Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

  Serena winked. “I’m a hot dish, too, baby.”

  “Go away.”

  Serena chuckled and strolled out of the conference room. Maggie and Cab were the only two people left inside. The room was warm and still smelled of pizza. Cab sat where he had during the meeting, laying out photographs from a file one by one across the table in front of him. Maggie came around the table and could see that the photographs had been taken in the woods where Peach Piper’s frozen body had been found.

  Cab, who was as smooth and glamorous a man as she’d ever met, was crying.

  “It’s probably better not to look at those,” Maggie murmured as she sat down next to him.

  “I need to see it.”

  Cab didn’t say anything. He picked up one of the photographs, which showed a close-up of Peach’s face, still dusted with snow crystals, looking angelic and peaceful. It was easy to imagine her smiling and opening her eyes as if this were just a game, except for the bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. He stared at it and couldn’t seem to put it down.

  “I’ll arrange for the body to come home,” Cab said softly. “Peach had no family. I want to take care of everything.”

  “Of course.” Maggie added after a pause, “Regardless of what happens to Dean Casperson, the man who actually did this to her is dead. There’s justice in that.”

  Cab finally turned the photograph facedown. He retrieved all the pictures and returned them to the file folder, then closed it and put his hands on top. His blue eyes turned to Maggie, and his jaw hardened in determination. Grief was done. Time to move on.

  “What about Peach’s notes?” he asked. “Did they give you anything useful?”

  “We didn’t find any notes,” Maggie replied. “John Doe got to her apartment first. He cleaned everything out.”

  “You found nothing at all?”

  “No. The only evidence left in her apartment was the Chinese food receipt that took us to the house where she was spying.”

  Oddly, Cab didn’t look unhappy at this news. In fact, a smile crept over his face, and Maggie didn’t understand it.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Peach was one of the most secretive people you’ll ever meet,” Cab explained. “Her nickname was Peach Paranoid. She hid everything. She had backups of everything. Trust me, I know that girl. Peach left something behind. We just need to find it.”

  31

  Serena twisted the knob and opened the front door at Aimee Bowe’s rental house. She knelt in the doorway and checked the lock to make sure there were no signs of tampering, but the latch was old and no longer clicked securely into place.

  Inside, she took off her boots on the mat and explored the house in her stocking feet. There was dried mud on the floor, but she and Guppo had brought that in. She retraced their search from the previous night in her head and realized that they’d looked for Aimee only in the obvious places. The bedrooms. The bathrooms. The porch. There were plenty of hiding places for someone who didn’t want to be found.

  Serena didn’t know whether to believe Aimee’s story about someone hiding inside. The actress had been drugged and nearly delusional the previous night, so she could have imagined the whole thing. However, Serena had seen footprints in the snow outside when she’d responded to Aimee’s first call. Someone had been there. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that whoever it was had come back.

  The trouble was everything else that Aimee had said.

  I knew they were going to be put me in the box.

  They’ve been watching me for weeks.

  Sometimes I channel other people.

  None of it made sense.

  She made sure that the house was really empty. She checked the places she’d overlooked the night before. The closets. The basement. The garage. She even brought in a ladder and pointed her flashlight around the attic. She found nothing up there but dust and spiderwebs.

  As she stood on tiptoe on the ladder steps, however, she heard something unusual in the house. She swung around quickly and nearly lost her balance. Her flashlight lit up the shadows of the hallway.

  “Hello? Who’s there?”

  Serena climbed down the ladder and returned to the living room. Through the porch windows, the bed of snow stretched down the hillside. The dark lake merged with the dark clouds. She flipped on a light switch, but the light was broken. The house felt cold. She spotted the thermostat on the wall and found that the inside temperature was fifty-nine degrees. Aimee hadn’t set it that low. Not a Los Angeles girl.

  There was a bitter draft from somewhere.

  She checked the porch and found the back door was open. Raw air chilled the space. When she tried to shut the door, the wind nudged it open again. There was no mystery about it. She did a tug-of-war with the breeze as she tried to secure the latch, and finally she grabbed a chair and wedged it under the doorknob. The chair rattled, but the door stayed closed.

  Then she heard a noise again.

  It was almost right behind her. She spun and saw nothing as she peered into the living-room shadows. She didn’t move, and her hand edged closer to the butt of her gun as a precaution. As she stood there, the same noise beckoned her into the other room. It was a whistle, like someone softly alerting her that she wasn’t alone. It happened twice. Hey there, hey there.

  “Is someone in the house?” she called loudly. “This is the police.”

  But the living room was empty. She wondered if her mind was playing tricks on her. There was no way anyone could have gotten inside without her hearing him, and she was certain that she’d searched the entire house.

  Hey there.

  The low whistle taunted her again. This time it came from the master bedroom at the end of the hallway, as if whoever it was had traveled invisibly from one end of the house to the other. She’d already been in the bedroom, and she knew it was empty, but she retraced her steps and assessed the gloomy interior from the doorway.

  Hey there.

  Serena smiled in relief. A black-and-white chickadee had perched atop the curtain rod by the bedroom window.

  “Well, hi,” she said to the bird. “Did you come in through the back door?”

