Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

“Are you afraid to die?” Lori asked her.

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “What if I told you that your plane going back to Los Angeles was going to crash? What do you think would go through your head in those last seconds?”

  Aimee hesitated. “I don’t know. Terror. Regret. Anger, I guess.”

  “You have thirty seconds. The last thirty seconds of your life.”

  Aimee groped for a response that wouldn’t sound foolish. “Hope maybe. Up to the last second. Physically, maybe dizziness. Nausea.”

  Lori spit out a wad of gum. “This is a waste of time. I don’t know why I bothered. I’m out of here.”

  Aimee grabbed the woman’s shoulder and wouldn’t let her leave. “No, please. You’re the only one who knows what it was like. The others died.”

  “You need to let go of her, Aimee,” Serena murmured.

  The actress ignored her. She held on to Lori Fulkerson and turned her around. “I can’t answer your question. About the plane. I’ve never been in that situation. And I was never in the box. You were. That’s why I need your help.”

  Lori ripped away Aimee’s hands and shoved the actress against the wall of the warehouse. Aimee lost her balance in the snow, and Lori physically picked her up and pinned her where she was. Serena moved closer to intervene, but Aimee shook her head and waved her away.

  “You want to know what you do in the box?” Lori spit back at her. Her voice was barely louder than the wind. “After seven days in pitch blackness? Cold, no food, no water? You really want to know what happens to you?”

  “Yes,” Aimee whispered.

  Lori shoved her face to within an inch of Aimee’s. “You’re not human anymore. You’re an animal. A beast. Everything that made you a person falls away like dead leaves.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re thirsty. You’re so dry you can’t swallow. You can’t think about anything except water. Nothing. If you have any piss left, you start peeing into your hands so you can drink it. Does that paint the picture?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “God? There is no God. You bargain with the Devil, not God. Jesus isn’t in the box. You say Save me, Jonathan Stride, because that’s what the voice tells you to say, but you don’t believe it. You know no one is going to save you. After a while, you don’t want them to save you. You want to die, because if you get saved, you know you’ll be in the box for the rest of your life. You’ll never get out. It will be there every time you close your eyes. At least if you die, it’s over. It’s almost euphoric when you feel it getting close.”

  “What else?”

  “You want more? You hallucinate. You hear voices. You see dead people. You can’t breathe. You shiver so hard in the cold that your bones break. You get so weak, you lie on your back and can’t move.”

  “What else?”

  “What else? What else? Are you kidding me? Here’s what else. The other women had a bird inside the box with them. Did they tell you about that? A chickadee. You can’t see it, but it flies around in the darkness, and it sings to you. It’s like this one beautiful thing that keeps you alive and reminds you of the outside world. But the whole point really is to drive you crazy. To see how long it takes before you decide to catch it and kill it and eat it raw and drink its blood.”

  Aimee put her hands over her mouth. She began to cry.

  “Is that enough?” Lori asked. “Are we done here?”

  Aimee nodded mutely, with tears ruining her makeup. Lori let go of her, but the actress stumbled as if she couldn’t stand on her own. Serena leaped forward and grabbed her. Lori Fulkerson stalked off across the slushy street to the curb where her Toyota was parked. She never looked back.

  “Are you okay?” Serena asked Aimee.

  The actress watched Lori drive away, her tires spinning on ice. Aimee separated herself and slipped Serena’s coat off her shoulders. She didn’t look cold anymore, and she seemed to have her strength back. Her face was pink and windburned, but Serena was surprised to see a grim smile of determination bend upward on her lips.

  “I’m fine,” Aimee said.

  “Is that really what you wanted?” Serena asked.

  “That’s exactly what I wanted,” Aimee replied as she headed back toward the warehouse door. “I’m in the box now.”

  12

  At noon, Stride got the call. They’d found a body.

