Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

  Stride watched grief darken Dean Casperson’s face.

  “Poor kid,” he said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Of course. I’m very sorry, I have to run. We’ll talk later.”

  Casperson nodded without saying anything more to his wife.

  “Oh, one thing, Lieutenant,” Mo called to Stride. “If you don’t mind my asking, how is your daughter? Or rather, the teenage girl who lives with you. Chris Leipold told me there was a regrettable incident at the party with Jungle Jack. I believe Dean had already left at that point. I want you to know I’ll speak with Jack myself and express how disappointed I am in his behavior. He’s a dear longtime family friend, but sometimes he’s less than careful about where he plies his charms.”

  “She’s fine,” Stride replied evenly, “but I appreciate your concern.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “What happened?” Dean asked his wife. “I didn’t hear about this.”

  “Nothing to concern yourself with, my dear. It’s just Jack being Jack in the usual way. My regards to you, Lieutenant. I hope I’ll have a chance to meet you in person someday. Although, to be honest, I’d rather it be down here than up there.”

  She smiled, waved at both of them, and then cut off the connection.

  Stride found himself feeling oddly intimidated by Mo Casperson. She was beautiful. She’d said all the right things. Yet he stared at the blank screen and felt as if he’d been threatened. It wasn’t simply that she knew about Jungle Jack’s behavior with Cat or that she’d made sure that Stride knew Jack was a close family friend. It was the other, throwaway line that he remembered.

  Or rather, the teenage girl who lives with you.

  She’d made a point of making it clear that she knew Cat wasn’t his daughter. It made him wonder what else she knew about Cat. And he suspected that was precisely why she’d said it.

  Stride turned away from the blank screen and realized that Dean Casperson hadn’t said anything more since the call. He was distracted, holding the coffee mug near his lips but not drinking from it. The actor’s blue eyes had a faraway look of loss that Stride knew very well.

  “Your wife mentioned someone who passed away?” he said.

  Casperson looked at him as if he’d forgotten that Stride was there. “What? Oh, yes, I often do things for Make-A-Wish. This eight-year-old boy with cancer, Tommy Ford, wanted to be in a movie. So I arranged for him to have a little role in the last film I did. A scene with me. It’s not out yet, but I managed to get an early copy to his parents so they could all watch it together. I’ve tried to FaceTime with Tommy every month to see how he is.”

  “That’s a very gracious thing to do,” Stride said.

  “Oh, how could I not? If you don’t give back on the things you get in life, what’s the point?”

  Stride could see that Casperson was genuinely affected by the boy’s death. He watched as Casperson idly rolled balls across the billiard table and then grabbed a cue and began shooting them one by one into the various pockets. His mouth was grim. His aim was perfect, and the crack of the cue with each shot was angry. He acted, again, as if he were alone.

  “I don’t mean to bother you at a difficult moment,” Stride said, “but I do have a few questions.”

  Casperson looked up blankly. “Questions?” Then he put down the cue and focused. “Of course, sorry. Please, go ahead.”

  “Did you have some kind of party here at the house last Saturday?” Stride asked.

  “Saturday? Yes, probably. I don’t pay a lot of attention to individual days on location, but I try to get the cast and crew together as often as I can. It brings everyone closer, which makes the process go more smoothly.”

  “Who was here?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea. Most of the film people and probably some locals. I don’t get involved in any of that. Usually I put in an appearance, have a drink, and then go upstairs to read.”

  “Did anything unusual happen at the party?” Stride asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of. Why?”

  Stride pulled his phone from his pocket and made his way to the photograph of John Doe. “Does this man look familiar to you? Do you know him?”

  Casperson peered at the screen. “No. Chris showed me the same photo, but I’ve never seen him before. Pretty gruesome, whoever it is.”

  “Someone saw him here at the party on Saturday,” Stride said.

  “Here? That man? Well, I didn’t see him myself, but that doesn’t mean anything. Who is he?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Then why are you interested in him?”

