A Bobwhite Killing

by Jan Dunlap

  But it wasn’t Rene Ackerman behind the wheel.

  It was Sheriff Paulsen.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Darn it,” I said. I’d forgotten that Shana had said the sheriff was going to come out to Kami’s this morning, possibly to arrest her. Naturally we’d see her patrol car on the tape. “Any other cars?” I asked.

  Kami shook her head. “That’s it, Bob. But anyone who knows my security setup could conceivably manipulate it at some other point along the fence itself, I think.” She looked up at me apologetically. “And whoever’s been messing with my fence seems to know it well enough to do just that. Nice try, but we’re not getting anything we don’t already know from these recordings, I’m afraid.”

  “Although they’re going to come in real handy when the prosecution builds its murder case against you, Kami.”

  The three of us spun around to find Sheriff Paulsen standing in the doorway of the garage. “Jack and Billy were both here late Saturday night. You’ve got the tapes to prove it. The same gun killed both of them, and Billy had a tranquilizer dart in his neck, a dart identical to the ones you use for your animals. You’re the only one left, Kami. Simple arithmetic. Three minus two equals the killer. You’re under arrest, Ms. Marsden, and anything you say or do will be held against you in a court of law.”

  “She has an alibi,” I blurted out. “You can’t arrest her.”

  The sheriff gave me a glare. “Are you her alibi, Mr. White?”

  I shook my head. “No. But I can get you in touch with the man who is.”

  I pulled out my cell phone to find Eddie’s number.

  “Don’t bother,” Kami told me, her voice miserable. “Eddie can’t vouch for me.”

  I looked at her in confusion.

  “He was here on the property, but he was out camping. He can’t swear to my whereabouts all of Saturday morning.”

  “What about Ben?” Alan asked. “Could he swear to it? Any of it?”

  Kami threw him an angry glance, but said nothing.

  “Could he?” I pressed her.

  “Now that’s an interesting question,” Sheriff Paulsen observed, her voice sounding unnaturally tight. “Especially if this Ben you’re talking about is Ben Graham. Is it?”

  I looked from one woman to the other, and guessed that despite her earlier fury at the mayor, Kami hadn’t gone to the sheriff with her suspicions and accusations about Ben’s role in the property tug-of-war. For some reason, she was still protecting hers and Ben’s privacy, or maybe, unlike Ben, she was too loyal to tip a murder rap in the direction of her lover. I guess love really is blind. Though if she and Ben had been together in the wee hours of Saturday morning, they’d be each other’s alibi, effectively safeguarding them from prosecution.

  At least, that’s what I thought.

  “Is it?” the sheriff repeated, her voice even more strained than before.

  “Yes,” Kami let out on a sigh of resignation.

  For a moment or two, the sheriff just stared at Kami. “I’m still taking you in, Ms. Marsden. And as soon as I find Ben Graham, I’m bringing him in, too. He told me he was home alone on Friday night and I didn’t question it. So who’s lying here? You or him?”

  I knew the answer to that one: Ben. According to Skip, Ben had been in the A&W late Friday night with the Canadian collections guy. Whether he’d moved along to Kami’s after that, only she and Ben knew. And judging from Kami’s reluctance, she wasn’t happy about admitting it to the sheriff.

  “Check the surveillance record,” Alan proposed. “If Ben’s car was here at the house early Saturday morning, you’ll have your answer, Sheriff.”

  She turned to Kami. “I want to see it,” she demanded. “Right now.”

  Kami punched more buttons on her control board until the recording on the monitor was dated for yesterday morning. We watched Jack’s car back out and drive away, then Kami fast-forwarded the video to the time stamp of three in the morning. Sure enough, a nice looking Audi sedan came into the picture and parked. The big bear of a guy who exited the car and walked up to the front porch of Kami’s home was, without a doubt, Ben Graham.

  I slid a glance at the sheriff, her face suddenly suffused with heat.

  “Not exactly the paragon of honesty you were hoping for in a mayor, I’m guessing,” Alan observed.

