Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

  He slipped a hand inside the pocket of her coat and found the revolver and made sure it was secure. Without asking her permission, he unloaded the bullets and put them away in his jacket. “Why the gun?”

  “Protection. You meet strange people out here.”

  Stride didn’t doubt that was true, but he wondered if the gun was really for protection or was for something else. He wondered how many times she’d brought it with her. He wondered how many times she’d stared into the barrel with her finger on the trigger. The past didn’t give up its grip easily. Horror had a way of coming back like a virus.

  She looked at him unhappily and then looked away, as if she could see what he was thinking.

  “How are things going for you, Lori?” he asked pointedly.

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Of course. I’m just expressing my concern.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  Lori had never been a warm person, even after he’d rescued her. She was prickly and hard to like. He didn’t know how much of that was her natural personality and how much was a reaction to the time she’d spent in the cage. She was a loner. As far as he knew, she’d never been married. He didn’t know much about her family background.

  “Are you getting help when you need it?” he asked. “I’m not asking for details; I just want to make sure you know about resources—”

  “Trust me, I’ve burned through most of the shrinks in Duluth,” Lori interrupted. “My head should be the size of a walnut by now. Same with antidepressants. Nothing makes it go away.”

  He didn’t say anything more, because anything he said would make things worse. He’d had to remind himself years ago that not every victim was a saint.

  “So they’re making a movie about you,” Lori went on with acid in her voice. “You must be pretty impressed with that.”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s got to be a big ego thing.”

  “There’s nothing about what happened back then that I want to remember. Three women died. You nearly died, too.”

  Lori shrugged. “Well, Art Leipold hung himself. So at least one good thing came out of it.”

  Stride didn’t know how to respond to such raw pain. Eleven years had gone by, but it might as well have happened yesterday.

  “The actress who’s playing me keeps calling,” Lori continued. “She wants to meet me. She says she wants to know what it felt like to be in the cage. She invited me to visit her on the set tomorrow.”

  “Is that why you came back here tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s not like I need a reminder.”

  “You don’t have to talk to Aimee Bowe,” Stride said. “On the other hand, maybe it would help to have someone else try to understand what you went through.”

  “It’s not like some Hollywood blonde can spend ten minutes with me and get inside my head.”

  “You’re right,” Stride said. “Nobody will ever know the truth except you.”

  “Yeah. Me and the ones who died. Sad little club, huh?”

  “You’re alive,” Stride pointed out softly.

  Lori didn’t look at him like being alive was any prize. “My mother thinks I should talk to Aimee Bowe. She says it would be good for me. She says I’m still in the box and maybe it would help me get out. She told me to be brave. Like she has any idea what that’s like. At the first whiff of trouble, she runs away. Did you know my mom walked out on my father when I was ten years old?”

  Stride shook his head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “She took me away from him. Moved us across the country. I never saw my father again. When he died, she didn’t even tell me about it for six months. Six months! She got married again, and she and my stepfather pretended I had brand-new parents. Like the past was nothing, you know. Like I should just forget it. Well, that’s not me. First chance I had, I got out of there and got the hell away from them. I went to business school when I was eighteen, and when I was done with that, I moved back to Duluth. I figured I’d be happy coming home. You want to guess how well that turned out?”

  The venom in her voice filled Stride with sadness. He hated to see a young life destroyed, and he hated that there was nothing he could do about it. He was a fixer, but some things couldn’t be fixed.

  Lori opened the truck door. “I’m leaving now.”

  “I wish you’d let me take you to the hospital, Ms. Fulkerson.”

  “You can’t make me, can you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then good-bye, Lieutenant,” she retorted. She climbed down into the snow, but before she closed the door, she leaned back inside. Her eyes were bloodshot. Her voice cracked with despair. “Two hours, right?”

  Stride cocked his head in puzzlement. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Two hours. The docs said I would have been dead in two hours.”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “I wish you’d been late,” she said.

  *

  It was after midnight by the time Stride made it back to the matchbox cottage on Park Point where he lived with Serena and Cat. The house was on the other side of the sand dunes from Lake Superior, and the lake was oddly quiet. Most of the year he heard the thunder of waves twenty-four hours a day, but sometimes the long cold of January built enough ice beyond the beach to dull the noise.

  He let himself into the dark house. The first thing he did was check on Cat, who was asleep in the corner bedroom facing the street. She didn’t wake up. Her breathing was soft and regular. He stared down at her pretty face, which was lost in a tangle of chestnut hair. It was hard to be mad at her even when she did foolish things. He closed the door softly and let her sleep.

  Stride took a shower and then tried to get into bed without disturbing Serena. It was impossible, because the old timbers in the floor always groaned. She murmured a drowsy greeting at him. He slipped into bed behind her, slid an arm around her waist, and kissed her neck. Those were the moments that reminded him how good it was to be married again.

  “You’re late,” she said. “You want to talk?”

