A Bobwhite Killing (16 page)

“It’s getting better,” I reported. Stan’s latest bit of news seemed to confirm my earlier suspicion that Chuck had more riding on the line with his payments to Ben than just funding his father’s old friend. Obviously, Chuck and Ben had some kind of deal going—Ben was moving money along to the ATV group for Chuck. Ben was also getting a cut on the deal—enough to keep himself financially comfortable, according to what Shana had said—but what was in it for Chuck wasn’t clear. It also made the death threat note even more confusing: based on what I now knew about the estrangement between Jack and Ben, it seemed highly unlikely that Jack would have charged the mayor with any task at all, let alone the task of killing me.

Yet someone had cut my brake line.

A furious Chuck?

A deranged Mac?

A vengeful Big Ben?

As I stepped over some exposed tree roots on the trail, I realized that the only way I was going to find out who had sabotaged my car was to figure out why I was a threat to someone.

A threat that was strong enough to cause someone to want to kill me.

Alan’s hand suddenly shot out and grabbed my elbow, pulling me to an abrupt stop. “Look!” he said, pointing ahead.

Seated cross-legged on an enormous fallen log off the path, her very short silver hair glinting in the sunlight that streamed through an opening in the branches overheard, was a small woman. She was dressed entirely in green and blended in so well with the forest around her, I doubted I would have noticed her until I’d almost pulled level with her on the trail. She was motionless, staring at Alan and me.

“It’s a wood sprite,” Alan whispered.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Birding is magical, but not that magical, Alan.”

“Hello, Bob White,” the little woman said.

“I knew it,” Alan whispered again. “She’s a sprite. How else would she know your name?”

I rolled my eyes in Alan’s general direction. “Yeah, right.” Although, to be honest, I had no idea who this woman was, how she knew me, or even how she managed to be on our trail.

“I’m sorry,” I said, advancing toward the woman, who still sat in that pixie-like pose on the log. “Have we met?”

Her light-blue eyes speared mine. “Only in a dream, Mr. White.”

Okay. I’d found a crazy woman in the woods. Happens all the time. Right?

Wrong.

Caution! Caution! went the bells in my head. Did she have a knife in her lap? A blowgun with a poison dart? A snare set in the earth in front of my feet? Was this tiny woman stalking me? I froze in place, trying to recall what I’d learned in grad school about handling people in the midst of a psychotic episode.

Actually, we never covered that in grad school.

Memo to me: on the next alumni survey, I should mention that.

“That’s usually a conversation stopper,” the woman observed. “Actually, Eddie Edvarg described you to me so accurately, I couldn’t mistake you for anyone else. I’m Kami Marsden.”

She smiled then and stood up, holding her hand out for me to shake. “I’d hoped to meet you yesterday when Eddie and I stopped by at the hotel, but you weren’t around. And for the record, I did see you in a dream. It’s a little habit I have—random flashes of precognition. Not that it’s been very useful so far—I still haven’t won the lottery like Eddie did.”

“I’m Alan Thunderhawk,” Alan said, taking Kami’s hand after I had released it. “You made quite a picture on the log there. I was ready to chase you down and ask for three wishes.”

Kami laughed. “It’s the haircut, I know. That and my size. I could probably pose for Pixies R Us. When we were kids, Jack called me his leprechaun, and I’m not even Irish.”

She folded her arms over her chest and planted herself on the trail in front of us. “You found Jack,” she said to me.

“I did,” I agreed.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said, “but I can make a couple guesses as to who did.”

A couple guesses?” Alan asked. “That’s why I’m here at Green Hills,” Kami explained. “I was hoping my little habit of precognition might kick in and help me narrow the field of suspects. Sometimes I pick up impressions of people from a place if I can just tune in. I know it sounds crazy, but you go with what you’ve got, right?”

Yup—it definitely sounded crazy. Another memo to me for that alumni survey: add “dealing with psychics” to graduate instruction for counselors.

I took another look at the petite woman in front of me. Now that I was within arm’s reach of her, she didn’t look so much like a wood sprite, but more like a woman who had been raised outdoors. She had a healthy tan and the crow’s feet around her eyes testified to a lot of smiling or squinting in the sunshine. Her bare arms looked lean and muscular, and her cargo shorts revealed well-toned legs. All in all, she didn’t look particularly crazy.