  “Not exactly,” Sheriff Paulsen agreed through gritted teeth.

  “He wants fossils,” I informed her. “He’s been playing the eco people and ATV lobby against each other to drive down the price of the land.”

  The sheriff latched her eyes on mine. “What are you talking about?”

  I filled her in on the mayor’s plan as Alan and I had assembled it, including Skip’s report about the Friday meeting with the collections man. By the time I finished, the sheriff was moving rapidly into meltdown mode.

  Clang! Clang!

  Geez—first Kami at Green Hills, now the sheriff. Ben Graham seemed to have that effect on women down pat.

  “So he’s been using everyone and everything to get just what he wants,” Sheriff Paulsen spit out.

  “Looks like,” I said, backing a little bit away from the irate lawwoman. I didn’t want to get burned by the steam she was generating in the small space. “Though I guess the rule is still innocent until proven guilty, right?”

  She threw me a scalding glance. “I know how to do my job, thanks.”

  “So Kami’s off the suspect list?” Alan asked.

  “No. And I want you two out of here, or I’ll arrest you for the obstruction of justice. In fact, I want you to get out of the county before you totally screw up my investigation. Are you getting the message here?” She dropped her right hand to rest on the butt of the gun on her hip.

  Great. Just because I’d stuck around to give Shana moral support, I was getting the boot from the law. I remembered that Tom had also said this morning that the sheriff wanted us all to go home, but she didn’t have to get nasty about it.

  I exchanged a look of frustration with Alan. I didn’t want to leave, and I couldn’t shake a bad feeling about the way the sheriff’s investigation was going if she was planning to arrest Kami for Jack’s and Billy’s murders. It was like Sheriff Paulsen had already made up her mind about Kami’s guilt, even after we’d shared with her all the information we’d collected about Ben. Actually, now that I thought about it, she seemed a lot more upset about Ben’s potential fossil business than she did about the possibility that he might be involved in a double murder.

  There was something odd about that.

  But she was the law, and she was basically throwing us out of town. Being the good citizen that I am, I didn’t see any alternative but to honor her wishes. Even if that still left me in the dark about who killed Jack O’Keefe and Billy Mason, not to mention who had sabotaged my car and in so doing, had sent Bernie to the hospital to get a plaster fashion statement cemented on her arm.

  The hospital.

  Shana was having the twins.

  “Look,” I said to the sheriff as the four of us exited the garage, “we’ll leave Fillmore, but first I’ve got to stop at the hospital to see how Shana’s doing. She was in labor when we came out here.”

  “She’s having the babies?” Kami asked. “She’s early. Jack said she had another five weeks to go.”

  “Twins usually come early,” Alan advised her, “or so we hear.”

  “I want you to show me this fossil cave entrance that you say is in that meadow on the other side of Ms. Marsden’s property,” Sheriff Paulsen said, oblivious to our conversation about Shana’s impending motherhood.

  “I’ll lead you to the meadow,” I offered, “but Alan and I already searched for an entrance earlier today and we couldn’t find it.”

  “I know where the meadow is,” Sheriff Paulsen snapped. “It’s the cave part I’m still not believing. Show me the cave, and then maybe we can make some sense of all this.”

  I’d already made sense of it, but I didn’t wan
t to point that out to her. She’d already snapped at me once, and I wasn’t about to further upset a woman with a gun on her hip.

  We walked past Claudius, who apparently hadn’t moved since Kami had signaled him to lay down on the pavement. I guessed he hadn’t been curious about the sheriff’s car when it had come up the drive. He must have recognized it from this morning, when Sheriff Paulsen had first come to arrest Kami. I expected that Claudius could feel the vibrations of the damaged patrol car as it bounced into the parking area in front of the farmhouse. I remembered how yesterday morning, I was afraid the damaged shocks would send Shana into labor.

  And that was when I thought she still had more than a month to go before her due date.

  I walked over to my car while Sheriff Paulsen opened the back door of her cruiser for Kami to get in.

  “I have to cuff you,” I heard the sheriff tell Kami.

