Never Murder a Birder

by Edie Claire

  Chapter 24

  Leigh was thoroughly enjoying herself. She and Warren had walked out on the pier, watched the surfers and the fishermen do their thing, had coffee and donuts for a mid-morning snack (the cranberry bread had been so terribly long ago, after all), and were now wading barefoot in the waves as they made their way slowly back down the beach, walking hand in hand like teenagers. “Business Warren” of days past had exchanged his stuffy professional attire for a pair of shorts and a lightweight button-down shirt, and Leigh could admire the good looks of “Vacation Warren” all day. They’d made reservations on a dolphin cruise in the afternoon and the only major decisions left to be made were where to eat lunch and dinner.

  Yet still, every once in a while, a niggling feeling intruded on her happiness. The feeling that she had forgotten something, that she should be worrying about something, that she should stop what she was doing and try to figure it all out before something really bad happened.

  She quashed that feeling mercilessly.

  “This is interesting,” Warren said, stooping down to pick up a fragment of shell with funky spots like a giraffe’s.

  “That’s a broken piece of a crab carapace,” Leigh said knowledgably.

  “Oh.” He tossed it back in the ocean. A very large bird cruised along the waterline, not too far above their heads. “And I suppose you know what that was, too?”

  Leigh smirked. “Brown pelican,” she answered. “Not to be confused with the white pelican.”

  Warren raised an eyebrow. “They’ve done it, haven’t they? They’ve made a birder out of you.”

  Leigh laughed. “Well, um… some of the names are easier to remember than others.”

  His gaze focused over her shoulder across the road, and Leigh turned to glimpse the roof of the pavilion. They had reached the north entrance to the preserve.

  When Leigh turned back to him, he looked away toward the Gulf. “So, you want to keep walking this way, or are you ready to head back?” he asked cheerfully.

  Leigh smiled. They had been married entirely too long for him to fool her. “If you want to see the preserve, it’s okay,” she offered gamely. The prospect of returning didn’t thrill her, but nor did it wield the same creepiness factor it had when the Finneys were still on the loose. Besides which, it was too important a part of Port Mesten’s mystique for Warren to miss out on because of her. “It’s a big place. I can avoid the areas I want to avoid, no problem,” she assured.

  “Are you sure?” he questioned. “The last thing I want to do is ruin your mood. But I have to admit, I’d like to at least get a glimpse of these mythical wetlands before we leave. I’ve heard so much about the boardwalk and the alligators and the herons and the quicksand…”

  Leigh started walking toward the road and pulled him with her. “The alligators are only at the other entrance. I think. But you’ll love the herons. They are seriously cool looking. And yet they seem rather sinister, somehow…”

  She fought back against the pang of trepidation that taunted her as they crossed the road and entered the nature preserve. It was a beautiful morning, and the parking lot was nearly full. The trails and boardwalk were humming with visitors, and the mood was lively, but respectful. Leigh’s cynical side wondered if half the crowd were gawkers who were only here because of the murders. On the flip side, however, the whole “serial-killer” thing had probably scared some people away, so maybe the crowd was average for a Saturday. A good percentage of the people were older adults, as usual, and many had binoculars and cameras with zoom lenses, identifying them as legitimate nature lovers. Leigh and Warren merged with the crowd, and she began to feel more comfortable. She was perfectly safe here, and not needing her disguise anymore was heavenly. How she loved letting her unfettered hair fly in the breeze! If she was lucky, she might even return to Pittsburgh with her face tanned.

  They walked through the pavilion and along one of the far trails, and Leigh amused herself by pretending to identify birds (with ridiculous names she made up on the spot) until Warren caught her out by finding an educational sign with pictures on it. They circled back to the main boardwalk, and Leigh accompanied him partway down. But when they reached the first resting platform, well short of the location where Stanley had died, she seated herself on a bench. “You go on to the observation tower,” she instructed, pointing ahead. “I’ll wait here. My feet can use the rest.”

