The Kiskadee of Death (14 page)

The chief sat back in his chair. “Cynnie Scott is a force to be reckoned with. The woman is unstoppable when it comes to promoting ecotourism, which means she has the support of all our ecotourism businesses in the Valley. But if you're a SpaceX advocate, she's the enemy. For the longest time, I thought she was going to single-handedly keep the project out of Bocha Chica, thanks to her appeals to every conservation group in America to intervene. But the project got the green light after all.”

Which, I knew from our conversation with her last night, did not make Cynnie Scott happy. As I recalled, the naturalist had said that she was going to be continuing to work against the SpaceX project, using a more personal approach. What that might entail would be pure conjecture on my part, since she hadn't provided us with any details.

Not that I was any stranger to conjecture. I happened to like conjecture very much. I did it a lot.

I just happened to know that conjecture very frequently turned out to be wrong, if not downright stupid.

And stupid was not something I was fond of being, which was one of the reasons I asked so many questions.

“By the way,” I said, asking another of those questions that had recently popped into my head, “what exactly does Buzz Davis have to do with Space X?”

Pacheco leaned forward again, sliding his elbows onto the table. “What do you mean?”

“I've seen clippings and overheard people talking about the spaceport,” I explained, “and I know he and Birdy were in a parade about it, but aside from his past involvement with the space program, I don't know what his connection is to it. He's not running the project, is he?”

Pacheco tapped twice on his box of doughnuts. “The land,” he said. “The tract of land in Boca Chica, where they're going to build SpaceX, belongs to Buzz. Or, at least, it did. It belongs to SpaceX now.”

I let out a low whistle.

“I guess that explains the Porsche in his garage,” I commented to Luce.

“And maybe Mark's classic Mustang, too,” she said.

“Cynnie Scott must be furious with him,” I speculated. “Buzz enabled SpaceX to site its installation in a critical ecological area, and yet he's a member of the MOB. And she's the group president.”

“She was at Buzz's last night, working on the float,” Luce pointed out. “Given the SpaceX deal, I expect their relationship is… conflicted… to put it mildly, though I didn't see any direct evidence of that. They seemed cordial enough around each other. In fact, I think I remember Cynnie giving Buzz a hard time about taking too long to let her know about the Eared Grebe he'd found that morning, before… ah… Birdy…” She let the sentence trail off.

I patted her hand. Finding bodies together was not one of the things I promised her when we got married, but it seems to happen every so often. On the upside, one of the best things about being married to another birder, I've discovered, was that Luce had the same memory for details I did, so if I missed something, I could generally depend on her having caught it. That was a big plus when we were trying to identify a bird unfamiliar to us; Luce was an ace at picking up minor field marks.

She was also an ace at picking up what I was thinking, which could be either a plus or minus, depending on what I was thinking. When she could jump right onto my train of thought about chasing a bird, that was great. When she figured out that I hadn't only forgotten we had tickets to the symphony but was hoping she'd forget, too—not so great.

“I think they've made their peace,” Chief Pacheco said, referring to Cynnie and Buzz's opposing positions on SpaceX. “Besides, money talks. I'm sure Cynnie likes the money Buzz contributes to the club, even though she hates where it might be coming from, as in the sale of his land for the construction of a spaceport. When you have no other option, you learn to make accommodations, even if you still don't quite forgive.”

Pacheco's cell phone rang, and he removed it from his belt holder, checked the number, then slid it back into its case.

“Speaking of accommodations, are you two heading back to Minnesota today?” Pacheco asked.

“We're leaving after the Citrus Festival Parade on Saturday,” Luce told him. “I've got a soft spot for parades.”

“And your niece Pearl told us it was worth sticking around for,” I added. “I don't want to disappoint the Queen. It's not every day I get an invitation from royalty.”

Pacheco didn't look pleased. “Eddie's no longer a suspect, if you're worrying about him getting arrested. But your threatening note writer—that's another matter we'll have to try to track down. Given the timing, my guess is that it has something to do with Birdy's murder, unless you've been going around town deliberately antagonizing the locals.”

He gave me and Luce a questioning glance.

“You haven't been doing that, have you?”

We assured him we'd been Minnesota nice to everyone we'd met in the Valley.

“Well, somebody doesn't want you around, obviously,” he said, patting the pocket where he'd stowed the note. “Do me a favor and be careful, okay? I'd ask you to stay away from any of the MOB, but I guess that's just about impossible since they're all over the place down here, and you're here to bird.”

