Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

“Anything missing?” he asked again.

“Only one thing that I see,” Chris replied finally. “The tape recorder.”

“What?”

“The old cassette recorder that Art used to make the victims tape their messages to you. I kept it in this box. Now it’s gone.”

“So who’s Troy?” Cab asked Maggie as they drove to the Central Hillside apartment that Peach Piper had rented. “I heard Serena mention him to you after the meeting.”

“Troy is my Mosquito,” Maggie explained.

“Ah. Recent breakup?”

“Christmas,” she said.

“Very recent. So what happened?”

She wiggled the fingers of her left hand. “He wanted to put a ring on that.”

“And you don’t want anything on your finger?”

“Nope.”

With only one hand on the wheel, Maggie nearly lost control of the Avalanche. The truck bumped halfway onto the sidewalk before she steered it back into the street. In the process, she breezed through a stop sign and nearly collided with a panel van coming down the steep hillside toward the lake. The back of the Avalanche fishtailed, and the van’s angry horn blared in their ears.

“I think I just saw my dead grandmother,” Cab remarked.

“You and Stride. Always with the crap about my driving.”

“Not at all. Next time I rob a bank, you’re my getaway driver. Utterly fearless. So what’s the deal with Troy? Is he a tall suave blond like yours truly?”

Maggie chuckled. “Troy’s not much taller than me and not much smaller than Guppo. He could also bench-press the two of us put together. He’s a widower with two daughters and a heart the size of Alaska. So in other words, he is nicer and sweeter than me in every possible way.”

Cab was silent for a long time. “If you hadn’t sworn to me that you wanted nothing but casual relationships, I would almost think that you were still in love with him.”

“That is not a good way to get laid tonight, Bolton,” Maggie replied sharply. “Can we drop it?”

Cab grinned. “Consider it dropped.”

Maggie spotted the apartment building ahead of them and pointed the Avalanche at it like a torpedo. She parked at a forty-five-degree angle on the street with one wheel over the curb and then swiveled her head to stare at Cab, as if daring him to say something. He was smart enough simply to smirk and keep his mouth shut.

She let them into Peach’s ground-floor apartment.

“Stride and I searched the place after she went missing,” Maggie told him. “Then Guppo did another search after we found the body. If Guppo didn’t find anything, there’s nothing to be found.”

“Well, I know how Peach thinks.”

“I get that, but John Doe got here ahead of us. He took everything.”

Cab didn’t look discouraged. He wandered around the apartment, picking things up and putting them down, as if they would give him inspiration. Peach hadn’t left behind many personal items. Near the sofa was a pair of red Crocs, and Cab turned them over with the toe of his shoe and examined the bottoms. Then he kicked them away. He saw a rubber band on the carpet and picked it up and stretched it between his hands. He went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, which contained nothing but a pint of mocha chip ice cream, a Heggies pizza, two Lean Cuisine dinners, and a package of frozen spinach. Cab opened the ice cream container and dug around inside with one of his fingers.

“You think she hid something in there?” Maggie asked.

“No, I just like mocha chip,” Cab said.

He licked away the ice cream and then took the package of spinach and popped it in the microwave and zapped it on high.

“You want some spinach, too?” Maggie asked dubiously.

“I love spinach,” he said with a little smile, “but more importantly, Peach hates it. When I first met her, I watched her pick it off a pizza at a motel in Lake Wales, Florida.”

Maggie cocked her head and did a double take. “I’ll be damned.”

She waited next to Cab while the little brick of spinach went around and around in the microwave. A few minutes later, the timer dinged, and Cab retrieved the mushy package and put it on the counter. He carefully unsealed the wrapper and opened the white plastic carton inside. Then, using the tines of two forks, he carefully picked through the green wad of spinach.

“Et voilà,” he said.

“What the hell is that?” Maggie asked.

It was a small package of plastic wrap, no more than two inches by two inches, that Peach had secreted inside the spinach and then resealed. Still using the forks, Cab carefully peeled back the folds of the plastic until it was open on the counter. Inside was a rhinestone button shaped like a crystal flower, the kind that might appear on a woman’s dress.

Maggie began to feel sorry that she’d never had a chance to meet Peach Piper. The girl was clever.

“A button,” she said. “I wonder where she got it. And who it belonged to.”

“I have no idea, but Peach obviously thought it was important.”

“Do you think there’s anything else in the apartment?” Maggie asked.

“Yes, I do,” Cab said.

They left the kitchen and went into the bedroom, and this time Cab didn’t even hesitate or look anywhere else. He went straight to the white mannequin standing behind the door with her arm cocked seductively behind her head.

“Sexpot,” he said, as if talking directly to the mannequin. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Maggie asked.

“Peach had a collection of mannequins,” Cab explained. “It was a little weird, and she’d be the first to say so. She had six of them in her bedroom in Florida. Ditty, Petunia, Harley, Bon Bon, Rickles, and Sexpot. I don’t know how the hell she got Sexpot up here with her, but there was very little that Peach couldn’t do.”

He put his hands on his hips and studied the mannequin, which was made of fiberglass and was connected to a heavy glass stand by a jointed metal rod. He began to undress it.

“Something you want to tell me about your fetishes?” Maggie asked.

Cab winked at her.

When Sexpot was naked, he carefully detached the mannequin’s cocked arm from the rest of the body. He studied the metal plates on both sides, then reattached the arm and did the same thing on the other side. Then he removed the head and segmented the torso from the legs. When he found nothing, he lifted the entire mannequin off the metal rod that secured it on the glass base. Two screws with plastic caps held the rod in place on a metal pole that jutted out of the base, and Cab loosened both screws and separated the rod from the base. It was hollow.

He peered inside the small square tube.

“Can you grab me a wire coat hanger from the closet?” he asked.

Maggie found one and handed it to Cab, who straightened the hook end and stretched the rest of the hanger until it was no wider than the mouth of the rod. He shoved the hook end inside the rod and wiggled it around. Then he yanked. The coat hanger slid out of the rod, and so did a wad of gum. After that, a small piece of plastic and metal dropped into Cab’s hand.

A flash drive.

Maggie smiled. “I like this girl.”

“So did I,” Cab replied. “Do you have a laptop in your car?”

“I do.”

Maggie left the apartment and jogged back to her Avalanche and retrieved a laptop from underneath the backseat. She came back and found Cab sitting at the weathered oak desk near the window. She dragged another chair next to him, and together they booted up the laptop. The wallpaper on Maggie’s computer screen showed a photo of Troy Grange with his bulging squirrel cheeks and shaved head in the cockpit of his time-share Cessna, wearing pale green headphones. He grinned at her from the computer, and Maggie winced.