The Money Bird (An Animals in Focus Mystery)

by Boneham, Sheila Webster

  Tom stood at one end of the ring with Drake sitting at his side. Then he gave a command that I couldn’t hear, he spoke so softly, but I knew to be “fly out.” Drake raced straight ahead, running between two jumps set up halfway down at right angles to the side of the ring. One, the high jump, consisted of three wooden boards held edge to edge by the standards to form a solid obstacle. The other was a single wooden bar set into cups on the standards. The ends of the two jumps stood about twenty feet apart.

  When he reached the far end of the ring, Drake spun around and sat down, his tail whipping back and forth and his face alight with anticipated fun. Tom stayed still for a couple of seconds, then raised his right arm toward the high jump and said, “Over!” Drake took off, veered to his left, and cleared the twenty-four inches he was required to jump with plenty of air beneath him. He was already turning toward Tom when he landed, and he slid into a sit right in front of the man. Again, I wished I had my camera to catch their matching grins.

  Tom was setting Drake up for the other jump when I saw a man I didn’t know walk in the front door. That wasn’t unusual. But he didn’t have a dog with him, or a woman with a dog, and the only man I’d ever seen come in here unaccompanied by one or both of those was Neil Young. This guy was about Tom’s size, five ten or so, but a good decade younger, maybe more. He was clean shaven and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He scanned the room, then started our way. When he got close I realized that although he nodded at me, his smile was for Jay. But he did have the grace to greet me first. “Janet, I presume?”

  “I’m going to take a wild guess. Dr. Crane?”

  “George.” We shook hands, and he nodded toward Jay and asked, “May I?”

  “Wow. Thanks for asking, and yes, of course.”

  He knelt and held out the back of his hand. I released Jay from the down-stay and he was up in a flash, wriggling like a hula dancer and pushing his shoulder into George, who quickly had his fingers deep in blue-merle fur.

  “I’m going to take another wild guess. You know about Aussies and their affinity for butt scratches?”

  George said, “I grew up with them. Just lost my old dog a few months ago.” He stood back up and looked at the action in the ring. Drake sat at the far end from Tom again. “That must be Tom and Drake.”

  Tom signaled Drake to take the bar jump, and once again Drake was nearly perfect. Tom finished up the session by giving Drake a jackpot of treats, handing him five or six of them one right after the other. Then he pulled Drake’s special training toy, a five-inch stuffed mallard with one wing and evidence of several “surgeries,” from his back pocket and tossed it. Drake pounced on it, tossed it in the air, caught it, and shook it.

  To George I said, “Male bonding. Could go on for hours.” Then I called, “Tom.”

  Drake ran to the edge of the ring and showed me his duck, and Tom followed. Once the introductions were out of the way, Tom suggested we go to his house so George could settle in. I pulled Tom aside in the parking lot and said, “I’ll come over for a while, but then I have to go home.”

  “It might be easier if you stay the night at my house. I think George wants to get out to the lake early to see if we can spot the parrot.”

  I hadn’t told him about my plans to snoop around Treasures on Earth with Peg, but I had told him I had an appointment the next day. “I can’t go in the morning. I have an appointment.”

  “But I thought you wanted to be in on this?” Tom looked into my eyes. I know he was reading my mind. “You are, aren’t you? You’re up to something.”

  Offense being the best defense, I dodged a direct answer and said, “I didn’t think he would be here until tomorrow. I kept Wednesday open, but made an appointment for tomorrow morning.”

  Tom leaned back against my van, folded his arms across his chest, and looked at me through half-closed lids. “What are you planning?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Janet … Never mind. Do what you want.”

  “I will.”

  “I know.”

  We stared at each other, and something passed between us. Not anger, not resignation. It seemed more like understanding. After a moment, I sighed and said, “Look, I just have a lead …”

  “A lead? A lead?” Tom stood up straight and I couldn’t be sure in the yellow-tinged light of the parking lot but I thought his face darkened a tad. “The only lead you should worry about is the one attached to your dog.”

  My own face heated up at that. “Excuse me?”

