The Kiskadee of Death (15 page)

The truth was that I'd come to… well, not exactly
like
Mark… but at least feel some compassion for the kid after our birding walk. Sure, he had some pressing and very difficult personal issues to work through, but my gut told me he was a good kid. The possibility that our shared passion for birds could blind me to the true nature of a person was disturbing. Combined with my just-revealed inability to recognize my own wife's need for routine, I was suddenly doubtful of what I'd always believed was one of my unique strengths: a hyper-sensitivity to others and the surroundings in which I found myself.

It was one of the main reasons I loved birding so much: I prided myself on close attention to the little details that allowed me to identify one bird from another. That knowledge, that gift of acute observation, made me feel like I had a special connection to nature itself, almost as if nature waited patiently to reveal its mysteries to me. It was, I believed, what made me a good high school counselor, too—I was able to synthesize careful observation with knowledge and sensitivity to help my students find their way in the world, even on the occasions when the world wasn't such a welcoming place for them to be.

If I couldn't trust my own abilities, my own gut, where did that leave me as a birder or counselor?

Gutless?

Or just tragically mistaken?

“Well, whatever he was doing, he wasn't killing Birdy,” Eddie said, breaking into my wallow of self-doubt. “Heck, he wasn't there long enough to write down his license plate number, let alone get to Alligator Lake, commit a murder, and get back to the parking lot.”

I focused on the screen, which showed Mark getting back into the Mustang within minutes after his arrival. His face looked angry. He pulled out of his parking space and zoomed out of the camera's range, but not before I saw him thump the wheel of his Mustang in what looked like intense frustration.

Mark hadn't killed Birdy.

My gut was right.

Which meant that I was not, after all, gutless.

Or even tragically mistaken, hopefully.

I supposed it did mean, however, that I might have just a tiny inclination to overreact.

Imagine that.

The other thing I tried to imagine was what Mustang Mark was doing at Estero Llano for just those few minutes on Wednesday morning.

Something had upset him.

As in, really upset him.

And then last night, Mark had been so drunk, he'd almost hit Luce in Buzz's driveway before he announced to everyone there that, despite appearances, his uncle hated Birdy.

For a moment, the wheels in my head spun crazily and landed on something I'd noticed last night.

Buzz Davis had been exceptionally stoic about Birdy's death, to the point that he was driving a lift truck around with citrus to help build a float.

If I were grieving the death of a best friend, I don't know that I could drive a toy truck across a carpet, let alone a lift truck that required precision and concentration.

Mark's accusation of his uncle came back to me: he said his uncle hated Birdy Johnson and that he was a two-faced liar.

Why would Mark say that? Why would he think Buzz had hated his long-time friend?

And if it were true, could Buzz Davis not only be a popular ex-astronaut and a very rich man, but a man who had held a grudge for years until he could get away with murder?

Payback, Mark said.

A very drunk Mark who clearly took Birdy's death very hard.

And why was that? What kind of connection was there between Mark and Birdy?

“Stick me with a fork,” I told Eddie. “I'm done. It seems like for every question your records can answer, they raise ten more. People who solve murders for a living must feel like they spend half their time on merry-go-rounds.”

I supposed that someone could probably say the same of birders like me—we spin our wheels chasing birds all over the map, sometimes for years. But at least at the end of a birding chase, we get to add a bird to our life list.

When you solve a murder, on the other hand, you find a killer, but it doesn't bring anyone back to life.

 

Chapter Seventeen

G
iven our experience the night before at the vulture roost, Eddie and I decided he'd bow out of joining Luce and me to watch the parrots flocking in Weslaco at sunset.

“I'm going to get enough grief from my wife for one gunshot graze,” he explained. “No way I'm looking for two. Besides,” he said, “I promised Chief Pacheco I'd stay out of sight for forty-eight hours to give him time to investigate my shooting without having to worry about me landing back in someone's crosshairs. I've got a room and a bodyguard here at the base till further notice, courtesy of the chief.”

“Aha,” I said, “that must be the reason there's a very grim young man with an Army-issued gun standing outside your office door here. By the way,” I confided in Eddie, “I don't think he has much of a sense of humor. When I told him he could pat me down if necessary, but that I'm ticklish, he didn't even crack a smile.”

Eddie waved me out of his office. “Get out of here, birdbrain. Go get your wife and seek out some of your own kind.”