  Adding insult to injury, I thought.

  And I suddenly knew who had killed Jack O’Keefe.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I climbed in behind the wheel, stunned by my revelation, and just sat for a moment, trying to figure out my next move.

  “Let’s go, White-man,” Alan said, snapping shut his seat belt.

  I pulled out my cell phone and punched in a number.

  “Where are you?” I asked Stan when he answered.

  “Green Hills. Looking at a Worm-eating Warbler,” he replied.

  “I need back-up.”

  “Where?”

  “At a seepage meadow on the west side of Kami Marsden’s exotic animal sanctuary.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. The dial tone buzzed in my ear.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Alan asked as I backed up the SUV enough to turn it around.

  “Sheriff Paulsen killed Jack O’Keefe.”

  “And you know this … how?”

  I glanced at my future brother-in-law as I put the car in drive and took off down Kami’s driveway to the main road. “You know how I’m always telling you that to be a really good birder, you have to be both observant and able to make fine distinctions? That two birds can look very similar, but if you know the one thing that distinguishes one from the other, you can correctly identify the bird?”

  “Yeeaah,” he said, drawing the word out.

  I threw him another glance and noticed that he had grabbed the door handle again. I checked my speed and let up on the accelerator a little. There was, after all, a sheriff right behind me. Even if she was a murderess.

  “Her anger about the fossils, Alan,” I said. “That was the fine distinction that started everything else falling into place for me. And then I thought about how Claudius didn’t seem interested in the sheriff’s car—because it had been there earlier.”

  “She came for Kami. We knew that. We saw her on the surveillance tape getting out of the cruiser and then getting back in.”

  “But the tape didn’t show us where she went,” I persisted. “We assumed it was to the farmhouse, but the cameras didn’t show that. I think she went into the garage and pulled the plug on Nigel’s fencing, Alan. The time stamp on the video proved that Paulsen was right there during the exact time Kami figured someone shut down the fence.”

  “You’re making a big assumption, Bob. She’s the sheriff,” he reminded me.

  “She also knows where the meadow is, and when I rode in her cruiser yesterday morning with Shana, she told us she’d just damaged the car. You saw how bad those ruts into the meadow were. You drove especially carefully not to bang up the undercarriage of your hybrid.”

  “So her bumpy ride is why you think she killed Jack?”

  “No,” I explained, trying to make myself put it all in sequence for Alan, “I think Paulsen is the one who’s been sabotaging Kami’s fence as a favor to Ben. Either he asked her to do it, or she figured she’d score points with him for it because she thought he was supporting the ATV project behind the scenes.”

  I looked in my side mirror to see the sheriff’s car following me by just a few car lengths.

  “Eddie said the fence in the seepage meadow was malfunctioning after midnight on Friday,” I continued. “Saturday morning, when Paulsen was driving Shana and me into town, she said she’d just recently damaged her car. I’m betting that happened when she was in the meadow pulling the fence, which places her on that road very early Saturday morning, which is the same time Jack and Billy were on that same road, coming back from Kami’s. Three people on the same road at that time of night, two of them dead the next day. Coincidence? That’s a mighty big stretch, if you ask me. Besides, did you catch what Paulsen said after we told her about Ben’s fossil scheme? She said that Ben had been using everyone. Which sure sounded to me like she was including herself.”

  I turned out onto the main road and checked my rear view mirror. Sheriff Paulsen was right behind me, her eyes shaded by her standard-issue sunglasses.

  “But why would the sheriff kill Jack, or Billy?” Alan persisted. “It’s not a capital offense to be on a lonely country road in the middle of the night. You’re missing a motive, Bob.”

  I was still working that out in my head. If Paulsen felt used by Ben, there had to be a reason.

  “She didn’t know about the fossils,” I reasoned, “but she was sabotaging the fence for Ben. I don’t know—maybe he promised her a kickback from the ATV group when they got their project approved, or that he’d okay county funding for a new fleet of squad cars for the department if she’d help him squash the eco-community. Either way, she’d think she stood to benefit from doing his dirty work. That would be using her, for sure.”