Then again, she cared for a Bengal tiger on her private sanctuary of land in southeastern Minnesota. Nigel, her tiger, had to outweigh her by at least five hundred and fifty pounds, yet she cared enough for the big cat to jump through all the hoops to provide it a safe home.

In my book, that still made her crazy. Crazy and determined.

Kind of like a lot of birders I know.

“So who’s on your suspect list?” I asked.

She looked me in the eye. “Chuck. Billy.”

“Billy? Billy worked for Jack,” I said. “And Chuck is his son. I understand that Jack and Chuck had problems, but were they that bad that you could honestly suspect Chuck of killing his own father?”

“Money is a powerful motive when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, Bob.”

“Chuck siphoned off that much to Ben?”

Kami looked confused.
Well, duh
, I told myself. She hadn’t had a phone call from Stan in the last hour like I had. Of course she wouldn’t know about the money game at OK.

“I don’t know anything about money going to Ben,” she said. “I’m talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars Chuck stood to gain if the eco-community got killed and the ATV park was developed in its place.”

“ATV park?”

I looked at Alan, but he shrugged his shoulders. Apparently, his students hadn’t reported anything about this little wrinkle in the zoning battle.

“That’s the scuttlebutt. There’s a big ATV manufacturer looking to set up shop here in Fillmore County,” Kami informed us. “And that’s not the extent of it, either. The word is that the manufacturer wants to develop a whole driving range through different habitats adjacent to the facility for both test driving vehicles and public usage. For a fee, of course.”

“An ATV wonderland,” Alan murmured.

“That’s right,” Kami agreed.

“And Chuck fits into this … how?” I asked.

Kami raked her slim fingers through her cropped silver hair. “He owns the land the manufacturer wants.” She looked from me to Alan and then back again to fix her pale-blue stare on my eyes.

“It’s a legacy from his mother—Jack’s first wife. It’s also the land where Jack wants to build the eco-community. And to top it all off, it’s the land right next to mine. I don’t expect you know this, but Jack’s first wife was my sister.”

“Jack is your brother-in-law,” I said, trying to reconfigure relationships in my head.

“It generally works that way,” Kami said.

I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “Give me a minute here. I need to get this straight.” I made a chart in my head of all the players in the Fillmore drama. Jack and Shana were married. Jack’s first wife was Kami’s sister. Chuck was Jack’s son and Kami’s nephew. “So Shana knows who you are, right? That you’re Jack’s sister-in-law?”

“Of course,” Kami said. “But I think she’s not too comfortable with me. Not only do I look an awful lot like my sister Char—Jack’s first wife—but Jack and I have a history that goes way back. We were high school sweethearts. Char was three years younger than me, and she and Jack didn’t get together until after I’d gone to Texas for college and vet school. Jack stayed in state. Anyway, I think Shana feels a little left out when Jack and I start reminiscing.”

“I think she feels more than left out,” I pointed out. “She thought you and Jack were having an affair.”

Kami’s mouth dropped open. “You have got to be kidding me. Jack is so totally in love with Shana, he can hardly talk about anything else.”

“Hormones,” Alan announced. “Shana’s pregnant. With twins. She’s probably got so many hormones flooding her brain, she can’t think straight. I had a cousin who swore she saw aliens in her backyard when she was pregnant. She refused to leave the house even when she went into labor. It was pure luck that the paramedics got there when they did to help her deliver the baby in her front hallway.”

For a moment, neither Kami nor I said a word.

“Aliens?” Kami repeated.

I socked Alan in the shoulder. “Thanks so much for that little anecdote, Hawk. I’ll be sure to share it with Shana. She’ll probably kill you.”

I started walking on the trail, and Kami fell in beside me. I told her what Stan had found out about the money from Chuck that ended up in the ATV lobby group’s coffers after it had passed through Ben’s hands.

“So Chuck was passing money along to the lobby to fund their zoning fight against the eco-community, but he didn’t want his dad to know,” she concluded.

“That’s what I figure,” I said.

“And Ben was the middleman.”

“Yup.”

“That bastard,” Kami muttered.

