Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

“You’d think so, but no.” She grabbed the phone from him and dialed the number of the downtown Sammy’s, which she’d memorized long before. She ordered an extra large sausage pizza and then hung up the phone. “Thirty minutes. See how easy that was?”

“I guess I’m not familiar with the intricacies of Duluth pizza ordering,” Cab said.

Maggie grinned at him. “You’re pretty good at other intricacies.”

She hopped off the sofa and headed for the bedroom. “I suppose I ought to be wearing something more than a bra and panties for the driver.”

“I don’t know. Sounds like the making of an adult movie.”

She went to her dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts from the middle drawer and threw them over the rumpled sheets of her bed. Then she stopped. Without putting them on, she went back to the doorway and stood with her hands on the frame. “Cab,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“What if our guy with the burner phone did the same thing?”

Cab turned his phone over in his hands. “You mean, what if he called the wrong delivery location?”

“Exactly.”

“There was only one call in the phone’s records,” Cab pointed out.

Maggie came back and sat down on the sofa. “Yeah, I know. Think about it. He’s talking to John Doe. When he’s done, he decides to order a pizza, and he accidentally uses the same phone and calls the downtown restaurant. Except if it’s Jungle Jack and he’s up in Hermantown, they don’t deliver up there. He hangs up and then realizes he used the wrong phone to make the call.”

“So he calls back to the right location with a different phone.”

“Exactly,” Maggie said. “That’s why Guppo couldn’t find anything. He was talking to the wrong delivery drivers.”

Stride carried his travel mug of black coffee out to his Expedition in the driveway of the cottage. The sun wasn’t up yet at seven in the morning. Four inches of snow had fallen already, and it was still coming down like a dense curtain across the Point. He used a brush to clear the truck. By the time he was done, the windshield was partly covered again by heavy wet flakes.

He drove into the storm. Josh Turner sang on his radio. He followed a snowplow up the hill, but his twenty-minute drive to police headquarters still took forty-five minutes through the slippery streets. By the time he arrived, he was out of coffee. He headed for the building through the parking lot and got more coffee before making his way to his office. When he sat down, he swung the chair around and stared out at the streaks of snow landing on the glass.

His phone rang before he had a chance to do anything else. It was Chris Leipold.

“Good morning,” Stride said when he answered. “Looks like Duluth is giving your film crew a January send-off.”

“It is.”

“If you’re calling about the storage unit, I don’t have any information for you. There aren’t any security cameras out there to figure out who broke in.”

“I’m not calling about that,” Chris said. His voice was still raspy from the flu.

“What’s up?”

“I was wondering if Serena had talked to Aimee Bowe this morning.”

“She took Aimee back to her house from the hospital last night,” Stride replied. “I don’t think they’ve connected since then. Why?”

“We can’t find Aimee. She was due on the set early, but she didn’t show.”

“It’s probably the storm slowing everything down,” Stride said. “It took me twice as long to get to work.”

“No, she wasn’t at her house. We sent a car to pick her up. The driver got there at five-thirty in the morning and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Given what happened to her, I told him to try the door. It was unlocked. He went in and said the house was empty.”

“Aimee was gone?”

“Yeah. He said the bed didn’t even look slept in.”

Stride frowned. “Okay. We’ll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.”

“Keep me posted,” Chris said.

Stride hung up the phone and immediately dialed Serena, who was still back at the cottage. She’d slept late, and her voice sounded sleepy. “It’s me,” he said. “We may have a problem. Aimee Bowe is missing.”

Serena took a long time to reply. Even in the silence, he could feel her concern.

“Can you meet me over at her house?” she asked.

“I’m on my way.”

Stride got up and grabbed his leather jacket from the hook behind the door. The coat was still wet. He alerted Guppo and then made his way back out to the parking lot. The snow continued to fall, but the engine of the Expedition was warm enough that the snow still melted as it hit the metal. He unlocked the door, but before he got inside, he stopped.

Something was wedged under his driver’s side windshield wiper.

A small padded envelope.

Stride looked around. He hadn’t been away from the truck for more than fifteen minutes. He saw footprints near the front of his truck, but whoever had left the package had kicked his way back through the snow to erase his tracks. None of the imprints of tread was left. He followed the prints until they got lost in the jumble of others coming and going from the building.

Someone had been waiting for him in the parking lot.

He removed the padded envelope from his windshield with his gloved hands. There were no markings on the outside. The flap was self-adhering; they wouldn’t find DNA on the gum. He stood in the darkness and snow, weighing the envelope in his palm. It was light but not empty. When his fingers traced the contents, he could feel something hard, small, and rectangular inside.

Somehow he knew. He just knew.

Stride took a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cut a slit in the narrow bottom of the envelope. He separated the two flaps and looked inside. It wasn’t easy to see the contents, but he recognized what it was. He’d received a package just like this four times before. The envelopes had all been left on his truck in different places around the city.

They were messages from the women locked in the box. Messages to him.

Stride felt an ugly sense of déjà vu. He thought about the break-in at Chris Leipold’s storage unit, where only one item had been stolen. Art’s old cassette recorder. It took on a whole new significance now. What he was thinking was impossible, yet here it was in front of him.

He reached into the envelope and pinched the corner of the contents with his gloves. He pulled it out and covered it with his hand to protect it from the snow. It was just what he feared. A Maxell-brand cassette tape.

Someone had scrawled a message on the label.

Save me, Jonathan Stride.

Outside Aimee Bowe’s house, Max Guppo looked like a snowman, completely encrusted in white.

“We’ve checked with all the neighbors,” he told Stride. “No one saw or heard anything last night. Serena had an officer cruise by three times between midnight and five in the morning. He didn’t see anything. No lights. No cars on the street.”

“Where do we stand with the cassette tape?” Stride asked.

“It’s not that easy to find a cassette player these days. I sent somebody over to my grandmother’s place to see if she has one in her attic. Unless you still use one at home, boss.”

“Nothing but eight-tracks for me, Max.”

Guppo chuckled.

The two of them pushed through the snow to the front door of Aimee’s house. Serena was visible at the fringe of the yard, looking like an apparition in the storm as she searched the grounds. Stride and Guppo took off their boots and replaced them with plastic booties as they went inside the house.

“What do we know so far?” Stride asked.