As soon as the Honda passed him, Seth Early leaped into action, running across the fields. I hadn’t seen that he had his truck stashed nearby, but I saw it join the spread-out caravan.
Aha! Apparently my fake bird-watcher in the Honda was also Seth Early’s swarthy man.
What the hell. I climbed down the tree again, ran back to the house the shortest way possible—along the now deserted road—and jumped into my car. Rob hadn’t been going that fast, so if they were following him, I should be able to catch up with them before they got too far.
After a couple of miles, I spotted Seth Early’s truck and slowed down to keep a safe distance behind it. When we came to a long, gentle curve, I got a chance to check out the others. Rob in the lead, cruising along a mere five miles above the speed limit. The Honda, its lights now on, following about ten car lengths behind him. Seth Early, about ten car lengths behind him. Since ten car lengths seemed to be the generally approved standard distance for tailing people, I made sure I was in sync with the rest of the caravan and tried to think ahead to any places where they could do something clever and lose me.
I don’t know why I bothered. Rob and Seth Early were clearly oblivious to the possibility that someone might be following them, and even if the Honda’s driver realized he was part of a parade, he probably couldn’t do anything about it.
Near town, Rob signaled way in advance before turning left onto the Clay Hill Road, and then again before his right turn onto Whitetail Lane. Did Rob’s errand have anything to do with Jasper Walker?
Seth Early and the Honda fell back a little on the small country lane, and I followed suit. I breathed a slight sigh of relief when we cruised past the Belle Glade Bird Farm sign without turning in. Still odd that Rob happened to be going out in this direction, but at least it wasn’t likely to be anything connected with Jasper’s murder and Karen’s disappearance.
Then a few miles farther, we hit another long curve through open fields, and I realized that Seth Early must have fallen too far back. He was now lead car in a truncated caravan.
He cruised on, apparently oblivious. Or maybe he was speeding up slightly, assuming the others had merely gotten a little too far ahead of him and trying to catch up.
I turned around in the next driveway and hightailed it back to Hiram Bass’s house and the bird farm.
I parked my car on one of the vestigial side lanes, near the ruins of a cement truck, and made my way on foot.
The Bass place was deserted. No sign of Rob’s car or the Honda. I took the lane toward the bird farm. I was halfway there when I heard some faint ticking noises in the shrubbery. I wasn’t sure what caused them, but my car made those same sounds when it had recently stopped and the engine was cooling.
I followed the noises, trying very hard to avoid touching any vegetation, since it was too dark to tell harmless vines from the ubiquitous poison ivy. Sure enough, I found the blue Honda parked at the side of the road, the bird books still lying on the front seat.
I stood listening for several minutes, trying to discover where its occupant had gone.
Then I heard voices farther along. Up at Aubrey Hamilton’s house. I left the Honda and walked cautiously along the road, expecting the fake bird-watcher to leap out of the bushes at any second.
At the end of the lane, I saw that both the house and barn were illuminated. Rob’s car was parked at the side of the lane, near the barn. The voices seemed to be coming from the barn, so I headed that way.
As I drew closer, I heard Rob’s voice.
Thirty
“Okay, I’m not sure it’s ready for prime time,” he was saying.
“Well, I told you this was harder than it looks,” a woman’s voice said. “And frankly, you couldn’t have picked a less promising subject.”
I felt incredibly exposed as I walked across the barnyard, and sighed with relief when I reached the shadows beside the barn.
“It hasn’t been easy,” Rob said. “But I like a challenge.”
“You could have fooled me,” I muttered. Maybe this wasn’t my slacker brother, but his long-lost industrious identical twin. I crept to one of the barn windows and peeked in.
Rob was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt, and a leather jacket. He had somehow managed to tie a red bandanna around Spike’s neck. Not the first time he’d done it either, to judge by the relatively calm way Spike reacted—he only turned around from time to time and growled over his shoulder at the offending fabric.
