Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

  “Maybe, but I don’t know what he would gain by staging a copycat of Art Leipold. He tries to stay out of the headlines.”

  He felt his phone vibrating inside his pocket. He checked it and saw that Guppo was calling from inside the house. It was a quick call, and then Stride shoved his phone back in his jeans.

  “Max says they were able to find a cassette player,” Stride said. “We can listen to the tape. Let’s get back to headquarters.”

  Stride turned away, but Serena reached out and grabbed his arm. “Jonny? What if this isn’t a copycat?”

  He stared at her face, which was flushed with cold. Snow gathered on her eyelids and melted into water on her cheeks. “What do you mean?”

  “Last night, Aimee told me she thought Art Leipold was innocent. She said somebody else put all those women in the box. I didn’t believe her when she said it, but now? I don’t know.”

  “Did she say why she thought so?”

  “This is Aimee. I think she just sensed it.”

  Stride shook his head. “Come on, Serena.”

  “It sounds crazy to me, too, but look what’s going on.”

  “It’s been eleven years. If Art was innocent, why would the killer have gone dark all that time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Every shred of evidence pointed to Art. He did it.”

  “I hope you’re right, Jonny,” Serena told him. “I do. But even with Art dead, we both know what’s waiting for us at headquarters, don’t we? We’re about to listen to a tape from a woman who’s locked in a cage somewhere. And if we don’t find her soon, she’s going to die.”

  *

  “Save me.”

  That was the first whisper Stride heard.

  He looked at Serena, who nodded at him. There was no doubt. It was Aimee Bowe’s voice. The tape crackled as if time had rewound. It might as well have been eleven years earlier, when Stride stood under a water-stained ceiling in the basement of City Hall. Back then, he’d listened to the first victim, Kristal Beech, saying the same words to him. Maggie had been there. So had Guppo. He’d gone home to his wife, Cindy, and told her about the horror he felt as he listened to the tape.

  They’d all been much younger.

  “It’s cold. Oh, my God, it’s so cold. And dark. I can’t see anything. I can’t even see my hand when I put it in front of my eyes. Where am I? Tell me where I am. Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? I know, I know, I’m supposed to say it. Save me. Save me.”

  He heard static in the silence. He listened for something in the background, some clue, some noise, that would tell them where she was. But the cage was virtually soundproof. Just as it had been back then. The only sound was the ragged in-and-out gasp of Aimee’s breathing.

  When she spoke again, her voice was louder.

  “I don’t know how much time I have. There’s no water in here. No food. And the cold is like a knife. You have to find me. Quickly. I know about the others. I know they died because you failed. Yes, you. Jonathan Stride. I’m here because of you. I’m paying for your mistakes.”

  Stride pushed the plastic button on the tape recorder to pause the playback.

  “Is this real?” he asked Serena.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What do you think?” he asked again. “Is this real? Or is something else going on here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He started the tape again.

  “My name is Aimee Bowe. I don’t know where I am, but you know all you need to know to find me. My life is in your hands. I need you to save me if you can. Save me, Jonathan Stride.”

  The tape rolled on, but the recording was over. Stride let it play for several more minutes to see if anything else was on the tape. It was empty.

  “I didn’t hear any clues,” he said. “Nothing that would tell us where she is.”

  “‘You know all you need to know to find me,’” Serena quoted. “Did the others say anything like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the tape itself?” she asked.

  “There are no fingerprints on it. Apparently, Maxell cassettes are still surprisingly easy to find. Whoever did this could have gotten the tape just about anywhere. The forensic team thinks it’s new.”

  “But why steal Art Leipold’s tape recorder? You can still buy tape recorders in various places, can’t you?”

  “Maybe because it belonged to Art. If a copycat wanted to follow in Art’s footsteps, that’s one way to do it.” He noted Serena’s dubious expression, and he continued. “We found the tape recorder next to the box in the hunting lodge. Art’s fingerprints were all over it.”

  “You worked that case, Jonny. I didn’t. I’m not doubting you.”

  But he could see that she was, and it bothered him.

  “Why did you ask me if the tape wasn’t real?” Serena said. “Did you hear something?”

  Stride didn’t answer immediately. He rewound the tape and played it over from start to finish without stopping. When he heard the final words—Save me, Jonathan Stride—he clicked it off. He watched Serena’s face.

  “You hear it, too, don’t you?” he asked. “It’s too perfect. The original tapes from the victims were rough. They stuttered. They made mistakes. They started and stopped. Aimee sounds rehearsed, like an actress, not a victim. She sounds as if she’s reading from a script.”

  “She is,” Serena said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything she said is from the script of the movie. I heard the first take she did in the warehouse when she was doing her scene in the box. The words match. I’m pretty sure they match exactly. The only thing she changed was to take out the fictional character, Evan Grave, and put in your real name.”

  “So it’s fake?” Stride said.

  “I’m not sure about that, Jonny.”

  “You said yourself she’s an actress reading lines. What else could it be?”

