Maggie opened the shower door and stepped onto the plush mat. Steam clouded the mirror and made the bathroom feel like Florida. She grinned as Cab followed her out of the oversized marble shower stall, then wrapped his arms around her wet waist. He lifted her off the ground until they were face to face. Water from their hair dripped down their cheeks, and their slippery skins squeezed together.
“I’m starting to like Minnesota,” he said as he nibbled her ear.
She reached down. “I can tell.”
They both toweled off and got partly dressed. Barefoot, Cab wandered back into the living room of Maggie’s condo, which was situated above the downtown Sheraton hotel. He went to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and she joined him there. Snow poured down through the glowing lights of Superior Street below them. The lake was a black shroud immediately behind the buildings.
“Nice place,” he told her.
“It’s not the Gulf,” she replied, “but it’s not bad.”
“You like things modern?” he asked, noting the sleek Scandinavian design of the furniture, which was heavy on metal, glass, and blond wood.
“Yeah, when I was married, I lived in a Dark Shadows house. This is more me.”
“What about Troy? Is he modern like you?”
Maggie thought about being annoyed that Cab had brought up Troy again, but she was mellow enough from sex and wine not to worry about it. “Troy? No, he says coming here is like walking into a Woody Allen movie. That’s not a compliment. He’s a Minnesota dude. Fisherman, pilot, hunter.”
“And father?”
“Yeah, his girls are sweet. I suppose I don’t seem like the type for kids.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cab said. “I think you’d be a cool mother.”
Maggie turned away from the lake and sat down on one end of her black-and-white sofa and stretched out her feet. “I tried to adopt, but being a single cop whose husband was murdered is apparently not the ideal background for stable parenting. At least that’s what the adoption agencies told me.”
Cab sat down across from her on the other end of the sofa. His feet played with her toes.
“What about you?” Maggie asked him. “Do you want kids?”
“I’m still too busy trying to figure out my mother. Lala wants kids. I imagine she’ll be married and pregnant soon enough.”
“I’ve thought about getting a dog,” Maggie said. “Or maybe a cat. Or a fish. Except I’m never home. I sleep here and that’s about it. Lately, I haven’t even done much of that.”
“Dogs are too clingy, cats are too judgmental, and fish are too slimy.”
“Don’t you get lonely?” she asked. “Your house is in the middle of nowhere. I’m not sure I like myself enough to spend that much time alone.”
“Ah, well, that’s the difference between us,” Cab said. “There’s no one I like more than myself.”
Maggie chuckled and shook her head. “You really are a piece of work.”
“Thank you.” Cab craned his long neck to stare at her stainless steel refrigerator. “Sex makes me hungry. Are you hungry?”
“I think I have some cold Sammy’s pizza from a couple days ago.”
“Sold,” he said.
He hopped off the sofa and made his way to the kitchen. When he opened the door, he peered around at the mostly empty shelves. “Not much of a chef, are we?”
“Not much.”
“There’s a pizza box in here, but it’s empty,” Cab said.
“Oh, sorry. I guess I finished it. Or maybe the fish ate it.”
Cab took out the empty box and dropped it in the wastebasket. He returned to the sofa and staked out the same spot he’d been in before. “So tell me again about the burner phone.”
Maggie sighed. “We’ve been down that road and haven’t gotten anywhere.”
“Yes, but this is how my brain works. One layer at a time. Think of it as adding pizza toppings.”
“Okay, now you’re talking my language. Here’s what we know. About a week before Rochelle Wahl died, there was a call between the burner phone and John Doe’s cell phone just after nine o’clock in the evening. The call lasted four minutes. It was the day John Doe arrived in town, so we figure it was a confirmation that he was around and available. Almost immediately after that call, the burner phone made a one-minute call to the downtown Sammy’s Pizza. That’s the only call in the phone’s records that was not to John Doe.”
“Got it. So first of all, what does that tell us about John Doe?”
“He was on call,” Maggie said. “They didn’t bring him to town just for Rochelle. They had him around in case a Rochelle situation arose. Which tells me that this wasn’t the first time a problem like this came up.”
“Agreed. I’d be willing to bet we’d find John Doe staying somewhere in the area when most of Casperson’s movies were being filmed.”
“But probably with a different identity each time.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“As far as the pizza order goes,” Maggie went on, “the restaurant doesn’t have trackable records that we could link back to a delivery address. We also don’t know if it was a delivery or pickup order.”
“And the delivery drivers?”
“Guppo interviewed all the drivers who were working that night. None of them remembered anything useful. These guys do dozens of delivery runs every single evening.”
“So nobody remembered a drop-off at Casperson’s rental house?”
Maggie shook her head. “No.”
“Well, that’s not very helpful, is it?” Cab asked.
“No.”
“I’m still hungry,” Cab said. “All this talk about pizza is putting me in the mood for some.”
“So order us a Sammy’s,” Maggie told him.
“What do you like on your pizza?”
“Sausage. I’m a purist.”