  “Janet, whatever you have, give it to the cops. You said yourself that something very weird is going on. It isn’t safe. Don’t be st …” He caught himself before he said “stupid,” and his voice softened. “Janet, let Jo and Hutch look into things. Just give them what you have and leave it.”

  “Look, Tom, I’m not going to do anything dangerous. But Anderson was my student, my friend. I sent him out there. Someone killed him, and I think the autopsy will show that, somehow. Even if it doesn’t, I know it.” My voice cracked, but I recovered. “And something is going on with those birds.”

  “But you don’t have to …”

  I cut him off. “Don’t tell me what to do, Tom.” I signaled Jay to hop into his crate and took the opportunity to take a deep breath while I filled his water bowl and shut the hatch. I considered going straight home, but I wanted to hear what Dr. Crane had to say about my photos of the parrots and about the birds themselves. “Shall we?”

  George entered Tom’s address into his GPS in case they got separated.

  “Anybody else hungry?” I asked. My cream cheese muffin was long gone, and it turned out George hadn’t eaten. I called our favorite pizza place and said I would swing by there on my way. I checked my messages, too, but didn’t have any. I thought that was odd since Jo was usually quick to get back to me, especially about potential police business. She did say she had something big going on, though, so I decided to wait until morning before I pestered her. I was just setting my phone down on the seat when it rang and scared the bejeebers out of me. Note to self: what were you thinking when you reset the ring to “Vintage Telephone”?

  It was Peg, verifying our early morning rendezvous outside the Kroger store at Coldwater and Dupont. Before we hung up I asked, “Peg, do you have a camera?”

  “Sure.”

  “A little one? You know, point and shoot?”

  “Yes. Nice little one. Fits in my pocket. Oh, I get it. That’s what you want, right?”

  “Right. One that fits in your pocket. Charge it, okay?” Common problem among my beginning students, forgetting to charge their cameras. One reason I prefer regular batteries.

  The pizza was just coming out of the oven when I got to the carry-out counter and Jay and I walked in Tom’s door a quarter hour later. Drake, always a perfect gentleman, ushered us in with a smile on his face and a wag in his tail. Tom and George gave me back-handed waves but kept their noses pointed at Tom’s laptop. I set the pizza down and looked over Tom’s shoulder.

  An array of six parrot photos filled the screen. They were all basically red, but the shades varied from a deep red approaching purple to a bright tangerine-red. “How true are those colors?” I asked George, knowing that photos don’t always show colors as we see them in real life, and that the screen settings would further affect their hues and intensity.

  He glanced at me and nodded as he answered. “Reasonable. At least the colors. But seeing them here is nothing like seeing them in the open, in the sun. This one, for instance,” he pointed at the tangeriney bird, “practically glows in the flesh. Or the feather, I guess. And this one,” he clicked on another photo and it filled the screen, “is almost iridescent.” He clicked the mouse again and the photo array reappeared.

  “Okay, let’s feed the man,” said Tom. He put his laptop to sleep and cleared the table, pulled three Harps from the fridge, and opened the pizza box.

  I grabbed some plates and napkins and told the dogs to lie down. “So,
what did I miss? George, what are you thinking?”

  “The birds in the photos are not common parrots.” He stuffed most of a pizza slice into his mouth and rolled his eyes and groaned. Both dogs cocked their heads, and when I looked toward the movement I saw that Drake had strings of drool hanging to his paws and Jay had little drops of saliva dripping from his dangling tongue like a leaky faucet.

  “All of them?” I asked. “They’re all rare?”

  George swigged some beer and studied the bottle as he set it down, as if considering his response. “Okay, the parrot in the veterinary office, he’s not rare. Not exactly. But he’s not a common pet species either, and he’d be expensive to buy. South American species, doesn’t breed well in captivity. So his owner must really be into parrots, or into conspicuous possession.” He seemed to be waiting for an answer.

