The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

24


There are a few reports of the species killing live prey, but such reports are rare.

—The Turkey Vulture Society



February 14 has never been a big deal for me since the year Mason Faircloth gave Caroline Atherton a dollar valentine with a satin heart on it, while the one he stuck in my construction-paper mailbox came from a package of “25 for $2.50” with their one-size-fits-all sentiments. I was nine years old and my heart was broken.

Mother didn’t laugh at me when she found me in tears after school, but she did go through all the cards I’d gotten and made me stop and think about the handmade ones. “These are the ones that came from the heart,” she told me. “Not the Hallmark ones.”

As far as she was concerned, birthdays, weddings, funerals, and Christmas were the only legitimate occasions for sending cards, and then only to people who didn’t live under her roof. Even Mother’s Day was a commercial ploy to guilt people into spending money.

It’s made me cynical about the public display of roses and tulips that arrive at the courthouse on birthdays, anniversaries, and Valentine’s Day. I suspect that more than one woman orders them for herself so that everyone will think she has a romantic husband.

All the same, I admit that I bought a couple of chocolate éclairs sprinkled with red candy hearts for Dwight and Cal, and I was delighted with the valentine Cal made for us with “Dad and Mom” spelled out in red crayon on the front.

I was less delighted to hear that Dwight had accepted an invitation to Kate and Rob’s for supper with Sigrid and her mother, even though he sweetened the announcement with a new charm for my silver bracelet: the silhouette of a boy’s head, engraved with Cal’s initials and the date of his birth.

“Your idea or Kate’s?” I asked.

“The bracelet or supper?”

“Both.”

“Mine. Sorry.”

“Still baiting your hooks?”

“Can’t catch anything if you don’t have a line in the water,” he admitted. “And it won’t hurt to have another professional’s eye on the cork. Sigrid did say she wanted to see how we ran things down here.”

I immediately started calling around the farm for a babysitter and got lucky on my first try. My brother Zach’s daughter Emma agreed to come over, and her brother Lee said he wasn’t doing anything either, so if there was going to be free pizza…

In the end, it cost us two large pizzas, because Emma called back within the hour to say Seth’s daughter Jess and Andrew’s Ruth wanted to come, too. Wherever two or three of the kids are gathered, more of my nieces and nephews are sure to turn up. Evidently the tribal grapevine was working just fine, because I was able to tell Cal, “They said they’d be happy to stay with their new cousin.”



We were the first to get to Rob and Kate’s and she was apologetic. “Sorry, Dwight, but Martin Crawford begged off and I didn’t know how much you wanted me to push it.”

“That’s okay,” he told her.

Sigrid and Anne blew in about two minutes later, red-cheeked and hair tousled by the wind. We shed our heavy coats and soon sat down to an informal supper of Rob’s hearty beef stew with a few bottles of Dwight’s homemade ale, perfect for a cold winter’s night.

“I don’t normally like beer, but this is quite good,” Sigrid said, wiping the foam from her upper lip. She was as relaxed as we’d yet seen her, but the death watch was starting to wear on both of them.

“Grandmother doesn’t seem to be in too much pain. The doctor’s put her on an intravenous pump with a mixture of something that makes her sleep a lot.”

“My sisters are flying in the end of the week,” said Anne, who was further worried that something she had said or done might have led to the attack on Jeremy Harper. “I spoke to Mrs. Harper this afternoon. She says he tried to squeeze her hand and that his eyelids fluttered a little. I don’t know if it’s wishful thinking or he really is starting to come around.”

“Where’s your investigation going?” Sigrid asked with professional interest. “Any leads?”

“Not really,” Dwight said. “We found his Toyota over by the NutriGood store on Saturday morning. “Unfortunately, no one seems to know when it was parked there.”

“Could he have gone straight there after leaving us on Thursday, or do you think somebody else drove it there later?” Anne asked.

“No telling, but we’ve asked the media to run our hotline number in case anyone noticed. The steering wheel wasn’t wiped and it’s covered with his fingerprints.”

Anne sprinkled pepper on her stew and described some of the adventures she’d had over the years, adventures she’d told the Harper boy about. “I wanted to give him a sense of the opportunities out there if he was persistent and determined. Now I’m wondering if I gave him an unrealistic view of how willing some people are to answer awkward questions.”

Sigrid took another swallow of beer. “I know Martin found him near where that real estate woman was dumped, but is there any real connection?”

“Not that we’ve found, and believe me, we’ve looked.”

“What about your cousin?” I asked.

Anne made a rueful face. “I’m afraid he was no help at all. He showed us some pictures and talked about tracking vultures, and Jeremy found it about as exciting as watching paint dry. To be fair, though, he’s on a tight deadline and his editor’s bugging him to finish the article.”

She broke off a piece of her crusty whole wheat roll and buttered it. “He wants to get it finished before he flies back to England.”

“He’s leaving?” Sigrid asked, looking a little surprised.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Dwight said, including Sigrid in his question, “how much do y’all know about him?”

