Alter Ego

by Brian Freeman

  Save me.

  *

  The Yorkshire terrier barked madly as Stride broke into the house. It quivered on its tiny legs with a combination of terror and bravado, making little yips that sounded like an elf coughing. He squatted down, and the Yorkie continued its ferocious din until Stride extended the back of his hand. The dog gave it a quick sniff, decided he was friendly, and began licking his fingers.

  “Heck of a watchdog there, buddy,” Stride said.

  He climbed the staircase, which was barely wider than his torso, to the second floor. A dark hallway led to the rear of the house. He was there when Serena called to let him know that she’d found footprints in the backyard, and he dialed Guppo to request backup. Then he searched the upstairs rooms. Lori Fulkerson might as well have been a ghost. If she’d ever had furniture upstairs, most of it had been moved out. The rooms were empty, just old paint, worn carpet, and occasional wires poking out of holes in the walls.

  There was nothing to tell him who she really was.

  According to the city and state records they’d found, Lori Fulkerson had arrived in Duluth eleven years earlier, only weeks before Kristal Beech had been abducted. Before that, she’d been a mystery. She didn’t seem to exist. She had no past, no credit, no previous address. If she’d grown up in Duluth as she claimed, she’d grown up as a completely different person.

  He took the stairs back down to the ground floor. The dog followed him.

  He went into the kitchen, where mail was stacked up on the table in piles. There were weeks of mail that looked as if she’d never gone through it. Everything was addressed to Lori Fulkerson, but most of it was junk. None of it was personal, from friends or family. He didn’t see a computer or a smart phone anywhere in the house. There was a calendar thumbtacked to the kitchen wall, but she’d written nothing on any of the dates.

  The Yorkie ran for its food bowl in the corner. Stride saw that the food bag had been tipped over, spilling its contents onto a plastic tray. The dog had enough food to last for days. Its water dish was a large bucket filled almost to the rim. Lori Fulkerson wasn’t planning on coming back.

  She knew the end was near.

  Serena was right. There was only one explanation for Lori knowing secrets about the other three women in the cage. She’d put them there herself. She’d murdered Kristal Beech, Tanya Carter, and Sally Wills, and she’d left a trail of bread crumbs leading the police to Art Leipold. She’d manufactured the ultimate alibi by making herself the fourth victim. And then she’d waited for Stride to find her.

  The question was why.

  Stride went into the living room, which was a sea of old newspapers, dog toys, and CD jewel cases stacked like skyscrapers. Lori had cleared one little spot at a table where she ate her meals. She was a gatherer, someone who was afraid to let anything go or throw anything away. Those were typically people who’d had things taken away from them as a child.

  He glanced at the pale yellow living room wall. Three photographs were hung there, all of them from decades earlier. They’d been taken in a children’s park near the house and showed a father and daughter together. Stride took one of the photographs off the wall and held it in his hand and stared at it. He had a hard time recognizing Lori Fulkerson’s face in the young girl in the picture. This ten-year-old looked innocent and happy, nothing like the angry woman she’d become later in life. She stood on the base of a kiddy slide, with her father standing next to her, his arm around her waist.

  Her father.

  Seeing the man beside Lori Fulkerson was a sucker punch to Stride’s gut.

  He knew him. He recognized him all these years later. It was a face he would never forget.

  Stride understood. He saw where the stone had gone into the lake and how the ripples had spread. The daughter lost her father, the daughter grew up nursing her rage, and eventually that rage led to revenge and murder. There were plenty of people to blame. Most of all he blamed himself.

  He’d let it happen. Years ago he could have stopped it, and he’d done nothing.

  Stride took his phone and dialed Serena.

  “I know who Lori Fulkerson is,” he told her. “I know what this is about. She’s Mort Greeley’s daughter. Mort lived in a house on a spur road about two blocks from here. I’m betting that’s where she’s keeping Aimee Bowe.”

  “I’m already there,” Serena replied, “and I’m going in.”

  47

  The footprints reappeared a hundred yards down the spur road, where Lori Fulkerson had emerged from the trees.