  He stood on the shoulder of Lavaque Road, surrounded by a posse of ambulances and police cars. Up and down the road in both directions, he saw nothing but evergreens, naked birches, and a few ash trees whose dried yellow leaves had clung to their branches deep into the winter. They were less than a mile north of the accident site where they’d found the Impala in the ditch.

  A narrow break in the trees led east into the woods. The deep snow was littered with the boot marks of cops and the paw prints of search dogs. Stride skidded down the slope and followed Guppo on the trail.

  “We got lucky,” the oversize cop called over his shoulder as he wheezed his way through the snow. “We were two hundred yards in and about to turn back when one of the dogs picked up the scent and dived into the trees.”

  “John Doe was smart,” Stride said.

  The remoteness of this location didn’t feel random. Without the car accident and the Glock to prompt a search, it was unlikely that a body ever would have been discovered up here even after the spring snowmelt. Hikers simply didn’t wander through these woods. Haley’s disappearance never would have been solved. Without evidence of foul play, they would have had no reason to consider it a murder. She just would have been one more unexplained lost soul.

  Stride continued behind Guppo into the teeth of the wind. He wore sunglasses against the bright sun, had put on earmuffs, and his green cap was low on his forehead. Ahead of them, the footsteps veered into the thick of the forest. Guppo turned, and so did Stride. There was no path; they slogged through dense, sharp branches and low weeds. The shadows from the crowns of pines overhead made it hard to see more than a few feet in front of them.

  Guppo stopped abruptly. Stride stopped, too, nearly running into the man’s back. He saw crime scene tape awkwardly looped around tree trunks. There was no clearing. Looking down, he saw only a pink athletic shoe jutting out of the brush to let him know that they’d reached the body.

  “End of the line,” Guppo said. “This is where he dumped her.”

  Stride bent down under the tape and took two steps forward, careful to stay in the footprints that had been left by the police officers who’d already been there. The young woman was at his feet, practically invisible until he was looking directly down at her. John Doe had covered her in feathery snow, but the wind had brushed it aside in patches, like a terrible treasure being revealed. She was frozen solid. Where he could see her limbs, she looked bony to the point of anorexia. Her milky white face stared at the sky, blue eyes wide open, mouth parted in surprise between colorless lips. She had blond hair in a short, boyish cut. There were a few freckles across her forehead, but mostly he saw the burned bullet hole in the center that had killed her.

  “Is that Haley Adams?” Guppo asked.

  Stride studied the body and realized he had no idea. He hadn’t seen a single photograph of the girl from the movie crew, and none of the descriptions they’d gotten matched one another. He bent down to get closer to the girl’s face. Her features weren’t familiar. She wasn’t a match for any of the Florida driver’s license photos that Maggie had pulled. So far, she was as much a mystery as John Doe.

  They had two dead strangers in town. One killer. One victim.

  “The age and physical appearance are consistent,” Stride replied, “but that’s all I can say right now. We’ll have to get people on the movie set to see if they can identify her.”

  Guppo shook his head. “She looks like a sweet kid. I don’t think she knew what hit her.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing,” Stride said.

  Some faces of the dead were hard
to get out of his brain. This girl was going to be one of them. Guppo was right. She looked innocent and lost, not like a spy. She had a loneliness about her, as if it were somehow inevitable that she would end up in a lonely place. One small body among the miles of wilderness.

  He’d suspected all along that she was dead, but there was a terrible finality about finding her here. Every missing persons case held out faint hope until they located a body.

  “I assume this isn’t where he did it,” Stride said.

  “No, she wasn’t killed here,” Guppo told him. “We widened the search area and found a Flexible Flyer and some bloody plastic sheeting about fifty feet away. That was how he dragged the body in. He weighted it all down with heavy branches and covered it up with snow.”

  “John Doe must have scouted the area in advance to figure out where he was going to dump the body. The guy was definitely a pro.”

  “If he was so smart, what was he doing in Duluth in January without a decent coat?” Guppo asked with a chuckle.

  Stride laughed, too. Not many people were prepared for the reality of a Minnesota winter. It had been six days since the air temperature had climbed above zero.