  Hey there, hey there, the bird replied.

  “And I bet you want to get out again, don’t you?” Serena asked. She went to the casement window, which had no screen, and cranked the metal handle to open the window toward the winter air. As if the bird could smell freedom, it vanished quickly through the opening with a flutter of wings. Serena shut the window and locked it. It was one of the few locks in the house that seemed to work.

  She laughed at her own anxiety. The dark house. The open door. The whistle of the bird. In the end, it had all proved to be nothing. Yet her unease refused to let go, and she wasn’t sure why.

  Then she remembered.

  It was something Lori Fulkerson had said.

  There was a bird inside the box. Did they tell you that? A chickadee. You can’t see it, but it flies around, and it sings to you. It’s like this one beautiful thing that keeps you alive and reminds you of the outside world.

  Aimee’s drugged delusion was that someone was going to kidnap her and put her in the box just like Art Leipold’s other victims. And now here was a chickadee trapped inside her house.

  Serena knew it was a coincidence. Tiny little chickadees were one of the few songbirds tough enough for Minnesota winters, and they were common even in January. The lock on the back door didn’t work. The wind pushed it open. The bird flew inside. That was all it was.

  Unless someone was playing a very strange game.

  *

  Stride found the small self-storage complex on a dirt road north of the city. It had been built on cheap land surrounded by acres of forest. There were three long, low buildings with rows of red garage doors. Piles of dirty snow had been plowed up to the edge of the trees, but the gravel driveways were slick with ice. He saw a gray Mercedes parked halfway down the third building, and he drove up next to it in
his Expedition. He opened his window.

  Chris Leipold was inside the Mercedes. He could see in Chris’s face that the stress and long hours of the movie production were taking their toll. Behind the man’s small wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were watery. His skin was pale, and his thinning blond hair was greasy and unwashed. Chris opened the Mercedes window, and when the cold air hit his lungs, he unleashed a rattling cough.

  “You okay there, Chris?” Stride asked.

  “Flu. A little welcome home present from Minnesota.”

  “Yeah, it’s going around. You should get some rest.”

  “I’ll rest when we’re done filming,” Chris said.

  “Is that going to be soon?”

  Chris shrugged. “Depends on Aimee Bowe. We weren’t counting on losing her today, so we have to rearrange the shooting schedules. Hopefully, she’ll be back on the set tomorrow.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that. She almost died.”

  “Death’s a pretty good excuse, but short of that, actors have contracts.”

  “Does Aimee have any scenes left with Dean Casperson?” Stride asked.

  “One,” Chris replied. “Why?”

  “I just thought it might be difficult for her.”

  Chris shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Come on, Chris. It’s just the two of us out here. Off the record. No notes, no reports. You can’t tell me it’s not all over the set that Aimee was drugged.”

  “I talked to Dean. He says Aimee was clearly high on something when she arrived at his place last night. He asked me to try to keep it under wraps as best as I can. The last thing Aimee needs is to have people start saying she’s unstable. If that gets around, no one will hire her again.”

  “So Casperson already has his knives out,” Stride said. “Discrediting her. Making sure she doesn’t talk.”

  “He’s protecting her,” Chris replied.

  Stride sighed in frustration. Everyone around Dean Casperson did his dirty work for him. Chris Leipold was essentially a good man, but in Hollywood, even good men made compromises. Everything was a trade-off. Sometimes talent came with perversions and secrets, and you had to live with it. If you wanted to get a film made, you couldn’t risk being blackballed, so you kept your mouth shut.

  “Why did you want me out here?” Stride asked Chris, gesturing at the self-storage units.

  “I got a call from the owner this morning. He came over here and saw one of the units with an open door. Somebody broke in overnight. It was my unit, so he wanted me to know about it.”

  “You still keep a storage unit here in Duluth?” Stride asked.

  Chris coughed phlegm into a tissue. The effort wore him out, and he laid his head back against the seat. “I keep all of Art’s crap here. That’s his whole life, crammed inside that little box. Appropriate, huh?”

  Stride said nothing.

  “I should have burned it long ago,” Chris went on. “Instead, I put all of it in here after the trial, and I’ve never wanted to deal with it since then. I just pay the bill month after month.”

  “And now someone broke in?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Is anything missing?” Stride asked.

  “I haven’t gone inside. I probably didn’t need to call you, but if it involved Art, I figured you’d want to see it first. Old habits die hard.”

  “Who knows you rent this unit?”

  “Other than the guy who owns the complex? Nobody. That’s what makes it a little weird. The thing is, I came out here last week and spent some time going through everything. It was the same day I visited the hunting land. I don’t know, I guess I needed to face Art again.”

  “Do you think someone followed you?” Stride asked.

  “I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Well, let’s take a look,” Stride said.

  They both got out of their vehicles. Chris was slightly hunched from the flu and looked even smaller than he was. Stride checked the door to the storage unit and saw a padlock sitting in the snow, its shackle cut open. He bent down and slid up the garage door. Inside, the unit was crammed with furniture and boxes stacked on gray steel shelves. There wasn’t much room to walk. He saw paintings and framed photographs leaning against the walls on either side, and he recognized some of them from inside Art’s house.

