A Bobwhite Killing (24 page)

There was something odd about that.

But she was the law, and she was basically throwing us out of town. Being the good citizen that I am, I didn’t see any alternative but to honor her wishes. Even if that still left me in the dark about who killed Jack O’Keefe and Billy Mason, not to mention who had sabotaged my car and in so doing, had sent Bernie to the hospital to get a plaster fashion statement cemented on her arm.

The hospital.

Shana was having the twins.

“Look,” I said to the sheriff as the four of us exited the garage, “we’ll leave Fillmore, but first I’ve got to stop at the hospital to see how Shana’s doing. She was in labor when we came out here.”

“She’s having the babies?” Kami asked. “She’s early. Jack said she had another five weeks to go.”

“Twins usually come early,” Alan advised her, “or so we hear.”

“I want you to show me this fossil cave entrance that you say is in that meadow on the other side of Ms. Marsden’s property,” Sheriff Paulsen said, oblivious to our conversation about Shana’s impending motherhood.

“I’ll lead you to the meadow,” I offered, “but Alan and I already searched for an entrance earlier today and we couldn’t find it.”

“I know where the meadow is,” Sheriff Paulsen snapped. “It’s the cave part I’m still not believing. Show me the cave, and then maybe we can make some sense of all this.”

I’d already made sense of it, but I didn’t want to point that out to her. She’d already snapped at me once, and I wasn’t about to further upset a woman with a gun on her hip.

We walked past Claudius, who apparently hadn’t moved since Kami had signaled him to lay down on the pavement. I guessed he hadn’t been curious about the sheriff’s car when it had come up the drive. He must have recognized it from this morning, when Sheriff Paulsen had first come to arrest Kami. I expected that Claudius could feel the vibrations of the damaged patrol car as it bounced into the parking area in front of the farmhouse. I remembered how yesterday morning, I was afraid the damaged shocks would send Shana into labor.

And that was when I thought she still had more than a month to go before her due date.

I walked over to my car while Sheriff Paulsen opened the back door of her cruiser for Kami to get in.

“I have to cuff you,” I heard the sheriff tell Kami.

Adding insult to injury, I thought.

And I suddenly knew who had killed Jack O’Keefe.

I climbed in behind the wheel, stunned by my revelation, and just sat for a moment, trying to figure out my next move.

“Let’s go, White-man,” Alan said, snapping shut his seat belt.

I pulled out my cell phone and punched in a number.

“Where are you?” I asked Stan when he answered.

“Green Hills. Looking at a Worm-eating Warbler,” he replied.

“I need back-up.”

“Where?”

“At a seepage meadow on the west side of Kami Marsden’s exotic animal sanctuary.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. The dial tone buzzed in my ear.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Alan asked as I backed up the SUV enough to turn it around.

“Sheriff Paulsen killed Jack O’Keefe.”

“And you know this … how?”

I glanced at my future brother-in-law as I put the car in drive and took off down Kami’s driveway to the main road. “You know how I’m always telling you that to be a really good birder, you have to be both observant and able to make fine distinctions? That two birds can look very similar, but if you know the one thing that distinguishes one from the other, you can correctly identify the bird?”

“Yeeaah,” he said, drawing the word out.

I threw him another glance and noticed that he had grabbed the door handle again. I checked my speed and let up on the accelerator a little. There was, after all, a sheriff right behind me. Even if she was a murderess.

“Her anger about the fossils, Alan,” I said. “That was the fine distinction that started everything else falling into place for me. And then I thought about how Claudius didn’t seem interested in the sheriff’s car—because it had been there earlier.”

“She came for Kami. We knew that. We saw her on the surveillance tape getting out of the cruiser and then getting back in.”

“But the tape didn’t show us where she went,” I persisted. “We assumed it was to the farmhouse, but the cameras didn’t show that. I think she went into the garage and pulled the plug on Nigel’s fencing, Alan. The time stamp on the video proved that Paulsen was right there during the exact time Kami figured someone shut down the fence.”

“You’re making a big assumption, Bob. She’s the sheriff,” he reminded me.

“She also knows where the meadow is, and when I rode in her cruiser yesterday morning with Shana, she told us she’d just damaged the car. You saw how bad those ruts into the meadow were. You drove especially carefully not to bang up the undercarriage of your hybrid.”