  “We believe he was using a stolen identity,” Stride said without giving more details.

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t help. Is that all, Lieutenant?”

  “There’s one other thing,” Stride told him. “This may be unpleasant, but the woman who calls herself Haley Adams also doesn’t appear to be who she said she was. And we believe she’s been spying on you.”

  Casperson leaned on the pool cue. “Spying?”

  “She had a telescope focused on the master bedroom upstairs.”

  Casperson took a step backward in surprise. He twirled the cue in his fingers and then chalked it. He didn’t say anything for a while. “Well, just when you think people can’t stoop any lower,” he murmured.

  “Did you have any idea what she was doing?” Stride asked.

  “None. She seemed like a nice young woman.”

  “Forgive the question, Mr. Casperson, but in looking into your bedroom, would she have seen anything?”

  Casperson shrugged. “Me reading Tippi Hedren’s autobiography? Tippi and Hitchcock. Wow.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “That’s as exciting as it gets around here, Lieutenant.”

  “Have there been any problems on the set? Any issues with the tabloids or the paparazzi?”

  “No more than usual. The tabloids don’t bother me and Mo too much. If you don’t want a dog to bite you, you keep it fed. We give them interviews. Exclusives. Candid photos. In return, they don’t run stories about transgender Venusian mermaids swimming in our Captiva pool.”

  “Well, that sounds smart,” Stride said.

  “It’s self-protection. Anything else?”

  Stride removed the page of Florida driver’s license photos from his pocket. “I wonder if you could take a look at these pictures and let me know if any of these women look familiar to you.”

  Casperson found reading glasses in his back pocket and positioned them at the end of his nose. He eyed the pictures one by one. He noticed the names, too. “These are all Florida women named Haley Adams?”

  “Yes. Are any of them the Haley Adams you knew on the set?”

  Casperson took a look at them again and shook his head. “No. At least I don’t think so. Oddly, I was never entirely sure what Haley really looked like. She looked different to me whenever I saw her.”

  “What about the last picture on the page? It’s a woman named Haley Adams who lived in Fort Myers. Do you recognize her? Even if it wasn’t from the set.”

  Casperson’s eyes flitted to the page, but his review looked perfunctory this time. There was no reaction on his face. For a chameleon like Casperson, the lack of expression looked out of character. “No. Sorry.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Stride asked.

  “I am.”

  Stride took the paper back and filed it in his pocket again. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Casperson.”

  “Of course. I’ll walk you out. You might get lost in this place.”

  Stride followed Casperson on the twisting route back through the house, and when they reached the foyer, the actor pulled open the front door, letting in a frigid blast of winter air. Neither of the men shivered.

  “Oh, one quick question,” Stride said as he stepped onto the porch. “I’m not very good with my Florida geography. Where is Fort Myers in relation to Captiva?”

  Casperson smiled, b
ut his eyes looked as cold as the Duluth morning.

  That was the moment Stride realized they were going to be enemies, not friends.

  “It’s close, Lieutenant,” Casperson told him. “Very close indeed.”

  11

  Aimee Bowe was in the box.

  There was dead silence on the set. Serena watched from the rear wall of the warehouse, where it was dark and cold. They were nowhere near the rural lands where Art Leipold had his hunting cabin. Instead, they were inside a giant empty building steps from the frozen water of the Duluth-Superior harbor. Shipping had closed for the winter, and a film company renting warehouse space was a welcome source of off-season cash.

  The movie version of the cage where Art kept his victims was built with one side open for filming, but otherwise the interior details were shockingly real. Jonny had shown her crime scene pictures, which were enough to make her shiver at the thought of being trapped there. The straw floor. The filth. The steel mesh. The tiny claustrophobic space that made you feel as if the walls were closing in on you.

