A Bobwhite Killing (22 page)

“Collections? Like financial debts?” I knew that Ben was handling money for Chuck and the ATV group, and Stan had reported a big sum in the mayor’s off-shore account. It didn’t appear that Ben was hurting for cash, yet why else would he be involved with a collections agency?

“Not money,” Skip clarified. “Collections like in museums. I looked his company up on the Internet. He specializes in representing collectors from Asia.”

“Why would Ben …” Shana began to say, then stopped short as she obviously connected the same dots I’d used earlier to draw a possible picture of Ben’s real motives in the eco-community versus ATV manufacturer controversy.

“He’s planning to sell fossils,” she concluded. “He’s not working for Chuck, or the ATV lobby, or the eco-community. He’s working for himself, and it’s not even the land he’s interested in—it’s what’s
underneath
it.”

“Give the lady a cigar,” I said. I glanced at Shana’s tummy. “On second thought, bring her a big glass of milk,” I told Skip. “We want those babies healthy.”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” Shana informed me. “I want to go to the hospital. The one where they took Bernie.”

“Right now? I’m sure Bernie will call us when she’s ready to be picked up.”

“Yes, I know she will, but Bernie’s not why I need to go to the hospital. My water just broke.”

My eyes automatically dropped to her water glass on the table. It looked perfectly fine to me. No cracks. No cascading flood. “What are you talking about?” I asked, oblivious to Tom rising from his chair next to me.

“The babies,” he calmly announced. “Shana’s in labor, Bob.”

“That can’t be right,” I inanely argued with him, even as I saw Alan pull out his cell phone to dial 911. “She told me she wasn’t due for another two months.”

“I lied.”

“What?”

“I’m due in five weeks. But twins sometimes come early,” Shana explained, breathing deeply as she pushed back from the table.

“They
usually
come early,” Tom corrected her. “Just keep breathing nice and deep, Shana,” he instructed her. “That’s the way.”

“Your ride will be here in a minute,” Alan assured her. “Can you walk to the door?”

“I think so.”

“Are you nuts?” I spit at Alan. “The woman’s about to birth whales and you want her to walk?”

To my surprise, Shana laughed. Right there in the Spring Valley A&W, like she didn’t have a care in the world, she laughed. “I can walk, Bob. Just help me up.”

She started to stand, and Tom and I each took one of her arms to give her support. Alan was already at the diner’s door, holding it open, and scanning the street for the ambulance he’d called.

“I don’t know how to deliver babies,” I told Shana. “You have to wait for the paramedics.”

“I’m a trained paramedic,” Tom said.

I gave him a panicked look, then refocused on Shana. “You have to wait for the other paramedics!” I commanded her.

“Bob, I’ve got some time here,” she reassured me. “I only had the one contraction so far.”

“That’s one too many.”

“My doctor said this could happen and it might still be hours before I deliver. And I’ll probably end up with a C-section anyway.”

Thank you, God, I prayed. But just in case …

“Where’s the ambulance?” I shouted at Alan.

The sound of the siren cut through the afternoon air, and mere seconds later, Alan was waving the EMTs in our direction. A minute later, Shana was being escorted out the diner’s door by two paramedics, one of whom looked back at Tom and me, obviously not sure which of us to address. “You want to come along, Dad?” he finally said to both of us.

“I’ll go,” Tom immediately responded and hustled out after them. I was rooted to the spot, still shaken from being called ‘Dad.’ It dawned on me that if my life had been different, if Shana hadn’t left that following summer, if we’d become a couple … if, if, if. But the truth was that none of those “ifs” had happened. Shana was carrying Jack O’Keefe’s twins, and pretty soon, she was going to deliver them. And the best baby gift I could think of was to find out who had murdered their dad.

“We’ve got to find Kami Marsden,” I told Alan as the paramedics slammed the ambulance door on Shana and Tom, “and find out if she’s got surveillance on her property from this morning. I bet you if we can find out who let the cat out of the bag—or the fence, as it were—this morning at her place, we’ll find Jack’s killer.”

“Because a loose tiger and a murdered eco-community supporter are the best ways to drive down the price of a piece of land no one else is going to want?”

I nodded. “Yeah, something like that.” I headed for my car in the Valley Inn & Suites parking lot. “I’m driving.”

