A Bobwhite Killing (17 page)

Alan, however, didn’t have any problem with sharing.

“They found a tranquilizer dart in Billy’s body,” he explained to Kami. “Last we heard, the sheriff was on her way to ask you about it. So, yeah, I can see where you might not want to mention to her about tracking Billy’s car. It’s a no-brainer that if she knew about the tracking, she’d slap some cuffs on you. I hope you can think of someone else who might have tranquilizer darts. Otherwise, you’d better have a good lawyer in mind.”

Geez, Alan, way to be sensitive and helpful.

Kami didn’t seem especially rattled, though. Then again, like I already said, this was a lady with a tiger. I expect if you share your property with a megafauna like Nigel, it takes more than the threat of handcuffs to throw you for a loop. Instead of getting flustered or defensive, Kami became really still. I could almost see the wheels turning inside her head.

“That bastard,” she whispered one more time.

“Are we still talking Ben here?” I asked, wanting to be sure I was still on the same train of thought with her.

“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “We’re talking Ben here.”

“What does Ben have to do with the dart?” Alan wanted to know.

Kami looked from Alan to me. She was definitely considering telling us something, but hesitating for some reason.

“What?” I pressed her.

I could see her jaws tighten in silent anger.

“Ben would have had access to my darts.”

Before I could even formulate the next question, she answered it for me. “Ben has a key to my home. We have an on-again, off-again relationship. It’s been that way for almost twenty years. He knows where I keep my vet supplies, so it wouldn’t take him more than a minute to pull one out of the cabinet and stuff it in a pocket.”

Kami looked up into the treetops around us, pausing to collect her thoughts. “He’s pulled some pretty low stunts over the years, but this … this would be a new low. I don’t even want to think about the possibility he could have killed Billy, but how can I not? I saw them together on Friday in the same place where Billy was found dead the next day. Who else would know the place? I just can’t believe it.”

She lowered her eyes to the ground and dug her heel into the dirt. “And what reason would he have to kill Billy? Billy was working for him, spying on Jack and me.”

“Maybe Ben decided that wasn’t such a good idea, anymore,” Alan theorized. “Maybe Ben wanted, or needed, to get rid of the messenger to protect himself from being exposed?”

“And then he tells the media I was sleeping with Jack? That bastard!” She looked up at me and Alan, her voice a choked whisper. “I’m going to kill him.”

“I’d recommend you not mention that to the sheriff at this point,” Alan suggested. “She might be a little overly sensitive to people announcing their plans to kill other people right now.”

“He set me up!” she suddenly shouted. “He wanted me out of the way! Oh, my God, I get it now!” Kami slapped her palms against her temples and spun in a circle.

Clang! Clang!
went the warning bells in my brain. Female meltdown coming up! Stand clear!

I grabbed Alan’s arm and moved him back a few paces from where Kami’s fury was beginning to send smoke out of her ears.

“Get what?” I carefully asked.

“What he was up to these last few months!” Kami hissed through her clenched teeth. “Here he’s been Mr. Romance, telling me he’s thinking maybe we should finally tie the knot, and I kept saying I had to think it over. It’s the land! He wants my sister’s property for the damn ATV project! How could I have been so stupid?”

She’d stopped spinning around and was now stomping the ground as hard as she could. “That jerk! I was actually starting to believe him! He was funneling the money to the lobbyists for Chuck, and I bet you my last dollar the lobbyists were paying him off big-time, too. He kept saying, ‘Come on, Kami honey, forget the eco-community. We don’t want that next door.’ He wanted me to desert Jack and the project. That lying scum! For all I know, he made a deal with the ATVers that he’d get my property for them, too! That’s Ben, all right, always thinking of the big score.”

She pounded her heel into the ground, then stared at the dirt between her feet. “And then what? When I kept putting him off and continued making plans with Jack, he decided he needed more drastic measures to get what he wanted?”

Alan and I stood there, afraid to make any sudden moves. Kami stopped ranting for a moment, her eyes getting even larger in her small face as she made the obvious leap of deduction.

“No,” she insisted, shaking her head. “No way. Ben could not kill Jack. They’ve been friends forever. Not even a fortune would make Ben do that.”

“But it might convince Ben to frame you for a murder?” Alan quietly questioned.