  Nothing had led Serena to search the road except the feeling that Aimee was there. She walked through the deep virgin snow, seeing no sign of Lori’s trail until she reached the crest of a shallow hill. There she saw the footprints again, leading out of the woods. Lori didn’t try to hide her path. The footprints led to a turnaround at the end of the dead-end road. A two-story 1950s-era house was nestled inside a grove of trees below the slope of the I-35 freeway. Two huge electrical towers guarded the house like soldiers. So did a stand of snow-white fir trees that were twice as tall as the roof.

  There were no vehicles parked outside. The only sign of life was Lori’s footprints, walking up to the front door.

  She had a sense of Aimee’s voice in her head, stronger than ever.

  Save me. Hurry.

  Serena listened for the sirens of backup, but the morning was dead quiet. Even running, Jonny was five minutes away. She didn’t know how much time Aimee had left, huddled in a cage in the cold. All she knew was that Aimee was inside, and so was Lori Fulkerson.

  She’d already guessed the truth before Jonny called. She didn’t believe in coincidences. When she reached the summit of the spur road, she’d recognized where she was. Jonny had taken her here once before, when he’d told her the story of Mort Greeley. That was how he confessed his mistakes, by going back to the places where they’d happened, as if the locations were sacred. Not even fifty yards away from Mort Greeley’s old house, Serena could see another fenced gray house with two cars out front and smoke rising from a chimney against the cloudy sky. Those were the only two homes on the wooded road.

  More than twenty years earlier, that house had been the home of an eight-year-old boy who’d been abducted at the Duluth zoo. Eventually, all the suspicion in the crime had landed—falsely—on the man who lived next door.

  Mort Greeley.

  Lori’s father.

  With Art Leipold leading the way, the police and media had crucified and ostracized Mort Greeley until he took his own life.

  Serena closed on the house. The curtains were shut on every window. Sprays of snow blew off the peaked roof. She followed the footprints to the front door, and she slid her pistol into her hand. The butt was warm against her cold fingers. She tried the knob of the door; it was open. She pushed it ajar and shouted into the house.

  “Lori Fulkerson! It’s Serena Stride from the Duluth Police. We know about your father. We know everything. It’s time to give up. It’s time to put an end to this.”

  There was no answer from inside. She swung the door open with her boot, and the light from the gray day was the only light in the house. With her gun in front of her, she crept inside. The icy air couldn’t be more than a few degrees above freezing. The light switches didn’t work, and she took a small flashlight from her pocket, throwing a dim beam into the foyer. She listened. No one moved, and no one spoke.

  “Lori Fulkerson!” she shouted again.

  The house was quiet except for her footsteps on the loose panels of the hardwood floor. She made her way into the living room, shining her light into every corner. Dust floated like summer gnats in the beam of the flashlight. The room was furnished, but all the furniture was covered in white sheets. Flowered red wallpaper peeled from the ceiling in strips. The house had a musty, shut-up smell. She next went to the dining room, which looked like a room for a family of ghosts in a haunted house. The oak chairs were neatly positioned around the dining-room table, which
was arranged with white linen place mats, as if dinner would be served soon. There was a bureau on the east wall, still stocked with wedding crystal and china.

  In here, time had stood still. In here, Mort Greeley had never been accused, never lost his family and his job, and never shot himself in an upstairs bedroom.

  The deeper she went into the house, the darker it got. The kitchen was empty. So was the main-floor bedroom. Serena kept searching, making her way into a long hallway. Her flashlight lit up a wooden floor, beige-painted walls, and a back staircase leading to the second story. She headed that way, swinging the light back and forth. A mouse scurried.

  At the base of the stairs, she pointed the light upward.

  It landed on the face of Lori Fulkerson.

  Lori’s face was pale and expressionless in the glow of the flashlight. Her curly hair looked flat. She sat on the top step in a sweatshirt and khakis. Her arms were at her sides, and her right hand was curled tightly around a gun. Serena swung her own pistol to point at Lori’s chest.

  “Place your weapon on the step, Lori, and then put your hands on top of your head.”