“Watch out, Fillmore County’s finest,” Alan laughed. “The birdman is back on the road.”

I took a hard right out of the parking lot and flew towards Kami’s sanctuary.

You think we’ll arrive alive?” I took a quick glance at Alan in my passenger’s seat. His right hand held a death grip on the bar that sat just above his side window. I checked my speedometer and eased up on the gas. “Sorry,” I told him. “I forget you don’t drive with me often.”

“And there’s a reason for that, White-man. You scare the crap out of me when you drive on county roads.”

“I’m a good driver, Alan,” I assured him. “I just speed a little when I’m focusing on other things.”

“Such as?”

“Catching a killer.”

“You think it’s the mayor, don’t you? That he offed his old friend to cinch a deal for himself.”

“It looks that way to me,” I said. “I think Billy called up Ben after he followed Jack to Kami’s at Shana’s request. Ben figured it was a perfect opportunity to ambush Jack and knock the eco-community group out of the picture, so he somehow got him to meet him at Green Hills.”

“Where he shot him in the wee hours of the morning.”

“Yes.” Alan’s recap of my reasoning only made me more certain I had Jack’s murder solved. Big Ben had been playing the ATV and eco-community group against each other, secretly funneling Chuck’s money to the lobbyists so it looked like he favored the ATV crowd, even while he wouldn’t publicly support them. While the zoning council floundered, trying to make a decision, Ben had added fuel to the fire by tampering with Kami’s fences to use Nigel as both a public relations nightmare and a choice bait: for the eco-community, Nigel’s lack of containment was a serious problem, while for the ATV enthusiasts, he was a selling point for their playground. All along, though, Ben had just wanted the land to be ruled useless so its selling price would drop, at which point, he’d step in and snap it up, hoping to make his fortune from selling the fossils he knew were buried beneath it.

“What about Billy?” Alan asked.

“I think Billy knew too much about what Ben was really after, so Big Ben promised him a payoff at Mystery Cave, and instead, killed him, and then planted the gun that he used to shoot Jack in Billy’s car.”

“Too many loose strings in your theory, Sherlock,” Alan said after a moment of silence. “For one thing—maybe the most important thing—Ben didn’t need to knock the eco people out of the picture at all. In fact, he wanted the opposite. He wanted the group to keep butting heads with the ATV crowd so the whole mess would stay deadlocked while the land kept deteriorating and falling in value to anyone, except him. So killing Jack would have been a stupid move, since it might have caused the eco group to give up and pull out, leaving the property wide open for the ATV manufacturer.”

Ahead of me, a Cliff Swallow dove across the road, then arced back up into the sky, where two more swallows were swooping through the air. Alan was right, Ben really didn’t want a resolution to the zoning conflict for either party, so eliminating Jack would have been detrimental to Ben’s grand scheme to acquire the land and its hidden fortune of fossils. To win the game he was secretly playing, Ben needed both Jack and the ATVers to stay up in the air.

“Loose string number two,” Alan continued. “How could Ben convince Jack to meet him at an isolated spot in the middle of the night? Even if they were old friends, that’s pushing it. And it’s not like Ben could say, ‘Hey, Jack, I know you’re awake and driving out in the country at 3:00 a.m., so how about we split a really early beer at Green Hills?’ Ben couldn’t let Jack know he was tracking him through Billy.”

Okay, that part bothered me, too. Especially if, as Shana had said, Jack had any reasons to suspect some dirty work from the ATV crowd. If he were being even remotely cautious, the last thing he would do was meet someone—best friend or not—alone in the middle of the night in an isolated birding spot.

But that’s exactly what he had done.

“And as for killing Billy, because he knew Ben’s big picture, that would be plain stupid, too” Alan concluded. “Billy worked for Ben. You’ve got to assume that he knew a lot of his boss’s plans, in which case Ben trusted Billy not to betray him. Ben Graham isn’t stupid, Bob,” Alan said. “He’d be very careful about who was on his payroll. He’d make sure they were absolutely loyal to him one way or another.”

“A bullet dead center ensures loyalty,” I pointed out.

“Or at least silence,” Alan added.

I watched the three swallows wheeling in the sky. Suddenly a Red-tailed Hawk sped past the swallows, making a steep dive at its next meal of some unfortunate rabbit or rodent scurrying across a field of young grasses. The three swallows quit their acrobatics, and peeled off in separate directions. Watching them gave me an idea.