Cab rolled his eyes, as if she were a savage for not wanting kale and goat cheese. He took out his phone, ran a quick web search, and then tapped the button to make a call. “I’d like to place an order for delivery,” he said into the phone when the store answered. “Can you do a quattro stagioni?”
There was a long pause, and then he covered the phone with his hand. “They don’t know what that is.”
“Shocking,” Maggie said.
“Just make it an extra large sausage,” Cab said into the phone with pain in his voice. Then to Maggie: “What’s the address?”
She rattled it off, and Cab repeated it into the phone. He said it twice and then hung up. “They won’t deliver to you,” he told her.
“What are you talking about? I order from there like twice a week.”
“They said I should try the location on First Street,” Cab said.
“Why, which location did you call?”
“Duluth Lakeside.”
“Nope, wrong one,” Maggie said.
“I’m sorry, isn’t that the lake right outside? As in Lakeside?”
“You’d think so, but no.” She grabbed the phone from him and dialed the number of the downtown Sammy’s, which she’d memorized long before. She ordered an extra large sausage pizza and then hung up the phone. “Thirty minutes. See how easy that was?”
“I guess I’m not familiar with the intricacies of Duluth pizza ordering,” Cab said.
Maggie grinned at him. “You’re pretty good at other intricacies.”
She hopped off the sofa and headed for the bedroom. “I suppose I ought to be wearing something more than a bra and panties for the driver.”
“I don’t know. Sounds like the making of an adult movie.”
She went to her dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts from the middle drawer and threw them over the rumpled sheets of her bed. Then she stopped. Without putting them on, she went back to the doorway and stood with her hands on the frame. “Cab,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“What if our guy with the burner phone did the same thing?”
Cab turned his phone ov
er in his hands. “You mean, what if he called the wrong delivery location?”
“Exactly.”
“There was only one call in the phone’s records,” Cab pointed out.
Maggie came back and sat down on the sofa. “Yeah, I know. Think about it. He’s talking to John Doe. When he’s done, he decides to order a pizza, and he accidentally uses the same phone and calls the downtown restaurant. Except if it’s Jungle Jack and he’s up in Hermantown, they don’t deliver up there. He hangs up and then realizes he used the wrong phone to make the call.”
“So he calls back to the right location with a different phone.”
“Exactly,” Maggie said. “That’s why Guppo couldn’t find anything. He was talking to the wrong delivery drivers.”
*
Stride carried his travel mug of black coffee out to his Expedition in the driveway of the cottage. The sun wasn’t up yet at seven in the morning. Four inches of snow had fallen already, and it was still coming down like a dense curtain across the Point. He used a brush to clear the truck. By the time he was done, the windshield was partly covered again by heavy wet flakes.
He drove into the storm. Josh Turner sang on his radio. He followed a snowplow up the hill, but his twenty-minute drive to police headquarters still took forty-five minutes through the slippery streets. By the time he arrived, he was out of coffee. He headed for the building through the parking lot and got more coffee before making his way to his office. When he sat down, he swung the chair around and stared out at the streaks of snow landing on the glass.
His phone rang before he had a chance to do anything else. It was Chris Leipold.
“Good morning,” Stride said when he answered. “Looks like Duluth is giving your film crew a January send-off.”
“It is.”
“If you’re calling about the storage unit, I don’t have any information for you. There aren’t any security cameras out there to figure out who broke in.”
“I’m not calling about that,” Chris said. His voice was still raspy from the flu.
“What’s up?”
“I was wondering if Serena had talked to Aimee Bowe this morning.”
“She took Aimee back to her house from the hospital last night,” Stride replied. “I don’t think they’ve connected since then. Why?”
“We can’t find Aimee. She was due on the set early, but she didn’t show.”
“It’s probably the storm slowing everything down,” Stride said. “It took me twice as long to get to work.”
“No, she wasn’t at her house. We sent a car to pick her up. The driver got there at five-thirty in the morning and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Given what happened to her, I told him to try the door. It was unlocked. He went in and said the house was empty.”
“Aimee was gone?”
“Yeah. He said the bed didn’t even look slept in.”
Stride frowned. “Okay. We’ll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Keep me posted,” Chris said.
Stride hung up the phone and immediately dialed Serena, who was still back at the cottage. She’d slept late, and her voice sounded sleepy. “It’s me,” he said. “We may have a problem. Aimee Bowe is missing.”
Serena took a long time to reply. Even in the silence, he could feel her concern.
“Can you meet me over at her house?” she asked.
“I’m on my way.”
Stride got up and grabbed his leather jacket from the hook behind the door. The coat was still wet. He alerted Guppo and then made his way back out to the parking lot. The snow continued to fall, but the engine of the Expedition was warm enough that the snow still melted as it hit the metal. He unlocked the door, but before he got inside, he stopped.
Something was wedged under his driver’s side windshield wiper.
A small padded envelope.
