Heaven's Keep (24 page)

Cork went back to rifling through the files in the cabinet. When he’d finished he said, “Anything?”

Parmer shook his head. “Nothing extraordinary so far as I can see. He flew two men to a town in northern Ontario to fly-fish. All the paperwork seems to be here.” He handed the file back to Cork. “Did you find anything?”

“It’s what I didn’t find that concerns me.” Cork scanned the file Parmer had given him, then put it back where it belonged. “It appears to me that Bodine kept good records of every charter flight he made, and for every charter there’s a signed contract. But the file for that final charter, the one to Seattle, doesn’t contain a contract or a record of a deposit made to secure the flight.”

Parmer nodded. “A strange omission for a man so organized.”

“Omission? I don’t think so. It’s possible, I suppose, that the FAA investigators or the attorneys somehow ended up with the original.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“No. Stolen would be my guess. Before the investigators ever saw the files.”

“What is it they don’t want us to see?”

“It would tell us, among other things, who arranged for the flight. Whoever it was that wanted Bodine dead had time to plan things carefully. If we knew who made the flight arrangements, we might be able to get a handle on who could have been involved in planning his disappearance. It would be a lead to follow, anyway.”

“Okay,” Parmer said. “What now?”

“Let’s have a look at the entertainment center in the living room.”

“This isn’t exciting enough for you?”

“Before he disappeared, Stilwell called Becca Bodine and asked if she had a VCR here.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe the VCR will give us a clue.”

But it didn’t. The machine was empty. There were two shelves of videotapes and DVDs, mostly kids’ things. Cork stood looking at the clutter of the living room.

“Okay, Sherlock, I’m waiting,” Parmer said.

“We need to visit Bodine’s office at the airport. But before we do that, there’s another stop I want to make.”

The Rice Lake Police Department shared a building with the Fire Department. It was one-story, a couple of blocks off Main Street, situated under the town’s water tower. Inside, Cork slid his business card through the slot beneath the glass of the contact window and said to the woman on the other side, “I’d like to speak with the chief.”

She was nonuniform, dressed casually. She came to the window and took his card. “Just a moment.” She returned to her desk, punched in a number on her phone, and spoke quietly. She hung up and said to Cork, “He’ll be right with you.”

The chief came out almost immediately. He was a stocky, solid man, mid-thirties, with a Scandinavian look to him—blue eyes, blond hair, a ruddy cast to his face. He wore gold wire rims.

“I’m Chief Amundsen,” he said.

“Cork O’Connor. And this is my associate Hugh Parmer.”

The chief shook their hands. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

He led them to a small meeting room, and they all sat around a table.

“What can I do for you, Mr. O’Connor?”

“We’re looking into the disappearance of a colleague, a man named Steve Stilwell. He might have dropped by a few days ago to pay a courtesy call himself.”

“As a matter of fact, he did,” the chief said. He folded his hands. His fingers were like thick bratwurst. “He told me he was working for
Becca Bodine. A couple of days later I got a call from Becca. She hadn’t heard from him and was worried. Asked me to check into it.”

“Did you?”

“I did as much as I was able. Becca told me that he’d registered at the Best Western here in town. I checked the hotel and found that he stayed for a single night and left the next day.”

“Checked out?”

“He never actually stopped by the desk. Express checkout, you know how that works. According to the hotel people, he didn’t leave anything behind. That’s pretty much the extent of my investigation. Seemed like there was nothing here to warrant anything more. He still hasn’t popped up?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, nothing personal, O’Connor, but in my experience private dicks aren’t necessarily the most reliable of businesspeople. Could be he’s on a bender somewhere.”

“Could be,” Cork allowed.

“He was looking into that business with the missing plane last fall. Is that part of why you’re here, too?”

“That’s part of it. Becca told me you knew her husband.”

“Small town. Pretty much everybody knows everybody here. I went to high school with Sandy.”

“Was he a drinker?”

“Oh, yeah. Back in the day he could drink the rest of us under the table.”

“But he stopped drinking, right?”

Amundsen shrugged. “Around here. But Sandy was gone a lot. Hard telling how a man behaves away from home.”

