A Murder of Crows (26 page)

Just like Boo Metternick had attempted to divert attention away from himself and his past history as a circus performer, along with the question of the Bonecrusher’s real identity.

Boo had fooled me on both counts. I never would have imagined him touring the country as the Strongest Man Alive, and he’d just about had me convinced that Savage’s new art teacher Paul Brand was the Crusher. The ten dollars I bet Alan had already begun to sprout wings to fly right into his billfold.

Distraction and deception worked, and not just for the former film studio artists of the Allied forces during World War II.

So now I needed to ask myself: Was Sonny’s killer using a similar strategy of misdirection to keep himself—or herself—safe from a murder rap?

I groaned.

Using that approach, I might as well start from scratch, since every person even remotely connected to Sonny’s murder seemed to be pointing the finger at someone else for something. I figured Gina had picked the hemlock for the poisoned tea; Gina thought her brother Noah might be capable of murder; Noah said that Boo, “of all people” should know that he, Noah, could keep a secret (which secret, I still didn’t know); Boo accused Noah of lying; and Vern and Tillie Metternick blamed Arlene Weebler for trying to dishonestly lock up a wind farm land lease by seducing Sonny Delite in the bed of her pink pickup.

If I thought back to Sunday morning at Millie’s, I could name even more people blaming others: Alan noted that Sonny had made plenty of enemies in the utilities community; Prudence claimed that Red had painted a virtual target on Sonny; Rick’s police buddies admitted he’d told them to arrest me; and Rick himself fingered Mr. Lenzen as the one who let the cat out of the bag about the new celebrity wrestler incognito on the Savage High School faculty.

I’d even gotten in on the name-blaming game, too: I blamed Rick for squealing on me to Mr. Lenzen every time I was involved in a murder case.

Obviously, we were all guilty of something.

Which also made it obvious that I needed more to distract myself from a certain birder’s mysterious death than a short hour or so of looking for shorebirds at Gorder Lake.

What I needed was for someone to put a name to Sonny’s killer, and the sooner that happened, the better.

Determined to shut it all out of my head, I grabbed my binoculars from under my seat and hopped out of the car. The sun was bright, the air clear, the water calm. In the distance, the prairie rolled west, studded with small groves of trees and more wetlands.

In front of me, the surface of the lake was dotted with ducks and geese. Northern Shovelers and Mallards dabbled along the shallows, while a handful of Redheads and a raft of Ruddy Ducks floated out in the deeper parts of the lake where they could dive for food. A large flock of Snow Geese dominated one side of the lake, and it was there that I trained my binos to see if I could pick out a Ross’s Goose among them.

Not that a Ross’s Goose would be a real find, since they’re rare but regular in Minnesota, showing up sporadically in specific types of habitat, and often with a flock of Snow Geese. I just liked finding them since it was a test of my identification skills. To the untrained eye, a Ross’s Goose looks almost exactly like a Snow Goose, except that the Ross’s is slightly smaller. The real key to differentiating between the two is the bill: the larger goose’s is a bit heavier and longer than the Ross’s, and it sports a distinctive dark “grin” patch. Without that tell-tale clue, the Ross’s Goose can easily pass for a Snow Goose, especially at a distance. I focused my binos and looked at the individual geese on the outer edges of the floating flock.

Bingo.

Dipping its slightly smaller head into the water with exactly the same motion of its larger companions, a Ross’s Goose was idly paddling between two Snow Geese, its dull pink, stubby bill lacking a grin patch, a clear verification of what I suspected from its size. As I dropped my binos back to my chest, I caught a sparkling glint of reflection from back in the trees to my left.

I wasn’t alone at Gorder Lake.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I froze for only a moment before I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder. Spinning around, I came face-to-face with …

“White.”

Scary Stan, my birding archrival and barely articulate sometimes-friend.

“What did you shoot at my shoulder?” I asked him.

Stan had been a covert government agent in his earlier years, and now, along with his day job as an accountant, he occasionally field-tested hunting equipment. My sister, Lily, once referred to him as a grown man playing at being Robin Hood.

