Free The Boreal Owl Murder by Jan Dunlap Page A

abandonment, along with the hairpiece. He was also rolling in dough thanks to his former medical practice and a slew of lucrative private investments. When MOU finances had run especially low at the end of last year, he’d picked up the slack out of his own generous pockets.
    “Just by a week or two,” he assured me. “Myrna was missing the grandkids pretty badly, and I needed to check on some business, so here we are.”
    “We were talking about Andrew Rahr,” Jim told Dr. Phil. “Do you remember when he had that grad student working with him?”
    “Sure do,” Dr. Phil said. “I offered to help fund another year for that assistant, but Andrew said no way. He thought the kid was undisciplined. Had a problem with authority. Like he didn’t want to put in the hard tedious work of the actual research, but just wanted to get to the finished product instead. No guts, all glory. I think Andrew was afraid the kid would jeopardize the study.”
    Dr. Phil’s face suddenly blanched under his tan. “Oh, my gosh,” he said. “You don’t think that kid was involved in Andrew’s death, do you?”
    I wondered why Dr. Phil made the same connection I’d considered. “Why do you say that?” I asked.
    “Because,” Dr. Phil said, “when Andrew turned down my offer for funding the kid to come back, I remember what he said because he was so vehement about it.”
    “What did he say?”
    Dr. Phil looked at me, then at Jim and back again at me.
    “He said, ‘Over my dead body.’”
    None of us said anything for a moment or two.
    “That was four years ago,” Jim reminded us.
    He was right. Four years was a long time.
    Then again, I’d been chasing the Boreal for almost twenty.
    Maybe four years wasn’t so long, after all.
    “Do you remember the grad student’s name?” I asked.
    Dr. Phil shook his head. I looked at Jim. He shook his head, too.
    “Jim! Phil! Bob!”
    Bill Washburn walked into the room accompanied by Anna Grieg. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
    Everyone shook hands. After a minute or two of weather talk, we all took seats at one end of the long conference table. Bill works for a utilities company, and Anna is a police officer out in one of the suburbs on the east side of St. Paul. Like me, they were relatively new to the MOU board. I guessed Bill was in his late fifties and Anna about ten years younger.
    When I first started birding as a kid, most of the birders I met were between fifty and seventy years old. I was the odd duck who wasn’t even in his teens. Back then, birdwatching had the reputation of being a hobby mostly for senior citizens.
    In the last few decades, however, that image has really been changing as more and more people have become interested in outdoor activities, environmental issues, and observing wildlife.
    These days, birders come in all ages, shapes, and sizes. The increase in birdwatchers has, in turn, fueled all kinds of related businesses, including the bird stores springing up all over the place now, special interest magazines, birding equipment catalog sales, novelty underwear, you name it. (All right, I confess—the only bird-themed underwear I’ve seen was on the sale rack at a local discounter. They were boxers, and the birds were flamingos. Glow-in-the-dark flamingos. I wonder if that would qualify for that one birder’s list of birds that woman saw while having … never mind. Where was I? Oh, yeah … the growth of a fabulous hobby.) As a result, birdwatching has gone mainstream—it isn’t just retirees hitting the birdseed anymore. In fact, it’s been the fastest growing outdoor activity in America for the last ten years.
    And, until I found Dr. Rahr’s body last weekend, I thought it was probably the safest outdoor activity.
    Now, I wasn’t so sure.
    Dr. Phil got the meeting underway. We ran through the minutes from the last meeting, approved them and moved on to tonight’s agenda. Anna presented suggestions for alternate ways to collect members’ dues,