  “I guess he figured, why buy a coat if you’re heading home to Florida?”

  “Do you think he really was from Florida?” Guppo asked. “The ID was a fake. He could have been from anywhere.”

  “Maybe, but the Sunshine State keeps coming up everywhere we look. John Doe had a Florida license. Haley Adams told Chris she grew up in Florida. And Dean Casperson has a mansion on an island down there. That’s a lot of connections.”

  “So why did Haley get killed up here?” Guppo asked.

  Stride frowned. “Good question. It’s a long way to go to commit murder. It might help if we knew who the hell she really was.”

  *

  By the time Stride made it back to the highway, Maggie had arrived at the crime scene. She had Aerosmith booming on the radio, but she clicked it off as he climbed inside her Avalanche and warmed his hands in front of the vents. When he’d thawed out, he showed her the photo of the girl in the woods.

  “Damn,” she murmured with regret in her voice. “I hate it when we find snow angels.”

  “Yeah.”

  They didn’t talk for a while. For all of the prickliness about Maggie, she had a soft spot for victims. A death like this always got to her. He also could see in her face that the weight of everything was catching up with her. Her lack of sleep. Her breakup with Troy. And it was hard not to feel depressed here in the dead of winter, when the days were short, bitter, and gray. If the sun shone at all, it wasn’t around for long.

  “I called Serena,” she said eventually. “I told her about the body.”

  “Thanks,” Stride said. “Was she able to get any more information out of Aimee Bowe?”

  Maggie nodded. “One little tidbit. It sounds like there might have been something going on between Haley and Jungle Jack.”

  “Well, I’ve been looking for an excuse to have a little chat with him,” Stride said.

  “Try not to break his face, boss. He’s a jerk, but he’s pretty.”

  “No guarantees,” Stride replied. “What have you been able to find out about Jack?”

  Maggie didn’t bother consulting her notes. She could recite everything from memory. “Where Dean Casperson goes, Jack goes, too. They’re thick as thieves. Jack has worked every Casperson movie for more than fifteen years. He’s a stunt double, but the relationship goes much deeper than that. When they’re not filming, Jack lives with Dean and Mo.”

  “At their estate on Captiva?”

  Maggie nodded. “That’s what his ID shows. Like I said, they’re close.”

  “Does Jack have a record?”

  “Not that I could find. It sounds like he’s the bad boy on every set, but being a pig isn’t a crime. From what I could find out, Jack gets away with a lot because he’s tight with Casperson. Nobody wants to cross him, and Casperson has the money and influence to make bad things go away.”

  “Speaking of bad things, did you track down the other intern Chris Leipold mentioned? The one who quit after saying she’d been assaulted.”

  “I did,” Maggie said. “She stuck to the party line. It was all a misunderstanding. She also had a brand-new Subaru BRZ parked outside her apartment. These people know how to cover their asses, boss.”

  Stride shook his head. He stared through the window at the police activity in the woods. They’d be bringing out the body soon. His first thought about the murder was that something had happened between Haley Adams and Jungle Jack. Another assault. And maybe, unlike the other intern, Haley wouldn’t take a payoff and slip quietly away.

  But that didn’t explain the telescope. It didn’t explain why Haley Adams had no identity of her own.

  “Do we know how Jack originally hooked up with Casperson?” Stride asked. “They seem like an odd match. Was it a Hollywood thing? Did they get together on one of Casperson’s movies?”

  “No, Jack doesn’t have any acting or movie background,” Maggie replied. “He’s got a degree in security management from the University of Central Florida. He specialized in celebrity security and worked with some of the rich and famous down on the Gulf Coast. That’s how he met the Caspersons.”

  “Florida again,” Stride murmured.

  “Yeah. The trail leads down there.”

  “You sound pretty sure about that.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m sure.”

  He heard something in Maggie’s voice, and his eyes narrowed curiously. She had information that she hadn’t shared with him yet, and based on the look on her face, it was something big. “Okay, what did you find out?”