“So her bumpy ride is why you think she killed Jack?”

“No,” I explained, trying to make myself put it all in sequence for Alan, “I think Paulsen is the one who’s been sabotaging Kami’s fence as a favor to Ben. Either he asked her to do it, or she figured she’d score points with him for it because she thought he was supporting the ATV project behind the scenes.”

I looked in my side mirror to see the sheriff’s car following me by just a few car lengths.

“Eddie said the fence in the seepage meadow was malfunctioning after midnight on Friday,” I continued. “Saturday morning, when Paulsen was driving Shana and me into town, she said she’d just recently damaged her car. I’m betting that happened when she was in the meadow pulling the fence, which places her on that road very early Saturday morning, which is the same time Jack and Billy were on that same road, coming back from Kami’s. Three people on the same road at that time of night, two of them dead the next day. Coincidence? That’s a mighty big stretch, if you ask me. Besides, did you catch what Paulsen said after we told her about Ben’s fossil scheme? She said that Ben had been using everyone. Which sure sounded to me like she was including herself.”

I turned out onto the main road and checked my rear view mirror. Sheriff Paulsen was right behind me, her eyes shaded by her standard-issue sunglasses.

“But why would the sheriff kill Jack, or Billy?” Alan persisted. “It’s not a capital offense to be on a lonely country road in the middle of the night. You’re missing a motive, Bob.”

I was still working that out in my head. If Paulsen felt used by Ben, there had to be a reason.

“She didn’t know about the fossils,” I reasoned, “but she was sabotaging the fence for Ben. I don’t know—maybe he promised her a kickback from the ATV group when they got their project approved, or that he’d okay county funding for a new fleet of squad cars for the department if she’d help him squash the eco-community. Either way, she’d think she stood to benefit from doing his dirty work. That would be using her, for sure.”

“You told me that everyone keeps saying that Ben is the big man in this county,” Alan conceded. “He pulled strings to get your car fixed. Maybe he’s got the sheriff in his pocket, too.”

“Or in his bed,” I said, surprising myself, then realizing that jealousy was exactly the vibe I’d picked up when Sheriff Paulsen had asked if the Ben about whom Alan questioned Kami was indeed Ben Graham. Believe me, I’m very familiar with that particular vibe after counseling high school drama queens for almost a decade. To be honest, I’d rather have a rattlesnake in my office than two jealous girls—at least with a rattler, you get some warning before the venom spews out. With hormone-driven teens—not so much. Counseling high school students isn’t all fun and games, you know.

Nor was going on a birding weekend and ending up with a killer on my bumper.

“Okay, let’s go with this,” Alan said. “Ben says ‘jump’ and the sheriff says ‘how high?’ He doesn’t share his fossil plan with her, but lets her think he’s helping Chuck push the ATV park. She sabotages Kami’s fence, thinking that’ll move the ATV project forward and win her points from her lover. But then Jack catches her in the act Saturday morning on his way back from Kami’s place, so she’s got to get rid of him before he connects the dots to Ben and Chuck, and blows them all out of the water politically and professionally. Who knows? Maybe by that point, Paulsen figured that killing Jack was doing Ben a very special favor to move the ATV project forward.”

“But now,” I finished for him, “thanks to our filling her in on what’s really going on with Ben, it turns out to be the wrong favor, since Ben didn’t want the ATV project to succeed anyway.”

My eyes flew to the rear view mirror again. The sheriff was almost in my back seat.

“I have a really bad feeling about this,” I told Alan.

“Join the crowd,” he said.

I put my foot down on the accelerator and my car surged forward, giving me breathing room ahead of the sheriff. Let her give me a ticket, I figured. If she pulled me over, I’d grab her through the window until Alan could jump out and put a headlock on her.

Of course, if all my suspicions were wrong, Alan and I would be sitting in jail before dinner time for assaulting an officer.

Where, at least, we’d be safe from Lily, who would undoubtedly want to kill us both.

This was one of the problems with my sister marrying my best friend—depending on the situation, Lily could now probably hit two birds with one stone: a Hawk and a Bob White.