Rob took up a position beside Spike. Spike looked up at him and curled his lip. Somehow, with the bandanna, it almost looked cute. Probably did look cute if you didn’t know Spike.
“Okay,” Rob said. “Hit it.”
Music blasted out—evidently the woman had turned on a tape or CD player. I recognized the crashing opening chords of George Thorogood and the Destroyers’ “Bad to the Bone.”
Rob immediately assumed a pose of utterly theatrical menace, narrowing his eyes, slouching with his left hand hooked into his belt loops while he snapped the fingers of the right occasionally to punctuate the opening bars. Then, he extended one finger dramatically down, pointing straight at Spike.
Spike leaped up toward the finger, jaws snapping shut with less than an inch to spare. Rob and Spike then proceeded to execute nearly five minutes of the most demented dance routine I’d ever seen. At least Rob was dancing—a skill I’d never seen him display before. Dancing and acting; if I hadn’t seen the transformation, I’d have had a hard time recognizing my brother Rob as the cool leather-clad troublemaker strutting around the barn floor. Spike wasn’t acting or dancing, though—he was out for the kill, leaping up and snapping whenever Rob extended a finger down toward him. And by keeping one finger or the other just out of reach the whole time, Rob deftly managed to lead Spike through some fairly intricate choreography. Spike wound around and through Rob’s legs, eyes always fixed on that elusive, teasing finger, occasionally twirling in a circle or leaping over an extended ankle.
I was amazed at how well Rob took Spike’s mono-maniacal urge to bite and channeled it into a really cute routine. Cute even to me, and I knew all too well how close Rob was to losing those fingers Spike found so irresistible. As the music built to its final crescendo of guitars and drums, Rob even went down briefly on one knee, leading me to cover my eyes and hope he was smart enough to be wearing a hockey protector.
“Bravo!” came a voice. A spry-looking older woman with a mop of unruly salt-and-pepper curls came into view, applauding vigorously. “You’ve worked wonders with him! You’re definitely ready for the contest.”
Rob grinned, and Spike stood graciously accepting her praise, as if he’d done something really clever instead of spending the last five minutes attempting mayhem.
I actually had to remind myself that I was spying and probably shouldn’t join in the ovation. Their performance was a tour de force. Rob must have been working on it all summer. No wonder Jack Ransom and the guys at the office had been so undisturbed.
But why all the secrecy? And why was the fake bird-watcher tailing Rob? And speaking of the fake bird-watcher—where was he?
I stepped away from the window and circled around a bit. Toward the back of the barn I heard smothered laughter.
The fake bird-watcher was standing outside another of the windows, with one hand over his mouth and the other clutched to his stomach, shaking with suppressed laughter.
“Bit off the beaten path for bird-watching,” I said.
He stopped laughing, and I suddenly found myself staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Don’t make a sound,” he said, suddenly serious. “And put your hands in the air. What are you doing here?”
I put my hands in the air. Inside the barn, the opening bars of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” began playing.
“I asked, what you were doing here,” he repeated.
“You also said don’t make a sound,” I said. “I was trying to figure out if you expected me to mime my answe
r. I’ll need to put my hands down to do that.”
He didn’t look amused. Over his shoulder, in the barn, I could see that the gray-haired woman was doing a spirited dance routine with two enormous gray poodles.
“I followed you to see why you were following my brother,” I said. “What are you, a rival canine choreographer?”
“Hmph.” He glanced over his shoulder at the canine acrobatics inside, shook his head slightly, and focused back on me. “You’ll have to come with me.”
“I don’t think so,” a voice said from behind me. “Drop the gun.”
I turned slightly to find Freddy Hamilton holding a gun of his own.
“I said drop it,” Freddy repeated. “And put your hands in the air.”
The fake bird-watcher dropped the gun and raised his hands. I wasn’t sure whether I’d been rescued or had only gone from frying pan to fire. I kept my hands up, just in case.
“Now move, both of you,” Freddy said. “Inside the barn.”