  “I have no idea how to explain it, but here’s the thing. John Doe killed Haley Adams.”

  “Yeah, that seems like the obvious conclusion. What’s your point?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” Maggie went on. “I’m not talking about the girl here in the woods. I’m talking about Haley Adams in Florida. The girl from Fort Myers who was murdered, the one I put on the lineup of driver’s license photos. John Doe shot her.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “The ballistics report on the Glock came back from the Gherkin at the FBI. The gun was used in one other unsolved crime. Two years ago, a twenty-two-year-old Florida woman named Haley Adams was found shot to death in the parking lot of a shopping and restaurant complex called Tin City in Naples, Florida. One bullet in the middle of the forehead. It’s a match for the gun we found in John Doe’s rental car.”

  “And now we have another girl using the name Haley Adams, killed in the same way, probably with the same gun,” Stride said. “Only the two crime scenes are a couple thousand miles apart.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What did you find out about the Florida murder?” he asked.

  “Not much. The investigation went nowhere. The girl was a waitress at one of the seafood joints in the area. The police never found a motive. There were no witnesses. Her wallet was missing, so it got written off as a street crime. Except clearly it was something else.”

  Stride didn’t have any trouble reading her mind. “I’m guessing there’s somewhere you want to go, Mags.”

  “Naples,” she said. “We need to get some answers down there.”

  “I don’t suppose this has anything to do with the fact that it’s about ninety degrees warmer down there right now?”

  A grin crept across Maggie’s face. “That thought never occurred to me.”

  Stride didn’t protest. “Okay. Fine. It would do you good to get away from here for a couple days, anyway. I’ll talk to K-2 about finding a way to pay for it. Get some sunblock and go.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Maggie replied cheerfully. “The chief said there’s not a hope in hell of him paying for it, but don’t worry, I bought the ticket myself. I have a flight out of Minneapolis in three hours, so I need to crank down the freeway.”

  Stride g
lanced in the backseat of Maggie’s Avalanche. He wasn’t surprised at all to see that she already had a suitcase there, and he laughed. “It may be warmer, but it’s pretty sticky down there with all the humidity. You’ll hate it.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “What’s your plan?” Stride asked.

  “I’ll talk to the Naples police when I get there and fill them in on what we’ve found. I also want to track down the detective who originally worked on the Haley Adams murder. He left the force and went private a while back. The guy’s name is Cab Bolton.”

  13

  Stride found the apartment complex in the flatlands that led from Duluth toward the Iron Range. They were individual one-room cottages dotted among soaring evergreens, and it was a good place to stay for people who didn’t want anyone to see them coming and going. The rentals were month to month and not expensive. They were across the street from empty fields and at a crossroads that led north toward the intersection with Lavaque Road.

  This was where John Doe had stayed for ten days.

  It was also where Jungle Jack Jensen was renting an apartment.

  Stride turned off the highway into the dirt parking lot, which was a slippery mess of matted-down snow and ice. Daylight already was waning in the late afternoon, and the evergreens cast long shadows. John Doe had rented a unit tucked back among the trees and invisible from the road, but Jack’s unit was closer to the street. There was a rental Lexus parked outside that looked out of place in the downscale surroundings. The boxy cottages all needed a coat of paint

  He knocked on the apartment door. No one answered, so he knocked again and called Jack’s name. Finally, the door opened. Jungle Jack stood in the doorway with nothing but a motel towel wrapped around his waist. He grimaced as subzero air whipped against his bare skin and brought up goose bumps.

  “Jack Jensen? I’m Lieutenant Stride with the Duluth Police.”

  “It’s not a great time to talk right now,” Jack replied.

  Stride could see over Jungle Jack’s shoulder into the one-room apartment. There wasn’t much to see: just a bed and some modest furnishings, a kitchenette, and a doorway to the bathroom. There was a dark-haired young woman in the bed with a sheet pulled up to her bare shoulders.