  Normally, he would have pretended to be tired and let her go back to sleep, but not tonight. He’d told her about Art Leipold before, but he found himself talking about the case all over again. How personal it was. How the voices of the women got inside his soul. How much it made him question whether he was really ready to be in charge of the detective bureau.

  Eventually he fell silent, but he kept thinking about what the women had gone through inside the cage. He remembered the bodies of the other victims and the details of the autopsies. He knew what they’d done to themselves. Unspeakable things. Desperation drove people to dark places.

  “We never released the details publicly,” he murmured. “Some of the things the women did in the box were—disturbing. No one else needed to know.”

  Serena turned around to face him. “But you know.”

  “Yeah. I wish I didn’t.”

  They couldn’t see each other in the darkness. All he could feel was her warmth. She put her hands on his face and kissed him softly, over and over, until he kissed her back. Then, in silence, she wrapped herself up in his body and made him forget for a while.

  8

  Stride found Maggie with her feet up on his desk when he arrived at police headquarters at seven in the morning. She was drinking a jumbo-size Coke through a straw and eating a Sausage McMuffin.

  “Hash browns?” she asked as he sat down. She dug inside a bag on the floor and waved a little oval patty of fried potatoes at him.

  “No, thanks.”

  Maggie shrugged and took a large bite. Stride found it amazing that Maggie could consume McDonald’s nearly every day of her life and never put an ounce on her tiny frame. Her metabolism, even in her forties, was like the growling engine of a sports car.

  He eyed the darkness outside his office window. Dawn was still almost an hour away thanks to the short winter
days. The rest of the building was mostly quiet. He was halfway through his coffee and slowly starting to wake up.

  “How early did you get here, Mags?” he asked.

  “Not early at all,” she replied.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “If you never leave, it’s not early,” she explained with her mouth full.

  “You were here all night again?”

  “Yup.”

  Stride shook his head. “This is extreme even for you, Mags. You really need to get some rest.”

  Maggie shrugged without replying. Her cheeks made dimples as she sucked on the Coke. He leaned back in his chair and studied his partner’s face, which couldn’t hide her exhaustion. After so many years together, there were very few secrets between them.

  “Is this about you and Troy?” he asked.

  “Troy and I are done. Over. Kaput.”

  “I know. And you never told me what happened between you two. You just walked in after Christmas and announced between bites of a Big Mac that the longest relationship of your life was over.”

  “What’s to tell?” Maggie said. She dropped her feet back on the floor. She crushed the empty bag in her hands and shot it across the room, where it landed in Stride’s wastebasket. “I guess I’m a better shot than Haley Adams.”

  “Come on, Mags. Was it an argument?”

  “Nope.”

  “Was there a problem with Troy’s kids?”

  “Nah. I love the girls.”

  “Then what?”

  Maggie rolled her tongue around her teeth as if there might be a bite of McMuffin that she’d missed. “Oh, let’s not make a big deal of it, okay? On Christmas Eve, Troy asked me to marry him.”

  Stride froze with his coffee cup at his lips. Then he blinked and put the cup down. He’d talked with Serena about a lot of possible reasons Maggie and Troy had broken up, but that wasn’t one of them. “He did what?”

  “Yeah, it was pretty romantic for a big teddy bear like Troy. He waited until the kids went to bed. Then he opened champagne. He put on Michael Bublé, and of course I immediately turned off Michael Bublé. And the next thing I know, he had a ring in his hand and was on his knees popping the question.”

  “That must have been quite a surprise.”

  “It was.”

  “And you said—”

  “No.”

  Stride sat in his chair in silence. He didn’t know how to respond.

  “Needless to say, that killed the mood,” Maggie went on. “About five minutes later, I was back in my truck heading home. And that was that.”

  “That was that?”

  “Right.”

  “Have the two of you talked?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Mags. You guys really need to talk.”

  “About what? I don’t want to get married, boss. Period. Remember the one time I tried it? Dead husband, me accused of murder, the damn sex club that screwed up my head?”

  “I’m not sure it’s fair to generalize about marriage from your particular experience,” Stride said drily.

  “Well, being married made me rich. Otherwise, there isn’t much I want to remember about it. Marriage isn’t for me. Never again. I was happy with the status quo with Troy. I wasn’t asking for anything more. But that’s not what he wanted. So it’s over, and I’m moving on.”

  “And by moving on you mean not getting any sleep?” Stride asked.

  “There’s no connection. I’m not obsessing about it.”

  “Are you sure? It’s a big deal.”

  “Look, I appreciate your concern, but I’m okay, boss. Really.”

  Stride sighed and didn’t push her any further. “If you say so.”

  He knew she wasn’t okay, but with Maggie you had to settle for information in dribs and drabs. She wore a suit of armor around herself and didn’t like to take it off. Plus, the two of them were still wary about getting too personal with each other. They’d been burned that way in the past.

  “So did your all-nighter here result in any new information?” Stride asked.

  “Actually, quite a lot,” Maggie replied. “Remember the phone we recovered from John Doe’s car? He used it to call the same Duluth number about a dozen times while he was in the city. We figured he was talking to his handler, getting instructions. The number he called is dead now, but I pulled the call logs for that phone. Every call went back to John Doe’s phone—except one.”