  Several of the boxes had been pulled off the shelves. They lay on the concrete floor, their lids open. A square nineteen-inch Panasonic television sat next to the boxes, its cord plugged into a power outlet on the wall. There was an old VHS player connected to the television, and its green light was on. He pushed the eject button, but the machine was empty.

  “Did you leave it this way?” Stride asked.

  “No, the boxes were on the shelves, and the TV wasn’t plugged in.”

  “Somebody was watching something,” Stride said.

  Stride squatted and pawed through the boxes on the floor. It was like an encyclopedia of Art’s career. He saw newspaper clippings of Art getting journalism awards and Art emceeing outdoor city events. There were plaques from charities and reading lists from the classes he’d taught. Stride also saw dozens of videotapes. They were archives of stories Art had done over the years. Each was neatly labeled, and Stride recognized Art’s handwriting. He took them out of the box one after another, and he remembered each of the stories from years earlier. It was like a history of his own life.

  Murder-Suicide at Antenna Farm

  Kerry McGrath Lakeside Disappearance

  Mort Greeley / Child Abduction at the Zoo

  Wallace Corruption Investigation

  “Is anything missing?” Stride asked in a flat voice.

  Chris sat silently on the cold concrete six feet away. He had another box between his legs, and he’d removed some of the contents. Stride could see gruesome memorabilia from Art’s other job as a serial killer. Newspapers with headlines about the trial. An old pair of boots that Stride knew had been found with traces of DNA from one of the victims in the box. Even a long ribbon of fabric that had been torn from a prison bedsheet. Stride was surprised Chris had kept it. It was the cell-made rope Art had used to hang himself.

  “Anything missing?” he asked again.

  “Only one thing that I see,” Chris replied finally. “The tape recorder.”

  “What?”

  “The old cassette recorder that Art used to make the victims tape their messages to you. I kept it in this box. Now it’s gone.”

  32

  “So who’s Troy?” Cab asked Maggie as they drove to the Central Hillside apartment that Peach Piper had rented. “I heard Serena mention him to you after the meeting.”

  “Troy is my Mosquito,” Maggie explained.

  “Ah. Recent breakup?”

  “Christmas,” she said.

  “Very recent. So what happened?”

  She wiggled the fingers of her left hand. “He wanted to put a ring on that.”

  “And you don’t want anything on your finger?”

  “Nope.”

  With only one hand on the wheel, Maggie nearly lost control of the Avalanche. The truck bumped halfway onto the sidewalk before she steered it back into the street. In the process, she breezed through a stop sign and nearly collided with a panel van coming down the steep hillside toward the lake. The back of the Avalanche fishtailed, and the van’s angry horn blared in their ears.

  “I think I just saw my dead grandmother,” Cab remarked.

  “You and Stride. Always with the crap about my driving.”

  “Not at all. Next time I rob a bank, you’re my getaway driver. Utterly fearless. So what’s the deal with Troy? Is he a tall suave blond like yours truly?”

  Maggie chuckled. “Troy’s not much taller than me and not much smaller than Guppo. He could also bench-press the two of us put together. He’s a widower with two daughters and a heart the size of Alaska. So in other words, he is nicer and sweeter than me in every possible way.”

 
Cab was silent for a long time. “If you hadn’t sworn to me that you wanted nothing but casual relationships, I would almost think that you were still in love with him.”

  “That is not a good way to get laid tonight, Bolton,” Maggie replied sharply. “Can we drop it?”

  Cab grinned. “Consider it dropped.”

  Maggie spotted the apartment building ahead of them and pointed the Avalanche at it like a torpedo. She parked at a forty-five-degree angle on the street with one wheel over the curb and then swiveled her head to stare at Cab, as if daring him to say something. He was smart enough simply to smirk and keep his mouth shut.

  She let them into Peach’s ground-floor apartment.

  “Stride and I searched the place after she went missing,” Maggie told him. “Then Guppo did another search after we found the body. If Guppo didn’t find anything, there’s nothing to be found.”

  “Well, I know how Peach thinks.”

  “I get that, but John Doe got here ahead of us. He took everything.”

  Cab didn’t look discouraged. He wandered around the apartment, picking things up and putting them down, as if they would give him inspiration. Peach hadn’t left behind many personal items. Near the sofa was a pair of red Crocs, and Cab turned them over with the toe of his shoe and examined the bottoms. Then he kicked them away. He saw a rubber band on the carpet and picked it up and stretched it between his hands. He went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, which contained nothing but a pint of mocha chip ice cream, a Heggies pizza, two Lean Cuisine dinners, and a package of frozen spinach. Cab opened the ice cream container and dug around inside with one of his fingers.

  “You think she hid something in there?” Maggie asked.

  “No, I just like mocha chip,” Cab said.

  He licked away the ice cream and then took the package of spinach and popped it in the microwave and zapped it on high.

  “You want some spinach, too?” Maggie asked dubiously.

  “I love spinach,” he said with a little smile, “but more importantly, Peach hates it. When I first met her, I watched her pick it off a pizza at a motel in Lake Wales, Florida.”