Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

  Maggie cocked her head and did a double take. “I’ll be damned.”

  She waited next to Cab while the little brick of spinach went around and around in the microwave. A few minutes later, the timer dinged, and Cab retrieved the mushy package and put it on the counter. He carefully unsealed the wrapper and opened the white plastic carton inside. Then, using the tines of two forks, he carefully picked through the green wad of spinach.

  “Et voilà,” he said.

  “What the hell is that?” Maggie asked.

  It was a small package of plastic wrap, no more than two inches by two inches, that Peach had secreted inside the spinach and then resealed. Still using the forks, Cab carefully peeled back the folds of the plastic until it was open on the counter. Inside was a rhinestone button shaped like a crystal flower, the kind that might appear on a woman’s dress.

  Maggie began to feel sorry that she’d never had a chance to meet Peach Piper. The girl was clever.

  “A button,” she said. “I wonder where she got it. And who it belonged to.”

  “I have no idea, but Peach obviously thought it was important.”

  “Do you think there’s anything else in the apartment?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Cab said.

  They left the kitchen and went into the bedroom, and this time Cab didn’t even hesitate or look anywhere else. He went straight to the white mannequin standing behind the door with her arm cocked seductively behind her head.

  “Sexpot,” he said, as if talking directly to the mannequin. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Maggie asked.

  “Peach had a collection of mannequins,” Cab explained. “It was a little weird, and she’d be the first to say so. She had six of them in her bedroom in Florida. Ditty, Petunia, Harley, Bon Bon, Rickles, and Sexpot. I don’t know how the hell she got Sexpot up here with her, but there was very little that Peach couldn’t do.”

  He put his hands on his hips and studied the mannequin, which was made of fiberglass and was connected to a heavy glass stand by a jointed metal rod. He began to undress it.

  “Something you want to tell me about your fetishes?” Maggie asked.

  Cab winked at her.

  When Sexpot was naked, he carefully detached the mannequin’s cocked arm from the rest of the body. He studied the metal plates on both sides, then reattached the arm and did the same thing on the other side. Then he removed the head and segmented the torso from the legs. When he found nothing, he lifted the entire mannequin off the metal rod that secured it on the glass base. Two screws with plastic caps held the rod in place on a metal pole that jutted out of the base, and Cab loosened both screws and separated the rod from the base. It was hollow.

  He peered inside the small square tube.

  “Can you grab me a wire coat hanger from the closet?” he asked.

  Maggie found one and handed it to Cab, who straightened the hook end and stretched the rest of the hanger until it was no wider than the mouth of the rod. He shoved the hook end inside the rod and wiggled it around. Then he yanked. The coat hanger slid out of the rod, and so did a wad of gum. After that, a small piece of plastic and metal dropped into Cab’s hand.

  A flash drive.

  Maggie smiled. “I like this girl.”

  “So did I,” Cab replied. “Do you have a laptop in your car?”

  “I do.”

  Maggie left the apartment and jogged back to her Avalanche and retrieved a laptop from underneath the backseat. She came back and found Cab sitting at the weathered oak desk near the window. She dragged another chair next to him, and together they booted up the laptop. The wallpaper on Maggie’s computer screen showed a photo of Troy Grange with his bulging squirrel cheeks and shaved head in the cockpit of his time-share Cessna, wearing pale green headphones. He grinned at her from the computer, and Maggie winced.

  “Guess I better change that,” she said.

  Cab said nothing. He inserted the flash drive into one of the USB ports. A few seconds later, the drive opened and spilled a list of dozens of JPEG photos down the screen across Troy’s face. He switched the view to thumbnails, and when he opened the first of the photographs, he saw the double front doors of a house. The picture had been taken at night, with the faces of two women dimly illuminated by a porch light.

  “Do you recognize this place?” Cab asked.

  Maggie squinted. “Looks like the house Casperson is renting.”

