The detective doesn’t react, his jowls moving in uninterrupted cadence as he chews. “You know with who?”
“She didn’t say. I don’t think she had any proof. Just a gut feeling.”
I should have brought it up the last time I saw her. Should have been focused on something other than myself. I pull my plate closer and unwrap my silverware, ignoring the stab of guilt. “So what do you know about it? Was he?”
CHAPTER 56
MIKE
I do a slow and careful inventory of the liquor safe. The lock is clean, with no evidence of picking. I line up the liquor in very precise rows and check the labels of each twice. There is an expected amount of rums, vodkas, tequilas, and gins. While there might be a bottle missing here or there, or missing amounts from this one or that, that is expected, especially with Lillian’s occasional spikes in drinking. But the one bottle that is always there, the one that Lillian has never touched, because tradition, ceremony, is one of her sticking points—it and its box are gone.
I didn’t purchase the bottle to use as a hiding place. The original purchase was entirely innocent. We had taken a vacation at a time when I had been particularly in love with her, her fragility after the miscarriage triggering a protective bubble of rare emotion. Walking home from dinner, we’d passed an upscale wine and liquor boutique and walked in.
The bottle was a special edition, one that the salesperson had promised would appreciate nicely in value and taste, as long as it was kept in a climate-controlled location. And that night, tucking it away in our suitcase, we’d made plans to open it on the evening of our twentieth anniversary and toast to our future.
I’m trying not to panic, because reckless emotion doesn’t help anything. I pull out a padded chair and sit, needing to think this through. The only people who know where the key to the cabinet is are Lillian and I. I certainly hadn’t taken the bottle, which leaves Lillian. Normally, I would track down my wife and question her within an inch of her life, but—thanks to recent events—that’s no longer possible.
So I do the next best thing and pull the camera footage.
For obvious reasons, I don’t have cameras in my house, with two exceptions. I have a cam in the guest bedroom closet and one built into the air-conditioning vent of the pantry. The pantry cam is motion activated and angled to catch the full view of anyone who opens that cabinet. The video feed is wired, not wireless, and therefore not dependent on the reliability of an internet connection or the security risks of one. The wiring, which was put in place when we renovated our kitchen six years ago, runs along the back of the cabinet and to a small flash drive that will hold 420 hours of footage. Since the camera is only activated by motion, there is no chance of filling up the drive, but if that unlikely possibility ever occurred, it would simply overwrite the oldest file. I insert the flash drive into my computer’s USB and wait for the folder to load.
It is, as predicted, not full. In fact, there are only six and a half hours of footage, across hundreds of video files. I start at the most recent, and immediately hit pay dirt.
On the video, Lillian appears, wearing the same white T-shirt and yoga pants she was found in. Her hair is in a ponytail and her movements are jerky, almost manic. As she gropes in the cabinet, she reaches for one bottle, then another. She stiffens, and this is probably when she spots the special-edition box. She stands on her tiptoes to reach the back, and pulls out the box. She examines it, and I can see the moment where she considers returning it. The war of right versus wrong. Marriage vows versus disrespect. The anger—hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—wins out, and she uses the edge of her fingernail to break the seal. Then she opens the lid, pulls out the bottle and twists the cap, and takes a small sip.
It’s unnerving, the smile that passes over her features. A long, knowing grin, one dipped in revenge, but my wife thinks she’s stomping on a planned tradition, a keepsake. She has no idea of what she really holds in the box tucked under her arm—the financial infrastructure of one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of organized crime. She puts the bottle back into the box, and I want to smash my fist into that smile, to destroy the computer screen, to break her face and not stop punching until there are no more bones left to move, no more life left to open those light-brown eyes.
She opens her purse, puts the box inside, and then is locking the cabinet and returning the key. Fifteen seconds later, she’s out of the pantry and the video goes dark.
I rewind the clip and watch it again. The video is time-stamped at 11:02 a.m. on the day of her disappearance and death.
My cell phone rings, and it’s Lillian’s drunk of a mother. I silence the ringer, unable to take another round of her sobs and nonsense questions. No, I do not know why Lillian did it. No, I do not know if she was alone. No, I do not need you to come here and grieve with me. No, I do not want to talk with your latest boyfriend and answer his questions. No, Jacob is not okay and doesn’t want to talk to you either.
Her mother seems convinced that it’s a suicide, but I’m not sold on that. Originally, I hadn’t seen a motive for murder either, but maybe her holding the key was it.
I start the video again, and on this take, I focus on Lillian’s facial expressions and demeanor. It looks like Sam was right, and she was off her medicine. In the video, she goes through an entire range of emotions when it comes to selecting the bottle. This was a potential risk that I should have calculated when she got wind of the affair. Relationship heirlooms would have been at risk, and my wife has always had a fondness for being drunk, a fondness that spikes dramatically when things go south.
I thought I was being smart, putting it in a firesafe box in a pantry that a robber would never look twice at, locked by a key that no one other than us knew about. I should have put it in the guest-bedroom closet, with the other sensitive items, but I always reasoned that if something happened—if the organization, or the feds, or someone I had not anticipated came here and threatened me—I could give up the guest-bedroom stash and still have Colorado.
There is no recovery from a loss of Colorado. That loss is one with dozens of side effects, ones I have never calculated, because if Colorado is lost, I am dead, so the fallout is irrelevant.
Four years ago, when this sixty-four-digit encryption key was created, the bourbon box had actually been the backup plan—in case option one fell through. Option one was the number handwritten on the back of a framed family photo of Lillian, Jacob, and me—a photo I gave my grandmother, who added it to her mountain of frames on top of the baby grand piano in the corner of her Oklahoma City farmhouse. I’d expected that to be a safe location. Then five months ago, a tornado—a freakin’ tornado—picked up the entire house and spun it into a thousand pieces. Somewhere, a relief worker probably found and bagged the picture frame, oblivious to the lottery ticket that they were throwing away.
I should have found a new location, but Sam and I were working on an apartment-complex deal, and Luis was leaning heavily on me to research and invest in lean hog futures. Pigs. That’s what distracted me from what should have been my number-one priority—backup plans for backup plans. Pigs . . . and then the slow and eventual destruction of my marriage.
I call Sam, ready to hear whatever he has to say about Lillian’s state of mind that morning.