We drove for about an hour. To alleviate my own anxiety about returning to the place where I’d barely avoided a bullet, I decided that we’d take a different approach to the Boreal site, one that skirted around that neck of the forest. On this route, there wasn’t much to break up the scenery; mostly it was trees and trees and trees. Occasionally, we’d pass a mailbox, most likely for someone’s summer cabin. The road wound in and out of national forest, and we could see old logging roads trailing off along fences that marked park boundaries. The sun was definitely setting as we got closer to our destination. In the growing dusk, we could just make out a few stars.
I parked in an old trailhead access lot, and Luce and I geared ourselves up for the hike to the site: we pulled on our woolen caps, looped binos around our necks, grabbed our small flashlights and tucked a couple of water bottles in our parka pockets. Then we started walking.
We followed an old trail that I assumed Rahr had used in the early years of his research; every quarter-mile or so there was a wooden marker nailed onto a tree at just about shoulder height. On the markers, dates and notes were jotted in permanent ink and covered in yellowed plastic. Next to a date, there were either dashes (lots of those) or the word call. My best guess was that this was some kind of record of where and when he heard the owls calling—as we went deeper into the forest, the call notation appeared more frequently on the markers. Using my flashlight, I checked each marker for the notes. When we came on one that noted call, Luce and I would stop walking and listen.
After our second stop, we both took a drink of water and looked around the darkening forest. Somewhere off to our right, we heard a shuffling noise. It sounded like a fair-sized animal; I guessed it was a deer.
At least I hoped it was a deer. And that was because I hoped it wasn’t a bear. Coming face-to-face with Smokey once in this forest had already been one time too many. And as far as I could tell, Stan wasn’t around this time to scare it off for me.
Luce moved closer to me.
“Do you think there are moose up here?” she asked in a quiet voice.
I was worried about a bear. Luce was worried about a moose. Were we brave birders, or what?
“We don’t have to worry about moose, Luce,” I assured her. “They aren’t predators. They eat grass.”
“I know that,” she said, making that almost-hissing sound again.
Luce the Goose, I thought. I could feel myself smiling. Oh man, she’d kill me for that one for sure.
“I’m not worried that a moose would eat me. I just don’t want to run into one,” she explained, a note of annoyance in her tone. “They may be dumb, but they’re big. And strong. Not a great combination, if you know what I mean.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I did, after all, work with big, strong adolescent males every day. Not to infer that they were dumb, but sometimes you had to wonder what in the world they were thinking … or not. So far, none of them—to my knowledge—had tried to take down a train, but in a high school counselor’s office, you learned to be ready for anything.
Luce took another drink of her water. “Once, when we went camping in Wyoming one summer, we were up in the mountains outside of Laramie, and we hiked into this big meadow. We were about to lay out a picnic when I read a posted warning that said ‘Moose release area. Please use caution.’ Well, I was petrified. The only moose I’d ever seen in the flesh was a stuffed one, and that had scared the bejeebers out of me.” She capped her drink bottle and looked at me.
“It was this huge stuffed dead moose with an enormous rack of antlers that stood in the lobby at the lodge we stayed in when we went to Thunder Bay in Canada when I was six years old. My mom wanted to take a picture of me with the moose, so I stood in front of it. I didn’t know my dad was hiding behind it, and just as my mom snapped the picture, my dad shoved it up against my shoulder and made a moose sound. I screamed and jumped about a foot straight up, hit the underside of the stuffed moose’s neck and fell back on the floor.”
“Poor baby,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulder and hugging her close. “No wonder you don’t like moose.”
Luce started laughing. “My mom was so furious with my dad that she hardly spoke to him the rest of the day. She was afraid I’d need therapy to get over my fright.”
“Did you?”
“Heck, no. I just learned to stay away from moose. Although I suppose it might have contributed to my obsessive habit of immediately scanning my surroundings wherever I go so I don’t get taken by surprise.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I’ve seen you do that scanning thing every time we go somewhere new. You did it last night at the Splashing Rock, didn’t you?”