  “What about the women?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  Cab clicked to the next picture, which showed the same angle on the house, with a man on the porch with his back to the camera. Each of the next several photographs showed different people entering the house. Maggie spotted a couple of individuals she recognized from the film set, but most were strangers or their faces weren’t visible in the pictures.

  “Looks like she’s documenting a party,” Maggie said. “What’s the date on the files?”

  Cab checked. “A week ago Saturday.”

  He went slowly through the photographs one by one. Maggie studied the faces where she could see them, but they told her nothing. After fifty nearly identical pictures, the people began to blur. Then, as Cab clicked to the next picture, her mind caught up with her eyes.

  “Hang on, go back one,” she said.

  Cab used the touch pad to return to the earlier photograph, which showed a man just inside the open door, slipping off a coat to reveal the shoulders of a red dress shirt. He was partly blocking a tall young woman next to him, who was in profile. She caught a glimpse of long reddish hair covering most of her face, but she could also barely make out a hint of her glasses. They were turquoise blue.

  “I think that’s Rochelle Wahl,” Maggie said. “She was there, just like Serena thought.”

  “Who’s that with her?”

  “I can’t be sure from the back, but it looks like Jungle Jack to me.”

  Cab enlarged the photo and studied the man. “I think you’re right.”

  “Skip ahead. Is there anything with Casperson?”

  Cab scrolled through the array of photographs. He opened up several with different angles, but they were mostly dark exterior shots of the house. Peach had zoomed in on a second-floor room where the lights were on, but it was impossible to make out any details behind the curtains.

  “That’s Casperson’s bedroom, but we can’t see inside,” Maggie said. “What about photos of people leaving? If the girl Curt Dickes saw was really Rochelle Wahl, she had to be helped out of the party.”

  “They wouldn’t have taken her out the front door,” Cab said.

  Maggie nodded. “You’re right. Are there any photographs that focus on the side of the house?”

  He enlarged the window and leaned forward to get a better look at the thumbnails. At some point during the evening, the photographs shifted, showing people heading out the house’s front door. Peach had shot all of them one by one, but Maggie didn’t see Rochelle Wahl, and she didn’t see a man wearing a burgundy shirt. Then, near the end of the array, the camera switched to a different angle.

  “There,” she said.

  The photograph showed a sedan parked in the driveway beyond the main entrance, in the shadows of the north wing. There was only low light glowing through the house windows, making the details hard to distinguish as Cab enlarged the picture.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s John Doe’s Impala,” Maggie said.

  The next picture confirmed it. The driver’s door and a rear door were both open, lighting up the car and two people around it. She saw John Doe loading an unconscious woman into the back of the Impala. Peach had taken several photographs one after another, catching the action in progress; she knew she was witnessing something important. Most were out of focus. One photograph, however, caught the girl’s face turned toward the camera, eyes closed, hair spilling across her face, blue glasses dangling off one ear.

  “That’s definitely Rochelle,” Maggie
said. She added in a subdued voice, “She doesn’t look fifteen, does she?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if they found her school ID in her purse and panicked,” she said.

  “Look at her dress, too,” Cab added, zooming in as far as the resolution of the photograph would take him.

  The dress was hard to make out in the enlargement, but it was either navy or black. At first, Maggie didn’t understand what she was looking for, but then she spotted tiny silver glints running in two rows down the front of the dress.

  “Are those buttons?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Is that what Peach hid in the freezer?”

  “Could be,” Cab said.

  Maggie rocked back in the chair, lifting the front legs off the carpet. “Where did she find it?”

  Cab kept scrolling. He saw a shift in the character of the thumbnails on the screen. Night changed to day. The location was different, too. Peach had staked out a location across a rural highway from a small complex of rental cottages.

  “That’s where John Doe was staying,” Maggie said. “What day were these pictures taken?”

  “Monday.”

  “So that’s the day after Rochelle’s death hit the evening news and one day before Peach disappeared.”

  “Except how did she know where to find John Doe?” Cab asked. “I can’t believe he was hanging around the movie set. Casperson would have wanted to keep him under wraps.”

