The folks who take them oneway spend those two weeks attending to other charters. Our boy would have settled on one of those planes, and almost certainly would have made a cash arrangement to fly back out with them. Eastbound.”
Stephanie said, “What would he have done if the people using the plane he planned to take cancelled their flight at the last minute?”
Dave shrugged. “Same thing he would’ve done if there was bad weather, I guess,” he said. “Put it off to another day.”
Vince, meanwhile, had moved Stephanie’s left finger a little further to the right. “Now it’s getting close to one in the afternoon on the east coast,” he said, “but at least our friend Cogan doesn’t have to worry about a lot of security rigamarole, not back in 1980 and especially not flyin private. And we have to assume—again—that he doesn’t have to wait in line with a lot of other planes for an active runway, because it screws up the timetable if he does, and all the while on the other end—” He touched her right finger. “—that ferry’s waitin. Last one of the day.
“So, the flight lasts three hours. We’ll say that, anyway. My colleague here got on the Internet, he loves that sucker with a passion, and he says the weather was good for flying that day and the maps show that the jetstream was in approximately the right place—”
“But as to howstrong it was, that’s information I’ve never been able to pin down,” Dave said. He glanced at Vince. “Given the tenuousness of your case, partner, that’s probably not a real bad thing.”
“We’ll say three hours,” Vince repeated, and moved Stephanie’s left finger (the one she was coming to think of as her Colorado Kid finger) until it was less than two inches from her right one (which she now thought of as her James CoganAlmost Dead finger). “It can’t have been much longer than that.”
“Because the facts won’t let it,” she murmured, fascinated (and, in truth, a little frightened) by the idea. Once, while in high school, she had read a science fiction novel calledThe Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. She didn’t know about the moon, but she was coming to believe that was certainly true of time.
“No, ma’am, they won’t,” he agreed. “At four o’clock or maybe fourohfive—we’ll say fourohfive—Cogan lands and disembarks at Twin City Civil Air, that was the only FBO at Bangor International Airport back then—”
“Any records of his arrival?” she asked. “Did you check?” Knowing he had, of course he had, also knowing it hadn’t done any good, one way or another. It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.
Vince smiled. “Sure did, but in the carefree days before Homeland Security, all Twin City kept any length of time were their account books. They had a good many cash payments that day, includin some pretty goodsized refueling tabs late in the afternoon, but even those might mean nothing. For all we know, whoever flew the Kid in might have spent the night in a Bangor hotel and flown out the next morning—”
“Or spent the weekend,” Dave said. “Then again, the pilot might have left right away, and without refueling at all.”
“How could he do that, after coming all the way from Denver?” Stephanie asked.
“Could have hopped down to Portland,” Dave said, “and filled his tank up there.”
“Why would he?”
Dave smiled. It gave him a surprisingly foxy look that was not much like his usual expression of earnest and slightly stupid honesty. It occurred to Stephanie now that the intellect behind that chubby, rather childish face was probably as lean and quick as Vince Teague’s.
“Cogan might’ve paid Mr. Denver Flyboy to do it that way because he was afraid of leaving a paper trail,” Dave said. “And Mr. Denver Flyboy would very likely have gone along with any reasonable request if he was being paid enough.”
“As for the Colorado Kid,” Vince resumed, “he’s still got almost two hours to get to Tinnock, get a fishandchips basket at Jan’s Wharfside, sit at a table eating it while he looks out at the water, and then catch the last ferry to MooseLookit Island.” As he spoke, he slowly brought Stephanie’s left and right forefingers together until they touched.
Stephanie watched, fascinated. “Could he do it?”
“Maybe, but it’d be awful goddamned tight,” Dave said with a sigh. “I’d have never believed it if he hadn’t actually turned up dead on Hammock Beach. Would you, Vince?”
“Nup,” Vince said, without even pausing to consider.
Dave said, “There’s four dirt airstrips within a dozen miles or so of Tinnock, all seasonal. They do most of their trade takin up tourists on sightseein rides in the summer, or to look at the fall foliage when the colors peak out, although that only lasts a couple of weeks. We checked em on the offchance that Cogan might have chartered him a second plane, this one a little propjob like a Piper Cub, and flown from Bangor to the coast.”
“No joy there, either, I take it.”
“You take it right,” Vince said, and his grin was gloomy rather than foxy. “Once those elevator doors slide closed on Cogan in that Denver office building, this whole business is nothing but shadows you can’t quite catch hold of…and one dead body.
“Three of those four airstrips were deserted in April, shut right down, so a planecould have flown in to any of em and no one the wiser. The fourth one—a woman named Maisie Harrington lived out there with her father and about sixty mutt dogs, and she claimed that no one flew into their strip from October of 1979 to May of 1980, but she smelled like a distillery, and I had my doubts if she could remember what went on aweek before I talked to her, let alone a year and a half before.”
“What about the woman’s father?” she asked.
“Stone blind and onelegged,” Dave said. “The diabetes.”
“Ouch,” she said.
“Ayuh.”
“Let Jack n Maisie Harrington go hang,” Vince said impatiently. “I never believed in the Second Airplane Theory when it comes to Cogan any more than I ever believed in the Second Gunman Theory when it came to Kennedy. If Cogan had a car waiting for him in Denver—and I can’t see any way around it—then he could have had one waiting for him at the General Aviation Terminal, as well. And I believe he did.”
“That is just so farfetched,” Dave said. He spoke not scoffingly but dolefully.