 

I decided to take the scenic route back to McAllen from Weslaco, so I stayed off Highway 83 and wound through residential and commercial neighborhoods that took me from the Armory through the towns of Donna, Alamo, San Juan, and Pharr back to the Birds Nest. As I drove, I replayed in my head what I'd seen on Eddie's surveillance recordings, and tried to glean from them whatever information I could that might shed some light on Birdy's murder.

The fact that we had visual evidence that Mark was not inside the park prior to Birdy's murder eliminated him as a murder ­suspect, though I still wondered what had happened to make him so angry as he tore out of the parking lot.

Why would he have been there at all, if he was gone again so quickly?

I ran through a list of reasons I would drive somewhere specific, then turn around and leave within minutes.

Maybe I had laundry to drop off or pick up. That would be a quick turn-around.

Maybe I was supposed to meet someone, then realized I was at the wrong place, or had the wrong time. I'd be back in the car in no time.

Maybe I wanted to surprise someone, but then learned they weren't coming. No reason to stick around in that case.

My mind continued to remix possibilities.

Maybe I was going to surprise someone by showing up unexpectedly with someone else… kind of like the boy who shows up at Prom with a hot date after his girlfriend dumped him at the last minute to go with some other boy.

But Mark was alone in the parking lot, and he wasn't wearing a tux, so I scratched the hot date/revenge scenario from my list, although…

What if Mark had planned to surprise someone who he knew would be in the parking lot… like his uncle Buzz and Birdy, who everyone knew came to the park on Wednesday mornings… but when he got there and saw they'd already arrived and gone into the park… he left?

Why would he leave, and not try to find them? On the recording, Mark looked angry and frustrated, like he'd missed out on something.

Missed out.

Why did that ring a bell in my head?

“You're not the only one who missed out, Rosie.”

Buzz and the Eared Grebe he'd spotted yesterday morning!

When we met Buzz on the deck, he told Rosie he'd texted some birders he knew, but then the bird was gone before they arrived. He'd mentioned Cynnie Scott and Birdy… was Mark another birder that Buzz had tried to reach?

If so, that would probably explain Mark's roaring into the parking lot. Then, if he'd gotten the text the bird was gone before he even stepped into the park, maybe he'd be so frustrated at missing the rarity, he'd just turn around and leave.

Like he did, leaving his uncle as the only birder to see the Eared Grebe.

If Buzz really did see the grebe…

Not that birders were a suspicious bunch as a whole, but the fact was, a lone birder making a sighting of a rarity could seem questionable under the best circumstances. If that birder had a rocky relationship with one of the birders who missed seeing the bird…

Would Mark think his uncle lied about seeing the grebe?

Mark accused Buzz of being a liar, and knowing from counseling experience how messy relationships could get when alcoholism was involved, I didn't doubt Mark had a whole list of grievances against his uncle who was trying to help him get help. For all I knew, Mark made it a habit of comparing himself to his uncle, and every time he came up short, it only added fuel to the fire that was eating away at their relationship.

They needed help. Both of them.

But not from me.

I was on vacation, or at least, that had been the plan.

A birding vacation.

Heck, I would have liked to see that Eared Grebe myself. It must have been a prize for Buzz, too, since he said he'd also called Cynnie Scott to come out and see it. That was a smart move, and I believed that it proved Buzz did, indeed, see the grebe, because he wouldn't call a local legend to verify his sighting unless he really had the sighting.

Although… every birder knew, too well unfortunately, that birds—especially rarities, it seemed—had minds of their own. Presuming that a particular bird would patiently wait for a second birder to arrive and confirm its identification was downright idiocy; fervently hoping it might wait around, or reappear later, was a much more reasonable approach. Assuring you could get that second confirmation was one of the best reasons to bird with a buddy, if you asked me.

That, and having someone to commiserate with when you'd spent the day trying to track down a reported rarity and ended up instead with another empty tank of gas and a speeding ticket besides.

I mean, I loved our state patrol and our outstate gas stations, but seeing less of both of them wouldn't break my heart.

So the fact that no one joined Buzz in seeing the Eared Grebe could beg the question, then: did Buzz really see the grebe, or was he trying to construct an alibi for himself during the time of Birdy's murder? Once another birder arrived, it would be simple enough to tell him, or her, that the bird had just flown. It happened all the time.

Without another birder to back him up with the bird sighting, Buzz had no alibi.

He did, however, have a really big walking stick that looked like it could inflict some serious damage if you found yourself at the wrong end of it.

Great. I was back to pinning a murder on Birdy's best friend.