  Lori paid no attention to her.

  “I used to live here,” she said.

  “Lori, I need you to put the gun down right now.”

  “It’s been like this for years. Abandoned. My mother owned it, but she couldn’t sell it. No one wanted it.”

  “The gun, Lori. Put it on the step.”

  “Aimee’s up here,” Lori said, gesturing behind her. “I know that’s what you want. She’s in the box.”

  “Lori, it’s time to end this,” Serena told her. “Too many people died for nothing. Including your father. Put down the gun. Let me come up there and help Aimee.”

  “I said too much,” Lori went on, as if Serena hadn’t even spoken. “I heard the things she was saying on camera. I knew everyone would realize what I’d done. I knew the truth would come out. But it was more than that. It was like she already knew. I could feel her inside my head. She could see everything I remembered. I needed to stop her, to shut her out.”

  “It’s over, Lori.”

  “I know. Secrets always come out eventually, don’t they? You can’t run away from them forever. But I can still feel her watching me. It’s driving me crazy. I need to get her out of my head.”

  Serena heard noise behind her as someone else entered the house. Then a voice shouted her name. It was Jonny.

  “Lori’s armed,” she called back to him. “Stay back; don’t come any closer.”

  But he didn’t listen. He came even faster. She heard footsteps, and a few seconds later he was there with her in the hallway. He was directly at her side, the two of them shoulder to shoulder. Above them, Lori tensed at the top of the stairs, with two flashlights trained on her now. Her eyes glistened with tears and lonely fury.

  “Save me, Jonathan Stride,” she whispered with bitter irony.

  Serena kept her eyes on the gun. If it moved, she was ready to fire.

  “Lori, I know you blame me for what happened to your father,” Jonny told her. “That’s okay. I was a young cop, but I should have done more to help Mort. I knew what Art and my boss were doing was wrong. I thought your father was guilty—I was convinced he took that boy at the zoo—but he didn’t deserve to be lynched the way he was. It ruined his life, and it was all a terrible mistake. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “My mother took me away from him,” Lori murmured. “She took me away from my father and didn’t even leave a note. She left him alone. I found out later he sent me letters, but I never got to see them. I wrote him letters, but she never mailed them. My father thought I hated him, like everyone else. He thought I’d abandoned him. My bedroom was upstairs, you know. Just down the hallway. That’s where he shot himself. In my bedroom.”

  Jonny nodded. “I know.”

  “All he did was go to work that day,” Lori went on. “He went to the zoo. He never even saw that boy. And you made everyone in the city think he was guilty. That he was a murderer and a pedophile.”

  Jonny spoke softly, trying to reach her. “You hate me. I understand that. I deserve what you feel toward me. But those women didn’t do anything to you or your father. Aimee didn’t do anything. She’s innocent.”

  Lori didn’t seem to hear him. She glanced down the hallway, as if she could see inside the box that was down there and see all the women she’d imprisoned in the past.

  “I went to work with my father at the zoo sometimes,” Lori recalled. “He had to clean out the cages for the animals. I kept thinking how horrible it was to be trapped like that. I thought there was nothing you could do to anyone that was worse than that. To put them in a cage. I remember there was this little bird that used to hang out with one of the tigers. It flew around in the cage for days. It would land on the tiger’s head, like they were friends. My dad took me to see it, and I thought it was so cute. And then one day, as I was watching, the tiger simply killed the bird with one swipe of its paw and ate it. I couldn’t stop crying. But my dad told me that’s just what tigers do.”

  “Lori,” Serena murmured. “Please stop this. You don’t have to hurt anyone else.”

  “So you see, Jonathan Stride,” Lori continued, her voice rising into a shout, “it doesn’t matter whether those women were innocent. That’s just what tigers do. I came back to Duluth to destroy the people who destroyed my father. Art Leipold. And you. I wanted Art to know just what it felt like to be wrongly accused, to be set up for something you didn’t do, to have everyone turn on you, to be hated by every person who looks at you. I wanted him to suffer the way my father did. And I wanted you to be the one to do it to him. I wanted you to feel absolutely helpless, like I did. To know that people died and you couldn’t stop it. I wanted you to carry that with you for the rest of your life.”

