“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“Five years of work up in smoke in five hours. Now I’m the guy who wasted tens of millions of dollars and got nothing to show for it.”
“It’s not your fault that Dean Casperson is a sexual predator.”
Chris shook his head. “You don’t know Hollywood.”
Stride tried to feel bad, but he’d hated the idea of this movie from the beginning. There was no value in celebrating evil. “Be honest with me, Chris. Did you know what was going on?”
The writer turned his head slowly. “About Dean?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. Everyone knew. Do you think it’s only him? Every actress has a story about someone in this business. They swallow it down and smile and pretend it never happened. It’s what women everywhere do with powerful men.”
Stride wished that Chris was wrong. But he wasn’t.
“I’ve asked you this question a hundred times,” Stride said, “but I’ve never really gotten an answer. Why did you want to do this movie, anyway? Why did you write a script about what Art did?”
“I already told you; the movie was never about Art.”
“Except it is,” Stride said. “We both know that.”
“I cast a nobody to play Art. I cast Dean Casperson to play you.”
“Yes, thanks for that,” Stride replied drily. “Tell me the truth. How did you really feel about your father?”
Chris took a long time to reply. Then he said, “I loathed him.”
“Even before the murders?”
“Yes. He was a son of a bitch. All my life, he made sure I knew that he was Art Leipold and I was just a mediocre reproduction. A genetic copy made on bad carbon paper. I was never going to accomplish a fraction of what he did. He was a news anchor. I was a nobody.”
“That must have hurt,” Stride said.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve paid a lot of shrinks a lot of money over the years to deal with that. And yes, you’re right, that’s why I did the movie. Sure it is. I wanted to show him up once and for all. I wanted the world to see who he was. A nobody. A cruel, sadistic nobody. Now look what’s happened. Art gets the last laugh. I tried to destroy him, and he destroys me instead.”
Stride stood up and extended a hand. “Come on, Chris, let’s go inside.”
“I should go.”
“You’re in no condition to drive. You can sleep it off on our sofa.”
He helped Chris out of the chair and opened the cottage door. The house was drafty, the way it always was. The lights in the living room were low, and he could hear Serena working in the dining room beyond the great space. He guided Chris to the red leather sofa and draped him across it. He covered him with an afghan. Chris was asleep almost immediately.
Stride joined Serena in the dining room, where the lights were brighter. He kissed her, then went to the kitchen to get another Coke, but the caffeine was losing its punch. He was tired. He took a seat next to Serena and scanned the research she’d been doing. The dining room table was covered with his files and notes from the Art Leipold murders. She’d pulled their television into the room, too, and set it up near the windows. Frozen on the screen was a still of Aimee Bowe from one of her scenes in the movie.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“No.”
“This is months of work. You’ve only been at it a couple hours.”
“I don’t know how much time Aimee has,” Serena said.
Stride jerked his thumb at the living room. “Chris is drunk. I put him on the sofa.”
“He was waiting for me when I got here,” Serena said. “I asked him to pull Aimee’s takes in the movie and put them on a disk for me. I thought he went back to his hotel.”
“Did he tell you? The movie is dead. They’re shutting it down.”
Serena didn’t look surprised. “So you’re not going to be a star after all?”
“I guess not.”
“Well, you’re a star to me,” she told him, leaning over to kiss him again. “And to Cat. I was worried about you tonight, Jonny. I really thought you were going to shoot Casperson.”
“I thought so, too. Did you make it to the hospital? How is she?”
“Sleeping.”
“You should probably get a couple hours of sleep yourself.”
“I can’t,” Serena said. “I have to keep at this. I have to find Aimee.”
“Okay, we’ll do it together.” Stride stretched his arms over his head and leaned back in the chair far enough that he could see Chris Leipold in the living room. He made sure Chris was out cold before he spoke. “To be honest, I was starting to wonder if Chris was the one who took Aimee. I was beginning to think he might have framed Art for the murders back then.”
“Why would he do that?” Serena asked.
“To get revenge against Art for making him feel worthless for most of his life. Except now I can see that the movie was really his revenge. He didn’t commit murder over it.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Nowhere,” Stride said. He gestured at the television. “Why did you want the videos from the movie?”
“I’ve been going over every take Aimee did to see if there was anything that would give us a clue.”
“And?”
“There’s nothing that I can see,” Serena said.
Stride took the remote control and started the video again. The scene looked familiar to him, and he realized that he’d been on the set while it was being filmed. Dean Casperson was rescuing Aimee Bowe from the cage where she’d been held. It was unsettling to him seeing Casperson in the movie when he’d pointed a gun at the man’s head only a few hours earlier in real life. On the screen, they’d traded places. Dean Casperson was him. Casperson was the one with the gun.
He watched the dialogue between the two actors:
“Who did this—”
“It doesn’t matter now. We have him. He’s not going to hurt anyone else.”
“I can’t move. What’s wrong with me?”
“Give it time.”
“I’m so cold.”
“You’ll be out of here soon.”
“I killed it. I killed it. I killed the little girl.”