On the upside, I may have hit on the explanation for Mark's sudden arrival and departure in the parking lot at Estero Llano on the morning of Birdy's murder. So why did I feel like I was still missing an important clue from Crazy Eddie's recording?

As I waited for the gate to slide open at the Birds Nest to allow me to drive onto the property, a Great Kiskadee landed on one of the bushes near the garage.

It was not the one-eyed individual that seemed to keep turning up where we birded. I wondered if seeing the bird at Quinta Mazatlan had spooked me into considering it an omen, and that was the reason I'd spent much of the day fixated on Mark Myers as a suspect. Normally, I didn't subscribe to superstitions and omens, and even though birds were famous for their associations with those things in folklore and legends, I tried not to judge birds by their literary reputations. I liked to see birds objectively for what they were—amazing creatures that shared my space whenever I was outside.

And that sentiment brought me back to a consideration of the big space topic among the MOBsters: the SpaceX space port location outside Boca Chica Beach. Thanks to the chief, I knew what role Buzz had played in landing the project at Boca Chica, but I was still in the dark when it came to Birdy's involvement. As an avionics engineer, he'd worked at NASA, according to Eddie, and I knew that the drone being tested for finding drug smugglers was his design; why Birdy had been hailed with Buzz in the photo and article about last year's citrus parade was still a mystery.

And whether or not it had anything to do with his death was likewise a big fat question mark for me.

Face it, Bob
, I told myself.
You're not going to figure this one out. And as long as you stay out of trouble for another forty-eight hours, you don't have to. Bird with Luce, watch a parade, and let the chief do his job.

That was probably the best advice I'd given myself in years.

I just hoped I could take it.

 

 

Chapter Eighteen

T
welve hours later, Luce and I were both still alive and well, getting ready to cross off the last bird sightings we hoped to make during our trip to the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

After an early dinner on Thursday, we'd gone back to Weslaco to catch the nightly flocking of the Red-Crowned Parrots that Eddie had urged us to see. The birds weren't hard to find. All we did was drive around the older neighborhoods with our windows rolled down, and sure enough, about twenty minutes before sunset, we could hear them coming from blocks away, squawking and calling. We followed the noise, and witnessed close to 125 Red-crowned Parrots coming to roost in the trees lining a residential area. The noise was almost deafening, and I hoped the people who lived there all owned stock in earplugs.

No MOBsters crossed our path in our pursuit of the parrots, and that night was a quiet one at the Birds Nest, with no dog alarms or notes tacked on our guest suite door.

This morning, we were starting the day with our second trip to Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. Once again, the sun was out, and the air was warm. With the car windows rolled down, a light breeze tickled my face. I could almost forget that back home, Old Man Winter was still dumping inches upon inches of snow in my backyard.

“I have an idea,” I said to Luce as we passed by a new housing development just outside Bentsen-Rio Grande. “Let's play ‘let's pretend' and go look at some model homes. We can imagine what it would be like to live where you never have ice freezing your back patio door shut three months out of the year.”

Luce laughed. “That's true. Just think! We could spend all our time birding right here, right where the two migratory corridors—the Central and the Mississippi—”

“Converge,” we said in unison.

“You could give senior birding tours,” she reminded me. “CPR included. I bet you'd be a huge hit, especially with all the ladies.”

I watched the last house of the row of model homes disappear from my rear view mirror.

“On second thought,” I said, “frozen doors aren't that bad, especially when I have a gorgeous wife cooking something good and hot in the oven.”

Luce laughed again. “You are such a chauvinist.”

“No, I'm not,” I protested. “I'm practical. You're a chef, I'm not. It just happens that you're also gorgeous. I'm simply making an observation. That's what I do. I observe. Birds. Students. My wife. I'm a master of detail.”

This time, Luce snickered. “Okay, master of detail. What is today's date?”

I drew a blank.

“No fair,” I said. “We're on vacation. I don't keep track of dates when we're on vacation.”

“Then you're not a master of detail, Bobby,” she chided me. “If you were, you'd know why today's date is important.”

Oh, no.

I frantically searched my memory for anything that would tip me off to why today's date was important, but nothing surfaced.

It wasn't Luce's birthday.

It wasn't our wedding anniversary.

I was positive that Valentine's Day was next month.

Crap.

It was one of
those
moments—the ones that fill the heart of every married man with dread: I'd forgotten something important, or at least, something that was important to my wife.

Note that the two are not always the same: something important, and something important to my wife.