“Yup. No moose.”
I gave her shoulder another squeeze.
“But I bet I noticed something there that you didn’t,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Thompson’s jacket hanging on the back of his chair. When I was motioning to you to come back to our table, I noticed the lettering on the right shoulder of his jacket.”
“What did it say? ‘VNT’?”
“Nope. It said ‘DNR.’” She looked up at the sky, looking for stars. “And, Bobby, did you also notice the truck parked in the VNT lot today?”
I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but suddenly I got a feeling that I wasn’t going to be happy when she got there.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “It was an old pick-up like the one I drove for the DNR.”
Luce laid her gloved hand on my cheek. Even in the dark, I could see the lines of concern on her face. “You told me that yesterday, when you and Knott drove up here, an old DNR truck flew past you, and you saw the DNR patch on the driver’s jacket shoulder. His right shoulder. Bobby, you and I both know that the DNR doesn’t use that emblem on the right shoulder; it’s on the left. We also know, thanks to Eddie, that Thompson tried to pass himself off as an agency employee while he was poaching trees.”
I waited for her to spell it out.
“I think Thompson was sitting in that truck waiting for you to go by, then when you did, he raced ahead of you and got himself into position to watch that cleared area.” Her eyes glimmered in the night. “He had a trophy for marksmanship in his office, Bobby. It was sitting behind his desk. He shot at you to keep both you and Knott out of his poaching territory.”
“And all he had to do to identify me was watch for my license plate,” I filled in for her. “Which means that Thompson knew I was going up there yesterday afternoon, and that I was someone he needed to keep out.” I shrugged in my parka. “But I didn’t even meet the man until last night, Luce. So how could he plan to get rid of me before he knew me?”
In the distance, an owl hooted. A moment later, another owl answered.
“Great Horned,” I said automatically.
Luce hugged me tight. “I think there’s someone else involved, Bobby. You said yourself that both Ellis and Alice heard you say you were on your way up there.”
“It’s not Ellis,” I said. “He wants the study. And because of that, I can’t imagine that he’d be mixed up with someone who was destroying the habitat. So that leaves Alice.” I patted Luce’s back and held her away from me so I could look in her eyes. “I honestly don’t have a clue what Alice is capable of, Luce. But I want to think that if she were really dangerous, Stan would have done something about his sister before now.”
“All right, let’s think that, Bobby,” Luce agreed. “But let’s also remember that someone in the cities delivered a note and a dead owl to your deck. Maybe that someone also knew you were coming up here to owl and contacted Thompson to keep an eye out for you and make sure you stayed out of the Boreal sites.”
“You think Thompson has a partner in the cities?”
She nodded. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” came a voice from behind me. “It does.”
I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “I swear, you’re going to give me a heart attack.” I turned to peer into the camouflaged face. “What took you so long, Stan?”
Luce pointed to the crossbow slung across his back. “What are you doing with that? It’s not bow-hunting season.”
“I’m not bow-hunting.”
Luce and I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t.
Instead, I heard another sound. But it wasn’t an owl.
It was the sound of machinery, off in the distance. Machinery grinding. Like gears.
The sound I’d heard last Saturday after finding Rahr’s body.
I tried to visualize the maps I’d studied when I was trying to locate Rahr’s sites. Where was a road close enough that I could hear a vehicle from here? On the maps, there hadn’t been any roads marked at all, for the simple reason that Boreal Owls don’t nest anywhere near places where there might be traffic. They liked their seclusion. Like Eddie, they wanted distance from the rest of the world, but no matter what, it seemed like the rest of the world was determined to come after them.
Including me.
Damn.
The last puzzle pieces fell into place.
The grinding engine I was hearing wasn’t on any road. It was on an abandoned logging trail. A logging trail that cut right through the owls’ habitat. And given the sloppy thawing conditions this year, the vehicle had to be mired in mud—hence, the sound of grinding gears. Last week, when I’d found Rahr, someone had also been trying to move a vehicle somewhere nearby. That was the sound I’d heard. And who would be so desperate to attempt to gun a big vehicle out of the forest in March mud?
