The Boreal Owl Murder by Jan Dunlap Page A

and love, I think. Or is it revenge and jealousy? Either way, we’d better check out Rahr’s love life. Maybe he wronged some woman. Maybe he left her for the sake of his research.”
    I opened the bag of scones again and inhaled.
    Luce gave me a funny look.
    “Therapy,” I said and closed the bag. “I had a rough day.”
    And night. But I didn’t tell her that. I deliberately hadn’t mentioned to Luce about the part of my discussion with Knott about Stan Miller. The non-existent Scary Stan Miller who was dating my sister. Luce and I had had arguments before about my over-protective attitude towards Lily, and I just didn’t have the energy to get into it with her right now. After I’d hung up with Knott, I’d thought about leaving a phone message for Lily about Stan’s non-entity status, but figured she’d just delete it and refuse to speak to me. I did, however, give Lily’s telephone number to the detective, hoping he could get through to her. Hoping she wouldn’t hang up on him, too, thinking it was a friend of mine I’d put up to a prank. Nothing like trust between siblings, right? Anyway, my worrying about Lily’s poor judgment when it came to men, let alone her physical safety, had kept me awake much of the night. She might be the Mistress of Humiliation, but she is my sister.
    “Focus, Bobby.”
    I put the bag of scones on the desk.
    “According to Knott,” I explained, “Rahr and his wife were happily married for thirty-seven years. Three kids and five grandchildren. The only time he spent away from her was the weekends he spent in the woods researching the Boreals. That’s why she didn’t suspect anything when he didn’t come home last Friday night. He usually camped on-site. He knew what the weather was like and was prepared for it. That’s why the lack of adequate clothing on his body was so weird. He knew better. Knott thinks that maybe the killer knocked Rahr out against a tree, then wasn’t sure he was dead, so he stripped him down to make sure he’d freeze to death before he could hike out for help.”
    I closed my eyes, remembering a frozen corpse.
    I didn’t think hiking out had been much of an option for him.
    “It was below zero there last Friday, Luce—I know, I was there,” I reminded her.
    Mike and I hadn’t wasted any time finding our birding spots that night, it was so bitter. We had had a nasty wind chill, too. With that kind of cold, a person could be in serious trouble within thirty minutes. Rahr couldn’t have made it out in a flannel shirt even if he had recovered consciousness after getting his head bashed. I shook my head slowly. “Whoever it was,” I concluded, “made sure Rahr wasn’t going to be talking to anybody.”
    Luce frowned. “Okay, maybe not a woman scorned. What about plain revenge? By the time the dust settled last year after the DNR and S.O.B. arm-wrestled over clearing the forest, there were lay-offs in the logging companies up there. That had to hurt quite a few workers. Maybe a terminated employee decided to pin the blame on Rahr for his job loss.”
    I had considered that angle, too, but thought it was a stretch that some laid-off logger would have taken the time to track down Rahr, follow him up to the owl sites, bang his head on a tree, then strip him down to make sure he would die because he hadn’t done a better job of killing him in the first place.
    Besides, Rahr was just a researcher. He hadn’t taken a really visible role in the controversy—nothing like the media attention S.O.B. had commanded. I thought that if a laid-off logger was looking for someone to pay back for his loss of employment, it would be someone from S.O.B., not Rahr.
    “Although,” I said, remembering the demonstration I’d seen earlier, thanks to the testing students, of the superior strength of primal instincts compared to higher-level-thinking skills, “I suppose a crime of passion is possible. In the heat of the moment, momentary insanity could rule