Never, however, will a man say that to his lovely bride.

Unless he's looking for a night or two out on the sofa instead of in his own bed.

What was the big deal about the date?

“You don't know, do you?” Luce asked.

I could have sworn she sounded amused. Of course, she knew I didn't know. My wife can always read my mind, even when I can't.

I slowly shook my head, my eyes focused on the left-hand turn lane ahead that would take us into the state park.

“I am a failure as a husband,” I admitted.

My wife laughed once more.

“Oh, no, you're not,” she assured me. “You're just not good with numbers, Mr. Master of Details.”

“I know how many more Valley specialties we need to find,” I defended myself, making my left turn towards Bentsen-Rio Grande, “to make this trip a perfect grand slam.”

“Oh, I think this trip has been perfect even if we don't find the last few specialties,” she said. “Aside from a murder, Eddie getting framed, and our threatening note, that is.”

She placed her left hand over my right on the steering wheel and gave it a warm, soft squeeze. “This trip is a life-changing experience, if you ask me.”

I nodded in agreement. “The kind of birding you can do around here is nothing short of amazing, that's for sure. It's set a whole new bar for birding trips, as far as I'm concerned.”

Beside me, Luce laughed.

“You got that right,” she said.

I parked the car in the half-f lot, and we walked along the sidewalk into the main entrance of Bentsen-Rio Grande. I scanned the tops of the trees that lined the road, and caught the profile of an approaching bird.

“Some kind of hawk,” I said, lifting my binoculars.

It flew directly overhead, giving me a clear look at its broad wings, gray body, and the three wide bands of black feathers on its tail.

“My, my,” Luce said, her voice holding a hint of awe. “A Gray Hawk. Now that's a bird you don't see every day.”

“Not even around here,” I replied, feeling my own excitement kicking in at the unexpected sighting. “It's a permanent resident, but I guess the locals don't see it frequently.”

Why that was the case, I wasn't sure. A member of the southern buteo family, the Gray Hawk is mostly found south of the Mexican border. Yet on all the bird lists we'd seen at the World Birding Centers, the Gray Hawk was considered uncommon for the area, so to have one fly right over our heads was a real score with which to start our last full day of birding along the Rio Grande.

“Good thing the birds don't have to have papers to cross into the U.S.,” I commented. “I'd hate to see what immigration laws would do to our life lists if that were the case.”

From behind me, I heard the sound of wheels rolling and squeaking. I turned around and watched a young couple pulling along a canoe on wheels. Fishing poles stuck out on one side of the craft.

“Fishing on the Rio Grande today?” I called to the two.

The fellow nodded. “There's a good spot to put in at the edge of the park,” he called back. “As long as we don't drift over the international border, we're fine.”

Apparently, fish didn't need papers either to cross the border, although they did run the risk of getting eaten if they got caught.

As far as I knew, the human type of illegal immigrants just got sent back to Mexico.

We watched the couple head off on one of the roads inside the park, towing their canoe behind them.

“I wish we could use wheels when we transport our canoe in the Boundary Waters instead of portaging it on our heads,” Luce observed. “I'd be inclined to stay in the wilderness and enjoy it a lot more if I didn't have to carry around a canoe.”

A vision of the canoe lying atop Birdy Johnson at Alligator Lake popped into my head.

Why was a canoe on Alligator Lake? There were, after all, alligators in Alligator Lake. I assumed that a body of water frequented by big reptiles with very sharp teeth and surprising speed would not be a popular spot for watersports.

Had Birdy used the canoe to go place his sensors? I knew from looking at maps of the park that a trail around the lake led to the shore where Birdy's body was found, and I'd guessed that was how he'd gotten there. But if that were the case, how did the canoe get there?

I looked in the direction the young couple with the canoe had gone, and it occurred to me that perhaps Birdy's killer had used the canoe to approach Birdy as quietly as possible so as to catch him unaware. Canoes on wheels might make a lot of noise, but a canoe in the water was virtually silent. Paddling the canoe across the lake would also be a quicker way to reach Birdy than taking the trail that wound around the lake. And if the killer heard others approaching on the opposite shore, it would be a simple matter to escape the scene of the murder by slipping into the woods behind it.

None of which gave me a clue as to who might have guided that canoe across the water to kill Birdy. It did, however, tell me that Birdy's murder was well planned out ahead of time. His killer knew exactly how to get away with murder.

A MOB hitman?