  Serena played the tape one more time. Then she said, “No, I don’t think it’s fake. Aimee’s in danger. But she knows I was there to watch her in that scene, so she knows I’d realize what she was doing. Somehow, she’s trying to send me a message.”

  37

  Stride met Chris Leipold at the dead end spur off Highway 44 near Art Leipold’s hunting land. When Chris got out of the car, Stride could feel the blast of warm air from inside. It was desolate out there. They were the only two people around for miles. He watched Chris shiver as the cold penetrated his skin. The man still looked dragged down by the flu virus. Or maybe he felt the ghost of his father in this place.

  “Sorry to pull you away from the movie,” Stride said.

  “I’ve got assistants to keep it rolling. Dean’s done. Really, all we need is Aimee, but we don’t have her.” A gust of wind made a mournful cry in the trees, and he added in the quiet aftermath, “I don’t understand what happened.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “You said you got an audiotape. A message. Like all those years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you want to meet me here?” Chris asked.

  “Because someone is playing Art’s game. And this is where we found Art’s victims.”

  Together, they took the bridge over the Cloquet River. Several more inches of snow had fallen overnight, covering up the evidence of anyone who had trespassed there in the interim. He noticed that Chris didn’t say much and looked uncomfortable being there at all. The cold air made the man cough repeatedly as he inhaled.

  They followed the trail inside the trees, where the snow had trouble penetrating the branches overhead.

  “Why did you never sell this land?” Stride asked him.

  “I tried. No one wanted it. Can you blame them? The hunters come out here anyway. They don’t care who owns the land. And it wasn’t worth the money to keep curiosity seekers away from the cabin. So I just let it rot.”

  Where the trail narrowed, Stride took the lead. Chris kept pace behind h
im. The remnants of footprints lingered where the snow was shallower, but there were too many to isolate fresh tracks. Even so, he noticed a few places where the prints had been scrubbed away down to the mud, and it made him wonder if someone had been trying to make sure that nothing was left behind. He kept an eye on the dense woods ahead of him, looking for movement.

  “What did Art say to you when he was first arrested?” Stride asked.

  “That he didn’t do it.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “Sure. He was a son of a bitch, but he was my dad. I didn’t want to think that he could be such a monster.”

  “After the trial was over, did you ever wonder?” Stride asked.

  “Wonder what?”

  “Whether Art really did it.”

  There was no answer behind him. Stride took a few more steps, then turned around. Chris had stopped where he was. It was hard to interpret the look on his face. Anger. Disbelief. Confusion.

  “What the hell are you saying?” Chris asked.

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Art killed those women. You said so. The county attorney said so. The jury said so.”

  “I know.”

  “How could he be innocent? The women died here. They were all connected to Art. You found evidence in our house. You told me it didn’t point any other way.”

  “That’s all true.”

  Stride started walking again. Eventually, he heard the slushy footsteps of Chris catching up with him. They didn’t talk more as he pushed through the trees that grew across the trail. He stopped at the fringe of the clearing as the ruined cabin came into view. Chris stood beside him, and they both stared at it like it was a monument to bad history. Stride watched and listened. The cabin was deserted.

  “Did you come out here much as a kid?” Stride asked.

  “To the cabin? Not very often. It was pretty rustic. I remember the spiders and the wasp nests. It scared me to sleep here, so I didn’t like it. Art was a hunter. Me, not so much. I didn’t really see the point.”

  Stride knew Chris was cold and wanted to leave. The man danced on his feet impatiently, and his nose ran.

  “How did you write the script for Aimee’s scenes?” Stride asked in a low voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did you make it convincing? We didn’t release much information to the public.”

  “You released transcripts of the audiotapes,” Chris said.

  “But that’s all we did. Nothing else. What the women said on the tapes was coached. It wasn’t really them talking. I was just wondering how you got inside their heads for the movie.”

  “Well, that’s what writers do. We put ourselves inside someone else’s life.”

  Stride nodded. “There was something strange in Aimee’s message on the tape. She used your words.”

  “My words?”

  “She took it straight from the film script. Do you have any idea why she would do that?”

  “No.”

  “Serena thinks she was sending us some kind of message,” Stride said.

  “I don’t know what it could be. Aimee’s an actor. Actors memorize lines. If she was under pressure, maybe that’s all she could think to say.”

  “You said Aimee liked to improvise. After the first take, she almost never stuck to the script.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So I wonder why she would go back to your original words right now.”

  “I can’t explain it, Lieutenant.”

  Stride nodded. “Okay. That’s fine. You can leave now if you want, Chris. You look like you’re freezing.”

  “I am.”

  Chris turned around and hiked at a fast pace back into the woods, which swallowed him up quickly and left Stride alone. He waited until he couldn’t hear or see Chris at all, then made his way into the small clearing. The evidence of trespassers was everywhere. In the daylight, he could see the black scorch marks where the walls had burned and the open mouth of the caved-in roof. He walked all the way up to the front of the cabin, where he could see inside.

