Identical Stranger

by Alice Sharpe

Jack grabbed Sophie’s arms and turned her to face him. “I’ll help the deputy. Go back up to the road with Sue, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Sophie said, glad to be told to leave this spot. “Okay.”

  Having found nothing else at the dump site, they returned to the search, but after another fruitless hour in which they discovered more cast-off debris but nothing to suggest Sabrina had ever come this way, Jack and Sophie left.

  “I’m driving to Seaport,” Jack said.

  Sophie glanced at the dashboard clock, then in her rearview mirror. It would be so easy if she still felt that sensation of Sabrina’s closeness. Then she could insist they return. As it was, there was no point, no feeling, no nothing.

  “Shouldn’t we search Buzz and Sabrina’s house like the detective asked?”

  “If we have time,” he said. “I think he was giving us busywork. He’s got a whole squad of people who can do that job. His mind may be made up or his hands tied, but mine aren’t and neither are yours. I want to talk to the people at the hotel again.”

  “I could go to Sabrina’s house while you do that,” Sophie said.

  “We stick together,” he interrupted. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  As they drove down the coast, Sophie gazed out at the sea. When the road took them inland for a while, she turned to Jack. His profile was just as interesting as the scenery and much more dear, at least to her.

  “So you became a cop because of what happened with Lisa?” she ventured.

  “Yeah,” he said, sparing her a glance.

  “Why did you quit?”

  “Oddly enough, because of Lisa. Her unsolved murder got me into law enforcement, but the way every case seemed to echo hers drove me out of it.”

  “And here you are again,” Sophie said.

  “Yes, here I am again, but damn, this feels different. This isn’t just a case of bad memories. This is déjà vu. I’d never forgive myself if I let Sabrina and Buzz down, but it’s a slippery slope. On the one hand, I can’t assume that just because there are similarities that it’s the same kind of case. On the other hand, I can’t assume because I’m sensitive to overreacting that I’m misreading things. So in the end, I have to trust what my eyes see and what my gut tells me.”

  “And it tells you to go back to the hotel?”

  “And show the composite sketch around. I should have gotten a picture of Louis Nash to show around, too. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”

  “I’ll look on the internet and see if he has one.”

  She did just that while the miles sped by but in the end had to admit defeat. “Lots of pictures attributed to him but none of him.”

  “Is he a good photographer?”

  Sophie looked at a couple of examples of his work. “Not bad. Some of the girls look a little...provocative, but that may just be the way they wanted to look.”

  As they drove into the hotel parking lot a few minutes later, Jack threw her a grin. “Well, here we are again.” He found a parking spot up close to the front doors.

  “I wonder if Paul Rey followed us,” she asked. “For that matter, I wonder if he followed us out to the search area up in Astoria, too? What’s he making of all this?”

  “Who knows, but I have a feeling he’s around here somewhere. I tried watching for a tail but this guy is apparently pretty good at disappearing and until we know what he’s driving—”

  “You’d think his mother and brother would have called him off by now and told him the gig is up.”

  “I don’t think he’s communicating with anyone,” Jack said, holding the front door open for her. “He might be obsessive, his head set on one goal—kill Sabrina, then hit his brother up for half of what you get once she’s dead. His family refers to him as a loose cannon. Maybe he’s crazy enough to work in a void of his own making.”

  They bypassed the front desk and went downstairs, where the hubbub of the conference was over. Tuesday at noon seemed quiet at the hotel, perfect for Jack’s intention of showing the sketch around.

  Finding someone to show it to seemed to be the issue, however. Many of the people they’d grown accustomed to seeing were at home as the hotel had cut back hours once the rush was over. Still, they persevered, starting down in the kitchen and housekeeping, working their way up as they tried to find Jerry or Brad or Adam.

  They finally found a guy painting the trim around a large window at the end of a hall on the third floor. As if sensing their interest in him, he paused in his task and looked over his shoulder as they approached. For some reason, his measuring gaze made Sophie extremely uncomfortable.

  He was a tall, thin man with intense black eyes and longish black hair.

  “Are you Adam?” Jack asked.

  The guy kept his paintbrush poised on the wall as he leveled a steely stare at Jack. “I’m Adam.”

  “You’re sure handy with that paintbrush,” Jack said.

  “What can I do for you? It’s just me here right now. Give me your room number or better yet, call the front desk and get on the list. It may be morning before someone gets to you, though.”

  Jack showed him the composite sketch captured on his phone.

  Adam stared at it and as he did so, Sophie looked from the sketch to the man gazing at it and almost fell over. They looked so much alike it was uncanny.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  Sophie spoke up. “A man we need to ask a few questions,” she said.

  “Does he limp by any chance?”

  They hadn’t mentioned the limp, keeping that back in case someone recognized the sketch. Sophie could sense Jack fighting to rein in his excitement. “Yeah. He limps.”

  “I saw him Saturday. Up here, as a matter of fact. He was wheeling a cart with a couple of suitcases and a trunk on it.”

  “How big was the trunk?” Jack asked and Sophie could hear the edge in his voice.

  Adam held out his arms. “Sizable.”