“What if someone else got into the picture?” I wondered aloud. “Someone who wanted to force the zoning council into a decision for his own reasons and thought the way to do that would be to kill Jack?” I thought about the scattered swallows. “That would ruin Ben’s plans, but it might be the solution to someone else’s problem.”

Alan let out a low whistle. “Someone who wanted the ATV project to get started.”

“Maybe.” I suddenly recalled seeing the back of Renee’s sweatsuit last night as she returned to her room and realized what A-Man stood for. I thumped on the steering wheel.

“Ackerman! That’s it! Secure A-Man is Ackerman!”

“Come again?”

My foot fell a little more heavily on the gas pedal. “I think the Ackermans own a company called Secure A-Man. A-Man: Ackerman.” I threw Alan a quick glance to make sure he was following my train of thought. “Their company is the one that worked with Eddie last week to install Kami Marsden’s new invisible fencing. Eddie said the owner was an old friend of Kami’s, and Renee and Kami went to school together.”

“So Kami gave a job to an old friend.”

“Yes! And so guess who knows the security system that mysteriously keeps going down and letting Nigel out?”

“The same man who’s the chief lobbyist for the ATV group,” Alan replied.

“Yes! Also the same man who knew exactly what was wrong with my brakes.”

“So you think Mac Ack killed Jack in hopes that the eco group would pack up and go home, leaving the ATV manufacturer he supported as the last man standing in the zoning dispute?”

“It fits,” I insisted. “For all we know, Mac Ack might have a big juicy contract waiting with the ATV company to do all their security for the new facility and the park they want to build. If that’s the case, Mac had a motive for killing Jack in order to speed up the project approval and get the construction started, so he could get some dollars pouring into his security company.”

Up ahead along the road, I saw a mailbox marked “Marsden.” I made a quick left, spinning my tires into the gravel that lined the driveway to Kami’s place. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alan grab the window bar.

“But that doesn’t give Mac a motive for killing you,” Alan pointed out. “Unless he knew what a maniac you are behind the wheel and decided to do the rest of us a favor by getting you off the road permanently.”

I hit a rut hard and we both bounced off our seats.

“I know, I know,” I cut Alan off before he could say anything. “I’m slowing down. Really.”

Once again, though, I had to admit Alan was right. Mac had no reason to want me dead. Now that I knew the note was about the eco-community’s proposed Bobwhite Acres, I had no reason to think that Mac was in cahoots with Ben to murder me.

Someone else had wanted me out of the picture.

“And,” Alan was saying, “Mac Ack has no motive to kill Billy that we can see. Not to mention that he was birding with you guys Saturday morning when the sheriff says Billy was killed. We’re still missing something important, Bob.”

I had to agree, which meant that Alan was right for a third time.

“Three strikes and I’m out,” I muttered. “This is why I’m a counselor and not a detective.”

“I thought it was because of the stellar pay we get at Savage High,” Alan laughed. “That and the adoration of all the females in the student body.”

“Please,” I said. “I’m on vacation. Don’t even think ‘drama queen’ around me.”

The dirt driveway led to a paved apron in front of a small garage, which sat beside an old brick farmhouse. I parked the car behind a red pick-up truck. “I hope this means Kami is home,” I said, nodding at the truck. “I want to see those surveillance tapes.”

Just as I was going to push open my car door, though, Alan grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back against the seat.

“You don’t want to do that right now,” he warned me, pointing past me to a spot where trees edged the parking apron about fifteen feet from my side of the car. I followed his finger and saw the reason why.

Hello, Simba.

Part of me wasn’t surprised to see a full-grown lion crouching a few body lengths beyond my car. After all, Kami’s place was an exotic animal sanctuary. It stood to reason that Nigel wasn’t the only exotic animal on the property.

The other part of me, however, was busy wondering if that same full-grown lion could rip my car window out and drag me from my SUV for a late lunch. Suddenly, I could relate to every bunny or mouse that a Red-tailed Hawk had snatched for a meal. No one aspires to being an entrée.

“That is one big cat,” Alan remarked as we both watched the lion approach the car. He ambled over—the lion, not Alan—and plunked himself down right outside my car door. I figured his face was a mere inches away from mine on the other side of the window.