We marched inside, holding our hands up. Rob and the woman turned in surprise when we entered. The poodles stopped dancing and raced over to lick our faces—well, my face and the other prisoner’s. They didn’t seem all that keen on licking Freddy’s face. From the portable CD player in the corner, Bruce Springsteen sang on unheeded.
In one corner of the barn, I saw a giant bird cage, about six feet square and eight feet tall, with several dozen brightly colored canaries and cockatiels roosting in it. Or trying to roost—about half the birds had their heads under their wings while the rest were fluffing their feathers and looking around rather irritably, as if loud rock and roll wasn’t their idea of a bedtime serenade. And one wall of the barn was lined to a height of six feet with rough shelves containing several dozen smaller cages, with or without brightly colored birds in them.
“Over there,” Freddy said, pointing with his gun to where Rob and the woman were standing.
“Freddy, what are you doing?” the woman asked.
“My business,” Freddy said.
“You’re doing it in my barn,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Freddy said. “But why’d you have to come back so early? You usually stay up in Maine till Labor Day. Everything would have been straightened out by Labor Day. Will you shut that damned thing off?”
Evidently Freddy wasn’t a fan of the Boss. The CD had segued from “Dancing in the Dark” to “My Hometown.” The woman—whom I deduced must be Aubrey Hamilton—walked over and cut the power.
“Great,” Freddy said. “Now put the dogs in one of the stalls. I don’t want them drooling all over me.”
“Poodles don’t drool,” Aubrey said. But she opened the door of one of the stalls and called to the poodles, who obediently followed.
“Him, too,” Freddy added, gesturing at Spike, who was fixing him with a stern look and growling slightly.
“What’s going on?” Rob asked, as he dragged Spike into the stall with the poodles.
“Shut up,” Freddy said. He tossed a roll of duct tape at Aubrey. “Here, take this and tape their hands together.”
“Freddy!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe you’re doing this!”
“Start with him,” Freddy said, pointing to the fake bird-watcher.
“This isn’t helping your case,” the man began.
“Shut up,” Freddy said, waving the gun a little wildly. “That means all of you.”
Aubrey sighed, but she didn’t try to talk him out of tying us up, which probably said a lot about Freddy’s character. That, and the fact that even though he let her use a utility knife to cut the duct tape, she made no attempt to escape—she just obediently taped the fake bird-watcher’s wrists together, then mine, and finally Rob’s. Freddy then ordered her to secure us to the vertical posts that supported the hay loft—perhaps he’d caught me measuring the distance between us. And when she’d trussed the three of us up to Freddy’s satisfaction, he secured her to a fourth post. Took him long enough, since he was still holding the gun in his right hand and had to do all the taping with his left.
When he’d finished tying up Aubrey, he came around and checked the rest of us. He must have been satisfied with Aubrey’s handiwork—he looked a little more relaxed and stuck his gun in his belt.
Not having the gun pointed at anyone made me feel a little bolder.
“So, did you kill Jasper Walker?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” Freddy said. “Him and me were friends.”
“He and I were friends, Freddy,” Aubrey said.
“You were not,” Freddy said. “You never could stand Jasper. But he was working with me in the bird business. He was the one who figured out where to get the cash so we could expand our operations—why would I kill him?”
“Thieves fall out,” I said. “Where did he get the cash?”
“The jerk never told me,” Freddy said. “And he never showed up with the rest of the cash he promised. He’s left me in the lurch, owing a hell of a lot of money to some really impatient guys.”
He shook his head as if disappointed with Jasper’s inconsiderateness.
“So you weren’t involved with the embezzlement?” I asked.
“The what?” Freddy said. He looked genuinely puzzled. As if he not only hadn’t been involved in embezzlement but didn’t even know what the word meant.
“Jasper was using the computer system he designed to steal money from the college,” I said. And apparently investing the proceeds in illegal finches.