The chief stood up and tucked the box of remaining doughnuts under his arm.

“I'll check in with Rhonda and let her know I'm going to make sure she's got some extra patrolmen on duty in her neighborhood around the Birds Nest until you leave town,” he said. “If anything else comes up I should know about, you've got my phone number.”

He waved to the crew back in the kitchen and left us to figure out our plans for the rest of the day.

“Where to next?” Luce asked, stifling a yawn. “You want to try the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge? Someone told me they had a Tropical Parula there the other day.”

“Let's do that tomorrow morning,” I suggested. “We'll have better luck earlier in the day is my guess.” I looked at my wife's face and noticed shadows beginning to show under her eyes.

“Would you be up for a nap? Or down, as the case may be? You look tired,” I quickly added when she began to object. “And you weren't feeling your best yesterday, as I recall. Besides, I want to go talk to Eddie about the drones, and I know you're not that interested in them. What do you say? You can nap, I'll hang out with Eddie, we'll have a late lunch, then go see the parrots flock in Weslaco.”

Luce yawned again. “I am kind of tired,” she conceded. “I think it's our schedule here. I'm not used to sleeping in and staying up late. Those aren't a morning chef's hours.”

I stood up and put out my hand to my wife. “Let's go, then. We'll get you tucked in for a nap, and I'll go bug Eddie.”

Although bugging Eddie wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

What I really wanted was for Eddie to educate me about bugging… via a drone.

 

Chapter Sixteen

S
o, are there recordings of what the drones sense during their flights over the border?” I asked Eddie about an hour later in his temporary work space in an annex adjacent to the National Guard Armory in Weslaco.

“Do you want the short answer or the long one?” he asked me. He was sitting in front of a console with about a hundred dials and registers. On the other side of the console was a long table covered with electronic parts that apparently belonged to the dissected drone that sat on another table nearby.

“Short would be nice,” I said. I pointed at his tropical print shirt. “What is it with the Hawaiian print shirts around here? I'm beginning to think it's like an unofficial birder uniform.”

Eddie laughed and removed his reading glasses from their perch on the end of his nose.

“It's a happy shirt,” he said. “Everyone down here is happy to be here where it's warm, instead of somewhere up north where it's freezing. Use it or lose it, Bob.”

As soon as I had walked in and seen Eddie's shirt, I'd made a memo to me for later to tell Chief Pacheco to forget about the fabric cloth that Maddie the Labrador had retrieved for me. If the chief wanted to question everyone along the Lower Rio Grande Valley who had a tropical print shirt, he was going to need a task force of thousands.

Clearly, the scrap of material was not the most efficient or helpful lead I'd ever come up with. I'd be better off searching for a needle in a haystack than trying to find whose Hawaiian shirt left a shred in the Birds Nest's yard.

The Birds Nest
.

I gave myself a mental kick in the head.

Rhonda's backyard, the backyard she shared with the Birds Nest guest suite, was home to all kinds of birds and their nests. Anyone who had ever watched a bird build a nest knew birds were masters of ingenuity, using a multitude of materials for their construction projects; depending on the species, you could find nests made of yarn and twigs, dental floss and animal fur, mud and saliva, snakeskin and cotton. With all the nesting activity in Rhonda's yard, I should have been surprised there weren't stacks of fabric scraps lying around as nesting supplies flown in by the birds themselves as they cruised the neighborhood for suitable materials.

For all we knew, that shred I'd given to Pacheco had been on its way to decorate a bird nursery, and not left as evidence of an unwelcome intruder.

Hopefully, my current idea for a lead would turn out to be more helpful.

“The short answer is yes,” Eddie answered, “we have records, but Bob, you've got to understand this is still a developing technology. We don't have total coverage of an area. The drones are moving all the time, so unless something happens right under them, we don't know about it. It's luck, not skill.”

“But you're focusing on the border area, right? You've got to have some drones along the Rio Grande, and that would include some of the park areas, since the river is so close by,” I reasoned. “Eddie, if you've got any records on Estero Llano Grande State Park, even for the last few weeks, can't we just take a look at them?”

Eddie stroked his long white beard and then reached over to toggle a switch back and forth on his console. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “What do you think you're going to find in a drone report?”

I poked a finger in Eddie's tropical-shirt-covered chest.

“Evidence,” I said, “of why Birdy Johnson was at Alligator Lake.”

Eddie leaned back on his chair and studied me. “But like I just said, it's luck, not skill,” he repeated. “We don't have 24/7 surveillance capability.”