  “Possibly conspicuous possession,” I said, remembering Persephone Swann’s expensive duds and jewelry and her pulled-together chicness. “But I don’t think she had a clue what kind of parrot Ava was, or is, whatever his name is now. She didn’t even know he was male.”

  Tom joined the conversation. “Could she have forgotten? I mean, we run into that with dog owners all the time. People who can’t remember what breed the shelter told them they were getting, or they never check it out and realize the I.D. was wrong.”

  It’s true. I remember a woman who came for a beginning obedience class at Dog Dayz. She had an Australian Cattle Dog, probably purebred and a pretty nice example of the breed. Unfortunately, the shelter had misidentified the dog as an Australian Shepherd, and the woman held tight to that claim despite the obvious differences between her dog and Jay. I wasn’t sure the comparison worked for Persephone and her bird, though.

  “I don’t know. Remember what Giselle said about becoming a foster home, or, what did she call it? Guardian?” Tom nodded but George needed an explanation. “She made it sound like some sort of fostering program. Like they farm the birds out to members to take care of, but I didn’t get the impression it was meant to be permanent. Tom, remember what Goldie said? That Moneypenny was planning to build an aviary of some sort out there? Big fancy one?”

  George leaned back and closed his eyes, letting his head fall forward and nod up and down a few times. I waited until he seemed to come back to us, then asked, “What about the other birds? The loose one and the dead one?”

  “Ah, yes, a whole different matter with them,” George said. “A whole different matter.”

  “Endangered, you said?” asked Tom.

  “Critically endangered.”

  “What does that mean, in terms of numbers?” Tom again.

  “We don’t know how many are left in the wild, “ said George. “Hard to get accurate counts in Congo. This species has been documented only in one remote valley. It’s hard to get to, and dangerous. I know one field researcher who studied them there several years ago, but she got out when the fighting got too hot. I have a call into her, but she’s on sabbatical, in the field. In the Malagasy Republic. Might be a while.”

  We all sat silent for a moment, then George said, “So what do I think? I think you have some black-market trade in very rare, critically endangered, expensive parrots going on here.”

  “Why would anyone let a bird, two birds! like that loose?” I knew as soon as I said it that it was dopey. “Or more to the point, how would they get loose?” An image of the dead bird and the flight of the bereaved mate or friend came back to me like despair itself. “And the one that died. Sad enough, but sadder yet for an endangered species.”

  “Tip of the ’berg,” said George. “The numbers of animals killed in the illegal trade, the smuggling, is obscene. Not just birds, of course. Trade in live exotics, trade in pelts and body parts and eggs … To the poachers and middlemen, dead and injured and diseased animals are just part of the cost of doing business. To the animals …” He lifted his beer bottle to his lips but put it down without drinking. “To an endangered species, it may mean the end of their road.”

  “And not only for the individual species in question,” said Tom. “Whenever you remove an entire species, or reduce its numbers so much that it may as well be gone, you affect all the other species around it. Plants as well.”

  I can only take so much of this topic at a time. It makes me roiling mad, but more, it makes me feel I’m drowning in sorrow with no hope of ever surfacing. So I changed the subject, although not to a happier one. “Tom, did you tell George about Anderson Billings?”

  Tom looked like I felt after the previous few minutes. “Right. Let’s fill him in. You start. Be right back.” He picked up the empty pizza box with one hand and the two bits of crust he had saved with the other and turned toward the kitchen. “Janet, you want to release the boys?”

  George seemed to have just realized that the dogs had stayed where I told them all through our dinner and conversation. “Impressive. They’re really good.”

  “Free!” I said, and Jay and Drake were on their feet and crowding into Tom’s legs faster than you could say “pizza bones!” To George I said, “Consistency. That’s about all it takes.”

  Tom had the dogs sit and handed a piece of crust to each of them. From the looks on their faces you’d think he had given them each a haunch of venison. Then Tom pulled a towel out of a drawer and wiped each slobbery canine chin and said, “Good thing we didn’t have a four-course dinner. They’d have drowned themselves.”