  “I do.”

  “I didn’t want you to rescue me in the box,” Lori said. “I was supposed to die, too. That was supposed to be the end. I was supposed to be with my father when it was all over.”

  The gun quivered in Lori’s grip. She looked down the hallway again toward the bedroom and the cage. All Serena could see in the shadows was one eye, fierce and red, like the eye of a monster.

  “No one else needs to die, Lori,” Serena told her. “Not Aimee. Not you. Put down the gun. Put your hands on your head and let me come upstairs.”

  Instead, Lori stood up.

  “Stop stop stop!” they both shouted at her, their voices overlapping.

  “I can still feel her,” Lori said. “She’s still inside my head. I have to get her out.”

  In one sudden motion, Lori spun away and disappeared into the darkness. They heard footsteps overhead and the slamming of a door. Serena didn’t have time to fire. She thundered up the stairs two at a time, with Jonny immediately behind her. There was no light on the second story, and the flashlight beam showed a maze of closed doors. Then, from the end of the upstairs hallway, came an explosion.

  A gunshot.

  “Aimee!” Serena shouted.

  A second shot followed the first. Then a third.

  Serena sprinted for the end of the hallway and slammed through the closed door into the gloom of a small child’s bedroom. The beam of her flashlight bounced crazily. All she caught were horrible, disconnected images of cartoon animals on the old wallpaper, colored butterflies hanging on ribbons from the ceiling, and an eight-foot by eight-foot padded cage taking up most of the bedroom floor. Lori Fulkerson fired her gun over and over into the soundproof foam, kicking up a cloud of synthetic white snow.

  Serena jumped across the bedroom and hit her from behind, crushing the woman’s body against the metal bars of the cage. The gun fell. Serena knocked it away with her heel. Behind her, she was aware of Jonny scooping it up. She threw Lori bodily to the ground and landed on top of her with her knee in the small of her back, and as Lori struggled, Serena grabbed her handcuffs and pinned her wrist in the metal grips.

  There were othe
r noises in the house now. More shouts. The thunder of heavy footfalls.

  She heard Jonny shouting. “All clear, all clear, all clear!”

  “The key!” Serena screamed at Lori Fulkerson. She grabbed Lori’s shoulder and shoved her over onto her back and bellowed into her face. “Where’s the key?”

  The pause was only a second, but it felt like forever. Then Lori murmured, as if in surrender, “My pocket.”

  Serena squeezed her hand inside the right front pocket of Lori’s pants until her fingers closed around a tiny piece of metal. She pulled it out and crawled to the cage, where she fumbled in the darkness, trying to fit the key into the lock that held the door in place. She tried it again and again, dropped the key, and picked it up. She cursed loudly. Then Jonny was behind her with a firm hand on her shoulder, shining a flashlight onto the lock.

  She picked up the key. She put it in the lock.

  She opened the box.

  The light inside showed Aimee Bowe on her back on the straw floor of the cage. Serena gasped in horror. Blood was everywhere. One of the bullets had hit her thigh. Another had gone through her shoulder. Another had hit her neck. Her breathing was ragged. Serena bent over her, and Aimee’s skin was bone white and frigid to the touch. Her eyes were closed.

  She heard Jonny calling for an ambulance.

  “Hang on, you’ll be fine,” Serena murmured. She took off her coat and draped it over Aimee’s body, trying to keep her warm. “Help’s on the way.”

  Aimee’s eyes opened and tried to focus. The pain caught up with her and overwhelmed the numbness. Her lips murmured something, but Serena couldn’t hear it. She bent down near Aimee’s mouth and listened to what she was saying.

  “I felt you coming,” Aimee said.

  Serena smiled and held her hand. She stayed there, holding on, as Stride and Guppo applied pressure to Aimee’s wounds and tried to stop the bleeding. She felt too much time ticking away, too much blood pooling around them and soaking her clothes. The box was wet and cold and awful and evil.