Maybe I would have called him that, too, if he wasn’t holding a small tube in his fingers that looked very much like a dart launcher. I immediately clapped my hand over my shoulder where I’d felt the momentary sting.

“You are going to tell me it wasn’t a poison dart, aren’t you?”

“If you say so,” he replied in his usual limited conversational mode.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ but if I go into convulsions and die,” I tried to think of the worst possible thing I could threaten him with, “you’re going to have to answer to Lily.”

Stan blanched. He’d had a very short-lived relationship with my sister before she was married, but it had been long enough for him to learn that nobody crossed Lily White and survived—intact—to tell the tale.

“You won’t die,” he said. “Yet.”

“Thank you very much, Stan. I appreciate the clarification.” I pointed to the gadget in his hand. “What is that?”

“If I tell you—”

“I know, I know,” I interrupted him. “You’ll have to kill me. Got it. Now tell me what it is.”

Stan’s mouth twitched. That was his smile. As usual, his eyes were masked by dark reflective sunglasses, so I had to gauge his emotional responses from the millimeter movement of the corner of his upper lip. He was a laugh a minute at parties, I had no doubt.

“Dart gun,” Stan informed me. “Uses shellfish toxin. Lethal.”

“This is for hunting?” I asked in disbelief. “Hunting for what? Rabid squirrels?”

I realized he’d said “lethal” and totally forgot what I was saying.

Stan’s upper lip twitched again. “Bigger game, White. Animal control for parks. And I didn’t shoot you, either. Threw a little rock. Catch your attention.”

I glared into his sunglasses and changed the subject. “You saw the Ross’s Goose, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“I got a Ferruginous Hawk and a Purple Sandpiper today, too,” I casually noted.

He inclined his head a fraction of an inch. I could tell he was massively impressed.

My eyes traveled to the dart gun in his hand. “Shellfish toxin?”

“Yes.”

“Lethal.”

“Yes.”

I suddenly wondered how much Stan knew about poisons.

“Would hemlock tea give someone convulsions?” I asked him.

“You’re talking about Sonny,” he said. “I birded with him, too, White.”

“Stan, how quickly would hemlock tea give someone convulsions?”

He stood silently, motionless.

“Fifteen minutes,” he answered.

“So Sonny could have walked into the woods by himself before he knew anything was wrong.”

Stan nodded.

“And that means his killer didn’t have to carry him there,” I pointed out.

I paused a few seconds while I tried to put together a sequence of events. In the distance, a flock of Canada Geese flew in formation.

“He could have taken the poisoned tea from his killer, tossed the cup after drinking it, and walked for fifteen minutes before he had his first seizure.”

“Possible.”

“He would have stumbled off the path, convulsed, lost consciousness.”

I glanced at Stan, but he made no response.

“He’d lay where he fell, his limbs contorted from the seizure,” I said.

I looked back at the shining lake, but my eyes were seeing a dead Sonny Delite sprawled against a tree amidst a pile of russet leaves, with a murder of crows perched above him. “He’d look like a scarecrow set against a tree.”

“Where’d he get the tea?” Stan asked, his monotone sounding grimmer than usual.

My gaze sought out the Ross’s Goose, and I lifted my binos to my eyes to catch it in the lens. Like Sonny’s killer, the small goose practiced deception as a survival strategy: slip into the crowd and no one could single you out. You’d be safe as long as you acted like everyone else.

So who, among the cast of my own suspects, had most faded into the background?

Certainly not Noah or Boo—their size alone precluded them from ever becoming anybody’s wallpaper. You’ve have to be blindfolded to not notice them in a crowd. Besides, they were both so attached to Gina, I couldn’t see either one of them jeopardizing that relationship with a murder rap.

Arlene Weebler, on the other hand, didn’t seem to give a rip about what anyone thought of her. Judging from her behavior today, she could give in-your-face lessons to my most talented discipline problem students back at Savage. Now that I thought about it, I also couldn’t imagine she would forego the chance to mercilessly harass Sonny with blackmail by hiring some thugs to do the deed for her. Even a loose cannon needs a target.

Which left Gina and Red and Prudence.

Could I share Rick’s trust in Gina, or was there a lot more to his new girlfriend than even he realized?