“You mean Chuck?” I recalled that Shana had used the same euphemism for her stepson. Now Kami, Chuck’s aunt, was using it. I began to wonder if it was, after all, some sort of family endearment.

“Not Chuck,” Kami clarified for me. “Ben.”

Okay, I could accept that, too. Ben, the longtime family friend, was obviously playing father and son against each other and coming out with a fistful of dollars, according to Stan’s latest investigation update. I suddenly wondered if Kami was aware that Ben had publicly fed the rumor that she and Jack had been lovers. If she was already ticked off at him, I couldn’t imagine it would improve her opinion.

But hey, I decided it might be fun to find out.

Especially since the guy had been carrying around a note to kill me.

“So, Kami, I understand that Big Ben assumed you and Jack were involved, too. At least that’s what he suggested to the media yesterday afternoon at the hotel.”

She pulled up short.

No pun intended.

She turned those blue eyes on me like fine-tuned lasers. “He said what?”

Oh, yes. Big Ben was in trouble now. I mean, here was a woman with a tiger. Literally. I sure wouldn’t want to be on her bad side the next time I was anywhere near her property.

She repeated her new favorite name for Ben.

Twice.

At which point, Alan remembered a piece of our earlier conversation in my hotel room about a certain type of dart. “So you’re a veterinarian. And I bet you have darts for tranquilizing animals, too.”

Kami turned her attention to Alan. “Yes, I do. I use them on occasion in my practice, and I’ve had to use them with Nigel a few times as well. Mostly for traveling purposes. Why?”

Alan and I exchanged a look. Kami obviously hadn’t heard from the sheriff, yet, about the dart in Billy’s neck.

The tranquilizer dart.

I changed the subject.

“Before you said that Chuck was on your list of murder suspects, you mentioned Billy. Why was that? Especially since he turned up dead yesterday, too.”

Kami walked a few more paces up the trail, then stopped, her back to both Alan and I. Surrounded by the greenery of the forest, her slight figure almost seemed to blend in with the woods. For a split-second, I had the eerie feeling she was going to disappear right before my eyes.

Then she turned, a frown on her pixie face.

“Billy was spying on Jack for Ben. He was Jack’s assistant, but Jack and I figured out that Billy was feeding information about our progress with the eco-community to Ben, and Ben was passing it along to the ATV lobby. They always seemed to know exactly what our next move would be in the zoning process, and they were always there to block it.”

She stared down at the trail for another minute, then raised her eyes to mine.

“I’m not especially proud of this, and it’s probably illegal, but I had your friend Eddie put a tracking device on Billy’s car when he arrived at the hotel in Spring Valley on Friday afternoon. Jack and I had decided it was the only way to see if Billy was meeting with Ben on the sly.”

She dug her heel into the dirt. “I followed Billy. Sure enough, he and Ben had a cozy little chat at the trailhead to Mystery Cave State Park.”

“Where Billy’s body was found yesterday afternoon?”

“Yes, in that same area. But after midnight on Friday,” she paused to heave a weary sigh, “Eddie tracked Billy from my house to Green Hills. Here—the youth camp.”

Where I found Jack with two bullet holes in his chest early the next morning.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Alan whispered.

We climbed up the rest of the trail in silence and found ourselves back in the small meadow just below the covered wagon that was still draped with yellow crime scene tape.

“You’ve got to tell Sheriff Paulsen,” I told Kami, “about Billy being at Green Hills early Saturday morning. It places him at the scene of Jack’s murder. Did Eddie get a time on Billy?”

Kami nodded. “Oh, yeah. Billy was definitely there within the window of probability of when Jack was shot.” She lifted a hand to shade her eyes as she looked toward the wagon and its yellow ribbons. “So, what do you suggest I say to Paulsen? ‘Hey, I know Billy’s whereabouts for the twenty-four hours before he was killed because I was illegally monitoring him.’ I figure I’d be arrested for stalking, at least, if not for Billy’s murder.”

The tranquilizer dart popped back into my head again.

“Well, see, I think the sheriff kind of already has that idea,” I hedged, not wanting to tell her the piece about the dart in Billy’s back. For a split-second, I wondered if it was confidential information. Would I be in trouble with the law—Sheriff Paulsen, to be exact—if I told Kami what I’d learned from Shana and Tom?