“P’raps,” Vince responded, unperturbed, “but when you get rid of the impossible, whatever’s left…there’s your pup, scratchin at the door t’be let in.”
“He could have driven himself,” Stephanie said thoughtfully.
“A rental car?” Dave shook his head. “Don’t think so, dear. Rental agencies take only credit cards, and credit cards leave paper trails.”
“Besides,” Vince said, “Cogan didn’t know his way around eastern and coastal Maine. So far as we can discover, he’d never been here in his life. You know the roads by now, Steffi: there’s only one main one that comes out this way from Bangor to Ellsworth, but once you get to Ellsworth, there’s three or four different choices, and a flatlander, even one with a map, is apt to get confused. No, I think Dave is right. If the Kid meant to go by car, and if he knew in advance how small his timewindow was going to be, he would have wanted to have a driver standin by and waitin. Somebody who’d take cash money, drive fast, and not get lost.”
Stephanie thought for a little while. The two old men let her.
“Three hired drivers in all,” she said at last. “The one in the middle at the controls of a private jet.”
“Maybe with a copilot,” Dave put in quietly. “Them are the rules, at least.”
“It’s very outlandish,” she said.
Vince nodded and sighed. “I don’t disagree.”
“You’ve never turned up even one of these drivers, have you?”
“No.”
She thought some more, this time with her head down and her normally smooth brow furrowed in a deep frown. Once more they did not interrupt her, and after perhaps two minutes, she looked up again. “Butwhy? What could be so important for Cogan to go to such lengths?”
Vince Teague and Dave Bowie looked at each other, then back at her. Vince said: “Ain’tthat a good question.”
Dave said: “Arig of a question.”
Vince said: “Themain question.”
“Accourse it is,” Dave said. “Always was.”
Vince, quite softly: “We don’t know, Stephanie. We never have.”
Dave, more softly still: “BostonGlobe wouldn’t like that. Nope, not at all.”
17
“Accourse, we ain’t the BostonGlobe,” Vince said. “We ain’t even the BangorDaily News. But Stephanie, when a grown man or woman goes completely off the rails, every newspaper writer, big town or small one, looks for certain reasons. It don’t matter whether the result is most of the Methodist church picnic windin up poisoned or just the gentlemanly half of a marriage quietly disappearin one weekday morning, never to be seen alive again. Now—for the time bein never mindin where he wound up, or the improbability of how he managed to get there—tell me what some of those reasons for goin off the rails might be. Count them off for me until I see at least four of your fingers in the air.”
School is in session, she thought, and then remembered something Vince had said to her a month before, almost in passing: To be a success it the news business, it don’t hurt to have a dirty mind, dear. At the time she’d thought the remark bizarre, perhaps even borderline senile. Now she thought she understood a little better.
“Sex,” she said, raising her left forefinger—her Colorado Kid finger. “I.e., another woman.” She popped another finger. “Money problems, I’m thinking either debt or theft.”
“Don’t forget the IRS,” Dave said. “People sometimes run when they realize they’re in hock to Uncle Sam.”
“She don’t know how boogery the IRS can be,” Vince said. “You can’t hold that against her. Anyway, according to his wife Cogan had no problems with Infernal Revenue. Go on, Steffi, you’re doin fine.”
She didn’t yet have enough fingers in the air to satisfy him, but could think of only one other thing. “The urge to start a brandnew life?” she asked doubtfully, seeming to speak more to herself than to them. “To just…I don’t know…cut all the ties and start over again as a different person in a different place?” And then something elsedid occur to her. “Madness?” She had four fingers up now—one for sex, one for money, one for change, one for madness. She looked doubtfully at the last two. “Maybe change and madness are the same?”
“Maybe they are,” Vince said. “And you could argue that madness covers all sorts of addictions that people try to run from. That sort of running’s sometimes known as the ‘geographic cure.’ I’m thinking specifically of drugs and alcohol. Gambling’s another addiction people try the geographic cure on, but I guess you could file that problem under money.”
“Did he have drug or alcohol problems?”
“Arla Cogan said not, and I believe she would have known. And after sixteen months to think it over, and with him dead at the end of it, I think she would have told me.”
“But, Steffi,” Dave said (and rather gently), “when you consider it, madness almosthas to be in it somewhere, wouldn’t you say?”
She thought of James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, sitting dead on Hammock Beach with his back against a litter basket and a lump of meat lodged in his throat, his closed eyes turned in the direction of Tinnock and the reach beyond. She thought of how one hand had still been curled, as if holding the rest of his midnight snack, a piece of steak some hungry gull had no doubt stolen, leaving nothing but a sticky pattern of sand in the leftover grease on his palm. “Yes,” she said. “There’s madness in it somewhere. Didshe know that? His wife?”
The two men looked at each other. Vince sighed and rubbed the side of his bladethin nose. “She might have, but by then she had her own life to worry about, Steffi. Hers and her son’s. A man up and disappears like that, the woman left behind is apt to have a damn hard skate. She got her old job back, working in one of the Boulder banks, but there was no way she could keep the house in Nederland—”
“Hernando’s Hideaway,” Stephanie murmured, feeling a sympathetic pang.
“Ayuh, that. She kept on her feet without having to borrow too much from her folks, or anything at all from his, but she used up most of the money they’d put aside for little Mike’s college education in the process. When we saw her, I should judge she wanted two things, one practical and one what you’d call…spiritual?” He looked rather doubtfully at Dave, who shrugged and nodded as if to say that word would do.
Vince nodded himself and went on. “She wanted to be shed of the notknowing.