“Ever arrest him in relation to his drinking?”

“No. He didn’t have an arrest record of any kind here.” He smiled. “Stilwell asked me the same thing.”

“Did he ask anything else?”

“Yeah, what I thought of Sandy. And he also asked if there was any bad blood between Sandy and anyone around here.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I liked Sandy. He was good people. And that, as far as I
know, nobody here had it in for him. Of course, Sandy was Chippewa, and some folks, well, they’ve got ideas about Indians.”

“Anybody like that that you’d be able to put a name to?”

The chief made a brief show of thinking. “Nope, can’t say that I can.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“Welcome. What do you fellas plan on doing while you’re here?”

“As much as possible, we’re going to try to do exactly what Stilwell did.”

“I’d appreciate you keeping me apprised.”

“We’ll do that,” Cork promised.

B
ecca Bodine had called ahead, and when Cork arrived at the Rice Lake Regional Airport, he was expected. He showed ID at the contact counter for the airport’s fixed base operator, or FBO, the primary charter company, clearly a much larger enterprise than Bodine’s one-man operation. He was given the key code to get the Navigator through the security gate and into the hangar area. From the outside, the hangar was unimposing, simply a moderate structure of corrugated steel painted a dull tan. Inside, perhaps because it was empty, it felt enormous and abandoned, like a high school gym long after the last game of a losing season. Overhead, exposed girders supported fluorescent lights. Through dusty windows, the midday sun cast dun-colored rhomboids onto the bare concrete floor. Metal cabinets lined the walls, and there were stacks of cardboard boxes labeled to indicate supplies. The air was cool and smelled unpleasantly of engines and the fuel and lubricants of engines.

In a far corner, Sandy Bodine had established his simple office. There was a large desk of gray metal with an overhead work light and a rolling chair. On the desk sat a big tin can wrapped in orange construction paper decorated with a child’s drawings. The can held pencils, pens, and a ruler. The desk was shoved against a wall where two photographs hung. One was a framed family portrait: Bodine, Becca, and their son. The other was a large poster of a prop jet suspended in blue sky with the green earth far below. To the left of the desk stood a metal bookcase whose shelves were filled with aeronautical publications and rolled maps. To the right was a file cabinet that was a twin to the one in Bodine’s home office.

Cork handed Parmer the key ring. “I’m guessing that little key is for the file cabinet. See what you can find.”

“And I’m looking for what?”

“Pull anything on the Canadian charter a couple of years ago. And of course anything on the Wyoming flight. Other than that, anything that strikes you as odd.”

“Okay. What are you going to do?”

“I have an idea why Stilwell asked Becca Bodine about a VCR. I’m going to check it out.”

Parmer headed to the file cabinet and Cork began a slow search of the hangar. He walked along the walls, inspecting the stacks of cardboard boxes, checking under shelves and behind cabinets. He was moving along the final wall when he found what he’d been hoping for—cable wire concealed behind one of the tall cabinets. The wire ran up the wall to an industrial clock and appeared, at first glance, to be the clock’s power cord. Cork braced himself and shoved the cabinet away from the wall. The cord entered the cabinet through a dime-size hole drilled through the metal backing. The cabinet door was secured with a padlock.

“Hugh,” he called across the empty hangar. “Toss me that key ring.”

Parmer sent it sailing with a fine throw, and Cork snagged it midair. He quickly flipped through the keys until he found the one that fit the padlock. When he opened the cabinet door, he said, “Eureka.”

“What is it?” Parmer called to him.

“Exactly what I suspected. A security camera, a time-lapse VCR, and tapes.”

Parmer joined him. He had two file folders. “The Canadian charter. And the Wyoming flight,” he said.

Cork checked the VCR for a tape. The machine was empty. He looked at the shelf above, which held a row of tape cassettes, each marked with the dates during which the recordings had been made.

Parmer scanned the hangar. “Where’s the camera?”

“Disguised as the wall clock,” Cork said. “The dates on these cassettes indicate that each tape was created over a considerable period.
It’s a motion-sensitive security system. The clock camera only operates when it detects movement.”

“There’s no tape in the VCR,” Parmer pointed out.