For some reason, I seriously doubted that a birding club of senior citizens required the services of a professional killer. What would be the reason? To keep birders in line if they made false reports of rarities?

Surely a slap on the wrist would be sufficient. Heck, a simple email rejection did the trick for us in Minnesota. Besides, it wasn't like the MOB was a secret enclave of world-class competitive birders vying for international birding stardom.

After the few days I'd spent around the MOBsters, I'd gotten the impression that a lot of them were happy just to be able to get out and about and see whatever happened to be flying by. Their ­attitude reminded me of every birder I've ever met: birding was fun. Unlike some hobbies that required peak physical conditioning or over-the-top stamina, birding offered enjoyment for whatever level of activity an individual might choose. I knew a lot of birders, for example, who found their favorite birdwatching right in their own backyards, usually equipped with a multitude of stocked bird feeders for their feathered visitors and comfortable lounge chairs for themselves. I also knew birders who'd traveled the world to see exotic rarities. It didn't matter if you were new at it or had years of experience, birding was a hobby anyone could enjoy regardless of age, financial situation, health conditions, or skill.

Birds were everywhere.

At that very moment, my own “everywhere” was a rustic feeding station just outside the exhibit center of the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. A noisy flock of more than thirty Plain Chachalacas mobbed the dirt floor of the cleared area that hosted a variety of bird feeders. When we'd visited here earlier in the week, we'd watched park staffers refilling feeders in different locations around the park and marveled at the way the birds seemed to time their arrivals to coincide with the refilling of the feeders.

I don't know if birds can tell time, but they sure knew when it was time to eat and where.

On second thought, maybe it wasn't any different than the way I showed up in our kitchen every night just before Luce started making dinner.

Yes, it was true: a Bob White could be trained.

As the last of the rowdy avian crowd on the ground dispersed, a Green Jay flew through the clearing to land on a feeding platform strewn with seeds. Three more of the birds immediately joined the first one, each of them repeatedly dipping their brilliant blue heads to pick up seeds. Their jet-black bibs reached up and over their eyes, while their mostly green bodies blended in with the greenery behind them. Meanwhile, in a tree nearby, a Great Kiskadee loudly ­announced its own arrival at the feeding station with a triple riff of its signature bird call.

“It's Grand Central Station around here,” Luce commented.

“Rio Grande Central Station,” I corrected her.

“Hey, Bob!”

Luce and I both turned in the direction of the human call to see Cynnie Scott making her way over to us from the exhibit center. Dressed in faded blue jeans and a rolled-sleeve work shirt, the local birding legend had a pair of binoculars around her neck and a set of keys in her hand. Today her long silver hair was tied back into a fat ponytail.

“I just got a text from some birders down by the river,” she said, “they say they're looking at that Eared Grebe I missed two days ago at Estero Llano. Want to join me?”

She held up the keys and jingled them. “I'm borrowing a park cart to get over there pronto,” she explained. “I'm not missing it again!”

“We'd love to,” I said. I grabbed Luce's hand and we followed Cynnie to an enclosure behind the feeding station where a cart was parked. A huge sack of seed took up the space behind the cramped second row of seats in the cart, so I directed Luce into the passenger seat next to Cynnie and climbed into the back row myself. The naturalist fired up the cart and whipped the little vehicle around to head towards the park trail down to the Rio Grande's shore.

“I'm sorry we didn't get to visit more the other night at Buzz's,” Cynnie said. “The club always prides itself on having one of the best floats in the Citrus Parade, and I'm afraid we fell behind schedule this year with our planning and building.”

She raised an arm to point upwards at a long pouch hanging from a tree off the side of the road.

“That's an Altamira Oriole's nest,” she said.

It was almost two feet long, I guessed, woven of roots and branches and suspended neatly from the tree's branch.

“I've seen the birds hunting for smashed grasshoppers on the fronts of cars,” Cynnie tossed out as she zipped along in the park's converted golf cart. “I don't know if that means Altamira Orioles are lazy or opportunistic. There they are!”

This time, she pointed at two of the bright orange and black birds as they foraged along tree branches on the opposite side of the road from the nest we'd seen. The Altamira Oriole also sported a black bib, though its bib narrowed below its beak unlike the broader one of the Green Jay.

“I also felt I owed you an apology for sounding so negative about SpaceX,” the MOB president added as we bounced along in the little cart. “It's going to be a boon for the local economy and provide a lot of jobs, which is a good thing for this area. I just get so disappointed that we have to keep trading off conservation for economic growth.”