  He opened more photographs. It was obvious that Peach had staked out the apartment complex for hours, taking photographs of every vehicle coming and going from the highway. The pictures stretched through the afternoon hours and into the evening. The darkness made the details harder to distinguish, but Peach stayed there as if waiting for someone.

  “Look at that,” Maggie said, pointing at one of the pictures, which showed a familiar face outside the cottages. “She wasn’t staking out John Doe; she was staking out Jungle Jack. She saw Jack arrive with Rochelle and saw her getting helped out to the car. And the next day, Rochelle’s death was all over the news. Peach knew that girl didn’t freeze to death in her PJs. She was at Casperson’s party.”

  Cab clicked a few more pictures forward. “Look who’s talking to Jack,” he said.

  “John Doe. They’re together. We’ve got Rochelle at the party with Jack, John Doe driving her away, and then Jack and John Doe together at the apartment complex two days later. And in between, Rochelle’s death was staged to look like an accident instead of murder.”

  “Is that enough to bring Jack in?”

  Maggie reached over and put her hand over Cab’s and moved the touch pad down to reach the last file on the flash drive. It was a video, time-stamped the same evening.

  She played it.

  Peach was on the move, obviously wearing a video camera clipped to her coat. She was in the parking lot of the complex, outside John Doe’s car. In the audio background, Maggie could hear Peach breathing. The interior of the car was too dark to make out any details, but as they watched, Peach used a slim jim to dig into the driver’s side window and unlock the vehicle.

  She opened the door. The dome light went on. They could see Peach turn nervously back to watch John Doe’s rental cottage, which was only a few feet away. The lights in the cottage were off.

  “Aw, hell, Peach, what were you doing?” Cab murmured.

  Peach opened the car’s back door, and the video followed her as she began searching the interior of the car, where Rochelle Wahl had been stretched out unconscious after the party. She dug her fingers into the seats, and they could hear her frustration at finding nothing. Then she began peering under the seats, and she pulled out a penlight and shone it along the car’s floor.

  They heard a tiny squeal of excitement, and Peach’s hand disappeared under the seat. When it came out, there was a rhinestone button pinched between her fingertips. They could hear her voice on the video, just a whisper.

  Maggie realized it was the only time she’d ever have a chance to hear Peach Piper speak.

  “Gotcha,” Peach said.

  33

  “I suppose you can’t smoke in here,” Jungle Jack said as he sat across from Stride in the police interview room. He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his burgundy shirt.

  “No,” Stride replied.

  “Oh, well.” Jack shoved the cigarettes back in his pocket. “I bet you used to be a smoker. Am I right?”

  “In fact, you are.”

  Jack grinned. “I can always tell. Doesn’t matter how long since somebody’s quit, I can see it in their face when they look at a pack. There’s still that longing, you know? It never goes away.”

  Stride ignored the comment, although Jack was right. “Before I ask you any questions, I’m going to read you your rights.”

  He rattled off the Miranda warning, and Jack listened with amused disinterest. The man didn’t seem intimidated or concerned. “Are you willing to talk to me without a lawyer present?” Stride asked.

  “I can’t imagine why I’d need one.”

  “Okay, good.” Then he added, “I like your shirt, Jack.”

  A little furrow of confusion crossed the man’s brow. “Thanks.”

  Stride took a photograph out of a folder and put it in front of Jack. It was the photograph Peach Piper had taken of the front door of Casperson’s house, with Rochelle Wahl standing next to a man who looked a lot like Jack Jensen. “Same shirt, right?” he asked, pointing at the picture.

  “Could be.”

  “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  “It looks like me,” Jack allowed. “From the back, it’s hard to tell.”

  “This was taken last Saturday night.”

  “Right. The party.”

  “Who’s the girl with you?” Stride asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You didn’t bring her to the party?”

  “No.”

  “She’s standing right there with you,” Stride pointed out.