  Aimee didn’t look like Aimee today. There was nothing sexy or glamorous about her appearance. Her skin was made up to look pale and drawn, to emphasize the bones in her face. Her fingers were covered in fake blood, as if she’d tried to claw free of the box, the way all the victims had. Her clothes were dirty and frayed, and she huddled in one corner, shivering. She yanked at her hair.

  The cameras rolled.

  The look that took over Aimee’s eyes alarmed Serena. She knew the woman was acting, but she felt terror emanating from her anyway. Aimee mumbled in hushed, disjointed words, too low for Serena to hear. Then Aimee screamed out a wail of frustration and fear and threw herself against the wall. She beat on it with her fists and tore at it with all the futility of a moth beating against glass. She fell back and kicked the wall with her bare feet. More fake blood—Serena hoped it was fake—seeped between her toes.

  Aimee collapsed. Tears leaked down her face.

  She murmured again, louder now. “Save me.”

  She shouted it. “Save me, Evan Grave.”

  Evan Grave was the character name of the detective in the movie. It sounded strange to Serena’s ears to hear it that way. The movie was fiction, but she still expected to hear Aimee say it the way all the other women had.

  Save me, Jonathan Stride.

  Aimee emerged from the box, and the crew swarmed around the set like insects. They touched up her makeup. They fixed her hair and clothes. Someone handed her water, but she shook her head.

  “Those women didn’t have water,” Aimee said.

  Serena waved from the back of the set, and Aimee came over to her. The two of them stood in the shadows at the back of the warehouse, and frozen air from outside blew in from a crack under the metal door. Serena wore a coat, but Aimee wore only a dirty white T-shirt with a knot tied at the base and frayed red jeans. She could see the actress was bitterly cold, but Aimee didn’t seek any help.

  “That was amazing,” Serena told her.

  Aimee shrugged. “That was crap.”

  “What? I thought you were great.”

  “No, I was completely outside the character. I was me, not her. That’s the problem. As a human being, you just naturally block out that kind of torment. I don’t know how to let it all in. I can’t find my voice.”

  Serena didn’t understand the actor’s craft or what Aimee was looking for in her performance. However, she could see the frustration in Aimee’s face, and she hesitated to intrude on her mind-set. “Look, I wanted to ask you a few more questions, but I can see it’s a bad time.”

  “It won’t make any difference. I just don’t have it right now. What do you want to know?”

  “I’m trying to find out more about a party at Dean Casperson’s house on Saturday night. Were you there?”

  Aimee shook her head. “No, I wasn’t feeling well. I popped a couple vitamin C pills and spent the evening in a hot bath.”

  “Did you hear any stories about the party?”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Anything that people might not want to see in a newspaper.”

  “Sorry, Serena. I wasn’t there.”

  Serena noticed that Aimee had dodged her question. “I’m curious. How well do you know Dean Casperson?”

  “Dean? We’re not in the same circles. Dean Casperson is an A-lister. He’s a household name. I don’t exactly jet off to Dean and Mo’s house for brunch.”

  “You’ve worked with him before, though, right? I looked up your profile on IMDb. Your first role six years ago was in a Dean Casperson film.”

  “Yes. That was a huge break for me. Dean picked me himself.”

  “Did he help you get this part, too?” Serena asked.

  “In fact, he did. Why are you asking about this?”

  “Because you were right that Haley Adams was a spy,” Serena said. “She was spying on Dean. I was wondering if you had any idea what she might have been looking for.”

  Aimee hesitated. “Honestly, these questions are making me uncomfortable.”

  “Why is that?”

  The actress looked over her shoulder to make sure that none of the crew was within earshot. She lowered her voice. “You have no idea how much power someone like Dean Casperson has. If he thought I was gossiping about him, he could ruin me.”

  “This isn’t gossip. Haley Adams is missing.”

  “I know, and I feel bad about that, but I’m sorry, Serena. I’m not saying anything about Dean.”

  “Okay. What about Jungle Jack? I heard there was something going on between him and one of the interns.”

  “Interns. Extras. Crew. Jack keeps plenty busy.”

