spring.”

  “Do you bird?” Luce asked him.

  “No, not really,” Thompson laughed. “I went on the trip more out of morbid curiosity than out
of interest in the owls.”

  “Morbid curiosity?” Luce repeated.

  “Yeah. The owls cost me my logging job. I was working for the company that was counting on the DNR contract to clear the forest, and when it fell through, thanks to the owls and Maggie’s S.O.B. crowd, so did my job.” Thompson laced his fingers together and pushed them out palms-first in front of his chest. “But turned out, it was the best thing that happened to me. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m my own boss.”

  “That’s quite an accomplishment,” Luce said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks … Luce,” he said.

  For a second there, I thought he was going to say “little lady,” but I guessed when he realized he was looking up at Luce, he figured it didn’t quite fit the situation. But Luce had his attention now. “I’d love to have my own business,” she told him, a note of longing in her voice.

  She did?

  Funny, she’d never mentioned aspirations of ownership to me. I slid her a glance and saw that she was gazing at Thompson with what I could only call blatant admiration. I even thought I saw her bat her eyelashes at him.

  For crying out loud.

  She was flirting with the guy.

  What was she thinking? That a little female flattery was going to overpower his instincts of self-preservation and convince him to confess to poaching plants from government land? That her beautiful blue eyes would reduce the rugged lumberman to a pile of sniveling self-reproach? That flirting was going to get us a clue?

  “Yeah, having your own business is the greatest thing in the world,” he assured her, smiling. I swear he suddenly seemed taller. Not that it helped. He’d have to grow another four inches to catch up to Luce. But it did make him talkative.

  “You don’t have to worry about lay-offs, job security, or catching grief for coming in late,” Thompson said. “I wouldn’t do it any other way, now. I think it would kill me to have to go back to working for someone else.”

  Kill me.

  All at once, previously unrelated thoughts rammed into each other in my head. Bells were ringing. Instincts were screaming. Thompson had something worth killing for.

  So maybe I was a little hasty about criticizing the flattery approach.

  Thompson was an outdoor guy. His livelihood was made in the woods—legally or not. Would he, I wondered, kill someone who threatened his business? Someone who could send that being-your-own-boss dream-come-true crashing down to the ground?

  The topped trees Luce and I had seen last night were in the owls’ range of woods; if Rahr had stumbled on Thompson cutting trees that were protected, would Thompson have threatened Rahr—or even, possibly, had him killed—to keep his illegal business secret and intact?

  Was that why Knott had no comment on the man who had turned himself in as Rahr’s murderer—because there was more than one person involved, and the case was far from closed?

  Rahr’s body, however, hadn’t been found at the place we’d visited last night where we saw the topped trees. His body was at another site a long ways from there.

  And then another thought crashed into what was becoming a virtual interstate pile-up in my brain. Were the trees topped where I’d found Rahr’s body?

  I didn’t know. I sure hadn’t noticed last weekend, but I hadn’t been looking either. Tonight I was definitely going to check. Of course, I was feeding a huge suspicion here: Thompson was the one who had topped the trees.

  And, I sternly reminded myself, even if he had, that didn’t prove he had anything to do with Rahr’s murder. Knott had a confessed killer in custody.

  But if Thompson’s “work” in the forest brought him into any kind of proximity to Rahr’s research areas, then there might have been some kind of on-going territorial dispute between the men that no one else knew about. And I wouldn’t have put it past Rahr to take matters into his own hands, especially if he thought someone was deliberating trying to sabotage his work.

  Which, apparently, he had, judging from our phone conversation.

  And that, in turn, would explain the spiked trees.

  If my emerging theory was correct, Rahr must have discovered that trees around his Boreal study sites were getting cut, and so he spiked the trees himself in an effort to stop the harvesting. In addition, he must have suspected the tree cutting was specific to his research locations. Being the secretive researcher he was, he didn’t want the DNR and the attendant media circus invading his space and disturbing the owls because of it, so he didn’t call in any complaints to the authorities. That left just one question: why, in that big forest with all those trees, did he think it was only his Boreal sites that were being targeted?

  The answer was obvious: Rahr must have found a pattern of poaching at his research locations.