“What do you mean?” Anne asked.

“Well, the other night, you said you hadn’t seen him since y’all were kids, and it was almost like Sigrid never even knew he existed. You sure he’s who he says he is?”

Anne frowned. “Well of course, he is,” she said. “Who else would he be?”

“Just askin’,” Dwight drawled.

“I may not have been in touch with him, but Mother certainly was. Not with Martin himself, perhaps, but she and his stepmother exchange Christmas cards and pictures every year. Of course it’s Martin.”

Sigrid had been watching Dwight’s face, and now she leaned forward to say, “Something about him bothers you, Dwight?”

He nodded, then looked around the table. “What I say stays here, okay? A man died out at the Clarenden Motel Thursday night. They’re calling it an accident, so the news media haven’t paid much attention to it, but I’m thinking it looks more like murder.”

Anne was bewildered. “What does that have to do with Martin?”

“Maybe nothing, but he’s been seen loitering in the area of the airstrip and the dead man was a pilot. Not that they’re admitting it.”

Sigrid’s gray eyes sharpened with interest. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“The FBI. A field agent showed up about a half hour after we did and claimed jurisdiction. I reached out to some of my old Intelligence buddies and they say he does some of those rendition flights between Guantanamo Bay and Maine that they try to pretend don’t happen. I checked the weather reports and Maine was iced in Thursday night, so he had to stay over. The maid found him in the tub with the shower on next morning. It was supposed to look as if he slipped and broke his neck in the fall, but our ME thinks he was murdered.”

Rob and Kate had been following the conversation as if watching a tennis match between the two of them.

“Someone snapped his neck?” Sigrid asked. “How could they call it an accident? Doesn’t that leave bruises?”

“Not necessarily,” Dwight said. “Not if it happens too fast for the blood vessels to react.”

Rob looked at Dwight in something between morbid fascination and awe. “You could do that?”

“In theory, yes,” Dwight admitted. “If you’re asking if I ever did, the answer’s no.”

“It isn’t just theory,” Anne said quietly. “I saw it done.”

We all stared at her.

“In Somalia,” she said. “Almost twenty years ago.”

We listened, fascinated as she told us about going into Mogadishu with some UN peacekeepers on a humanitarian trip. “Conditions were horrendous, but it was supposed to be safe as long as we were careful. That’s where I took the picture that won me my second Pulitzer.”

She described how she had gone to one of the outlying camps with a couple of truckloads of food and medical supplies and how they were ambushed and everyone killed except a fellow journalist.

“I was sure they were going to kill us, too, especially when two rough-looking Arabs came into the hut. Instead, one of them distracted our guard and then the other one came up behind him and broke his neck.”

With a few graceful motions, she pantomimed reaching up under the guard’s arm, then locking her hands on the back of his neck to force his head forward and down in a strong sharp yank. “I’ll never forget the sound the bones in his neck made when they cracked. He was dead before he hit the ground.”

She took a deep breath as if to dispel the memory. “They sneaked us out in burkas and got us back to the city. The man that killed the guard even saved one of my cameras. The one with the Pulitzer picture. He— Oh sweet Jesus!”

All the blood drained from her face as she broke off and looked at Sigrid in shock.

“What?” Sigrid asked in alarm.

“Martin,” Anne whispered. “That Arab was Martin.”

She gripped the edge of the table with both hands as if to steady herself. I pushed her water glass closer while the others pelted her with exclamations and questions.

She swallowed some water and we watched the color slowly return to her lovely face.

“Are you sure, Mother?” Sigrid asked.

“Remember when he came to dinner last week and I asked him if we’d met before? How he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him? And when we saw him the next day, he’d shaved off his beard. I remember noticing that Arab’s eyes. Martin’s eyes. I’m positive it was him.”

“But why wouldn’t he have told you who he was?” Kate asked.

“If he was in deep cover, it could’ve compromised his mission,” Dwight said. “Sounds to me like he took a serious risk to rescue you.”

“Deep cover?” Sigrid frowned. “He’s a spy? CIA?”

“I’m thinking more like MI6. The real MI6, not James Bond.”

“But he’s an ornithologist,” I protested. “He writes books, leads bird tours.”

“Perfect cover,” Dwight said. “Professional spies often have degrees in specialized fields—something that gives them a legitimate reason to be in a foreign country. Stinking buzzards make as good a reason as anything else.”

There was shocked silence as his words sank in, then Sigrid said, “Dwight, there’s something I didn’t tell you when you asked Martin if he’d been the one to call in the body of that dead woman.”

She seemed slightly embarrassed. “I’m a police officer. I know better, but it really didn’t seem important at the time.”

“What didn’t?” Dwight asked.

“You asked to see his phones and he showed you two of them. But he had at least a half dozen more in a satchel in his bedroom.”

She described how Crawford had diverted their attention with the old newspapers plastered on the wall while he covered up the phones.