“Exactly,” Cork said. “Bodine wouldn’t have left without activating his security camera, so the question is what happened to the final security tape. My guess is that Stilwell is the answer. He took the tape and headed to the Bodines’ house, where he knew he could find a VCR and a television to view what happened in the hangar the morning Bodine flew out.”

“Why not do that here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t feel safe here. With good reason apparently.”

“Is that what got Stilwell killed?”

“Could be.”

“Why? What was on the tape?”

“I’m not sure. But maybe it was an image of the man who killed Bodine. Maybe it even captured the killing.”

“You think he was killed here?”

“The first stop on that Wyoming charter was at the Aurora Regional Airport. It makes sense that whoever flew the plane flew it from the beginning, from right here in Rice Lake. If they wanted to get Bodine out of the picture without being seen, this hangar would be a good place to do that. And if they were careless and that wall clock did a good job of disguising itself, they might have been captured on film doing whatever it is that they did here.”

“A lot of speculation.”

“Got a better thought?” When Parmer didn’t offer him anything, Cork said, “Let me see those folders.” He checked the information on the Wyoming flight. “No contract here either,” he said.

“What about the Canadian charter?” Parmer asked.

Cork leafed through the documents in that folder but didn’t find anything that raised a concern. “From what Bodine’s wife told me, her husband was in a temporary financial bind. It’s possible the Canadian charter had to do with something illegal, quick money. Smuggling would be a good guess. Cigarettes, maybe, which are a
big black-market item because of the tax in Canada. But I’m seeing only this one flight, and that seems pretty small potatoes for the kind of murder we’re talking about with the Wyoming charter. I think there’s something bigger at stake.” He handed Parmer the folders to put back, then he continued his search of the hangar, poking into cabinets that weren’t locked, looking into tool chests, finding nothing that seemed of any help.

“What next?” Parmer asked.

“If Bodine was killed here, whoever killed him had to get onto the airfield. Let’s have a talk with the people in the office.”

Because it was a security issue, the FBO contact who’d given him the key code sent him to speak with Gage Williams, the airport manager.

Cork knocked on the manager’s door, and a firm business voice on the other side instructed him to come in.

Gage, he discovered, was a woman. She sat at her desk and eyed him over her reading glasses. Before her on the desk lay blueprints. She wore a white blouse with its long sleeves rolled back to her elbows. “Yes?” she said.

Cork introduced himself and Parmer. Gage Williams took off her glasses and used them to point toward a couple of chairs.

“I heard you were coming. We seem to have a regular stream of PIs through here lately. Did Becca fire the other guy?”

“He’s out of the picture.”

She folded her hands on the blueprints. “What can I do for you?”

“You can help us figure out how a man who might have wanted Sandy Bodine dead could have gotten onto the airfield and into Bodine’s hangar.”

She didn’t move for several seconds. “You’re not kidding.”

“Not at all.” Cork explained to her everything that had brought him to his conclusion.

“That’s a hell of a story,” she said when he’d finished. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s not easy to buy.”

“Humor us for a moment. If a man wanted to kill Bodine and fly
his plane out, how could he get onto the airfield? Could he simply sneak on?”

“That would be extremely difficult. Since 9/11 we’ve tightened things up pretty good. We have PIDS now.”

“PIDS?” Parmer said.

“Perimeter intrusion detection system,” Cork said.

“There are security cameras everywhere,” Williams said. “They feed directly into the Barron County Sheriff’s Department.”

“How closely monitored are they?”

“That I can’t answer. But really, it would be difficult to sneak onto the field without being spotted.” She sat back and toyed with her glasses. “Unless.”

“What?” Cork said.

“I’m not sure I should be encouraging you, because, like I said, your story sounds pretty crazy. But if I wanted to get onto the field without raising suspicion, I’d simply fly in.”

“Explain that,” Cork said.

“We’re a small regional airport. We don’t have a control tower. Planes can land here anytime, day or night. If they’re small enough, we don’t even log them in or charge a landing fee. Unless they want to tie down overnight, we don’t even keep a record of them. Conceivably a small plane could land in the dead of night and take off without us noticing.”