Stride stopped the playback. “I know Aimee improvises, but I still don’t understand that line. ‘I killed the little girl.’ What does that mean? Did she say anything to you about where it came from?”
Serena smiled. “You’re as bad at movie lines as you are with song lyrics.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s not ‘little girl,’ Jonny. It’s ‘little bird.’ She’s saying she killed the little bird. She’s talking about the chickadee that was inside the cage with each victim. That was an awful thing. I can’t believe you never told me about it.”
Stride rewound the video and played it again. He listened carefully and realized that Serena was right.
I killed the little bird.
And again and again and again.
I killed the little bird. I killed the little bird. I killed the little bird.
Serena stared at him as he kept replaying the scene. “Jonny, what’s wrong?”
He thought about all the possibilities, but none of them led him where he needed to go. None of them had an innocent explanation. Something wasn’t right.
“How did Aimee know about that?” Stride asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How did she know about the chickadees? We never released that information publicly. We didn’t want any of the families to know about it. It was too disturbing.”
Serena shrugged. “Lori Fulkerson told her about it.”
“No, that’s impossible.”
“Jonny, I was there when Lori said it,” Serena insisted.
“Lori didn’t know,” Stride replied. “There was no chickadee in the cage with her. The others, yes, but not her. We assumed Art wasn’t able to trap one during the winter.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
“Feathers. There were no feathers in the box with her. When we dug up the bodies of the other women buried behind the cabin, we found feathers trapped in their clothes. And then when we did the autopsies and got the analysis of their stomach contents, we figured out what had happened. It was grotesque. No one needed to know about that. We made a conscious decision to keep it private out of respect for the victims. The county attorney didn’t use that information at the trial.”
“Well, Lori found out somehow,” Serena said. “Somebody must have told her.”
“No. Nobody told her. There are no more than ten people in Duluth who know about the chickadees. They’re cops and attorneys, and that’s all. I can give you their names. There is no way Lori Fulkerson could have known about it.”
Serena thought about it. Then she shook her head.
“There is one way, Jonny. What if Lori put those women in the box herself?”
45
Gray dawn broke through the snow as Craig Dawson completed his overnight maintenance shift at the Duluth Airport. Stormy nights always made for hard, backbreaking work inside and outside the terminal building. He’d been on the job for sixteen hours straight when his boss finally told him to go home. He was ready for a hot shower, a hot breakfast, and a cold beer.
Craig trudged across the skyway that led from the terminal to the parking garage. He wore his heavy coat, unzipped, his overalls, and his dirty work boots. An empty coffee thermos dangled from his hand. Snow had crusted on the skyway windows, but below him he could see the parking lot, which was mostly empty of cars. Flights had largely been canceled throughout the previous evening, and no one was here to make drop-offs and pickups. The handful of cars in long-term parking wore deep caps of snow.
He reached the covered ramp and made his way to his white F-150 pickup truck. As he turned on the engine, Maroon 5 blared from the radio. He dug in his coat pocket for a bottle of Advil and swallowed two pills. He wiped his brow, which was damp with sweat despite the cold.
No one else was leaving at the same time he was. He drove through the garage and used his key card to exit onto the one-way access road. He was distracted, thinking about what the driveway would look like at his farmhouse. He kept a plow attachment on his pickup at this time of year, and he knew he’d have to push through a quarter mile of eighteen-inch snow to make it to his garage.
He tapped the wheel to the music as he neared the four-way stop at Haines Road. He wasn’t looking for other traffic on the lonely highway, so he had to slam on his brakes to avoid a sleek black limousine that breezed through the intersection without stopping. Craig leaned on his horn, but the limo driver didn’t even slow down as he cruised toward the airport terminal.
Annoyed, Craig rolled down the window and shoved his hand into the cold air with his middle finger extended. He shouted a curse, which no one could hear. It made him feel better.
He continued eastward through the four-way stop on his way home.
But he kept thinking about the limousine.
He also remembered the business card tucked into his wallet and the name of the woman who’d given him the card. JoLynn Fields.
He’d met her at Sir Benedict’s the previous Thursday, when he’d gone to listen to the weekly Celtic Jam over a pint of Boddington’s. JoLynn, with her red-and-blue hair, was obviously an out-of-towner. The two of them were both around thirty, and when JoLynn had started chatting him up at the bar, he’d thought at first that she was hitting on him. Then he realized she was talking to all the men, asking questions about who they were and what they did and dropping off business cards.
She was a reporter looking for spies.
When she found out that Craig worked at the airport, she’d bought him two more drinks and let him put a hand on her leg. As she left, she told him, “If you see anybody famous coming or going or if something looks weird to you, give me a call. There’s a hundred bucks in it for every solid tip and five hundred more if it turns out to be something that gets in the paper.”
Craig thought an early-morning limousine was just the kind of thing that might be worth a hundred bucks.
He turned his pickup around and headed back toward the airport. At the four-way stop, he turned into the airport complex and was surprised to find the limousine stopped in the small cell phone lot just east of the terminal building. It wasn’t dropping off; it was picking up. Craig pulled into the same lot and parked a few empty spaces from the black limo.