  “Did you see him unload the baggage or have any idea to whom it belonged or by chance see what he was driving?”

  Adam shook his head. “I saw him for about thirty seconds on my way to snake a plugged toilet. I didn’t see no tags or nothing else. He was just pushing the cart into the service elevator and then he was gone and I was off.”

  “I’m calling Reece,” Jack told Sophie.

  “Ask him to get a picture of Louis Nash.”

  “I will.”

  As Jack took a few steps to use his phone in privacy, Adam asked why they wanted to know about the guy.

  “A woman who looks a lot like me went missing from this hotel last Saturday,” she said. “Police will want to question this man if we can find him. They’ll probably want to ask you some questions, as well.”

  “Me?”

  “About what you saw.”

  He shook his head. “Well, they have until five, ’cause that’s when I’m leaving here. I have a lot to do on my new place.”

  “Is it here in town?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “No. Why do you ask?”

  She shrugged. “Well, you know, if the police want to talk to you—”

  “I can talk to ’em here as well as there. Anyway, it’s getting late. You got nothing else you want from me, I need to finish this job.”

  “Sure, only did you know Hank Tyson, the maintenance man who was killed last weekend?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Brad knows him. Knew him.”

  “How do you know Brad?”

  “We worked together in Idaho a few years back. What’s with all the questions?”

  Jack’s return saved her a response. “Reece is calling Sergeant Jones down here in Seaport,” he said. “Time for us to get back to Astoria.”

  As they hurried back to the car, Jack added, “Reece said he went over to Nash’s house after
we left. He said the guy was totally cooperative. He remembered taking the photo of Sabrina, thought it was one of his better efforts. Reece also said Nash has an alibi for the weekend but that he invited Reece to search his house claiming he has nothing to hide.”

  “Did Reece conduct a search?”

  “No. It’s easy to tell he thinks we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Maybe we are,” Sophie said. “Didn’t you notice Adam Cook looks like the sketch?”

  “I did notice that but he doesn’t limp.”

  “You were never sure the limp was real, remember? You said it could have been a temporary injury or even a faked diversion. Notice how quick Adam was to point out that the man he said he saw had a limp. Did he do that to avert suspicion from himself?”

  “Sophie, I don’t know. If that guy took Sabrina would he be painting window trim three days later?”

  “I don’t know—you’re the expert. But I have to remind you of one thing. We’re not looking for Lisa’s murderer, we’re looking for the guy who abducted Sabrina, and in that mind-set, a limp doesn’t matter.”

  “Neither does looking like a guy in a ten-year-old sketch,” Jack said.

  She sighed. “It seems almost impossible without the police reviewing surveillance tapes and questioning people more stringently. But can we afford not to consider everything and everyone? Remember when we talked to Brad Sunday morning? He said that Adam left here to go get a part. If he’d already stuffed Sabrina into a trunk and rolled her downstairs into a van, what better time to get her away from the hotel and Brad’s prying eyes than to fake an errand? Or maybe he had Hank in the van, too. Maybe that’s when he dumped the poor man’s body.”

  “A hardware store would have a record of a sale. And damn it all, someone needs to check the hotel’s security cameras.”

  “Oh, and, Jack, Adam said he was leaving town after work to go work on his new house. He was defensive and nervous and he looked at me like—I don’t know, he just gave me the creeps.”

  * * *

  THEY DROVE BY the Cromwell house and were reassured when Jack recognized an unmarked police car parked down the street. A second later, a taxicab drove by. Was that Sabrina returning from wherever the hell she’d been? The cab kept going and once again disappointment took a giant bite out of Jack’s gut.

  And that right there was the trouble with this whole thing. He might criticize Reece for not damning the torpedoes and investigating Sabrina’s disappearance as a criminal act and yet he himself could go from thinking she’d been carted off in a trunk to holding his breath that she might miraculously emerge from a taxicab.

  Jack had a sudden whim. “There’s somewhere I want to go before we settle in to search the house again. Mind coming with me?”

  “Are you kidding? There’s nowhere I’d rather be than with you.”

  He grinned at her. “The feeling is mutual.”

  “So, where to now?”

  He glanced over at her again, inordinately glad she wanted to be with him and very aware of how patient she was. They’d had coffee for breakfast, and a drive-through chicken sandwich for lunch. Not much of a romantic day after their first sexual encounter. She deserved dozens of red roses and champagne and boxes of chocolates—he wanted to shower her with attention. He wanted to be the man who erased the despicable Danny from her memory forever and showed her what a relationship could be like with someone who loved her.

  Because he did love her. A half dozen times that day he’d wanted to tell her so. That morning when they awoke and she smiled up at him and kissed his lips. Later, in the shower, then when she reassured Sue—such a kind thing to do. And during all this, he knew her insides were twisted into a terrible knot as she worried about her sister. She was growing more vibrant by the day, an unselfish and generous woman with a huge heart. He loved her.

  He lifted her hand from her lap. “Sophie, I have to tell you something.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “That sounds ominous.”

