The Boreal Owl Murder

by Jan Dunlap

  “Hey!” I said. “I’m dealing with a crisis here. I’m experiencing a major paradigm shift. What I assumed was true and good isn’t necessarily so. A little sensitivity might be appropriate.”

  Luce rolled her eyes. I drove in silence for about—oh—thirty seconds.

  “Okay, I’m over it,” I said. I looked in my rear-view mirror and seeing the road clear, I pulled a fast U-turn in the road.

  “What are you doing?” Luce grabbed the dashboard to steady herself against the sudden turn.

  “We’re going up to see that third Boreal Owl site I know.”

  “But it’s not dusk, yet. The owls won’t be calling now.”

  I gave Luce a quick glance. “I’m not looking for the owls. I’m looking for a pattern.”

  “A pattern?”

  “Topped trees. Spiked trees.”

  Another body?

  I sure hoped not. One was already more than enough.

  At which point, one last thought plowed into the still-smoldering wreck of my mental demolition derby. If I’d been shot yesterday, I would have been another body near a Boreal site.

  Did two bodies a pattern make?

  In the middle of hundreds of acres of deep woods, yet within calling distance of established Boreal Owl study sites—I’d have to give that a big thumbs up, buddy.

  And then I flashed on the hillcrest where I had been a sitting duck.

  It was unnaturally open. No trees.

  At least, there weren’t trees there anymore.

  Because they’d already been harvested.

  Now, in my mind’s eye, I could clearly see the hillcrest again, and what I had consciously missed seeing at the time: tree stumps. While I was lying on the trail, waiting for Knott to reach me, I’d scanned around myself at eye level and seen ground-level stumps lining the trail.

  Stumps of white pine.

  A tree cutter had been there.

  “Bobby?”

  I glanced at Luce. She looked concerned.

  “Are you all right? You looked kind of … glazed … for a minute.”

  I breathed deeply. “I’m okay.” I reached over and patted her thigh. “Some pieces of the puzzle just fell into place. I think Rahr was on to something that had nothing to do with the owls.”

  Then again, maybe it did.

  In fact, maybe it had everything to do with the owls.

  The location was the key, just like Knott and I had figured.

  Whoever was cutting the trees had deliberately selected the remote spots where Rahr did his research, specifically because the spots were so difficult to locate, which was almost a guarantee that the poaching there would go undetected.

  Unless you knew exactly where to find them. Was that why Rahr had jumped all over me in our phone call? Did he think I was directing poachers to his sites?

  “Luce,” I said, getting more excited as other pieces of information now made sense to me, “someone was cutting at his study sites, and Rahr knew it. That’s why he spiked the trees—he was trying to scare off the poacher. He didn’t know who was doing it, but he suspected it was someone he had trusted. He said as much when he yelled at me on the phone that someone who was supposed to be on his side was sabotaging him.”

  “Someone on his side?” She shook her head. “That’s a cast of thousands, Bobby. Colleagues at the university, S.O.B. members, the Minnesota birding community, anyone who’d gone on his owl tours. That’s not exactly a small bunch of suspects.”

  I had to agree, but I doubted that many of them had logging connections, because that was what it would take to pull off this poaching. We needed to make two lists, I decided: who had logging connections and who knew the location of the sites. Without hardly thinking, I could name one person for the top of both lists: Thompson.

  On the heels of that name, I realized I knew another: Montgomery.

  And another: Alice.

  Alice had said she’d been on a first-name basis with the logging industry people who’d lobbied Rahr. Could she have inadvertently—or not—leaked the site locations to someone looking for a lucrative, albeit illegal, sideline? Was that the person to whom Rahr caught her passing his research data, and not to Stan as I had assumed?

  Ouch. There was that donkey thing again.

  I tried to think of a way I might be able to whittle down the list of possible people who had not only access to the sites, but who had actually visited them in the last few months. I could only think of one way.

  “I sure hope he’s home,” I said under my breath.

  “Who?” Luce asked.

  “It’s time to call in the cavalry,” I told her. “We’re going to Crazy Eddie’s place.”

