Free Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron Page A

next case when something only peripherally seen abruptly jarred a nerve. I peered at the swinging doors. Too late. The
Rainmaker
crew were gone. Now why should their departure suddenly conjure up kaleidoscopic images of New York?
    “Line twenty-seven on the add-on calendar, Your Honor. Taking migratory birds without a valid permit,” said Hollis Whitbread, and reluctantly I pushed down memories of pastrami sandwiches four inches thick. Cappuccino on the Upper West Side. Columbia’s gray stone buildings...
    What—?
    “The State calls—,” Hollis Whitbread droned, and I dragged my thoughts back five hundred miles to this Carteret County courtroom.
•      •      •
    During the lunch recess (limited to forty-five minutes to make up for yesterday), I walked out the back door of the courthouse and down a rough plank walkway to the sheriff’s office, trying to avoid the mud and construction rubble. The taxpayers of Carteret County weren’t building their new jail house a minute too soon if this poorly lighted warren of tiny cramped offices reflected the condition of the old cells.
    “The sheriff’s at lunch,” said the gray-haired uniformed officer on desk duty when I explained why I’d come. “Want me to see if Detective Smith’s in?”
    I nodded and she punched a button on her outdated phone console. “Hey, sweetie, Quig still there? Judge Knott’s here to sign her statement. ‘Bout finding Andy Bynum? Okey-dokey.”
    She smiled up at me. “You can go on across.”
    “Across?”
    Turning to follow her pointing finger, I looked through the glass of the outer door and saw a house trailer parked at the edge of the muddy yard. The aluminum door opened and Detective Quig Smith gave me a big come-on-over wave.
    Smith was about four inches taller than my five six. Mid-fifties. If he had any gray in that thatch of hair, it was disguised by sun-bleached blond. His eyes were a deep blue, the shade of weathered Levis. And he seemed to be one of the more talkative Down Easters, greeting me like an old friend after our one meeting out in the sound over Andy Bynum’s body.
    I was ushered into the modular cubicle that functioned as his temporary office till they could move into new quarters, “Though Lord knows if it’ll happen before I retire.”
    I politely murmured that he didn’t look old enough to retire, and in truth he didn’t.
    “Thirty years the fifth of November and then I’m outta here,” he said cheerfully as he riffled through files looking for my statement. “Gonna become the biggest, meanest, peskiest mosquito the state of North Carolina ever had whining around their ears.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yep. Gonna be another full-time watchdog for the Clean Water Act. I’ve already loaded my computer with the name and address of every elected official in this voting district, everybody on relevant congressional committees, and every newspaper in the state with a circulation over five thousand.”
    He lifted a stack of marine conservation magazines from his desk and added them to a heap growing on the floor beside his file cabinet.
    “Every time we find a violation of federal rules, they’re gonna get a letter giving time, date, location, and nature of the violation. Gonna keep score of how they respond, too. Got a nephew taking computer courses over at Carteret Community College and he’s writing me up my own special program. Now where did I put—”
    It looked to be a lengthy search. From the only half-empty chair available, I removed a printout labeled North Carolina Fishery Products and sat down.
    “Guess you’re for regulating the fishing industry, too, then,” I said, wondering how he ever managed to find anything in this overflowing wastebasket that masqueraded as an office.
    “Not particularly.” He opened a folder, frowned at its contents, and stuck it back in the heap. “Fishermen are a lot more realistic about managing resources than landsmen and what they take out of the sound