  There had been a cage there eleven years ago. A box.

  Not now. Now it was empty. He was in the wrong place.

  But whoever took Aimee had expected him to come here. There was a fallen beam from the roof immediately inside the cabin, and someone had spray-painted a message in red across the timber.

  It was the same message that had come with each dead body.

  BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.

  *

  Serena arrived at Lori Fulkerson’s house while Lori was turning her Yaris off the gravel road into her yard. Both women got out into the cascading snow. Serena met Lori at the sagging wooden steps that led up to the storm door. Inside the house, her Yorkshire terrier jumped and pawed at the glass.

  “Ms. Fulkerson, do you have a minute?” Serena asked.

  “I have all day,” she replied. “The store closed because of the storm.”

  Lori opened the door and scooped her dog off the floor. Serena followed the woman into the tiny, cluttered living room and had to sit on top of newspapers again. Lori sank into her recliner with the dog in her lap. The house was cold. Snow plastered over the windows made the interior dark and gloomy.

  “What’s going on?” Lori asked.

  “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news reports, but Aimee Bowe is missing.”

  “Missing? What do you mean?”

  “Her disappearance seems to be a replay of what happened to Art’s victims.”

  “Art’s dead,” Lori said. “How could that be?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. I was wondering if you’d noticed any unusual activity around your house or in the neighborhood.”

  “Do you think I’m in danger?” Lori asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope not, but we’re not taking any chances. You’re one of only a handful of people with a direct connection to what happened back then. I’m going to ask a police officer to stay on the road outside and keep an eye on your house while we’re investigating. There’s probably no danger to you, but until we understand the threat, I’d rather be safe.”

  “I have a dog,” Lori said.

  Serena smiled. The Yorkie in Lori’s lap wasn’t two feet long from nose to tail. “And he does look ferocious, but I’d still like to have an officer close by.”

  Lori shrugged. “Okay.”

  “I know this is difficult, and I’m sure you went through it many times eleven years ago, but I was hoping you could tell me a little more about what you remember from your experience.”

  “Inside the box? I already told Aimee more than I’ve ever told anyone else.”

  “I meant the abduction itself. Were you conscious? Did you see or hear anything?”

  “No. I was sleeping when he hit me in the head. I woke up in the box.”

  “So you never actually saw Art Leipold?”

  Lori’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What are you saying?”

  “It’s just a question.”

  “No, I didn’t see him,” she replied.

  “When you made the audiotape, how did you know what to say?” Serena asked.

  “There was a voice. He said if I wanted to be rescued, I had to beg for it. I had to ask to be saved. He told me the name I had to use. Jonathan Stride. He said he was the only man who could rescue me.”

  “Did you recognize the voice? Did it sound familiar? Art was on television. His voice must have been pretty distinctive.”

  “The voice was disguised,” Lori said. “Muffled. Whiny. He didn’t want me to recognize it.”

  “Did you have some kind of connection with Art? The three earlier victims had all intersected with him at one point or another. I was wondering if that was true of you, too.”

  Lori nodded. “I helped him on special orders for parts. He was a car collector. He was in the store a lot.”

  “Did he pay any special attention to you?”

  “I didn’
t think so at the time, but I guess I was wrong. I’d only been back in town for a few months at that point. He used to ask me a lot of questions about growing up here and what it was like to move away and come back. I just figured he was making small talk.”

  “What about Art’s son, Chris? Did you ever meet him?”

  Lori looked at her strangely. “You mean before the movie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah, he came into the store with Art once. I only remember because they were having a big argument.”

  “Do you remember what the argument was about?”

  “No. Why do you care?”

  “I wasn’t in Duluth during that investigation,” Serena said. “I’m just trying to understand whether anything from the past could be connected to Aimee’s disappearance.”

  “I don’t see how,” Lori said.

  “Have you talked to Aimee recently?”

  “I went to her house the other night. I saw you there. That’s all.”

  Serena stood up. “Well, thank you for your time, Ms. Fulkerson. You should see a squad car outside your house very soon. Regardless, if you see anything unusual, please call me right away.”

  Lori nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “I do have one more question,” Serena said, “and I know this will sound strange.”

  “What is it?”

  “When I talked to you at Aimee’s house, you said you felt connected to her. Like she was inside your head.”

  “So?”

  Serena took a breath. This wasn’t the kind of question she’d ever imagined herself asking. “So I was wondering if you still felt that way.”

  Lori stroked the head of her dog and didn’t look up at Serena. “I do feel something. Until you showed up, I thought I was crazy. I figured the movie was getting into my head. You know, seeing Aimee pretend to be me.”

  “What do you feel? What do you think happened to her?”

  “She’s in the box,” Lori said.

  38

  Maggie drove toward the campus of the College of St. Scholastica. Her windshield wipers struggled against the snow, and the lanes in the street were no more than ruts tamped down by the other cars. Her route down the street was a serpentine path as her tires slipped and skidded. Ahead of them, the twin gray towers of the administration building loomed atop the campus hill.