  I knew the location of only three of his sites; certainly he had others I didn’t know about. But of the three I did know, one was topped and one was spiked. What about the third site?

  Suddenly, I was anxious to get going. I wanted to see the third site while it was still light and see whether it fit a pattern—spiked or topped. I took Luce’s hand to pull her to the car, but she and Thompson were still talking.

  “I have to say, though, if it weren’t for Maggie, it probably wouldn’t have happened,” Thompson was saying. “She’s the one who suggested I start my own business. Use your expertise, she said. Think creatively, she said. She’d been through job changes, too, so she knew what she was talking about.”

  “What job changes?” I asked, and almost simultaneously thought, Crap! Why did I do that?

  This is, I’ve found, one of the occupational hazards of being a counselor: you form a habit of encouraging people to talk. Even when you really don’t want them to talk anymore, when what you most want is for them to shut up, go away and leave you alone, you can’t help yourself—you ask them to keep talking. Unfortunately, this same habit makes people think you’re a good listener and that you’re really interested in them when it’s really nothing more than an automatic reflex. I used to think I had invisible words—invisible to me, at least—painted on my shirt that read “Tell me your life story. I really want to know,” because people I hardly knew would tell me all kinds of personal, intimate details I wouldn’t dream of sharing with my closest friend, let alone a virtual stranger.

  Judging from the eager monologue that was now pouring from Thompson’s mouth, the invisible message on my shirt must have been flashing like a theatre marquee on opening night. Without any encouragement at all from me, he was spilling his guts.

  Or rather, he was spilling Montgomery’s guts.

  “Maggie hasn’t always worked in Duluth, you know,” Thompson was saying. “She’s from the West Coast. That’s where I got the Seattle calendar you were looking at—from Maggie. She was a hot shot lobbyist for the timber companies out there back in the late 1980s.” He started shaking his head. “But things went from bad to worse for logging people after the owl thing, and she said she’d had enough. That’s when she landed in Minnesota.”

  Thompson paused and chuckled. “Funny, isn’t it? She moves out here and ends up on the other side of the fence.”

  “What fence?” Luce asked, totally confused.

  It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. All at once, I understood what Thompson was telling us.

  Before she came to Duluth to defend the habitat of the Boreal Owls, Margaret Montgomery had worked for the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest … as an opponent of preserving the habitat of the Northern Spotted Owls.

  In her current job, as the director of S.O.B., she was the champion of owls.

  In her previous life, she had been the enemy.

  Chapter Twenty

  So what?” Luce said as we drove back into Two Harbors. “So she switched jobs. And perspectives. People do that.”

  I knew she was right. Again. People make changes for all kinds of reasons. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad people if they make a complete reversal in the causes they
defend. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of convenience. Sometimes it’s a matter of enlightenment. Or, like Luce said, it’s a change in perspective.

  Although at times, I was sure, it was pure self-interest.

  Regardless of the reason, though, whatever lay behind Montgomery’s switch of allegiance was none of my business. For all I knew, Montgomery’s lobbying work and environmental activism were just her job, simply something she was good at, that earned her an income, and not something in which she had a personal emotional investment. I was the one who had made that assumption, and you know what they say happens when you assume—it makes donkeys out of all of us. Or, at least that’s the cleaned up version I tell my students. Maybe what really bothered me was that she looked like my mother, but this was definitely not something my mother would do: posture for pay. It felt cheap and dishonest. To my way of thinking, it gave S.O.B. a bad name to have, basically, a soldier of fortune for its director.

  Okay, so maybe I should reword that.

  Not the soldier of fortune part. The bad name part.

  I mean, how could you get a worse name than what it already had—S.O.B.? Anyway, as far as I was concerned, this little bit of biographical revelation about its director didn’t exactly cast a glow of confidence on the credibility or sincerity of its leadership in the area of conservation.

  But, as Luce proceeded to point out to me, that wasn’t my problem.

  “Bobby, we didn’t come up here to validate the work of S.O.B.,” she reminded me. “We came up here to find a Boreal Owl. And check out Very Nice Trees. And the Splashing Rock. Two down, one to go. Get over it.”