  “What was the other call?” Stride asked.

  “You’ll enjoy this. It went to Sammy’s Pizza downtown.”

  Stride chuckled. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I’m betting whoever it was made a mistake and used the wrong phone to order his pizza.”

  “Can we trace the order?”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, we know the date and time of the call, but the orders are written up on one-part paper receipts that go out with the pizza. Guppo’s going to be talking to their delivery drivers.”

  “Okay, anything else on John Doe?” Stride asked. “Are we any closer to identifying him?”

  “No, he’s still a mystery. But the Gherkin says she expects a ballistics report back on the Glock later today. See, my charm really does pay off.”

  “How about Haley Adams? What have you found out about her?”

  “She’s a mystery, too. Apparently Haley is a pretty little liar. She’s not a UMD student. Nobody in admissions or in the film studies department ever heard of her. And the apartment we searched? She rented it last month. It looks like she came to town when the film crew did and conned her way inside. Her whole identity is a fraud.”

  “Chris Leipold thought she might have been spying for one of the tabloids,” Stride said.

  “Maybe, but if she was, I doubt the National Gazette would admit it. Not when she left a telescope pointed at Dean Casperson’s bedroom. That’s an invitation to a lawsuit. And speaking of the telescope, the model she had is called a Moonraker. It costs like five thousand dollars. This girl didn’t just walk away and leave it behind. Something happened to her.”

  “Aimee Bowe told Serena that she thinks Haley is dead,” Stride said.

  “Based on what?”

  “She sensed it. Like some kind of psychic vision, I guess.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “California.”

  “Well, vision or not, Aimee may be right. We’ve still got John Doe and his Glock to think about.”

  Stride took his phone out of his pocket and opened up the photographs he’d taken inside Haley’s apartment. He scrolled through them again, hoping to see a clue that he’d missed the previous night.

  “So who is this girl?” he asked.

  “I don’t have any leads on her, either,” Maggie replied. “It doesn’t help that we can’t even get a read on what she looks like. Everyone describes her differently. Hair color, hair length, eye color, skin tone, it’s different with every witness. She wore disguises like day-of-the-week underwear.”

  “She told Chris Leipold that she grew up in Florida.”

  “Right, which may or may not be another lie,” Maggie replied. “Even if it’s true, we don’t know whether her name is really Haley Adams. However, just to be sure, I got Florida driver’s license records on every Haley Adams in the state.”

  “What did you find?” Stride asked.

  “There are about two dozen people with that name in Florida. I culled it to six women who seemed to be about the right age, weight, and look. I printed out copies and figured we could run them by the people on the crew. We can see if anyone recognizes her among the photos.”

  She handed Stride a sheet of paper with enlarged copies of multiple Florida licenses. He took a quick look at the faces and realized that Maggie was right. Any one of these women could have been the Haley Adams they were looking for. Or none of them.

  “Didn’t you say you culled it to six?” he asked. “There are seven licenses on this page.”

  Maggie nodded. “Yeah. See the o
ne on the bottom? Haley Adams from Fort Myers? She can’t be our girl, but I included her anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “She had something in common with our fake John Doe identity,” Maggie said. “She’s dead.”

  Stride stared at the face of the pretty young girl from Fort Myers. Strawberry blond hair and green eyes. Sweet smile. A Florida beauty, 102 pounds. According to her birth date, she would have been twenty-four years old the next month if she were still alive.

  “Interesting coincidence,” he said. “Maybe we have two ghosts.”

  “Maybe so. There was something else that made me curious about this particular Haley Adams, too.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “She was murdered.”

  9

  Serena sat across from Cat at a wobbly wooden table in the basement bakery in Canal Park called Amazing Grace. She ate a scrambled egg skillet with Yukon potatoes while Cat picked at a sugar-sprinkled blueberry muffin with her slim fingers. The girl didn’t look at her. The two of them hadn’t said much since they’d left the cottage. For Cat, the worst punishment was not knowing what her punishment was going to be.

  “Drew and Krista asked me to baby-sit today,” Cat murmured after a long stretch of silence. “Can I still do that?”

  “Of course.”

  “They’re counting on me,” the girl went on as if Serena hadn’t said anything. “And I haven’t seen Michael in like a week.”

  “Cat, I said it’s fine,” Serena told her.

  “Well, I wasn’t sure if I was grounded or something.”

  “You’re not. And regardless, I would never tell you not to see your son.”

  Michael was now a fifteen-month-old toddler. His adoptive parents, Drew and Krista Olson, had encouraged Cat to play a role in his life. After months of reluctance, Cat finally had stepped up. Drew and Krista were busy rebuilding their camping shop, which had been destroyed in the marathon bombing, so they called on Cat regularly for baby-sitting duties.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” Cat said finally, biting her lip.

  “I know you are.”

  “Is Stride mad?”

  “He’s mad at Jungle Jack. Not you.”