And even when he drank, he didn’t drink Jack Daniel’s.”
“Fifteen years sober?” Cork asked.
“That’s right.”
“Was he often gone overnight on his charter flights?”
“It was pretty common, yes.”
“Some men behave differently when they’re away from their families.”
“Not Sandy,” Becca Bodine replied fiercely.
“Maybe,” Cork said. “But there’s a lot to suggest that there was more to your husband than you were aware of.”
“Sandy was left-handed, Cork. Which hand does the man on the tape drink with?” Burns asked.
Cork thought a moment. “Usually his left, but occasionally his right.”
“And he smokes with his left hand, too. But sometimes, he uses his right.”
“So? He was a southpaw who sometimes was a switch-hitter.”
“My husband was left-handed period,” the Bodine woman insisted.
Burns said quietly, “It’s easy to see that you’re right-handed, Cork. Do you drink with your left hand?”
“I don’t know. Maybe sometimes.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Not anymore.”
“When you smoked, did you ever smoke with your left hand?”
“I don’t really remember.”
“And did you smoke more when you drank?”
“What difference does that make?”
“He smokes one cigarette the whole time he’s at the bar. One in two hours.”
Cork shifted his gaze to the Bodine woman. “Did your husband smoke a lot?”
“A pack a day. He gave up drinking, but he couldn’t kick cigarettes. He was happy enough to have the booze monkey off his back. Another thing. The bartender said this man bragged about his flying ability. He told everyone who’d listen that he could fly through the crack in the Statue of Liberty’s ass. My husband was a modest man. He was no braggart. He was quiet, considerate, even a little shy.”
“And did you notice that he never looks toward the camera?” Burns said. “He goes to the bathroom several times during the course of the whole tape and always keeps his head down so that the brim of the hat covers his features. The camera never has a clear shot of his face.”
“All of which leads you to the conclusion that the man at the bar isn’t Sandy Bodine?”
“He’s Sandy’s height and the same general build, but that’s not Sandy.”
Cork shook his head. “You’re grasping at straws.”
“This complete tape is nearly two hours long,” the Bodine woman said. “I’ve watched it a dozen times. Let me ask you a question, Cork. If you watched a two-hour tape of your wife, even if you never saw her face, would you know just from the way she moves, from her body language itself, that it was her?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” She eyed him with disappointment. “Then you didn’t know your wife. I knew my husband, and that’s not him on the tape.”
“The bartender and everyone in that bar IDed him from photographs,” Cork pointed out.
“What they saw was an Indian drinking. And when they were shown a picture of my husband, they saw the same Indian. Indians all look the same to chimooks, ” she said, using the Ojibwe slang term for white people. “Maybe especially to Wyoming chimooks. ” She glanced away, through a window, and her dark eyes reflected the bright May sunlight outside. “Look, I stand to lose everything Sandy and I have worked for. But I don’t care about that. The truth is I lost almost everything when I lost Sandy. What I have left that means anything to me is my son. I don’t want him growing up with people telling him his father was a drunk and a murderer. I want him to know the truth.”
“And what is that?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Burns said. “We’d like your help in finding the truth.”
“Why me?”
“You’re not involved in the lawsuit. You’re a private investigator. And you have a personal stake in the truth.”
“You could hire any number of licensed PIs to do this.”
“We did. A man named Steve Stilwell.”
“Well?”
“He’s vanished. We haven’t heard anything from him in almost a week.”
“Do you know what he’d been doing?”
“He went to Wyoming for a couple of days, interviewed some people out there, the bartender and some others who gave statements. Then he came back to Rice Lake. That’s in Wisconsin. It’s where Sandy and Becca live. Sandy operated his charter out of the regional airport there. He spent some time at Sandy’s office and was scheduled to meet with us the next day. He never showed. We haven’t heard from him since.”
“Does he work for a firm?”
“No,” Burns replied. “Like you, on his own. I’ve used him before. He’s good. But now he’s absent and that worries me.”
Cork got up and walked a little, thinking. From outside, muffled by the closed windows, came the music of a fiddler on a hot riff and then the crowd exploded in applause. “Why would someone impersonate your husband?” he asked Becca Bodine.
“I’ve thought about it until my head hurts and I don’t know. I just know someone did.”
Cork looked at the television screen, where the jerky black-and-white security tape still played. If it was Jo on that tape, even if he couldn’t see her face, he’d know it was her. He’d know it absolutely.
“Let me think about it,” he said. “Can I keep the tape?”
“Of course.”
“Are you staying in town?”
“My office is in Duluth,” Burns said. “And my home is there. Becca is staying with me for the weekend.” On the back of a business card, she wrote a telephone number. “This is my private cell phone. Call me there anytime.”
The two women stood, and Cork walked them to the door.
The Bodine woman extended her hand. “I’m sorry I got so emotional.”
“Not very Ojibwe of you,” Cork said and smiled.
She shrugged. “Modern Shinnob.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow with my answer,” Cork said.
“We appreciate your consideration,” Burns said. “But we’d appreciate your help more.”
After they were gone, Cork stood a few minutes looking at the tape on the screen, at the man his two visitors had insisted was not who he seemed. He didn’t know what to think, but he felt slightly disoriented, as if the world around him had suddenly tilted.
“Cheese!” Judy Madsen called through the door of the serving area. “Cork, we’re running low on cheese. And we could sure use your help up here.”
“Be right there,” Cork said and tried to turn his thinking to the matters of the moment.
TWENTY
The bluegrass sessions ended around four, and soon after, the crowd dispersed. At four thirty, Judy Madsen told Cork to go home, told him bluntly but gently that he’d been distracted all afternoon and had been about as useful as a wet kitchen match. Cork didn’t argue. He took the videotape the two women had brought him and left the Quonset hut. Outside he stood in the sunshine watching the band platform being dismantled. The folks at the balloon table were packing things up. Some of those who’d come for the festivities lingered along the shoreline,