Stride looked around. He hadn’t been away from the truck for more than fifteen minutes. He saw footprints near the front of his truck, but whoever had left the package had kicked his way back through the snow to erase his tracks. None of the imprints of tread was left. He followed the prints until they got lost in the jumble of others coming and going from the building.
Someone had been waiting for him in the parking lot.
He removed the padded envelope from his windshield with his gloved hands. There were no markings on the outside. The flap was self-adhering; they wouldn’t find DNA on the gum. He stood in the darkness and snow, weighing the envelope in his palm. It was light but not empty. When his fingers traced the contents, he could feel something hard, small, and rectangular inside.
Somehow he knew. He just knew.
Stride took a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cut a slit in the narrow bottom of the envelope. He separated the two flaps and looked inside. It wasn’t easy to see the contents, but he recognized what it was. He’d received a package just like this four times before. The envelopes had all been left on his truck in different places around the city.
They were messages from the women locked in the box. Messages to him.
Stride felt an ugly sense of déjà vu. He thought about the break-in at Chris Leipold’s storage unit, where only one item had been stolen. Art’s old cassette recorder. It took on a whole new significance now. What he was thinking was impossible, yet here it was in front of him.
He reached into the envelope and pinched the corner of the contents with his gloves. He pulled it out and covered it with his hand to protect it from the snow. It was just what he feared. A Maxell-brand cassette tape.
Someone had scrawled a message on the label.
Save me, Jonathan Stride.
36
Outside Aimee Bowe’s house, Max Guppo looked like a snowman, completely encrusted in white.
“We’ve checked with all the neighbors,” he told Stride. “No one saw or heard anything last night. Serena had an officer cruise by three times between midnight and five in the morning. He didn’t see anything. No lights. No cars on the street.”
“Where do we stand with the cassette tape?” Stride asked.
“It’s not that easy to find a cassette player these days. I sent somebody over to my grandmother’s place to see if she has one in her attic. Unless you still use one at home, boss.”
“Nothing but eight-tracks for me, Max.”
Guppo chuckled.
The two of them pushed through the snow to the front door of Aimee’s house. Serena was visible at the fringe of the yard, looking like an apparition in the storm as she searched the grounds. Stride and Guppo took off their boots and replaced them with plastic booties as they went inside the house.
“What do we know so far?” Stride asked.
“Serena already mentioned that several of the windows and doors don’t have working locks. If someone wanted to get inside and surprise Ms. Bowe, it wouldn’t have been hard.”
“But?”
“But the bed doesn’t look slept in, and there are no signs of a struggle. If it was a stranger abduction, I’d expect to find evidence of violence. Even so, she didn’t leave voluntarily. Look at this.” Guppo squatted with difficulty and pointed at the leg of an oak end table in the living room. “Right here, where the leg connects to the table, we found hair caught in the seam.”
“So she was dragged along the floor?” Stride asked.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Which means she was already unconscious,” he added.
Guppo frowned. “Or dead.”
“Any evidence of blood?”
“No.”
Stride wandered over to the fireplace and stared at the cold ashes. Wind whistled down through the open flu. “What else?”
“There was a wooden coaster on the coffee table. We identified minute traces of powder in the ridges. We’ll be having it tested.”
“What’s your theory?”
“According to Serena, Aimee was using the coaster where we found the powder to hold her wineg
lass. Serena said the open wine bottle in the refrigerator was mostly full when Aimee poured a glass. Now there’s barely two inches of wine left in that bottle.”
“So either she kept drinking a lot after Serena left,” Stride said, “or she had company.”
“Right.”
“She knew whoever abducted her.”
“I think so,” Guppo replied. “And my bet is that when the results come back on the powder we found, it will probably be some kind of sedative drug. Whoever was here drugged her wine.”
“Well, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Make sure we test the sofa for any hair or bodily fluids. I want to make sure Aimee wasn’t sexually assaulted before she was dragged out of here.”
“On it,” Guppo said.
Stride went back to the front door. He reclaimed his boots and headed outside, where the snow stung his face. He crammed his hat down on his head and squinted into the wind. The morning was gray, buried under clouds. He felt the cold with each breath, and it was one of those days when he missed having cigarette smoke in his lungs. Jungle Jack was right. The craving never went away.
At the street, Serena waited for him at his Expedition. Her long black hair was wet. Her hands were shoved into the pockets of her black jeans. She stared upward at the electrical wires strung along the street. She looked tall and strong, the way she always did, but her expression was troubled.
He came up beside her. “Did you find anything in the yard?”
“No.”
“Not finding a body is a good thing,” Stride told her.
“I know that.”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“It is my fault,” she snapped back at him. “I never should have left her alone. I should have trusted my instincts. I was so busy trying to convince myself that Aimee’s mystical talk was all crap that I stopped listening to my own gut.”
“What did it tell you?” Stride asked.
“That she was in danger.”
“There’s no way you could have predicted something like this. And we have no idea what’s really going on. Guppo doesn’t think it was a break-in. He’s guessing she was drugged.”
Serena frowned in confusion. “Do you think this could be Casperson?”
Alter Ego Page 25
