Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

She hung up the phone and handed it back to Guppo. “It’s freezing out here. We need to find her, Max. If Jack’s not lying, Aimee was heading for her front door when he left. At most, we got here fifteen minutes later. And Lori Fulkerson was here before that. In that time, Aimee managed to disappear.”

“But she never got inside the house,” Guppo said. “The floor mat inside wasn’t wet. She didn’t carry in any snow.”

Serena looked around at the large, sloping expanse of yard and felt a new sense of urgency. “Then she may be outside. Have the men check the perimeter of the property. Hurry .”

Guppo whistled with his fingers and shouted at the officers near the house. Serena headed through the snow for the lot line, where the yard was ringed with evergreens whose branches hung to the ground. Even in the moonlight, a body could lay there, unfound. The wind on the hill roared, fast and cold, cutting through her heavy coat and biting at the exposed skin on her face. Anyone outside in this weather didn’t have much time.

“Go, go, go!” she shouted. “Spread out!”

The police officers separated on the hillside, one small shadow after another. Serena headed for a sweeping ash tree near the street and had to duck to walk underneath it. The snow was deeper there. She saw nothing, so she pushed her way back into the open yard. Guppo was checking the fir trees near the neighbor’s house. Two officers hiked down the steep backside of the slope toward Skyline Parkway. Another was in the wooded land across the street.

Serena thought: Footprints .

If Aimee was out here, she had to leave footprints.

She focused on the bed of snow filling the yard and tried to separate out the prints that didn’t matter. The tracks of animals. The tracks of kids cutting through the yard from one street to another. The random dimples of ice blown off the trees. The cops who had trampled most of the area near the house. She looked for prints that started near the front door and veered off in a single, lonely track. Just one set, wandering away, getting lost.

She almost missed them.

The ground was higher than she was, making the seam on the hillside almost invisible, like a wrinkle in the snow that the wind was already whisking away. Yet she knew it was footprints. She ran. She took large steps, and when she reached the tracks, she saw an uneven row of small indentations, spread far apart, vanishing toward a stand of blue spruces.

Fifty yards away, where the trees spread their branches and the footprints ended, she saw an almost indistinguishable mound in the snow.

“Over here!” Serena called.

She charged downhill, and as she reached the small mound, she dropped to her knees. The wind had mostly covered the body in drifts already, and Serena had to brush aside snow to find the arms, the chest, and finally the face. It was Aimee. Her eyes were closed, the lids white with ice. Her skin was already way too cold. Her mouth was parted and unmoving, the lips slightly open. Serena patted Aimee’s cheek and called her name into her ear.

“Aimee, it’s me. It’s Serena.”

There was no answer.

“Get an ambulance!” she shouted over her shoulder.

Serena stripped off a glove and tried to take a pulse, but her fingers were too numb to find it. She put her cheek down next to Aimee’s mouth, and as she did, she felt the one thing that made her heart leap. Even in the frigid air, she could feel the steamy puff of a breath as Aimee exhaled.

She was alive.

In the middle of the night, Stride finally made it back home to the cottage. He went into Cat’s room and found the girl still awake, sitting up in the darkness in her T-shirt and sweatpants. One of the front windows was cracked an inch open, letting in icy air. She’d adopted that habit from him.

“Aimee’s alive?” Cat asked. “She’s okay?”

Stride sat down next to her and turned on a nightstand lamp to give the room a soft glow. “Yes, she’s in the hospital now. Serena’s with her. It looks like she’ll be fine.”

“Thank God. I was so scared.”

Cat stared at him with wide, vulnerable eyes. She shoved an index finger between her teeth and chewed on a nail, and that made her look younger than she was. He knew part of it was an act. When she was in trouble, when she felt guilty, she tried to look like a little girl.

He didn’t know what to say to her this time. He’d seen Cat do bad things in their two years together. She’d stolen. She’d lied. She’d protected people who didn’t deserve protection. This was different. It wasn’t about herself; it was about someone else. He wanted to ground her for her recklessness, but at the same time he was proud of her.

“That was a brave thing you did tonight,” Stride told her.

Cat looked down, embarrassed. “Thanks.”

“It was also very, very foolish.”

“Well, Aimee said I would do something like that. I guess she was right.”

He noticed that she didn’t apologize, and he wasn’t going to make her do that.

“Tell me why you did it,” he said.

“I don’t know. I was so angry about that article about you. I wanted to help. I thought if I saw something, if I could spy on Dean Casperson for you, I could help you prove what kind of person he really is.”

“Another girl tried to do the same thing, Cat,” Stride said, “and she wound up dead. This is dangerous business. You don’t belong anywhere near it. Climbing that wall tonight wasn’t just trespassing. You were putting yourself at risk. Anything could have happened to you at that house.”

“Yeah, I know. I was glad Curt was there to pull me over that wall.”

Stride rolled his eyes. “As much as I hate to say it, I’m glad Curt was there, too, but I wish he’d stopped you from going over it in the first place.”

“That’s not his fault. Nothing was going to stop me.”

Stride knew that was true. When Cat set her mind to something, she was as relentless as a runaway train. “Why was it so important to get inside?”

“Because when I saw Aimee getting out of the limousine, I could feel her reaching out to me from across the street. It was just like she said. Save me . She needed my help. I knew I had to do something.”

“Doing something didn’t mean going in there yourself. You could have called me. You could have called Serena.”

“And told you what?” Cat protested. “That I saw Aimee going into Dean Casperson’s house? There’s nothing you could have done about that. That’s why I had to find out what was really going on.”

Stride hesitated before saying anything, because on one level she was right. If Cat hadn’t been there, he didn’t know what would have happened to Aimee Bowe. Maybe she would have been fine. Or maybe she would have awakened to find herself being assaulted. Whatever Dean Casperson’s plans had been, Cat had interrupted them.

“So what happens next?” Cat asked him.

He hated to tell her the truth. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean?”

“I mean there was no crime committed, Cat,” Stride said.

“Why, just because he didn’t get a chance to rape her? That’s crazy! I saw what he was going to do to her.”

Stride took hold of Cat’s hand. “Okay, tell me exactly what you saw.”

Cat sniffled and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to remember. Then she opened them, and her face was serious. “I saw what Aimee looked like. She was drugged; I’m sure of it. She looked completely out of it, like she didn’t even know what was going on.”

“Did you see Casperson give her anything? Did you see him tamper with her drink?”

Cat shook her head in frustration. “No. They were already drinking by the time I got on the roof.”