The guy in the video usually turned away from the bartender and the other patrons when he lifted his glass. He tipped his head down as he brought the drink up. What Cork realized was that the glass never touched his lips. It was a move done well and, in the moment, would have been hard to catch. Unless you scrutinized the tape, as Cork was doing now, you might easily miss the fact that the man at the bar wasn’t drinking at all. The booze was going somewhere, but not down his throat.
“Liz, it’s Cork O’Connor. I’d like to drop by tomorrow and talk to you and Ms. Bodine, if it’s convenient.”
“Of course. What time?”
“Mass here is over at ten thirty. I’ll take off right away. I should hit Duluth around noon.”
“That’ll be fine.” She hesitated, then ventured, “You sound anxious.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Cork said.
He made a call to Judy Madsen, explained that he needed her to cover Sam’s Place tomorrow. No problem, she told him.
After he hung up, he went outside. He sat on the front porch swing, staring at the pool of light from the nearest streetlamp. He was thinking that, if it wasn’t Sandy Bodine flying that plane, what else about the incident wasn’t true? Though he wasn’t cold at all, his body shook uncontrollably. Inside he was battling an ambush of fear and rage, fighting against a desperate desire not to be drawn again into a hopeless spiral of despair. For six months, he’d struggled with his grief and pain and tried to help his children deal with theirs. For six months, he’d worked to reconstruct his life around the raw, empty hole at its center. For six months, he’d fought to accept the reality that Jo was dead. Now, staring at that tiny island of light the streetlamp cast in front of his house, he thought with a shiver of hope, What if she isn’t?
TWENTY-ONE
When Cork pulled off I-35 in Duluth and drove through the Canal Park district the next day, the sun was directly above him, glaring down from between sheets of starch-white cloud. He headed past Grandma’s Saloon, across the Lift Bridge, and onto Park Point. Half a mile farther, he pulled into the driveway of the home that belonged to Liz Burns. It was a nice piece of property, a two-story of modern design with an unobstructed view of the vast, frigid blue that was Lake Superior. He parked his old Bronco behind a red Taurus with Wisconsin plates and stepped out into a stiff, cold wind that swept off the lake. He reached back inside for his jacket.
Burns greeted him at the door. She was wearing a maroon sweater, tight white slacks, and a tentative smile. “Thank you for coming, Cork.”
Inside, the house was expensively furnished, mostly in shades of white set off with blue curtains that were the color of Lake Superior on a good day. Becca Bodine sat in a white, overstuffed chair. She held a glass full of a dark liquid cubed with ice. She eyed Cork warily as he entered the room, which Cork thought was good. In the business on which they were about to embark, caution would be an absolute necessity.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Burns asked from behind him.
“No, thanks.”
Burns sat on the sofa. Cork took a wing chair to her left. Becca Bodine set her glass on a coaster on the coffee table. The tabletop was glass. On a shelf visible beneath was a large book with a lovely cover photo of the Aerial Lift Bridge and Park Point. The book was titled Duluth: Gem of the Freshwater Sea. Cork laid the videotape from the Casper bar on the tabletop next to Becca Bodine’s drink.
“I stand by what I said yesterday,” he began. “Everything suspicious you saw on this tape could be the result of wanting to see something suspicious. I can’t imagine it would be convincing to anyone else.”
“So why are you here?” the Bodine woman said.
“Because I made some phone calls to colleagues in my line who know your investigator, Steve Stilwell. They told me he’s not the kind of guy to go on a bender and leave a client high and dry. According to them, he’s not the kind of guy to go on a bender, period.”
“I tried to tell you that yesterday,” Burns said.
“How good an investigator would I be if I just took your word? But there’s another reason I’m here. I saw something on the videotape that you didn’t, something that can’t be explained away.”
“And what’s that?” Burns asked.
“The man at the bar doesn’t drink.”
“What are you talking about? We’ve seen the tape. He drinks like a fish.”
“He does a good job of making it seem that way. But if you look closely, you can see that he pours the drink inside his shirt. You have a VCR handy?”
“In the den.”
“Let’s go have a look.”
He followed Burns and Becca Bodine into another beautifully done room. A flat-screen television took up much of one wall. Beneath it, housed in a mahogany cabinet, was a VCR-DVD player. Burns turned on the screen, popped the tape into the player, and joined the others standing a dozen feet from the enormous screen. She pressed buttons on the remote, and the by now familiar jerky black-and-white image appeared, much enlarged. They stood in the quiet of the den, watching the silent movements of the man purported to be Sandy Bodine.
“May I have the remote?” Cork asked.
“Sure.” Burns handed it over.
Cork fast-forwarded. “It takes a while before he gets careless and the camera catches what he’s up to. Here.” The bartender had just brought him another round and turned away. As the man at the bar bent to drink, Cork used the remote to slow the action. “Watch carefully,” he said.
The man brought the glass gradually to his lips, then tilted it a split second before it connected. The glass emptied, but clearly not into his mouth.
“Oh, God,” Burns said, and a huge smile broke across her face. “Oh, sweet God.”
“Where is it going?” Becca Bodine asked.
“Could be something as simple as a hot water bottle that he’s taped to his chest,” Cork replied. “Though it’s probably a little more sophisticated than that. He leaves to go to the men’s room several times during the video. It could be that he uses the opportunity to empty what he’s collected.”
“Why?” asked Bodine.
“Because he wants to appear drunk without being drunk.”
“But the taxi driver had to pull over so this guy could puke,” Burns said.
Cork shrugged. “Finger down his throat.”
“He wants to appear drunk without being drunk,” Becca said. She frowned, thinking. “So he’d be in good shape to fly the plane the next day?”
“While having given the impression that he was in no shape to be piloting,” Cork finished for her.
“Which brings us back to Becca’s question,” Burns said. “Why?”
“Mind if we go back into the other room?” Cork said. “This could take a while to sort out.”
Burns ejected the tape and they returned to the living room. Outside, the wind had picked up, and through the long dining room windows, Cork saw the waves of Lake Superior breaking blue-white and furious along the yellow beach.
“I could use a beer,” Burns said. “Anyone else?”
“I’ll have one,” Cork said.
“I keep a nice variety on hand.”
“Leinie’s?”
“Coming up. More Pepsi, Becca?”
“No, thanks.”
Burns vanished into the kitchen, and Cork heard a refrigerator door open and close. He turned his attention to Becca Bodine, who was staring toward the long windows and the whitecaps of the lake beyond.
“You never doubted him?” Cork said.
Her face was Ojibwe-skin the color of wet sand, high cheeks, a broad nose, eyes like dark almonds. Those eyes drifted toward him, and she looked troubled for a moment, then confessed, “All the time. But I knew that was my weakness. I knew that if it was the other way around, Sandy would have believed in me no matter what the evidence.”
Burns returned with two opened bottles, and they sat down again. For a moment, they drank quietly and Cork could hear the wind pressing against the house. One of the starch-white clouds blew across the sun, and the light through the windows turned gray and all the white in the house looked sullied.