  Warren studied her critically. “Are you sure?”

  Leigh smiled. He loved observation towers. “Go,” she repeated.

  He went.

  Leigh’s feet were enjoying the rest very much. But Warren hadn’t been gone thirty seconds when an elderly couple approached the platform moving at a snail’s pace, assisted by one younger woman and two metal walkers. “There’s a bench just ahead,” the younger woman said to them encouragingly.

  Leigh got back up. She walked to the edge of the platform and leaned her elbows over the railing. Footprints. She didn’t want to look for them. But of course, she couldn’t help it.

  Her eyes scanned the sandy plains with their tufts of grass, pools of shallow water, and maze of streams. Wherever there wasn’t high ground, water, or grass, the earth was topped with a smooth flat of muddy sand. She could make out no footprints from where she stood. But she knew they must be out there. No one could walk on the flats without leaving some trace. Not even a bird.

  She could go a little closer and look.

  But she shouldn’t.

  Why did she even care?

  Because something was still wrong, that’s why.

  No! Leigh forced herself to look in the opposite direction, out over the remainder of the preserve. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a spot of pink along a distant pond that could be a roseate spoonbill. Gulls and pelicans soared and swooped overhead, along with some kind of hawk. Herons stalked among the grasses, and coots squabbled with each other as they glided about in the reeds. Schools of tiny fish laid claim to wide, shimmering swaths of shallow water that to them must seem vast as the ocean. An amazing abundance of wildlife called this marshland home. And when word got out that millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds had been lost somewhere within it, it would never be the same again.

  Leigh exhaled with a sigh. The birders would try everything they could. But she doubted it would make any difference. The preserve already forbade visitors from leaving the trails. It could close entirely, even attempt some sort of fence, but people would breach it. The only way to keep out the fortune hunters would be to staff the entire place with paid, muscled security 24/7, and who could possibly foot the bill for that? Indefinitely?

  There was no hope.

  She lowered her eyes. A little brown spotted bird with long legs, one of those sandpiper/plover/yellowlegs things that the birders were always arguing about, was strutting around near the base of the platform looking for insects at the water’s edge. She watched as it darted after a bug, having to dodge around a discarded juice box to reach it.

  Leigh frowned. As soon as the bird had moved away, she stepped carefully around the edge of the railing and off the boardwalk. She walked the few steps over the ground, retrieved the crumpled juice box, and returned to drop it in the trashcan that was conveniently available right there on the platform. People! She returned to her place and looked out again. But now, all she could see in front of her were her own footprints in the mud.

  She was bothered again.

  Why?

  She didn’t know. It was only that her tracks were so incredibly obvious… The birders could not have been mistaken about the footprints they had seen the last two nights. Two nights. What had happened last night, anyway? If all the Finneys were arrested elsewhere, the one who was here searching must either have found the diamonds or given up and gone home sometime before dawn. If the police had recovered the diamonds during the arrests, they would almost certainly have said so. The fact that they didn’t meant that the murderer either found the loot and immediately got rid o
f it again or never found it at all. And if even the person who dropped the diamonds had given up searching for them… those diamonds were never going to be found. Not unless the water was drained and every cup of sandy mud here was poured through a flour sifter. In the meantime, the whole preserve would be overrun with greedy, noisy, disrespectful, trash-dumping, nature-wrecking fortune hunt—

  Leigh stopped in mid-thought as an image popped into her head. It was an image of something she had seen — seen and dismissed as unimportant. It could still be unimportant.

  Or it could be the answer to everything.

  She started walking toward the observation tower. Then she began to jog. It was an incredible long shot, and she was probably crazy. But what could it hurt? The worst that could happen was that someone would yell at her. And most likely she would ruin her shoes.

  It was worth it.

  For the birds, of course.