“I was pretty sure he’d reported the body, but I honestly thought he denied it because he just didn’t want to get involved in a homicide investigation.”

Anne appeared bewildered. “I never even noticed.”

“You also didn’t notice that you told him the dates you were in Peru so that he could claim that’s when he was there, too,” Sigrid said.

Anne leaned back in her chair and looked at Dwight with troubled eyes. “Did Martin kill that pilot? Why? And why hurt Jeremy?”

“Whoa, now,” Dwight said. “Let’s don’t go jumping to conclusions here. Just because you think he might have killed a guard twenty years ago doesn’t mean that he’s the one who did that pilot yesterday. And don’t forget that Crawford’s the one who found the Harper kid and reported it in time to save his life.”

(“That’s right!” said the preacher, who likes to think the best of people.)

(“Unless,” said the cynical pragmatist, who often thinks the worst, “he felt that the boy might never regain consciousness and that calling for medical help would automatically shift suspicion away from him.”)

Anne still seemed shaken by her memories. “I don’t think Martin killed that guard, Dwight. I know he did. But in all these years, he’s never gotten in touch. Never let me know. Never let me thank him. Why?”

“If he’s still working in covert ops, it would be too dangerous,” Dwight said.

“Working here?” Anne frowned.

“We won’t know till we ask him, and even then? Who knows?”

“He might really be working on a legitimate article,” I said helpfully. “Don’t spies have to keep their cover stories current?”

“It’s all so hard to reconcile,” Anne said.

“Let’s forget about him for a moment and go back to your time with Jeremy,” Dwight said.

“I told you.” Anne gave an impatient shake of her head as if to clear away confused memories and emotions. “Your mom showed me some of his work and made such a strong case for him that I couldn’t say no. Besides, I’m not all that good in a sickroom and I was driving Mother crazy. I thought it would give me something to do. My first meeting with him was immediately after Deborah turned him over to Richard Williams and me. We found an empty conference room there in the courthouse and talked about that disabled veterans’ group that Richard works with. He seemed willing enough to give Richard’s suggestions a try, and he was supposed to meet with them after school, but when Sigrid and I drove out to Martin’s so I could ask him to help—that must have been right when the body of that real estate agent was found—Jeremy was there with his camera, trying to get a closer look.”

She broke off another piece of her roll, then laid it back on her plate. “I sent him on his way and Richard did say he showed up at the vet center. A little late, but there, so he didn’t come back and sneak in. At least not then.”

She pulled off another bit of the hard roll and it crumbled in her fingers. She didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe he went back the next day after we met with Martin? That close, wouldn’t he have driven down that other lane and checked it out?”

“Maybe,” Dwight said. He opened a second quart bottle of beer and topped off our glasses. “Tell me about his visit with Crawford.”

“There’s really not much to tell. Martin was wearing some clothes that those buzzards had vomited on when he was banding it. Talk about gross! Then he was deliberately boring because he really didn’t want to help with Jeremy. I told you. He just showed us picture after picture of vultures. Vultures flying, vultures feeding, vultures roosting in treetops.”

“How did Jeremy react?”

“Polite, but by about the sixtieth or seventieth picture, he had run out of things to ask about focus or lenses. Martin could have told so many interesting things—organizing tour groups, the contacts he needed to make, lining up hotels and mountain guides, but no, it was one damn bird after another. We were both ready to pack it in and I was so furious with Martin that we went out on the porch and I jumped all over him. That’s when he admitted he really didn’t want to help but he couldn’t refuse when he was using Mother’s hospitality to write his article.”

Her slender fingers absentmindedly shredded another corner of her roll.

“And nothing was said or happened that might link to Rebecca Jowett’s death or to the airfield?”

“No.” She frowned. “Oh, wait! You know when you’re clicking through photo files, how those little thumbnails of different files will run along the top of the screen?”

Dwight nodded encouragingly.

“One of them showed a small jet. Jeremy spotted it and asked about it, but when Martin tried to go back to it, he couldn’t find the file. Which seemed rather odd to me then. Makes perfect sense now. He told Jeremy it was one of those puddle jumpers that fly between small cities and immediately changed the subject. That’s when I made him go outside with me so I could find out what was going on.”

“How long were you out there?” Sigrid asked.

“I don’t know. Five minutes? Six?” She wrinkled her nose. “His clothes stank so badly, I wasn’t in any hurry to go back in and sit down next to him, I can tell you that.”

We smiled and Dwight said, “So y’all left Jeremy alone with Crawford’s computer?”

“Plenty of time for a tech-savvy kid to find that file,” I said. “If he had a jump drive—”

“Two or three of them,” Anne said. “He doesn’t have a laptop or an iPad, so he uses those memory sticks to move data from his PC at home to the school’s computer.”

We kicked it around some more, wondering what the picture of a plane might mean. Anne had seen it only for a moment or two before Martin made it disappear, but from her sketchy description of the number of windows, Dwight said, “Probably a six-passenger Learjet. The kind of plane our man with the broken neck flew.”