The Killdeer Connection

by Tom Swyers

  David didn’t know what to say. The man acknowledged the oil spill but seemed much more upset about the loss of the bridge. “Whereabouts is this bridge located?”

  “It runs between Spokane, Washington, and Sandpoint, Idaho, but it’s really more a part of Sandpoint. Starts from its shoreline there.”

  David nodded slowly, but his mind was racing. “Say, is the Valley City police station close by?”

  The man in the John Deere hat pointed as he said, “Yup, it’s one block over. A half block up from the intersection of Second and Second.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, wondering how a street could intersect with itself. He looked at the man in the John Deere hat whose faint smile seemed to invite that question. But David was in no mood to play games. The other man had said something that rattled him, got him thinking. “You fellows have a good day,” he said, retreating to his table.

  He pitched his paper plate and napkins into a nearby waste bin, grabbed his coffee, and headed out the door. Leaving the shop, he was sure of his recollection. Julius Moore had said that Sandpoint, Idaho, was where Killdeer Society member Ronald Carson was strangled with fishing wire.

  TWENTY-ONE

  With the wind at his back and his briefcase in hand, David walked the single block from the coffee shop to the Valley City police headquarters. The cop shop was located near the intersection of Second Street NE and Second Avenue NE, a subtle difference in street names. There were a few cars moving by, but David had the double-wide sidewalk all to himself. He finished his coffee and threw the cup into an empty waste can. The pawn shop, consignment store, and Wells Fargo hadn’t opened yet.

  Police headquarters was a brick, one-story shoebox that butted up against a beauty salon across the street from the Salvation Army thrift shop. When David entered, Police Chief Frank Barber was perched on the reception desk in the front hallway, sipping his own coffee from a Styrofoam cup. David recognized him from his picture on the Valley City police website. All ten officers, including the sergeant and the chief, had posed for the website in their navy-blue uniforms with navy-blue ties against a multihued blue backdrop, like the cloud pattern used in high-school yearbooks. The police force was like a pickup basketball team—young white men, all with less than ten years on the force, most with less than five, according to their biographies. Barber had less than two years on the force but was in his forties. According to his write-up, he was an import from Beulah, North Dakota, a city half the population of Valley City’s sixty-seven hundred but still claiming to have “big-city looks” on its website.

  “David Thompson?” he asked, extending his free hand.

  “Yes, you must be Chief Barber.” David said, reaching to shake his hand while wondering for a second how Barber knew who he was. Then it occurred to him that visitors were rare there during the early morning hours of a workday.

  “Nice to meet you,” Barber said as they shook hands, his rough-skinned paw engulfing David’s. His fingers were long and wide, like rhubarb stalks. “Let’s go to my office.” He slid off the desk and pointed down the hallway. “I’m in the end room there.”

  They walked side by side down a hallway as wide as the sidewalks outside. David glanced at Barber’s Valley City police shoulder patch. It featured a depiction of the High Line Bridge, much like the one he had seen at the high school. Barber was six feet tall, with a medium build that boasted an extra layer of fat to get him through winter. He had salt-and-pepper hair trimmed above his ears with straight bangs covering half of his forehead. He had missed a dab of shaving cream that morning; it was drying on his ear. His dark face suggested that a five o’clock shadow would arrive by midafternoon.

  “So, is this the first time you’ve visited North Dakota?” Barber asked, like he didn’t know the answer.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How’s our weather treating you?”

  “It’s a bit colder than I expected.”

  Barber laughed with a wheeze, like a car in the freezing cold that couldn’t turn over. “They say our four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Winter’s Coming.”

  David chuckled in spite of himself. “Funny.”

  They entered the chief’s office together. There was a big desk flanked by a small American flag on one side and the flag of North Dakota on the other. It was mahogany-colored, like the wall paneling. Those panels held framed pictures of Valley City police cruisers, both old and new. Two upholstered chairs hunkered down in front of the desk. Barber gestured toward one as he sat down in his brown-leather high-back swivel. David sat but didn’t take his coat off.

  The men looked at each other for a second, trying to decide who should say something first. David won the standoff.

  “Thanks for coming here,” Barber said. “I hope you can give us some leads in the Safferson case. We don’t get many homicides here. You know why they say it takes us so long to solve a homicide in North Dakota?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s because we don’t keep dental records, and we all share the same DNA.” Barber started laughing. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “Yes,” David said, smiling.

  “But it’s funny, too. Anyway, this is the first homicide we’ve had since Billy Williams left to take a security job with an oil company.”

  “Who’s Billy Williams, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Oh, sorry, he’s the former police chief here.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “What do you know about Sheila Safferson?”

  “Not much more than I’ve read about her online in the news. She was divorced, in her fifties, with two grown children. She was a passionate environmentalist, in addition to being a biology professor.”

  “Passionate environmentalist? That’s a rather nice way of putting it. She was a leader of the ‘keep it in the ground’ movement when it came to fossil fuels.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That group just wants to break away from fossil fuels, period.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “So, what’s their view on stabilizing Bakken before it’s loaded on a train?”