Someone who was using it to poach trees.
Someone who had to remove evidence of illegal harvesting before some birders came looking for Boreals on their own private owl tours and stumbled across said poaching operation.
Someone like Thompson who had told Luce and me he had two trucks stuck up in the forest.
Someone like Thompson, who’d been captured on Eddie’s tape heading into the woods on both last Friday and Saturday.
Location, location, location.
And what was the one thing that had tied all those poaching sites together? The owl tours, of course. Before Rahr conducted the tours last spring, who else knew how to find those particular places? Ellis, perhaps, though it had been a long time since he’d been working with Rahr, and Alice, probably, though I expected her knowledge of the sites as Rahr’s longtime secretary was more clerical than first-hand. So, basically, the owls had had the forest to themselves.
Until Thompson, the unemployed logger, signed on to take the tour and noted the isolated locations, at which point he recognized an untapped gold mine of lumber and native plants, both of which could command high prices as building supplies and landscaping stock. And though the locations were remote, they were perfect—because since no one knew exactly where the owls were, the whole territory had been placed under the protection of the DNR. As long as a poacher cut trees in November, no one would even know he’d been there, because no one—not even Rahr—was in these woods then. Rahr only did his research in March and April when the owls were mating. S.O.B. had made sure people stayed away thanks to all the publicity about preserving the integrity of the Boreal Owls’ habitat. And because the DNR had banned any logging, there wouldn’t be any timber people nosing around, either. So an enterprising poacher could have the place to himself—a protected, virtually unlimited supply of Very Nice Trees, and, come spring, ladyslippers—that could yield him a very nice profit.
Rahr, then, must have discovered the topped trees on his first foray back to his research sites earlier this month, figured someone was cutting the trees and decided to put a stop to it before it scattered the owls. He spiked the trees, not realizing that the tree topping was a seasonal thing for Christmas and that his sites were no longer in danger of cutting. At least not during the owl mating season.
“So you think Thompson killed Rahr to protect his poaching business?” Luce asked after I laid out my theory to her and Stan.
“Either that, or hired someone else to do it,” I said, sliding a glance at Stan, wondering exactly what his stint as a CIA field agent had entailed.
“Not me,” he said. “I don’t do that. Anymore.”
“Good to know,” I told him. “Not that it helps.”
“Your threats,” he added. “It’s all about the vehicle. They didn’t want you to find it.”
“If it’s Thompson,” Luce said, “he must have heard that you were the one who found Rahr’s body, Bobby. And then he heard about your reputation for finding birds, and he was afraid you’d be back for the Boreal and find his stuck truck instead. It was never about identifying Rahr’s killer or protecting the owls at all—he was afraid you were going to destroy his business.”
We all stood there for a minute or two, trying to process our conclusions. If we were right, Thompson was a murderer, and I’d almost been his second victim. Luce and I had sat in his office just hours ago.
“I’ve got to sit down,” I said, and dropped to the ground.
“Near death does that to you,” Stan said.
I looked up at him, a dark ghost in the night. “What the hell are you doing here, Stan?”
“Birding.”
“No!” I shook my head and caught his eyes. “I mean really. What is this ‘contract’ you’re working on? Because every time I turn around, there you are. What’s the connection, Stan? Even though that’s not really your name, is it?”
He blinked. “Knott.”
“I know it’s not!” I almost shouted.
“No,” Stan said. “Knott. The detective. He told you about me.”
“We had a video recording,” Luce explained. “You were on a surveillance tape from a road.”
Stan nodded. “Crazy Eddie’s place. I smiled at the camera.”
“Stan!” I was losing what little patience I had left after a very long, very frustrating day. “What is the contract?”
He nodded in the direction of the grinding gears, which were now silent. “VNT. Tax fraud. Lily’s books tipped me off. I really am an accountant,” he added. “A forensic accountant. For the government.”
“So now what do we do?” Luce asked.
I looked at Stan and then at Luce.
“Find the Boreal.”