“I know,” I assured him. “I'm not looking for the moment Birdy was killed. I'm looking to see whatever you can show me that moved around Alligator Lake in the day before he was killed.”

Eddie finally gave up trying to dissuade me and hit some buttons on his console. Three small screens lit up in front of him.

“Well, then, Bob, you must be one of the luckiest son-of-a-guns on the planet,” Eddie said, adjusting a dial, “because it just so happens that Alligator Lake is directly under the path of one of the drones I was testing for Birdy.”

A spark of excitement ran down my spine. How lucky was that?

Or, maybe, not lucky at all, but planned.

“Did Birdy set up these aerial routes for the drone?” I asked Eddie, my excitement growing.

Eddie fiddled with another dial and the image on the screen took on sharper definition.

“Yes,” he said, “he did.”

I placed a hand on the back of Eddie's chair and leaned in to get a better look at the screen. “And did he give you any explanation of why he chose the route he did?”

Eddie was quiet for a moment or two.

“He said that Rosalie's favorite place at Estero Llano was Alligator Lake because that was where he'd first met her on a birding trip years ago.”

I tried to piece together my thoughts about the personal significance of Alligator Lake to Rosalie and Birdy and the fact that he'd told Buzz he was heading there to look for a park rarity for Rosalie the morning he was killed. I still wasn't sure how it would help catch Birdy's killer, but I had the nagging feeling the scene of the crime was the key to Birdy's murder.

“Eddie,” I said, “did Birdy ever talk to you about his relationship with Rosalie? I mean, would he have mentioned to you if they'd had a quarrel, or if he was in the doghouse with her, because of the work he was doing with the drone surveillance?”

Eddie started to object, but I cut him off.

“I know,” I assured him. “The drone surveillance isn't about illegal immigrants. It's about drug smuggling. But Rosalie didn't know that, right?”

Eddie stroked his beard a few more times.

“No. I'm pretty sure that Birdy wouldn't have told her any details about what we're doing here. The Border Patrol generally likes to keep this kind of development project under wraps until they've got all the kinks worked out.”

He rested his hands on his thighs. “Now that you mention it, Birdy did seem a little smug the last time I saw him, which was the night before he was killed. Smug, like he had a secret.”

Eddie shut his eyes, and I wondered if he was replaying a conversation in his head since his face took on a series of expressions: a smile, a frown, the raised eyebrows of surprise, and another smile. His eyes opened then and he immediately peered at the monitor screen, which showed five glowing spots arranged in a flattened X shape.

“That goofy old Romeo,” Eddie said, tracing a shape on top of the glowing spots. “He was at Alligator Lake to finish off his heart.”

Finish his heart?

“Birdy Johnson had heart disease?” I asked, totally confused.

Eddie guffawed.

“No, Bob,” he said when he stopped laughing. “Birdy Johnson was using his drone to set up a special valentine for Rosalie. Look.”

I watched as he traced a shape over the spots. What I had taken to be a flat X was, under Eddie's outlining finger, the top half of a heart. He pointed to an empty spot a little ways beneath the center of the X.

“Right here,” Eddie said. “This is where you found Birdy, on the southern shore of Alligator Lake. You put another heat source there, and it makes the bottom point of a heart shape. A valentine. Valentine's Day is only a few weeks away. About two weeks ago, Rosalie was here one afternoon in the shop, and she was giving Birdy an earful about immigration reform.”

Eddie traced the heart shape on the screen one more time.

“That Rosalie—she's got a temper on her, I think,” he commented. “A regular spit-fire. Anyway, after she left, I remember Birdy looking sort of hang-dog, and he said something about how he'd better come up with a rarity for her for Valentine's Day to get back on her good side.”

By golly, I was right. Birdy made up with Rosalie by finding rare birds for her.

I love it when I'm right.

And I was right about the location being important in Birdy's murder, too.

Though I never would have guessed that the location was important because he was using it to create a love note.

I'd thought it had something to do with the border, as in illegal immigrants sneaking over it, or drug runners using the spot for an exchange.

Remember what I said about conjecture?

Now, thanks to Eddie's drone records, I knew why Birdy was alone at Alligator Lake when he was killed.

He was building a valentine.

Why someone would object to that enough to kill him—and who that someone was—was still up in the air.

Unfortunately, no drone records could give me that answer.

“You want to see the Weslaco parrot flock tonight?” Eddie asked. “It's kind of like a wild goose chase, driving from spot to spot where you think they are, except that you actually do find them eventually. Of course, they're not geese, either.”