“Don’t look at me,” Freddy said. “Computers are Jasper’s thing, not mine. And I had nothing to do with his death.” His voice sounded a little shrill, and I winced when he pulled the gun out of his belt again. “Look at that crazy wife of his. I was coming home a couple of nights ago, and she came tearing out of Jasper’s driveway like a bat out of hell. Almost sideswiped my truck. I just figured they’d had a fight until I heard he was dead. Then I realized she must have been running away after killing him.”
After killing him, or perhaps after finding his body?
“Did you tell the police about seeing Karen?” I asked aloud.
“No,” he said. “I figured, why cause her any trouble?”
“More like you didn’t want to talk to the police,” the fake bird-watcher said.
“Whatever,” Freddy said, with a shrug. He stuck the gun back in his belt. “You can tell them for me. I’m getting out of here.”
He picked up a small bird cage, strolled over to the aviary, and opened the door. He reached in, grabbed a bird, and put it in the cage. Then he peered around as if looking for a particular bird.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
He closed the door to the aviary and scanned the cages lining the far wall. He went over to pull the covers off the few that had them. Then he whirled and strode back to Aubrey.
“What the hell have you done with my birds?” he shouted, waving his gun at her.
Thirty-One
Was Freddy crazy? Two walls of the barn were lined with cages full of birds—some sleeping and others twittering softly. It looked like plenty of birds to me, but I try not to argue with people carrying guns.
Apparently Aubrey agreed with me.
“Done with your birds?” she repeated. “The place is full of those messy canaries and cockatiels of yours.”
She pointed with her chin to the aviary and the cage-lined walls.
“Not those,” he said. “The finches.”
He held up the cage with the single bird he’d grabbed from the aviary. A rather dramatically colored bird, with an orange head, green body, purple and yellow breast, and stripes of blue and black around the face.
I’d seen birds like that before—in the cage that had mysteriously appeared on the third floor of our house.
“A Gouldian finch,” the fake bird-watcher said, causing me to wonder if I’d been wrong in thinking of him as a fake. He wasn’t particularly swarthy, either. “They’re endangered in Australia. And illegal to import. Of co
urse, I’m sure you bred those, right?”
“Yeah,” Freddy said. “You didn’t let them go, did you,” he asked, turning back to Aubrey.
“I just got here last night,” she said.
“And the day after you get here, my finches disappear. They were here yesterday.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” she said. “I didn’t even know you had finches here.”
“Maybe Dad and Grandpa took them,” Rob put in.
Freddy’s eyes narrowed.
“Why would they do that?” he asked.
“Just give up,” the bird-watcher said. “We’re not after you—we’re after the big guys.”
“We?” I asked. “Who is we?” The man glanced at me and ignored my question.
“If you give us information on them—” he went on.
“Look, dude,” Freddy began.
“Arroyo,” the man said. “Carlos Arroyo, with the—”
“Whatever,” Freddy said. “Do I look that stupid? Like turning stool pigeon on them is going to be good for my health. No thanks.”
“No one’s going to hurt you over a bunch of birds,” Aubrey said.
“Yes, except it isn’t just about birds, is it?” I said. “Because the same guys who smuggle in birds are also smuggling drugs, right?”
Freddy and Arroyo both looked at me with surprise.
“Montgomery Blake is my grandfather,” I said, with as much of a shrug as I could manage in my trussed-up condition. “He’s always going on about the connection between wildlife smuggling and drug smuggling and for that matter, arms smuggling. So what are the odds that birds are the only thing Freddy’s smuggling? He’s probably dealing a little cocaine, too, or is it heroin?”
“Oh, Freddy,” Aubrey said. “How could you?”
“You can’t get away with it, you know,” Arroyo said. “They’ll be watching for your car. Just give up.”
Freddy stared at him for a moment, then went over and began rummaging in Arroyo’s pockets.
“What are you doing?” Arroyo said.
Freddy emerged with a set of car keys.
“But they won’t be watching for your car, will they?” he said. “By the time you get loose, I can be long gone.”
Cockatiels at Seven Page 19
