Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

“Guess I better change that,” she said.

Cab said nothing. He inserted the flash drive into one of the USB ports. A few seconds later, the drive opened and spilled a list of dozens of JPEG photos down the screen across Troy’s face. He switched the view to thumbnails, and when he opened the first of the photographs, he saw the double front doors of a house. The picture had been taken at night, with the faces of two women dimly illuminated by a porch light.

“Do you recognize this place?” Cab asked.

Maggie squinted. “Looks like the house Casperson is renting.”

“What about the women?”

“I don’t know them.”

Cab clicked to the next picture, which showed the same angle on the house, with a man on the porch with his back to the camera. Each of the next several photographs showed different people entering the house. Maggie spotted a couple of individuals she recognized from the film set, but most were strangers or their faces weren’t visible in the pictures.

“Looks like she’s documenting a party,” Maggie said. “What’s the date on the files?”

Cab checked. “A week ago Saturday.”

He went slowly through the photographs one by one. Maggie studied the faces where she could see them, but they told her nothing. After fifty nearly identical pictures, the people began to blur. Then, as Cab clicked to the next picture, her mind caught up with her eyes.

“Hang on, go back one,” she said.

Cab used the touch pad to return to the earlier photograph, which showed a man just inside the open door, slipping off a coat to reveal the shoulders of a red dress shirt. He was partly blocking a tall young woman next to him, who was in profile. She caught a glimpse of long reddish hair covering most of her face, but she could also barely make out a hint of her glasses. They were turquoise blue.

“I think that’s Rochelle Wahl,” Maggie said. “She was there, just like Serena thought.”

“Who’s that with her?”

“I can’t be sure from the back, but it looks like Jungle Jack to me.”

Cab enlarged the photo and studied the man. “I think you’re right.”

“Skip ahead. Is there anything with Casperson?”

Cab scrolled through the array of photographs. He opened up several with different angles, but they were mostly dark exterior shots of the house. Peach had zoomed in on a second-floor room where the lights were on, but it was impossible to make out any details behind the curtains.

“That’s Casperson’s bedroom, but we can’t see inside,” Maggie said. “What about photos of people leaving? If the girl Curt Dickes saw was really Rochelle Wahl, she had to be helped out of the party.”

“They wouldn’t have taken her out the front door,” Cab said.

Maggie nodded. “You’re right. Are there any photographs that focus on the side of the house?”

He enlarged the window and leaned forward to get a better look at the thumbnails. At some point during the evening, the photographs shifted, showing people heading out the house’s front door. Peach had shot all of them one by one, but Maggie didn’t see Rochelle Wahl, and she didn’t see a man wearing a burgundy shirt. Then, near the end of the array, the camera switched to a different angle.

“There,” she said.

The photograph showed a sedan parked in the driveway beyond the main entrance, in the shadows of the north wing. There was only low light glowing through the house windows, making the details hard to distinguish as Cab enlarged the picture.

“I’m pretty sure that’s John Doe’s Impala,” Maggie said.

The next picture confirmed it. The driver’s door and a rear door were both open, lighting up the car and two people around it. She saw John Doe loading an unconscious woman into the back of the Impala. Peach had taken several photographs one after another, catching the action in progress; she knew she was witnessing something important. Most were out of focus. One photograph, however, caught the girl’s face turned toward the camera, eyes closed, hair spilling across her face, blue glasses dangling off one ear.

“That’s definitely Rochelle,” Maggie said. She added in a subdued voice, “She doesn’t look fifteen, does she?”

“No.”

“I wonder if they found her school ID in her purse and panicked,” she said.

“Look at her dress, too,” Cab added, zooming in as far as the resolution of the photograph would take him.

The dress was hard to make out in the enlargement, but it was either navy or black. At first, Maggie didn’t understand what she was looking for, but then she spotted tiny silver glints running in two rows down the front of the dress.

“Are those buttons?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Is that what Peach hid in the freezer?”

“Could be,” Cab said.

Maggie rocked back in the chair, lifting the front legs off the carpet. “Where did she find it?”

Cab kept scrolling. He saw a shift in the character of the thumbnails on the screen. Night changed to day. The location was different, too. Peach had staked out a location across a rural highway from a small complex of rental cottages.

“That’s where John Doe was staying,” Maggie said. “What day were these pictures taken?”

“Monday.”

“So that’s the day after Rochelle’s death hit the evening news and one day before Peach disappeared.”

“Except how did she know where to find John Doe?” Cab asked. “I can’t believe he was hanging around the movie set. Casperson would have wanted to keep him under wraps.”

He opened more photographs. It was obvious that Peach had staked out the apartment complex for hours, taking photographs of every vehicle coming and going from the highway. The pictures stretched through the afternoon hours and into the evening. The darkness made the details harder to distinguish, but Peach stayed there as if waiting for someone.

“Look at that,” Maggie said, pointing at one of the pictures, which showed a familiar face outside the cottages. “She wasn’t staking out John Doe; she was staking out Jungle Jack. She saw Jack arrive with Rochelle and saw her getting helped out to the car. And the next day, Rochelle’s death was all over the news. Peach knew that girl didn’t freeze to death in her PJs. She was at Casperson’s party.”

Cab clicked a few more pictures forward. “Look who’s talking to Jack,” he said.

“John Doe. They’re together. We’ve got Rochelle at the party with Jack, John Doe driving her away, and then Jack and John Doe together at the apartment complex two days later. And in between, Rochelle’s death was staged to look like an accident instead of murder.”

“Is that enough to bring Jack in?”

Maggie reached over and put her hand over Cab’s and moved the touch pad down to reach the last file on the flash drive. It was a video, time-stamped the same evening.

She played it.

Peach was on the move, obviously wearing a video camera clipped to her coat. She was in the parking lot of the complex, outside John Doe’s car. In the audio background, Maggie could hear Peach breathing. The interior of the car was too dark to make out any details, but as they watched, Peach used a slim jim to dig into the driver’s side window and unlock the vehicle.

She opened the door. The dome light went on. They could see Peach turn nervously back to watch John Doe’s rental cottage, which was only a few feet away. The lights in the cottage were off.

“Aw, hell, Peach, what were you doing?” Cab murmured.

Peach opened the car’s back door, and the video followed her as she began searching the interior of the car, where Rochelle Wahl had been stretched out unconscious after the party. She dug her fingers into the seats, and they could hear her frustration at finding nothing. Then she began peering under the seats, and she pulled out a penlight and shone it along the car’s floor.