  “You told me that everyone keeps saying that Ben is the big man in this county,” Alan conceded. “He pulled strings to get your car fixed. Maybe he’s got the sheriff in his pocket, too.”

  “Or in his bed,” I said, surprising myself, then realizing that jealousy was exactly the vibe I’d picked up when Sheriff Paulsen had asked if the Ben about whom Alan questioned Kami was indeed Ben Graham. Believe me, I’m very familiar with that particular vibe after counseling high school drama queens for almost a decade. To be honest, I’d rather have a rattlesnake in my office than two jealous girls—at least with a rattler, you get some warning before the venom spews out. With hormone-driven teens—not so much. Counseling high school students isn’t all fun and games, you know.

  Nor was going on a birding weekend and ending up with a killer on my bumper.

  “Okay, let’s go with this,” Alan said. “Ben says ‘jump’ and the sheriff says ‘how high?’ He doesn’t share his fossil plan with her, but lets her think he’s helping Chuck push the ATV park. She sabotages Kami’s fence, thinking that’ll move the ATV project forward and win her points from her lover. But then Jack catches her in the act Saturday morning on his way back from Kami’s place, so she’s got to get rid of him before he connects the dots to Ben and Chuck, and blows them all out of the water politically and professionally. Who knows? Maybe by that point, Paulsen figured that killing Jack was doing Ben a very special favor to move the ATV project forward.”

  “But now,” I finished for him, “thanks to our filling her in on what’s really going on with Ben, it turns out to be the wrong favor, since Ben didn’t want the ATV project to succeed anyway.”

  My eyes flew to the rear view mirror again. The sheriff was almost in my back seat.

  “I have a really bad feeling about this,” I told Alan.

  “Join the crowd,” he said.

  I put my foot down on the accelerator and my car surged forward, giving me breathing room ahead of the sheriff. Let her give me a ticket, I figured. If she pulled me over, I’d grab her through the window until Alan could jump out and put a headlock on her.

  Of course, if all my suspicions were wrong, Alan and I would be sitting in jail before dinner time for assaulting an officer.

  Where, at least, we’d be safe from Lily, who would undoubtedly want to kill us both.

  This wa
s one of the problems with my sister marrying my best friend—depending on the situation, Lily could now probably hit two birds with one stone: a Hawk and a Bob White.

  And then it dawned on me how Ben Graham could have had a note about killing Bobwhite in his pocket on Saturday afternoon that Jack O’Keefe had written on Inn & Suites stationery on Friday night at Kami’s place.

  The police must have searched Jack’s body and found the note and turned it over to Sheriff Paulsen for evidence. Seeing that it was about the eco-community, she passed it along to Ben so no one would make a connection between Jack’s death and the zoning dispute. She was covering her tracks, in other words.

  In my side view mirror, I could see that Paulsen was back on my bumper, and I knew in my gut that she was going to cover her tracks with us, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “She’s going to kill us at the seepage meadow,” I told Alan. “Yeah,” he agreed, “I’m coming to that conclusion. How fast do you think Stan Miller drives?”

  “I don’t know.” But I sure hoped he was as much of a speed demon as I was.

  More of one, actually. I knew I would definitely feel better if I could be sure that Stan was already waiting for us at the meadow. Stan would have a gun.

  Another two minutes of flying down the road and I took the bumpy path into the meadow.

  Sheriff Paulsen was right behind me.

  I scanned the edge of the forest as I slowly drove to the center of the clearing. A few Wilson’s Snipes took flight from the open wetland in front of me.

  No cars.

  No Stan.

  “Maybe we should call the police,” Alan said.

  “The police is the problem,” I reminded him. “You call 911 and you’re going to get Sheriff Paulsen. Newsflash: we’ve already got Sheriff Paulsen.”

  “Correction, White-man—she’s got us.”

  I put the car in park and Paulsen pulled up next to my SUV. A moment later, she was standing about five feet away from my car door, telling us to show her the cave entrance.