And then it dawned on me how Ben Graham could have had a note about killing Bobwhite in his pocket on Saturday afternoon that Jack O’Keefe had written on Inn & Suites stationery on Friday night at Kami’s place.

The police must have searched Jack’s body and found the note and turned it over to Sheriff Paulsen for evidence. Seeing that it was about the eco-community, she passed it along to Ben so no one would make a connection between Jack’s death and the zoning dispute. She was covering her tracks, in other words.

In my side view mirror, I could see that Paulsen was back on my bumper, and I knew in my gut that she was going to cover her tracks with us, too.

“She’s going to kill us at the seepage meadow,” I told Alan. “Yeah,” he agreed, “I’m coming to that conclusion. How fast do you think Stan Miller drives?”

“I don’t know.” But I sure hoped he was as much of a speed demon as I was.

More of one, actually. I knew I would definitely feel better if I could be sure that Stan was already waiting for us at the meadow. Stan would have a gun.

Another two minutes of flying down the road and I took the bumpy path into the meadow.

Sheriff Paulsen was right behind me.

I scanned the edge of the forest as I slowly drove to the center of the clearing. A few Wilson’s Snipes took flight from the open wetland in front of me.

No cars.

No Stan.

“Maybe we should call the police,” Alan said.

“The police is the problem,” I reminded him. “You call 911 and you’re going to get Sheriff Paulsen. Newsflash: we’ve already got Sheriff Paulsen.”

“Correction, White-man—she’s got us.”

I put the car in park and Paulsen pulled up next to my SUV. A moment later, she was standing about five feet away from my car door, telling us to show her the cave entrance.

“We didn’t find one earlier,” I reminded her.

“Let’s all look,” she insisted, waving us out of my car. “Except for Ms. Marsden. She can wait in my cruiser.”

I got out of the car and started walking towards the right side of the clearing. “You take the left edge of the meadow,” I told Alan over my shoulder.

“Oh no, I’d like us all to look together,” Paulsen said. “That way, there’s a better chance we’ll find the entrance. You fellows lead.” She pointed in the direction I’d headed.

I started walking towards the forest edge, with Alan beside me. The sun was warm on my arms and the back of my neck. From the other side of the meadow I could hear Horned Larks calling. Then I heard a slight sliding noise behind me and turned around to face the sheriff.

She had her gun aimed at the center of my chest.

“Oh for crying out loud,” I said, figuring that my best chance at survival was to brazen it out. “We just started looking! Don’t tell me you’re going to shoot us because we haven’t stumbled over the cave entrance in the first two minutes of searching for it.”

Paulsen’s hand was steady on her gun, and her voice was calm. “You’re right. I’m not going to shoot you because you haven’t found it yet. I’m going to shoot you after you find it, then dump your bodies in it, along with Ms. Marsden’s. Then I’m going to find that lying, cheating, son-of-a-bitch Ben Graham and shoot him, too.”

High time for a counseling intervention, I decided, my mouth going dry as I stared at the gun. Keep it conversational and non-threatening. Hopefully buy some time for my backup by the name of Stan to make a very welcome appearance, although I knew that Alan wasn’t just standing there beside me, taking in the scenery. My best friend might be a pushover for my sister, but Alan backed into a corner was asking for trouble.

I just didn’t want him asking for a bullet.

How was I going to explain that one to Lily?

“Sorry, Sis. He took a bullet a crooked sheriff meant for me. You know Alan—he’s got that impulsive streak. Or at least, he did.”

Shit.

“Okay,” I agreed with Paulsen, praying that Alan would just hold off rushing the sheriff another minute or two while I formulated some kind of plan to save us. “I get the part about you being angry with the mayor, but what did the three of us do to get included in this plan of yours? Wrong place, wrong time? Bad karma? Bad breath?”

A tiny smile pulled at the corner of the sheriff’s mouth. “You’re an idiot, White.”

“So I’ve been told,” I assured her.

“You just didn’t take the hint to get out of town, did you? After you called me last night with all that information about Ben’s finances, I figured you were going to be a problem. You were too involved with Shana’s situation to let it go. I’ve met enough birders in the last few years to know how obsessive and persistent you people can be when you set your sights on scoring a bird.”