She glared at Alan. “Ben knows I wouldn’t kill Jack, but it would sure cause trouble for me and Nigel if I was drawn into a murder investigation. Putting pressure on me would only make Ben’s job easier—no way would the county rezone the land next to me for an eco-community if there were doubts about my integrity, or about Nigel’s security. Talk about lawsuits just waiting to happen!”

“Who is Nigel?” Alan asked.

“My tiger,” Kami said.

“Her tiger,” I said at the same time.

“You have a tiger?” Alan asked.

“Yes!” I said in exasperation. “Kami has a wildlife sanctuary. She has a tiger named Nigel.” I looked pointedly at Kami. “And that’s why someone’s been wrecking your fence and trying to let Nigel loose, isn’t it? Someone wants to prevent the eco-community from getting the zoning changed to allow them to build the project because that same someone desperately wants the ATV park to go in there instead. Could that someone be Ben?”

She shook her head in denial. “He wouldn’t do that. Kill Jack, I mean.”

“But he might sabotage your fence?”

Kami didn’t respond.

“Or maybe he’d ask someone to do it for him? Someone from the ATV lobby?”

Someone like Mac Ack? I knew for a fact that the Ackermans had checked in ahead of me on Friday. I’d seen Tom briefly before hitting the sack and he’d given me a rundown on the birders attending the weekend. So if Mac had a little errand to run late Friday night for Big Ben, who was to know?

An awful scenario started to form in my head.

“What if Ben asked someone to pull the fence Friday night, Jack caught the guy in the act after he left Kami’s place, and the guy shot Jack in a panic?”

Kami’s face went white.

“Maybe you should sit down,” Alan said, reaching for her arm as she seemed to wobble on her feet.

“That bastard!” she cried, flinging off Alan’s arm. “That lying, cheating scum of the earth!”

I missed the next few names she came up with because my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw Lily’s name.

No way was I answering it. Instead, I handed the phone to Alan. “You talk to her. I can only deal with one screaming female at a time.”

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said after he flipped the phone open. “Yes, he’s right here, but he’s got his hands full … birding.”

I rolled my eyes at him, and he walked away from me to finish his conversation with my sister. I looked back at Kami, who was transitioning from cursing Ben to plotting her revenge.

“I don’t care if the sheriff does throw me in jail for Billy’s murder, I’m going to tell her everything. How Ben has funneled money. How he wants my land. How he’s in bed with the ATV lobby. How he met with Billy at Mystery Cave on Friday. How he got my darts! I am going to ruin that lying bastard!”

“Go for it,” I cheered her on, grateful to see that she was making a quick recovery from her meltdown. In counseling circles, we call it “making an action plan,” and it’s a first step towards dealing constructively with the irritating agent. Of course, the action plans I usually see developing don’t include drawing and quartering ex-lovers or ruining the career of the local mayor, but I’m always open to new ideas. The day you stop learning is the day you die, right?

Speaking of which, I had another question for Kami.

“Amidst all this other stuff that you’re figuring out about Big Ben,” I interrupted her ongoing tirade, “did he ever happen to mention that he and Jack wanted to kill me?”

Kami gave me an incredulous look. “What?”

I told her about the note that Shana had found, written in Jack’s handwriting, and that we’d realized it had come from Big Ben’s coat.

Kami rubbed her hand over her eyes. “I never heard a word about you, Bob. Not until Eddie told me he’d run into you yesterday afternoon. As for the note, I think I saw Jack jot something down on a piece of paper while we were talking late Friday night about the odds of the eco project succeeding. But I can’t imagine it was a death threat, or that Jack saw Ben after he left my place. Then again,” she added, her features darkening, “there are obviously a lot of things I never could have imagined, aren’t there? It seems my little gift of precognition is vastly overrated.”

Alan returned my phone to me. “Lily’s happy … for now. But if I don’t bring you home by noon tomorrow, we are both in very deep yogurt with your sister.”

“Thanks, Alan. You’re still my best friend, you know. Even if you are making the mistake of the century by marrying Lily.” My eyes drifted towards the old covered wagon and its drape of yellow tape.

And then I had one of those stabs of realization that came zipping right out of my left brain.

Or maybe it’s the right.

