Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

Lori said nothing for a long time. The wind lifted a cyclone of snow from the ground and threw it in their faces. Serena shivered, but Lori was like a statue made of white stone.

“I don’t know what to say,” she told her finally. “You can’t fake it.”

“I’m not trying to fake it,” Aimee replied.

“Are you afraid to die?” Lori asked her.

“Yes. Sure.”

“What if I told you that your plane going back to Los Angeles was going to crash? What do you think would go through your head in those last seconds?”

Aimee hesitated. “I don’t know. Terror. Regret. Anger, I guess.”

“You have thirty seconds . The last thirty seconds of your life.”

Aimee groped for a response that wouldn’t sound foolish. “Hope maybe. Up to the last second. Physically, maybe dizziness. Nausea.”

Lori spit out a wad of gum. “This is a waste of time. I don’t know why I bothered. I’m out of here.”

Aimee grabbed the woman’s shoulder and wouldn’t let her leave. “No, please. You’re the only one who knows what it was like. The others died.”

“You need to let go of her, Aimee,” Serena murmured.

The actress ignored her. She held on to Lori Fulkerson and turned her around. “I can’t answer your question. About the plane. I’ve never been in that situation. And I was never in the box. You were. That’s why I need your help.”

Lori ripped away Aimee’s hands and shoved the actress against the wall of the warehouse. Aimee lost her balance in the snow, and Lori physically picked her up and pinned her where she was. Serena moved closer to intervene, but Aimee shook her head and waved her away.

“You want to know what you do in the box?” Lori spit back at her. Her voice was barely louder than the wind. “After seven days in pitch blackness? Cold, no food, no water? You really want to know what happens to you?”

“Yes,” Aimee whispered.

Lori shoved her face to within an inch of Aimee’s. “You’re not human anymore. You’re an animal. A beast. Everything that made you a person falls away like dead leaves.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re thirsty. You’re so dry you can’t swallow. You can’t think about anything except water. Nothing. If you have any piss left, you start peeing into your hands so you can drink it. Does that paint the picture?”

“Oh, my God.”

“God? There is no God. You bargain with the Devil, not God. Jesus isn’t in the box. You say Save me, Jonathan Stride , because that’s what the voice tells you to say, but you don’t believe it. You know no one is going to save you. After a while, you don’t want them to save you. You want to die, because if you get saved, you know you’ll be in the box for the rest of your life. You’ll never get out. It will be there every time you close your eyes. At least if you die, it’s over. It’s almost euphoric when you feel it getting close.”

“What else?”

“You want more? You hallucinate. You hear voices. You see dead people. You can’t breathe. You shiver so hard in the cold that your bones break. You get so weak, you lie on your back and can’t move.”

“What else?”

“What else? What else? Are you kidding me? Here’s what else. The other women had a bird inside the box with them. Did they tell you about that? A chickadee. You can’t see it, but it flies around in the darkness, and it sings to you. It’s like this one beautiful thing that keeps you alive and reminds you of the outside world. But the whole point really is to drive you crazy. To see how long it takes before you decide to catch it and kill it and eat it raw and drink its blood.”

Aimee put her hands over her mouth. She began to cry.

“Is that enough?” Lori asked. “Are we done here?”

Aimee nodded mutely, with tears ruining her makeup. Lori let go of her, but the actress stumbled as if she couldn’t stand on her own. Serena leaped forward and grabbed her. Lori Fulkerson stalked off across the slushy street to the curb where her Toyota was parked. She never looked back.

“Are you okay?” Serena asked Aimee.

The actress watched Lori drive away, her tires spinning on ice. Aimee separated herself and slipped Serena’s coat off her shoulders. She didn’t look cold anymore, and she seemed to have her strength back. Her face was pink and windburned, but Serena was surprised to see a grim smile of determination bend upward on her lips.

“I’m fine,” Aimee said.

“Is that really what you wanted?” Serena asked.

“That’s exactly what I wanted,” Aimee replied as she headed back toward the warehouse door. “I’m in the box now.”

At noon, Stride got the call. They’d found a body.

He stood on the shoulder of Lavaque Road, surrounded by a posse of ambulances and police cars. Up and down the road in both directions, he saw nothing but evergreens, naked birches, and a few ash trees whose dried yellow leaves had clung to their branches deep into the winter. They were less than a mile north of the accident site where they’d found the Impala in the ditch.

A narrow break in the trees led east into the woods. The deep snow was littered with the boot marks of cops and the paw prints of search dogs. Stride skidded down the slope and followed Guppo on the trail.

“We got lucky,” the oversize cop called over his shoulder as he wheezed his way through the snow. “We were two hundred yards in and about to turn back when one of the dogs picked up the scent and dived into the trees.”

“John Doe was smart,” Stride said.

The remoteness of this location didn’t feel random. Without the car accident and the Glock to prompt a search, it was unlikely that a body ever would have been discovered up here even after the spring snowmelt. Hikers simply didn’t wander through these woods. Haley’s disappearance never would have been solved. Without evidence of foul play, they would have had no reason to consider it a murder. She just would have been one more unexplained lost soul.

Stride continued behind Guppo into the teeth of the wind. He wore sunglasses against the bright sun, had put on earmuffs, and his green cap was low on his forehead. Ahead of them, the footsteps veered into the thick of the forest. Guppo turned, and so did Stride. There was no path; they slogged through dense, sharp branches and low weeds. The shadows from the crowns of pines overhead made it hard to see more than a few feet in front of them.

Guppo stopped abruptly. Stride stopped, too, nearly running into the man’s back. He saw crime scene tape awkwardly looped around tree trunks. There was no clearing. Looking down, he saw only a pink athletic shoe jutting out of the brush to let him know that they’d reached the body.

“End of the line,” Guppo said. “This is where he dumped her.”

Stride bent down under the tape and took two steps forward, careful to stay in the footprints that had been left by the police officers who’d already been there. The young woman was at his feet, practically invisible until he was looking directly down at her. John Doe had covered her in feathery snow, but the wind had brushed it aside in patches, like a terrible treasure being revealed. She was frozen solid. Where he could see her limbs, she looked bony to the point of anorexia. Her milky white face stared at the sky, blue eyes wide open, mouth parted in surprise between colorless lips. She had blond hair in a short, boyish cut. There were a few freckles across her forehead, but mostly he saw the burned bullet hole in the center that had killed her.

“Is that Haley Adams?” Guppo asked.

Stride studied the body and realized he had no idea. He hadn’t seen a single photograph of the girl from the movie crew, and none of the descriptions they’d gotten matched one another. He bent down to get closer to the girl’s face. Her features weren’t familiar. She wasn’t a match for any of the Florida driver’s license photos that Maggie had pulled. So far, she was as much a mystery as John Doe.