  She had to slow down for two groups of people who were walking abreast and blocking the whole boardwalk, but otherwise she kept up a brisk pace. By the time she reached the spot where she had first encountered Barb on the path and Walter stuck out in the muck, she was breathing heavily and sweating again. She stopped and looked out. The tracks left by her and Walter and all the police officers were gone now, washed away by Thursday night’s rain. But she did see one new set of tracks in the distance. Boot tracks, and big ones, just as Sandy and Raymond had reported. And wait — there was another set over that way. And over there…

  Leigh turned and jogged to the spot where she had left the boardwalk to go fetch Walter. She looked at the line of tall marsh grass facing her and smiled. The trail she had beaten through the brush was still identifiable. She doubted the same was true of the paths she and Walter had followed when they discovered Stanley’s body, since a whole crime scene team had examined that area. But this place hadn’t been a part of that process.

  A couple with children approached, and Leigh pretended to be tying her shoe. As soon as they had passed by, she looked up and down the visible length of the boardwalk. There were several other visitors within sight, but none appeared to be paying any attention to her. Even the people visible up on the observation tower were looking the other way.

  She darted into the grass and moved swiftly out of view. The brush was tall enough here to swallow her up entirely, so she doubted her misdemeanor would get her into trouble. It was possible that someone up on the tower could see the grass moving, but once she got where she was going, she was pretty sure that risk would be eliminated. The area where Stanley died was difficult to see from the tower; the view was blocked by a line of scrubby trees and bushes in addition to the tall grass. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that same natural screen would hide her destination as well. But if it didn’t… Well, let somebody yell at her. She was doing this for a good cause.

  She continued to follow her previous trail until the grass thinned out and she neared the water’s edge. Straight ahead she could see the line of grass that had tricked her into thinking she could take a shortcut to Walter. Instead, she had plunged ankle deep into the water. This time she didn’t step out into the open, but stayed hidden in the brush. Then she began moving in a parallel track to where she had sloshed along in the water before. She looked up toward the tower and was pleased to see nothing but grass tips and distant branches. Perfect. She could conduct her analysis in private.

  A crackling sound somewhere to her right made her stop a moment. She stood still and listened, but heard nothing else. She chastised herself for panicking and started moving again. Of course there were other creatures around and about! Any bird could make such a sound. There were no alligators, at least. They liked deeper water.

  Relax, Koslow.

  She refocused on her mission. Where had she jumped back out of the water before? She studied the mud on the bank.

  Boot tracks.

  Her heart began to pound. So, the murderer had been here, too.

  A shiver began to rock her shoulders, but she stilled them with determination. It was at least seventy-five degrees out here, the sun was shining, and she was hot. Besides which, all the murderers were in jail now. It was over.

  But…

  Shut up!

  She looked further along the water line. Where was her scraping? When she had jumped back up on this bank before, she’d made a huge gouge with her right foot. Would the rain have completely filled it in?

  Probably.

  She turned and doubled back. She was approaching this wrong. She needed to look at the bank from the opposite direction, the direction she had seen it from last time. She said a fond farewell to her eighteen-dollar discount sneakers and splashed out into the water. As the cool liquid soaked its way through to her toes, she turned around and tried to remember exactly how everything had unfolded two days earlier.

  She had been moving along the bank, looking at the clumps of grass. She had wanted to find something halfway solid-looking to step on. Something that would hold her weight for a second, at least. And then she had seen something right over…

  She stopped. A grin spread over her face. It had been right here.

  A piece of trash.

  She’d seen the bit of wet cloth lying half submerged at the base of the tangled clump of grass. She hadn’t looked at it closely. Why would she? It could have been anything. A piece of a reusable shopping bag. A baby’s sock. A torn shred of landscaping fabric.

  She would never know unless she found it again. But that was a big “if.” Because whatever she had seen here before, it was no longer visible.