Wherever it came from, I realized with a jolt that there was a big flaw in my imagined scenario of Jack surprising his killer.

Jack wasn’t found dead in the meadow with the downed fencing. He was sitting right there behind the covered wagon. If he’d been shot in the meadow, how had his killer moved him here without smearing blood all over Jack’s body, not to mention driving Jack’s car here? As I recalled, Jack’s bullet holes had actually looked rather neat, and his clothes were blood-soaked only around those holes, which meant Jack had been killed right here, not in the meadow and then transported.

Jack had come here for a reason before he was killed. Since we didn’t have after-midnight owling on the agenda for the birding trip, I had to assume he had another compelling reason to visit Green Hills camp in the pre-dawn hours.

I knew it in my gut: Jack came here to meet someone.

Someone he knew.

I turned back to Kami to share my revelation with her, but I was too late.

The pixie had disappeared.

Where’d she go?” I asked Alan. He shrugged in reply. “She was right here a minute ago. Then poof! She’s gone. Pretty spooky, if you ask me.” He pulled his hat from his head and tapped it twice against his leg. “And I’m not so sure the lady doesn’t have a couple of little-bitty screws loose, Bob. I mean, come on! She thinks she can pick up ‘impressions’ from places, and she lives with a tiger.”

“To each her own,” I muttered. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Kami Marsden myself. The woman was undoubtedly elusive and eccentric, but I didn’t get the sense she was a killer or a liar. Big Ben, on the other hand, seemed to be fitting the bill for both.

“If I were the mayor, I’d stay far away from Kami,” Alan commented. “Like they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ And that woman is past scorned, if you ask me.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” I said. “Not only does she have the rage to fuel a full-scale campaign to trash Big Ben, but she also has plenty of circumstantial evidence that links him to Billy’s murder, and maybe even to Jack’s death, too.”

Which meant that the sheriff would have to reconsider her conclusion that Billy had killed Jack. Or at least, that Billy had acted alone. Combined with Shana’s protest that Billy didn’t even know how to use a gun, it seemed to me that naming Billy as the killer was looking more premature than ever.

Rushed, even.

Can you spell “cover-up”?

We started up the slope past the wagon and headed for the parking lot where we’d left Alan’s car. I could hear an Indigo Bunting and a Mourning Dove calling from beyond the lot, where the trees crowded in around the gravel area. On a normal weekend, the youth camp would have been a great spot for birding with all its different habitat areas: meadow, old-wood forest, stream, and wetlands. This weekend, though, it had proven to be a spot for murder and mystery.

Yup, you never know what you’re going to get on a birding weekend.

Just as we stepped into the lot, a boy hopped out of the driver’s seat of the car parked next to Alan’s. I could have sworn he looked familiar, but there was no way one of my students from Savage was going to turn up here in Fillmore County on a Sunday morning.

“Excuse me,” the boy said, “aren’t you Bob White?”

I looked him over. He was probably about sixteen and maybe all of five feet tall.

“Yes.”

He stuck his hand out to shake mine. “I’m Skip Swenson, and I’d like to interview you.”

Alan turned to me with a smile. “Your reputation precedes you, White-man.”

“The question is
which
reputation,” I replied, dreading the answer. I took the boy’s hand and gave it a brief shake. “Interview me about what?”

“About the murder of Jack O’Keefe,” he announced, puffing up a bit like a male bird on display for a female. It didn’t make him any taller, though. Or older. Or more commanding.

Skip Swenson was just a kid.

“And why is that?” I prodded.

“I saw you in the diner with Mrs. O’Keefe last night, and then on the nine o’clock news. I want to be a journalist, and I thought if I could land an exclusive interview with you, maybe it would get me an internship this summer with a TV crew.”

That explained where I’d seen Skip before—he’d been one of the kids working at the A&W the previous evening. No surprise that he’d noticed Shana, since he was alive and breathing. The fact that he’d also noted who her companions were, though, was a little more impressive—Skip was obviously an observant young man. That’s always a good skill in a high school student. I probably spend half the time in my counseling office at Savage High School telling kids to pay attention to what’s going on in the front of the classroom instead of what’s on their phone’s text message window. Realizing that Skip had also taken his observation and turned it into a possible job opportunity bumped my estimation of him to even a notch higher. The kid was smart, and he had nerve.