  “No, it’s nothing bad, at least I don’t think so. I just want to tell you that I’m aware we’ve known each other a lot less time than you knew Danny and you thought he moved too fast, but I know how I feel—”

  “Shh,” she said softly. “Don’t say anything. I feel the same way about you, like I want to announce to the world that you’re it, that you’re the only one for me. But we’ve known each other just a handful of days and they haven’t been typical days for either of us.” She laughed softly. “The horrible truth, my darling, is that I am the most boring woman you are ever going to meet. After this is over, you’ll see I’ll put you to sleep every time I open my mouth. You’ll want to run for the hills.”

  “Oh, Sophie, that’s not true and I think you know it.”

  “This is true. I don’t even know if you like oatmeal or walks on the beach or what kind of movies—”

  “Who cares about that stuff? Those are the things people find out about each other over time.”

  “Well, then, how about the fact that you live six hours south of me?”

  “More like nine. I’ll move, you’ll move, we’ll work it out. That’s what people who care about each other do.”

  “And then there’s Sabrina and Buzz and the immediate future and the potential wreckage—it’s too much to think about right now. Let’s just be in the moment, okay? Tell me where we’re going.”

  “I just hope by the time you’re ready to hear me out, I haven’t forgotten what I was going to say,” he teased her.

  She punched him in the side and laughed.

  “We’re going to Louis Nash’s house. I looked it up on the internet. It’s not far from here.”

  “What do you hope to find out?”

  “I just want to get a feel for the guy, see where he lives, what he’s like.”

  They found Nash’s residence on a steep street two blocks off the main avenue. Jack parked a couple of doors down and they both spent five minutes sitting in the car watching to see if anyone else parked nearby or drove by suspiciously. They both had an image of Paul Rey in their head now and that should help if Paul got close to Sophie again.

  “I have a gun in the trunk,” he said.

  “Why is it in the trunk?”

  “It’s back there with the handcuffs, a rifle, the stun gun—all the usual accruements. But I’m not a cop, I’m a private citizen, especially up here in Oregon where my license doesn’t even mean as much as it does in California. The stakes go way up when you introduce a lethal weapon. If you carry it, you’d better be prepared to use deadly force. All that said, I’m going to go get it out of the trunk and you’re going to use it if Paul Rey approaches this car. Okay?”

  “I’ve never shot a gun.”

  “I’ll show you how.” He retrieved the gun, once again scanning the peaceful street that had no new cars parked on it and no pedestrians lingering on the sidewalks. He got back in the car and quickly acquainted her with the weapon. “It’s all set to shoot. Just take off the safety, aim and pull the trigger. Got it?”

  “I got it. But I don’t want to kill Paul. He might know something about Sabrina.”

  “If he’s walking up to this car he’s got one thing on his mind, honey, and it isn’t a chat. Protect yourself. Promise me.”

  “Okay, yeah, I will. I promise.”

  He leaned across the seat and touched her lips with his. “Are you as scared as you look?” he whispered.

  “Yes, but mostly because I don’t want to shoot anyone.”

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “Make it nine.”

  “You got it.” He kissed her again, then walked quickly down the street toward Nash’s house.

  A small sign on the door read: Nash Photography. Please Knock. He knocked.

  The door was answered by a tall, dark man in his midforties. Longish dark hair fram
ed a lean, almost gaunt face dominated by large, heavily lidded eyes.

  “Are you Louis Nash?” Jack asked pleasantly, but the truth was the dude raised his hackles on sight. Did he look like the sketch of Lisa’s killer? About as much as Adam Cook did. The fact was that Jack had seen dozens of tall, drawn-looking guys over the years who resembled the sketch. This man had more angles in his face, was certainly older. There were surface similarities, but having never actually seen Lisa’s killer in the flesh, he couldn’t go so far as to say this was the guy.

  And there was that conundrum again, that concern that his subconscious was hell-bent on merging Lisa’s killer and Sabrina’s abductor no matter how unlikely the possibility.

  “I heard you were the best photographer in town,” Jack said, deciding on the spot not to mention Sabrina.

  “One of them, yeah.”

  “My fiancée and I are getting married this summer. I was hoping you could show me some of your work.”

  Jack sensed Louis’s reluctance. It could mean he had something to hide or he could just be in the middle of something. Maybe the detective’s visit earlier that day had put him on his guard. Or here was a thought: maybe he sensed that Jack wasn’t being honest.

  “I have a few minutes,” he said at last. “Come on in.”

  Jack stepped inside. A steep flight of stairs led upward to his left. The house was messy and cluttered, the walls covered with blown-up photos of kids and trees and oceanscapes.

  “Have a seat at the table,” Louis said as he swept aside what looked like lunch dishes to make space. “I’ll go get the book.”

  He limped out of sight into a room whose door he closed behind him. He limped—right leg. Could mean something, could mean nothing. Jack used the opportunity to check out what he could see of the house. A closed door off the kitchen could be a pantry. It could also be access to a basement. It took all his willpower not to dash up the stairs or open every closed door, but he could hear Nash’s returning footsteps. There wasn’t time. If he wanted to poke around, he’d have to get Louis out of the room again.

  Nash showed up with two books, one small and one album size. “This is a wedding I did last summer,” he said, handing Jack the album.