The Boreal Owl Murder (23 page)

“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.

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 trees. 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?

Or were they witnesses and knew it, but had kept that knowledge to themselves?

I remembered my earlier suspicions about Thompson. If he was the poacher—and Eddie’s comments seemed to confirm that—and he had tangled with Rahr, he’d probably be happy to have Rahr out of the way. As in permanently. Who did it or why wasn’t his worry. As long as he could keep poaching in peace, he was happy to let the police continue to run into dead ends. The last thing he’d want to do was show up at the station with information that would lead Knott directly to his place of “business.”

As for Montgomery, she’d have no reason not to report any suspicious activity along the road. What her reasons were for being in the area was anyone’s guess, though I had to admit that her association with Thompson made her a little suspect in my mind. What were the odds she’d be out for a drive just minutes behind Thompson?

Another possibility reared its ugly head. What if Thompson hadn’t stumbled upon the killer, but instead, had deliberately gone to meet him that morning? What if Thompson had hired a killer, and his trip past Eddie’s place had taken him to a rendezvous during which he led the killer to Rahr?

And what if Montgomery, then, had chanced upon the two of them?

My stomach lurched.

Was Montgomery in danger from Thompson? If she’d seen her friend meeting with a man in the woods near Rahr’s research site and then learned about the subsequent murder, she’d have to be terrified of Thompson and what he might do to her if she went to the police. At the same time, since she hadn’t already come forward, but had joined him for supper at the Splashing Rock, she could possibly be arrested herself as an accomplice after the fact. An accomplice to murder.

Probably not something she’d want to include on her next job application.

Unfortunately, the video couldn’t tell us Thompson and Montgomery’s final destinations that morning. Whether they had actually gone to the far site, met anyone, or just looped around Eddie’s property to the site Luce and I had just visited, was all conjecture. For all we knew, they’d each been out for a winter day’s drive through the forest and never had stopped anywhere at all. But it did seem that this was a very popular part of the forest, apparently.

I turned to Eddie.

“Before he left here last Friday morning, did Dr. Rahr say he’d seen anyone at the site here?”