  “Did he get busy with Haley Adams?” Serena asked.

  “He tried.”

  “Did Haley tell you that?”

  “She did. She also asked me how tight Jack was with Dean. I figured Jack was giving her a line. He was probably hinting that he could get her a role in the movie if she slept with him.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her to stay away from Jungle Jack,” Aimee said.

  Before Serena could ask anything more, she heard a loud voice on the set. “Ms. Bowe, we’re ready for you.”

  “I have to go,” Aimee told her. “Time for take two.”

  Serena watched the actress walk away, and she noticed Aimee get in character as she neared the box. Her shoulders slumped. Her legs wobbled as if they would cave under her. Aimee crawled inside, and when she turned around to face the cameras, she was already a different person.

  As the crew finalized the cameras and sound for the scene, Serena saw a triangle of light stream across the floor near her, and a blast of outside air roared through the rear of the warehouse. Someone slipped inside. A woman. Serena struggled to see through the shadows, but then she realized that the new visitor on the set was Lori Fulkerson. They’d never met, but Serena had seen her photo in the papers and seen her interviewed on television. Lori lingered near the door ten feet away as if leaving herself the option for a quick exit. They were nearly the same height, but Lori was heavier. Her curly hair crept from under a wool cap.

  Before Serena could go over and introduce herself, take two began.

  Serena watched Aimee in the box, but she also studied Lori Fulkerson out of the corner of her eye to see how the woman reacted. Lori’s expression never changed or showed any emotion. The woman’s eyes were lifeless. She kept her hands buried in her pockets. To Serena, Aimee’s performance was as gut-wrenching as it had been before, but it seemed to have no impact at all on Lori Fulkerson.

  They did another take and then another before Aimee broke free again. She walked toward Serena, but as she did, she saw Lori Fulkerson hovering by the door. Aimee walked past Serena and up to Lori and hugged her. It was a mistake. Lori reacted stiffly, obviously uncomfortable. Serena also noticed the physical differences between them. Aimee was the small, slim, Hollywood version of the victim, whereas
Lori was the reality.

  “I’m very glad you came,” Aimee said.

  “Well, my mother wouldn’t get off my back about it,” Lori replied.

  “I really could use your help,” Aimee told her. “Did you see the last couple of takes? I’m not getting it.”

  “No, you’re not,” Lori replied without any subtlety.

  “What am I doing wrong? What am I missing?”

  “Everything.”

  Aimee didn’t react defensively, but she looked at a loss for words. She beckoned Serena over as if searching for another way to make a connection with Lori. “This is Serena Stride. She’s Lieutenant Stride’s wife.”

  Lori’s eyes expressed no warmth or curiosity. “I suppose Stride told you about finding me last night?”

  Serena nodded.

  “He keeps rescuing me,” Lori said, but she didn’t make it sound like a good thing.

  The silence that followed was awkward, and Serena thought that Lori looked ready to bolt. Aimee saw members of the crew eyeing them with sideways stares. The warehouse felt crowded. The actress took Lori’s hand and pulled her toward the exit door, and Serena followed behind them. They went out into the subzero cold beside the gray warehouse wall. They were no more than fifty yards from the water. The sky was crisp and blue, but the sun gave no warmth. No one else was outside. Aimee did a jittery frozen dance, and Serena slipped off her heavy coat and put it over her shoulders. Lori unwrapped a stick of gum and chewed it as she stared across the ice of the harbor.

  “I know this is hard for you,” Aimee said, “and I appreciate your being here at all. Is there anything you can tell me?”

  Lori shrugged. “Like what?”

  “Anything about the emotional experience you went through. Or the physical experience. Something to help me understand. Something I can grab on to.”

  Lori said nothing for a long time. The wind lifted a cyclone of snow from the ground and threw it in their faces. Serena shivered, but Lori was like a statue made of white stone.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she told her finally. “You can’t fake it.”

  “I’m not trying to fake it,” Aimee replied.