  We moved out to the back patio and filled George in about all the strange goings-on—Ava’s visit to the vet, the bag that Drake had found with the red feather and blood inside, Anderson Billings’s photos of the man on the island disposing of the dead bird, my gruesome discovery, and the dead bird’s companion. I told him that several people associated with Treasures on Earth seemed to be getting involved with parrots. I’d heard that from Persephone Swann and then her cousin Giselle, from Dr. Neil Young, from Mrs. Willard. Tom told him about the creepy guy and his not-so-subtle apparent threat.

  “You have the picture?” asked George.

  “What picture?”

  “The guy. You said you took a photo of him?”

  “I do,” I said, and went into the house for Tom’s laptop. I’d sent all my photos related to the strange goings-on to Tom, partly so he would have them and partly for backup. I’m sloppy about my house and my hair and makeup, but fanatical about backing up my work. It’s all backed up automatically every evening to on-line storage, but I had decided on an extra measure of safety in this case. I set the computer on the patio table and pulled up my photos of Mr. Creepy, then turned the screen toward George.

  “Zoom in on him,” he said, and I filled the screen with the man’s face.

  “Cold-looking bird,” said Tom.

  George turned away from the screen and looked first at Tom, then at me, and said, “I know him.”

  thirty-eight

  “You know him?” I thought I must have heard wrong. How could George, an ornithologist from Florida, know the weirdo who had been skulking around Twisted Lake and dumping dead birds out there?

  George continued to stare at the screen. “I do. Or did. Name’s Rich Campbell.”

  “Is he a bird guy?” asked Tom, apparently assembling the pieces more quickly than I was.

  “Yep, he is. Raptors. At least when I knew him.”

  “So what’s he doing with dead endangered parrots?” None of this made a featherweight of sense.

  George seemed to be weighing his words.

  “How do you know him?” asked Tom.

  “Grad school.” George finally turned away from the face on the screen and looked at Tom, then at me. “Haven’t seen him in twelve years. Not too pleased to see him now.”

  My stupid phone rang. “Hold that thought, would you? I want to hear this, but I need to take this call.” To Tom I said, “Jo Stevens.”

  I walked into the living room to take the call and told Jo that the ornithologist had arrived and identified the birds a
nd the creep at Twisted Lake. “Where you been, anyway? I thought you’d call back hours ago.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “Actually, I thought you were going to drop by Dog Dayz.”

  “I had to go to Evansville.”

  Jo had family there. “Everything okay?”

  “Yep! Everything’s fine.” She sounded fine. She sounded buoyant, in fact.

  “Jo?”

  “Long story. I want to tell you in person. How about I drop by late morning?”

  “Okay. Oh, wait.” Peg and I were planning to go to Treasures on Earth mid-morning, but I couldn’t be sure how long we’d be there. “I can’t. Later?”

  We made plans to touch base early afternoon and I went back to the kitchen to hear what George had to say.

  “Sorry. Go ahead.” I sat down at the table.

  “So, he was a year ahead of me. Had a couple of classes with him my first year, then didn’t see much of him for a couple of years. He did his fieldwork in New Guinea, or that’s what he said, while I was finishing course work and taking exams, and when he came back, I left for the field.”

  Or that’s what he said sort of rattled around my brain, but instead of pursuing that odd comment, I asked,“Where was that?” It wasn’t particularly relevant, but I’m always fascinated by where academics of various stripes choose to do their research. I would love to travel. On the other hand, I won’t leave Jay and Leo for longer than a week, so I won’t be going anywhere exotic any time soon. There’s nothing to stop me having some vicarious adventure, though.

  “Southern California and the Baja.”

  Tom and George had a brief academic bonding moment when they found that their research stomping grounds overlapped. The objects of their interest may have as well. Birds and plants. Then I butted in again to ask, “What kind of birds were you studying?”

  George looked surprised. “Parrots, of course. Mexican red-heads to be exact. Amazona viridigenalis.”

  “Red-head?” asked Tom. “Viridi?”

  “Right,” said George. “Also known as the green-cheeked or red-crowned Amazon. We online?” he asked, gesturing toward the computer.