  We followed the county road west out of Two Harbors and wound up and down for about twenty-five miles. I made a right turn onto a dirt track and stopped the car in front of a rickety wire and post gate. I honked the horn twice, then tapped it three short blasts, then two more long ones.

  “Only Norwegians past this point,” Luce read off the enormous hand-lettered sign attached to the gate. “Others will be shot. Have a nice day. What is this, reclusive Scandinavian militiaman meets Minnesota nice?”

  “This,” I said, “is Crazy Eddie’s place. He likes his privacy. He’ll be out in a minute. You’ll see.”

  Sure enough, a couple minutes later Eddie came rolling up to the other side of the gate on what looked like a brand-new ATV. Even though he was driving slowly, every time he hit a bump in the track, the woolly ear flaps on his winter cap jumped, looking for all the world like little wings getting ready to take off. He was concentrating so hard on watching the track, I was afraid he was going to drive right through the gate, instead of opening it in a more conventional way. His long white beard drifted down his chest, and his cheeks were rosy with the cold. He was wearing an open down vest over his trademark flannel shirt, his red suspenders stretched across his rather expansive belly. At the last minute, he made a sharp turn and braked next to the gate. He flashed me a big grin and waved, then leaned over and unlatched the gate to slide it open with one hand while he had the ATV in reverse. I drove through far enough so he could close it behind us, and then I turned off the engine.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Luce whispered. “It’s the North Pole and we’ve caught Santa Claus out of uniform. Where are the reindeer and elves?”

  “They’re on spring break in Cancun,” I said. “Come on. You have to meet Crazy Eddie.”

  I got out of the car and waited for Eddie to pull up next to me. “What’s with the ATV, Eddie? Where’s the Mercedes?”

  Eddie laughed a big belly laugh and punched me in the shoulder. “Hit a deer. Again. This time it took out the radiator.”

  I could relate. Luckily, I’d only lost the headlight.

  Luce came around the front of the car, and I introduced her to Eddie.

  “Luce, this is Eddie Edvarg. Eddie, Luce Nilsson.” They shook hands, and I noticed him giving Luce a very obvious once-over.

  “Eddie and I worked together one summer for the DNR up here,” I explained. “We were tracking the movements of moose and documenting their range for a survey. Eddie’s a whiz with electronics and spreadsheets. He could predict where those moose were going to be ten days out if he wanted to.”

  Eddie laughed again. “Hell, I could tell you what they were thinking if I wanted to. Come to think of it, anyone could, because moose don’t think real hard.”

  He stroked his bushy white beard and addressed himself to Luce. Like a lot of men, he had to look up at her to make eye contact; at just over five feet tall, he’s not the most impressive in the height department. Unlike a lot of “vertically challenged” men, however, he’s not self-conscious about it. He insists his short stature makes him “accessible,” though to what, he’s never quite spelled out.

  “Moose have got to be the dumbest hoofed beasts on God’s green earth,” he told Luce. “I’ve heard of young bulls charging trains to prove their dominance. Guess who loses? And did you know they
’ve been known to walk out onto a frozen lake, get their hooves frozen to the surface and instead of trying to pull ’em off, they’ll just stand there and freeze to death? Swear to God. So, are you Norwegian? You look like one. I am, you know.”

  Luce nodded. “Minnesotan Norwegian all the way.”

  “That’s good,” Eddie nodded, too. “Then I don’t have to shoot you. Bob here, though, he’s a problem. I’ve tried for years, but I just can’t get him to eat the lutefisk. I’ve got a bottle of aquavit around here somewhere.” He twisted on the seat of the ATV, sticking his hands in all of his pants and vest pockets searching for a bottle of the traditional Norwegian liquor. “Can’t welcome a Norwegian properly without a toast with the aquavit.”

  “Eddie,” I said. “Can we cut across your land to that Boreal Owl site Mike and I visited when I was up here last weekend? It saves about an hour of driving. Otherwise I have to take the long way around.”

  “Sure you can,” he said, giving up on finding liquid refreshment. “Aren’t you here kind of early for owling?”