He waited. Five minutes passed. Then ten. He was about to give up and go home when he saw lights in the sky. A private jet dropped below the blanket of dark clouds and zeroed in on the main runway. As Craig watched, it touched down, slipped a little, and decelerated all the way to the fence on the other side of the grassy field in front of him.
Craig knew his planes. He recognized it as a Gulfstream G280. It was very sleek and very expensive. He grabbed a pen and notepad from his glove compartment, and while the plane was turning around on the tarmac, he jotted down the tail number.
The limousine headed out of the cell phone lot toward the terminal building. Craig watched it go, and then he followed. The limo didn’t stop at the terminal doors; instead, it continued past the main building and turned into the driveway of the rental car parking lot. Craig waited outside the lot and watched with the engine running and his phone in his hands. The limo headed up to the locked gate that led onto the taxiway, and a few seconds later, the Gulfstream taxied into view on the other side of the fence. A guard met the limo and opened the gate, and the car drove up beside the private jet. The driver got out, ready to open the rear door.
The door of the plane swung outward. Metal stairs unfurled to the pavement. One passenger got out of the plane and carefully descended the steps in the light snow. Craig couldn’t see who it was. He zoomed in as far as he could and snapped several shots, but he knew the images were out of focus. He didn’t have time to do anything else. When the lone passenger had deplaned and climbed into the rear of the limousine, the steps went back up inside the jet and the door closed.
The limo headed for the gate.
Craig shot off in his pickup truck before anyone started asking questions. He’d text the photos to JoLynn Fields as soon as he got home.
This was definitely worth a hundred bucks.
Maybe more.
46
Lori Fulkerson was gone.
Serena and Stride arrived at her house, which was steps from the overpass of the I-35 freeway, in the semidarkness of the early morning. There was still a police officer parked outside to watch the house. Lori’s red Yaris was parked in the yard on the matted-down snow. Even so, when they pounded on the door, the only answer was frenzied barking from Lori’s terrier. They looked through the front windows and didn’t see anyone inside.
“Did anything happen overnight?” Serena asked the cop. “Did you see anyone?”
“Negative,” the officer replied. “There were no cars on the road during the storm. Nobody came or went. If she left the house, she left on foot, and she didn’t use the front door.”
“She can’t have gone far,” Stride said. “I’ll check inside and make sure the house is empty.”
Serena nodded. “I’ll go around back.”
She climbed down the steps to the front yard. Ahead of her, on the other side of the narrow dirt road, was a mass of trees and brush marking the fringe of Keene Creek. She couldn’t see the freeway beyond the trees, but she could hear the roar of the car engines. She struggled through the snow to the back of the house, where a wooden deck led down from the rear door into the grass.
There were footprints in the fresh snow. Lori Fulkerson had left a trail for them.
Serena grabbed her phone. “Jonny, I’ve got her. She left tracks leading toward the freeway. I’m going to follow her as far as I can.”
“I’ll get Guppo to send backup your way. Be careful.”
“Understood.”
Serena watched the footprints heading away fr
om the house. The plows hadn’t reached the back roads, so there was no difference between the snow in the streets and the snow in the woods. Wherever Lori had gone, she didn’t seem to be hiding her route, as if she knew that sooner or later the police would follow her.
The footprints went from the house to the dirt road, then veered into the trees toward a bridge leading over the frozen creek. Serena followed, pushing through the deep snow. She crossed the bridge, and where the woods ended, she found herself adjacent to the I-35 overpass. Matching sets of concrete pillars, like football goalposts, stretched below the highway decks. Ahead of her was a children’s playground and a small parking lot.
She remembered the photographs in Lori Fulkerson’s living room.
Is that your father?
Yeah. Those were taken at the playground near the freeway when I was six.
The footsteps led to the climbing equipment. Serena could see that Lori had stopped for a while and sat down at the base of the kiddy slide. The snow had been brushed away there.
Why?
What was this all about?
Beyond the playground, the footprints continued under the overpass to Sixty-Third Avenue. The plows already had come through, erasing any evidence of where Lori had gone next. Serena walked into the middle of the street. The road was empty, and the morning was still mostly dark. The freeway overpass ended at a wall built into the side of a sharp hill. The parallel concrete beams overhead were like railroad ties. She turned completely around, looking for more footprints, but Lori’s trail seemed to stop.
Serena listened as the snow hushed every sound. Every few seconds, car lights passed on the freeway overhead with a thunder of tires. Otherwise, it was desolate here. There was no one else around. She could hear herself breathe, and she could see the steam clouding in front of her face. She felt the cold. The lingering flurries brushed like fingers against her cheek.
She put a question into her mind: Where are you, Aimee?
She didn’t expect an answer. That wasn’t how life worked.
Then, in the silent aftermath, she had the strangest experience of her life. It was as if a voice had whispered in her head. She was utterly alone, but she heard it as vividly as if Aimee had been standing next to her and murmuring in her ear.
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