  “You mean like removing the gases?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep it in the ground. That’s their answer to everything. Safferson was a character. She drove a Prius; she would have biked to work had she not lived in Castleton, forty minutes east of here. She dressed like an L.L. Bean catalog, only from twenty years ago. She was known for her gutter mouth at the regional Sierra Club meetings, saying on the open floor that they were ‘fucking winning’ against the fossil-fuel industry. The oil companies called her ‘the scarecrow,’ ’cause she scared them silly. I take it you didn’t know her personally?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I’m confused, then. Help me out. If you didn’t know her, how can you help us out with her homicide?”

  “There’s a common thread among a number of killings across the country—a connection, if you will. I’ve been told they were all members of the Killdeer Society.”

  “Who told you that?”

  David froze. He didn’t want to bring the FBI or, specifically, Julius Moore into the discussion. If Barber didn’t know about Moore’s investigation into him, he wanted to leave it that way. There was no way to tell how Barber would react to that revelation, and David didn’t want to test those waters if he could avoid it. “An investigator told me.”

  “It was Julius Moore, wasn’t it?”

  David heart raced. He considered lying, but if Barber knew Moore was investigating him, he’d be thrown out into the cold. He couldn’t take that chance. He didn’t have much to go on. He went with the truth as the best option.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I thought so. Well, that’s a link for sure, but he can’t make any sense out of it. The members won’t talk to him. It’s a secret society or something. They don’t trust the feds, for whatever reason. They see them as part of the foss
il-fuel industry. Are you involved with the Killdeer Society?”

  David didn’t want to explain to Barber that Harold Salar had unknowingly drafted him in the society and risk losing Barber’s cooperation. “I’m the executor for the estate of Harold Salar, one of the victims in upstate New York. I’m just trying to make sense out of his personal affairs.”

  “Oh, so that’s your connection.”

  “Right. Anyway, I brought some spreadsheet printouts with me that detail killdeer sightings somewhere in Valley City, perhaps Chautauqua Park. I suspect Dr. Safferson compiled the data. Let me show them to you.”

  Barber sighed. “All right, but what’s the point?” He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a pair of black, square-framed reading glasses from a case.

  David popped open his briefcase, pulled out the spreadsheets, and handed them to Barber. The weekly killdeer sightings for Valley City since 2008 had been recorded neatly and broken down into three columns: males, females, and newborns.

  “I’m a birder, you know,” Barber said while slipping his glasses into place. “Member of the North Dakota Birding Society, and there are over three hundred fifty birds on our checklist. There’s so much bird traffic around here that cats spend all day in the windows, eyes wide open. So, what’s with the killdeer? It’s a common bird, you know. No big deal.”

  “So I’ve heard,” David said, looking at Barber thumb through the spreadsheets. He would have put Barber at a NASCAR event rather than placing him at a bird-watching event.

  Barber raised his eyebrows, and the furrows on his forehead multiplied. He flipped through the spreadsheet pages, stopping every so often to read entries. He reached over the desk to hand the papers back to David.

  “That’s a copy for you to keep,” David said.

  “Oh, okay,” Barber said, placing the papers on his desk, “but this data doesn’t make any sense.”

  David took his copy out and set it on top of his briefcase. “What do you mean? It seems pretty straightforward.”

  “Well, yeah, it’s easy to understand, but it doesn’t make sense. You see, the killdeer is a migratory bird here in North Dakota. Only a few stupid ones stay here over the winter. I mean, if I had a choice to go south for the winter, I’d jump on it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “Well, the data in the spreadsheets shows that the killdeer population for Valley City is fairly constant through twelve months of the year, and the numbers seem high. Now, we either have a microclimate around here that’s favorable to the killdeer year-round, or we have a bunch of stupid birds.”

  David thought for a second. “Have the winters been mild here in recent years?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll tell you one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They say the birds have changed, especially in the oil patch, in the western part of the state. They say they’re acting weird. But the killdeer is adaptable. They don’t mind people messing with the land—they can always make a home someplace.”

  David sat there rubbing his chin, looking through the spreadsheet, trying to make sense of it all. Barber was right. The numbers were fairly constant year-round. There were just as many killdeers in November as there were in June.

  “Is that all you have for me?” Barber asked.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid so.”

  Barber scowled. “Did you give this data to Moore?”

  “No, not at this point. I’m not sure he’d be interested. He seems to be pursuing other theories in the Salar case.” David wasn’t going to tell Barber that Moore’s other theories involved him. “You know what? I’d like to go over to Chautauqua Park, look around, see if there’s anything that might give rise to a connection between the two deaths.”

  “Sure, go ahead. You know where it is?”

  “Yeah, I got my GPS. Where did they find her body?”

  “There’s a dirt road that circles around the park. Toward the back, you’ll see a dumpster and then a small pavilion with a few picnic tables. Go straight back through the trees to the edge of the park. There still might be a wooden stake in the ground where we marked the scene. It would have an orange ribbon tied to it.”