  “Actually, I’m not looking for the owls right now,” I said, climbing back into the car. “I just want to scout the place.”

  “Oh-ho, scouting! I like the sound of that. You need any surveillance equipment? Tiny cameras? Hidden microphones? Need help securing the area?”

  “Ah, no thanks, Eddie. I just want to look at the trees.”

  “What’s with the trees, anyway? Back in November, that DNR guy was up here almost every day clearing out timber on that state land next to mine on the north side, and now he’s been back a couple times in the last week. I thought the DNR gave up that idea because of those owls.”

  “They did. What DNR guy?”

  “The one with the truck like we used to use for our surveys. You know—beat-up, ugly green pick-up, standard issue. I stopped him once and asked what he was doing up there, and he said he had to thin out some young trees. He even had the DNR jacket. I got him on video if you want to look.”

  “Video?” Luce asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s been a long winter up here, and my satellite dish crapped out in January, so I rigged up motion sensitive cameras along the front gate here to watch the world go by. Cheap entertainment, basically, but it beats the monotony of watching the snow fall.” Eddie pointed to four tiny cameras mounted along the gate that I hadn’t noticed before. “Usually, all I get is the deer, an occasional bear and lots of coyotes and raccoons. But this month was busy, between the DNR man, those two gals and Dr. Rahr. And that guy in camos. In fact, last weekend it was a regular parade up here.”

  Last weekend? Eddie had Dr. Rahr on tape? Along with four other people?

  Before Luce could ask, I explained to her that Eddie’s place wasn’t just a convenient short cut to one of the Boreal Owl sites. The road it sat on, the road we’d taken up here, actually led eventually to two of the sites: the one we wanted to see now and the crime scene where the trees were spiked. I knew Eddie was living up here, so when I was doing my research to pinpoint possible birding locations and I realized his land butted up against owl territory, I’d called him and asked if I could use his place as a shortcut. He’d said sure.

  Then when I was up here last Friday night with Mike, I also realized that the road Eddie lived on hooked up to a long back route to the other site. When we went owling again on Saturday night, though, we hadn’t come this way first, but took a more direct route up to the site where we found Rahr. Eddie’s location on the road to the sites was the real reason I’d wanted to see him now, on the chance he might have some recollection of people or vehicles traveling by. To find he had video was a stroke of luck I couldn’t have even imagined. Maybe Luce had been right—yet again—and Eddie really was Santa Claus.

  “Eddie,” I said, “could you get me a copy of that video? There’s a detective in Duluth who would want to see it. He’s investigating Dr. Rahr’s death. You may have gotten a picture of a killer.”

  “What?” Eddie asked, his bushy eyebrows rising with surprise. “Wait a minute. Dr. Rahr’s dead? When did that happen? I just talked to him last Friday morning. He went up to his site where you’re going now, and then he said he was going to drive on to that other research spot he has way out there in the woods. Said he had some preventative maintenance to do.”

  Eddie cast a disgusted look towards the satellite dish sitting near his cabin. “Damn dish,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I moved out here to get away from it all and damned if it doesn’t seem like the world still comes after you.” Eddie shook his head.

  “Actually, my friend in Duluth—a detective with the name of Knott—arrested someone this morning for Rahr’s murder, but I expect he’d still want to look at those tapes. Maybe it would give him some hard evidence.” I put the car in gear while Luce buckled her seatbelt. “How about we pick it up on our way back out? Say in about half an hour?”

  “You got it, Bob,” Eddie said. He revved off to his cabin set back in the woods, his beard flying and his earflaps flapping.

  I took off down the track across Eddie’s property.

  “So why is he Crazy Eddie?” Luce asked as we bumped along the soggy road. “I don’t know that he’s any crazier than anyone else I’ve met. My great-aunt Vivi always carries a flask of aquavit with her. Just in case, you know.”