He paused and scratched his upper lip.

“So maybe it's not really like a wild goose chase, I guess.”

I patted Crazy Eddie on his shoulder. “We're planning on it,” I told him. “Luce is resting up right now so we can go. She's having a hard time on this trip,” I confided. “She's so used to her early morning work shift, it's hard for her to adjust to late mornings and irregular meals. I never realized how much she was a creature of habit, I guess.”

Eddie turned off his screens and toggled a few more switches.

“We're all creatures of habit, Bob,” he said. “It's just that some habits are good and some are bad. For instance,” he said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together over his ample belly, “you have a habit of finding bodies when you go birding. That's probably a bad habit. On the other hand, I can't look at any kind of electronic gizmo without thinking of a way to improve it. That's a good habit. I think,” he added. “Though my wife wasn't too thrilled that time I tried to rewire her curling iron to heat it faster. I liked the really short haircut she had to get afterwards, though.”

I looked at the blank screens on the console.

“And people close to us get to know our habits,” I continued, thinking about Birdy's ill-fated valentine attempt to give Rosalie a rarity she didn't expect to find. His gesture of reconciliation had ended with his death.

Wow. I knew making amends with a woman could be hard, but I didn't know it could be murder. Something to keep in mind, I supposed.

“Hold on,” I said, a detail from a conversation bubbling up from my memory. “Buzz and Birdy were at Estero Llano every Wednesday morning checking for species. Rosalie said so. Every birder in the MOB would know their routine, right?”

Eddie nodded slowly. “I suppose so. The MOB seem a pretty tight crew. From what I've seen while I've been here, they're always sharing bird sightings on their phones. It's not like some birders I've known, who try to keep sightings of rare birds to themselves.”

The idea of habit and routine began to dance around in my head in relation to Birdy's murder. “So if he'd been out setting up the sensors on Wednesday mornings, a birder who'd seen him do that on a previous Wednesday morning would know when he could catch Birdy alone,” I theorized.

Eddie moved his hands back to his console and sat upright again in his chair.

“Give me a minute,” he said, a hint of excitement in his voice. “You just gave me an idea.”

He proceeded to flip another section of switches and tapped on a different set of keys on the console. A wider screen lit up before him and I realized he was looking at the rear ends of a row of cars in a parking lot.

“The parking lot is Estero Llano's,” he explained. “I set up a tiny video camera system to monitor the cars that parked. That's why I was there yesterday morning—I was fine-tuning it. Marci—she's the park superintendent—asked me if I could help them gauge how many visitors weren't paying the admission fee once they got to the park registration area, since their receipts seemed lower than their visitor count. Visitors are supposed to register their vehicles when they pay, so she wanted to know how many vehicles didn't match up to paid registrations.”

He hit one more key and the license plates came into clear focus.

“This is the parking lot Wednesday morning,” he said. “Let's see which of the MOB might have arrived early enough to commit a murder. The chief already checked all the security tapes for the park's perimeter, and no one was trespassing into the park that morning, so the murderer must have walked right in the front entrance.”

He started the recording at daybreak when the park opened, and stopped it every time someone arrived, so we could get a look at the face. We hit the jackpot about fifteen minutes after sunrise.

“Birdy and Buzz,” Crazy Eddie said as the two men climbed out of the same green Porsche I'd seen in Buzz's garage. A moment later, I picked out Schooner and Gunnar getting out of a SUV with a Minnesota license plate, followed by Paddy Mac and his wife Poppy exiting a sedan, a small knapsack in her hand.

“No surprises there,” I said. “Poppy, Paddy, Schooner and Gunnar were with me when I spotted the body, and I met Buzz on the park deck before I headed over to Alligator Lake, where he told us Birdy had gone.”

Eddie continued to run the recording until I saw a classic Mustang roar into the lot and slide into a parking slot.

“Slow down!” I said. “I think I'm going to know this one.”

Eddie slowed the recording until a young man stepped from the car. He turned his head, scanning the parking lot and then the camera caught his face clearly.

On the monitor, Mark Myers looked downright frantic.

“It's Mark,” I confirmed. “Buzz's nephew. He was there yesterday morning.”

I blew out a breath, unsure how I felt about the discovery, especially since I'd already dismissed the floral scrap that had led me to suspect Mark's involvement in Birdy's murder as a worthless clue. I looked again at the slow-moving image of Buzz's nephew. “What was he doing there?”