  “Okay, thank you,” David said, getting up to leave.

  Barber extended his hand across the desk, and David shook it. “Come on back when you’re done, and let’s talk some more.”

  “Sure.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  No sign or gate marked the entrance to Chautauqua Park. It simply began at the end of Twelfth Street NE, right where the pavement stopped and the dirt-road loop around the park started. The grass on the inner circle had turned brown, like the old hay bales along the interstate. David proceeded slowly, letting the Spark dip in and out of a shallow pothole. He saw a cluster of gray slabs, two perfect rows on the inner circle of the park. At first, David thought they were aboveground graves, but as the car labored out of yet another shallow pothole, he realized the concrete enclosed twenty individual courts for playing horseshoes. Lights for nighttime play loomed over the courts.

  David spotted the brown dumpster just around the bend. Beyond that, he could see a small picnic pavilion and, farther away, a clump of leafless trees about fifty feet tall. There were no designated parking spaces, so he pulled his Spark off into a wide spot in the dirt road by the dumpster.

  He got out of the car and pulled on his parka and gloves before grabbing a pair of binoculars and his camera out of the luggage. He was going to search for killdeers. The first place he was going to look was where Sheila Safferson had been attacked. It was a chilly school morning, and the park was deserted. Over the trees, the sun tried to burn through the fog that floated over the Sheyenne River as it twisted and turned southward through Valley City, carving Barnes County in half.

  David locked his car. His feet crunched on the frozen ground as he walked to the outer edge of the park, along the banks of the near-frozen Sheyenne. In a clearing beyond the trees, he spotted a three-foot-long freshly cut pine stake driven into the ground. David touched the drooping, orange-plastic ribbon atop the stake and ran it between his fingers, wondering about Sheila Safferson.

  He lifted his eyes to look 200 yards up the valley. That’s when he saw it. At first, David thought he was seeing things. But as the fog crawled over and around the massive structure, the skeleton of the High Line Bridge came into focus. Its black-steel trestles propped the bridge up 150 feet in the air. The bridge spanned the river and the entire valley for almost a mile.

  For a second, he thought he heard the grinding of steel rails on the bridge, as if a train were about to cross. He heard kill-dee, kill-dee, kill-deeeee in the distance, coming closer and closer. It wasn’t a train but a killdeer that had dropped down in front of him on the grass. The bird’s black-and-white-striped head jerked all around as amber eyes looked David over. The bird screeched at him every few seconds. David reached for his cell phone to snap a picture of it. He fumbled turning it on and opening the camera app. As the screen came up, he saw there were now two killdeers eying him. A few rays of sunlight hit the birds for a second, making their eyes appear bright orange. David snapped a picture of the pair.

  Toward the bridge, he heard a rumble that grew progressively louder and louder, along with the screeching of steel. Raising his binoculars, he scanned for the outline of a train on the bridge. But he saw nothing, even as the rumble sounded and felt nearer. He dropped the binoculars from his eyes. The killdeers had inched closer to him—a bit too close. David wondered if they were tame, maybe expecting some food handout. The rumble was almost on top of him now. The ground seemed to vibrate with it. Then, in a clearing through the fog and the marsh grass, he spotted his quarry about 200 yards across the river. Two bright-red Canadian Pacific diesel engines labored along a track, pulling a train under the High Line Bridge, heading south along the riverbank on the other side.

  Following the two engines they came, one by one, he could see their dark shadows silhoue
tted through the fog along the track. They stood out distinctly as the train moved through the clearing. He opened his 35mm camera with its telephoto lens and began snapping pictures of the DOT-111 cars, the same type of car that Ben Prior had been unloading when he’d gotten caught up in a flash fire. Each car carried a single huge, black cylinder with rounded, convex ends mounted on rail wheels. Each one carried 30,000 gallons of Bakken crude. Each one was moving the energy equivalent of two million sticks of dynamite.

  These types of trains traveled often under the cover of darkness through the poorer neighborhoods across the country. The tanks’ outer shells were less than a half-inch thick, originally designed for the transport of corn syrup or molasses in the 1960s but now carrying deadly explosive fuel. While investigating the Ben Prior tragedy, David had learned that there had been talk about replacing the DOT-111s with updated cars, something with thicker shells, but it was just hot air. A safer car was a heavier car, and a heavier car meant less Bakken because there’s only so much weight that a track could handle. Less oil per car meant less profit per car.

  Some of the black tank cars looked fairly new; some were rusted. Many of them boasted graffiti. But they all had one thing in common. They each carried a placard, a blood-red, square sign about one foot by one foot, mounted on the lower front of each car. The signs had one corner pointing down, making them appear like diamonds. Each placard carried a four-digit number in black set off against a white background within the red diamond. The number was the same on every car. He watched them roll by in the clearing, clickety-clack, squealing and squeaking every so often, wheels grinding against the rails, all of them labeled 1267. That hazmat placard identified the cargo as petroleum oil, in this case, Bakken crude.