  “He’s filthy rich,” I said. “Eddie and his wife won the lottery about twelve years ago. They’d lived in this small town down in southern Minnesota for years, but they had to move because they were so swamped with phone calls and strangers showing up at their door asking for money. They could have gone anywhere: Hawaii, Florida, Europe, the Riviera. And they could have lived in luxury, but they love the north woods, so they moved here. Eddie doesn’t have to work—he’s got plenty of money—but he loves tracking for the DNR. You saw how he is about electronics. So when I got to know him when we worked together that summer on the moose survey, I told him he was crazy, that he ought to go lay in the sun somewhere and drink piña coladas instead of freezing up here for six months of the year. My name for him stuck.”

  “Does he really have a Mercedes?”

  “No, he doesn’t have a Mercedes.”

  I gave her a grin.

  “He has two—at least.”

  I stopped the car at the edge of Eddie’s land. We got out to hike just a short way beyond the state forest marker to where I’d located the Boreal Owl site. When Mike and I had come last weekend, there had still been good-sized drifts of snow, but today, the snow was rapidly melting into the earth. We came to a slight rise in the forest path and saw a wide clearing up ahead. When we entered the clearing, Luce and I both looked up … at a huge circle of topped trees.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  By the time we got back to the hotel, it was late afternoon. We wanted to start our drive up to our last Boreal Owl site before dusk, so we planned a quick stop for clean-up and to pick up the cooler Luce had packed for us yesterday afternoon at her place. I tossed Eddie’s video on the dresser and debated calling Knott about it. We’d taken a quick look at it before we’d left Eddie’s place, and, frankly, I wasn’t sure now what good it was.

  The recording was stamped with dates and times, so it had been easy to find the footage we especially wanted to see.

  “Now here’s last Friday morning,” Eddie had said, kicking back in his recliner while Luce and I sat on the sofa in front of the television set. On the screen, a beat-up truck neared the camera.

  “Isn’t that the truck we saw this afternoon at VNT?” Luce asked, leaning forward to get a better look.

  “Definitely a resemblance,” I answered, although I had to admit that it could just as easily have been any DNR vehicle—the agency must have had a corner on the world market for ugly green pickups. But then the driver’s face came into view, and if it wasn’t Thompson, then it was his identical twin.

  “That’s the man,” Eddie said. “Same DNR guy who was up here in November carting out tr
ees. Thought it was kind of odd they were doing that kind of work so late in the year, but when they’ve got the budget for a job, they do it no matter what the season, I guess.”

  “He’s not a DNR employee,” I told Eddie. “He owns his own garden supply company, and last November, he sold a big shipment of Christmas trees—very nice Christmas trees—to my sister Lily. Based on what you’re saying, Eddie, it sounds like those very nice trees were also very hot, as in stolen.”

  “Poached, you mean,” Eddie said.

  “Poached and then sold,” I added.

  “This was last Friday, right?” Luce asked, still studying the tape as it played.

  “Sure was,” Eddie replied. He nodded toward the television screen. “See, I told you it was a parade.”

  Luce was looking at the next vehicle approaching the camera. It was a jeep we’d never seen before, but as it neared the gate, we got a clear view of the driver.

  It was Margaret Montgomery.

  Luce and I looked at each other. Margaret Montgomery had been up here last Friday? Close on the heels of Thompson, it appeared. Eddie forwarded the tape to the next vehicle. This one also we didn’t recognize, just as we didn’t recognize the driver.

  “That’s Dr. Rahr,” Eddie commented. On the tape, Rahr stopped his truck at the gate and waited. A few seconds later, the gate opened and the truck drove through.

  “That’s when he came to take the shortcut back to the site you just visited,” Eddie explained, hitting the pause button. “It was when he left that he told me he had some maintenance to do at the other location.”

  A sudden idea hit me. Did Eddie have tape showing when Thompson—and Montgomery—had returned? It was hoping for a lot, I knew, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. The idea that they’d both been using a road in the morning that led to the Boreal site where Rahr was killed later in the day opened disturbing doors of possibility. Had they seen anything—or anyone—suspicious along the way, either going in or coming out? Could they possibly be witnesses, unaware that they had information that could help Knott tie up his case?