  “But this is where it was,” she whispered to herself. “I’m sure of it.” She didn’t know why she was sure. The clump of grass in question didn’t look like it used to. The weight of her body had almost completely smooshed it down into the mud. But some of the blades were still sticking up, and if she used her imagination, she could almost see a shallow dent in the bank where her other foot had landed and dug a trench.

  She squatted down, careful to keep her butt out of the water. “No other way to know!” she whispered encouragingly to herself as she stretched out a hand. Her fingers traced the grass blades down to their source and hit slimy mud, sending a cloud of brown up into the water. She could see nothing now; she would just have to feel. She pushed her fingers blindly into the sandy silt and wiggled, trying not to think about pinching crayfish and sucking leaches. In a matter of seconds, she felt something solid. It was fabric.

  Her fingers closed around the material. She jerked it up with a rush of excitement and instantly lost her balance. Her prize came up out of the water just as her rear end went down in it, and as oozing cold seeped rapidly through her underwear, she pretended to herself that she had intended to sit down all along.

  Hey… it worked for Mao Tse.

  Leigh remained sitting in the mud as she stared at the dripping material in her fingers. It was navy blue. It was made of an unassuming canvas-like material. But it was more than just a scrap. Now that she could see the whole thing, she could tell that it was a small change purse. She shifted her fingers to feel of its middle, and her heart skipped.

  There was something hard and gritty inside.

  Many, many small somethings.

  The diamonds!

  A distinctive click sounded from somewhere behind her right ear. It was followed by a calm, low voice she’d never heard before.

  “Hand that to me. Or my next bullet goes straight through your brain.”

  Chapter 25

  Leigh didn’t move. Birds overhead were still squawking. She could hear children shouting and squealing, people chatting. The sunshine was warm and the water around her butt and ankles was cold. The rest of this scene could not possibly be real.

  “Excuse me?” she said lamely, not moving.

  “You heard me,” the deep voice growled. In her peripheral vision she could see a massive, beefy hand stretching out, palm open. “Hand it over. Now. You make noise, I shoot.”

  Mo
re happy, chatting voices. The people on the boardwalk were so ridiculously close by — yet none of them could see her. Leigh swallowed hard and tried to think.

  Who the hell was this? Did it even matter?

  No. All that mattered was getting through the next few seconds alive. And as scared as Leigh was, she knew better than to think that following his directions, however simply they were put, was necessarily her wisest course of action. What did he want? He wanted the diamonds, obviously. Once he had them, he would want to get out of here without being followed. Both could be accomplished far more easily if Leigh ceased to breathe. What were three bodies as opposed to two? Or was it four as opposed to three?

  He could wrest the purse from her at any moment; he could shoot her dead and take it at any moment. But so far he had opted for neither, and she thought she understood why. Noise. There were people all around them. To engage her in any kind of struggle risked her screaming, and if he shot her, everyone would hear. Either way, 911 got called. His best chance to get the diamonds and get away unseen would be to threaten her into cooperating. Then he could gag her and strangle her quietly.

  Pass.

  Leigh tried very hard to concentrate. She really didn’t think he would shoot the gun. Dozens of witnesses would see him running away, the police would be called within seconds, and they were on a friggin’ island. There was only one road out southbound and a ferry to the north, so unless he had a boat he’d have to swim his way out of town. Of course, if the rest of him was as big as his hand, he wouldn’t need to fire the gun to shut her up, either temporarily or permanently. But that was a chance she’d have to take, because as far as she could figure, one chance was all she had.

  She was in a terribly awkward position, sitting in the mud with her face turned away from him. But the pose did offer her one advantage: if he couldn’t see her expression, he couldn’t anticipate her actions.

  Leigh looked at the hand that was stretched out to her left side and began, very slowly, to feint as if she was passing over the purse that was in her right hand. Then, with a flash of wiggling movement she prayed was difficult to follow, she pitched her body forward and to the left while revving up her right arm and throwing the purse as high and as hard as she could in the opposite direction.