Can you say “duct tape”?

As for Red and Prudence, I tried again to recall every detail from Sunday morning in Millie’s Deli. Red had been extremely protective of Prudence, and told me that her friend didn’t handle stress well. She’d reminded Sonny’s widow to take one step at a time to get through the crisis, and I’d thought that Red would have made a good counselor.

Crisis.

Red sounded like she was doing crisis counseling.

And the reason for that would be …

“I think I have an idea,” I finally answered Stan, “But I’ve got one last question I need answered, and I know just who to ask.”

I lowered my binos. “I’ve got to get back to Savage.”

“Wait.”

I looked back at Stan, but he was pointing toward the lake.

I followed the direction of his finger and spotted a stocky duck with an especially sloped profile. I captured it in my binoculars and studied it carefully. Its bill tapered into a hard shield that stretched almost up to its eyes, and its black cap contrasted starkly with its white back.

“Common Eider?” Stan asked.

I blinked a few times to be sure I was really seeing what I thought I saw. To my knowledge, only four of the sea ducks had ever been recorded in Minnesota, and three of those were in the northern third of the state. A native of Arctic waters, the Common Eider preferred the company of its own kind, and hardly ever traveled alone inland from the frozen coasts of Alaska or the northeastern edges of North America.

A Common Eider didn’t belong in the Alberta Marsh.

But there it was.

“Yes, Stan,” I finally confirmed. “It is, indeed.”

I watched the eider for a few more moments as it floated along with the other ducks and geese in the lake, occasionally diving and coming up shortly thereafter.

“Poor thing,” I commiserated. “You probably thought you knew exactly where you were headed, but something went wrong, a fluke of nature, and here you are, swimming in uncharted waters.”

And just like that, I knew for sure who had killed Sonny Delite … and why.

“Holy crap,” I breathed.

“Post it,” Stan said.

“What?” I looked at him in confusion, the story behind Sonny’s murder finally coming together in my head.

“The bird,” he said, pulling my attention back to the eider.

“Oh, right.” I fumbled in my jacket pocket for my phone.

“No one is going to believe that you and I were birding together,” I said, beginning to text a message to the MOU list serve, “let alone that we found a Common Eider.”

I turned to Stan, but he had already vanished.

As usual.

I finished sending the post and walked back to the car. A Killdeer skittered across the parking area and out into the prairie beyond.

“Can’t fool me,” I told the bird. “I’m on to you.”

I pulled out of Alberta Marsh and headed home, reviewing my finds for the day. I’d made positive IDs of a Purple Sandpiper, a Ferruginous Hawk, a Common Eider … and a killer.

Not bad for a day off from work.

Before I made my turn onto Highway 12 east, I stopped on the road shoulder and called Rick.

“I need to talk to Gina,” I told him. “Can you give me her phone number?”

“She’s right here,” he replied. “You want to speak with her?”

“Not right now,” I said. Over the phone was not the way I wanted to do this. I needed to see her reaction when we talked. I now knew that Gina could avoid the truth, but I doubted that her body language was capable of it.

“How about I just stop at your place when I get back to Savage?” I asked.

“Sounds great, Bob,” Rick said. “We’ll be waiting. Hey, did you get the hawk?”

“I did,” I said.

But I didn’t tell him what else I’d discovered.

He would be finding out soon enough.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The smell of burgers on the grill wafted over me as soon as I stepped out of my SUV in Rick’s driveway. I walked up to the door through a mat of wind-blown leaves that crunched under my feet with each step. Posed on a wooden chair beside the door was a life-size plastic skeleton, with one bony hand wrapped around an empty beer can and a sign looped over its ribcage that read “Let the Party Begin.”

Shoot. I’d been so absorbed by puzzling out Sonny’s death that I still hadn’t settled on a costume for the faculty party next weekend.

Thankfully, that particular preoccupation was about to come to a screeching end, though, which meant I could apply my problem-solving skills to something much more enjoyable than contemplating motives for murder.

I reached for the door buzzer, and the perfect costume idea popped into my head.

At the same moment, Rick’s front door opened, and I looked down into the pretty face of Gina Knorsen.