  “She must have arrived at the same time.”

  “You’ve never seen her before?”

  “No, not that I recall.”

  “She’s not connected to the movie. How would she have gotten into a party at Dean’s house?”

  “Pretty girls hang around the set all the time,” Jack said. “They hear about a party. They show up. Nobody says no.”

  “Did you sleep with her?” Stride asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you sleep with anyone at the party?”

  “The night’s a bit of a blur, but I usually do.”

  “Who?”

  “They all blend together, Lieutenant.”

  “Did Dean sleep with this girl?” Stride asked.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed in suspicion at the shift in questions. “Dean? Absolutely not.”

  “How do you know? It sounds like you were pretty busy that evening.”

  “I know Dean.”

  “So you don’t actually know whether he did or didn’t?”

  “I guess you’ll have to ask him,” Jack replied.

  Stride took another photograph out of the folder. “Here’s a picture of the same girl leaving the party.”

  Jack leaned forward. “Looks like she had a little too much to drink.”

  “In the morning, she was found dead. Her name was Rochelle Wahl.” Stride waited a beat. “She was fifteen.”

  Jack took a long time before he said anything. “Really. I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “What was a fifteen-year-old doing at Dean Casperson’s party?”

  “Lying about her age, I imagine,” Jack replied. “It happens.”

  “If it came out that an underage girl had sex at one of Dean’s parties, there would be serious consequences. For the movie. For him and his reputation.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “It makes me think Dean would be willing to do just about anything to get that girl out of the house and make sure no on
e knew she was there,” Stride said.

  “It sounds to me like you’ve been watching too many of Dean’s thrillers.”

  Stride tapped the photograph. “We think this other man took Rochelle back to her house and changed her clothes and then knocked her unconscious and left her out in the snow to freeze to death.”

  “Or maybe she went home and had an accident. If you’re a kid and you drink too much, bad things can happen.”

  “Except when a girl leaves a party with a hired killer, it’s usually murder, not an accident.”

  “Hired killer?” Jack asked. He made a show of looking at the photograph again. “Oh, this guy. You asked me about him before. He was staying at the same apartments as me. Hey, I wish I could tell you more about him, but like I said, I only bumped into him a couple times. That’s all.”

  Stride showed him one of Peach’s photographs that showed John Doe and Jack Jensen talking outside John Doe’s rental cottage. “Was this one of the times you bumped into him?”

  Jack smiled. “You have a lot of pictures, Lieutenant.”

  “What were you two talking about?” Stride asked.

  “I have no idea. He was probably asking me for a restaurant recommendation in town. I like that place by the water. Grandma’s.”

  “Who called this man to pick up Rochelle Wahl at the party?”

  “I have no idea about that, either. For all I know, he was at the party himself. Maybe he and this girl came together. Or maybe he’s an Uber driver. I don’t know anything about this, Lieutenant. You’re talking to the wrong guy.”

  “We have his cell phone records,” Stride said. “Half an hour before this photograph was taken of him putting the girl in his car, he got a call from a burner phone. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Did you make that call? Was it your phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Could Dean Casperson have made the call?” Stride asked.

  “Dean? He can barely operate a flip phone.”

  “Someone called this man to the party, he picked up Rochelle Wahl, he killed her.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true,” Jack replied, “but I don’t know anything about it.”

  Stride leaned across the interview table. “Do I need to lay it all out for you, Mr. Jensen? We have a picture of you arriving at the party with Rochelle Wahl. We have a picture of John Doe loading her unconscious body into his car two hours later. We have a picture of you and John Doe together two days after that. These pictures were all taken by the young woman who called herself Haley Adams. She was really a private detective from Florida named Peach Piper. The day after Peach took these photos of you and this man together, Peach disappeared. We found her body. She’d been shot by the gun that was found in this man’s car. By the way, that same gun was used to shoot a waitress in Florida on the same day you ate at her restaurant. Would you like to explain all of that for me, Mr. Jensen?”