Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

There were footprints in the fresh snow. Lori Fulkerson had left a trail for them.

Serena grabbed her phone. “Jonny, I’ve got her. She left tracks leading toward the freeway. I’m going to follow her as far as I can.”

“I’ll get Guppo to send backup your way. Be careful.”

“Understood.”

Serena watched the footprints heading away from the house. The plows hadn’t reached the back roads, so there was no difference between the snow in the streets and the snow in the woods. Wherever Lori had gone, she didn’t seem to be hiding her route, as if she knew that sooner or later the police would follow her.

The footprints went from the house to the dirt road, then veered into the trees toward a bridge leading over the frozen creek. Serena followed, pushing through the deep snow. She crossed the bridge, and where the woods ended, she found herself adjacent to the I-35 overpass. Matching sets of concrete pillars, like football goalposts, stretched below the highway decks. Ahead of her was a children’s playground and a small parking lot.

She remembered the photographs in Lori Fulkerson’s living room.

Is that your father?

Yeah. Those were taken at the playground near the freeway when I was six.

The footsteps led to the climbing equipment. Serena could see that Lori had stopped for a while and sat down at the base of the kiddy slide. The snow had been brushed away there.

Why?

What was this all about?

Beyond the playground, the footprints continued under the overpass to Sixty-Third Avenue. The plows already had come through, erasing any evidence of where Lori had gone next. Serena walked into the middle of the street. The road was empty, and the morning was still mostly dark. The freeway overpass ended at a wall built into the side of a sharp hill. The parallel concrete beams overhead were like railroad ties. She turned completely around, looking for more footprints, but Lori’s trail seemed to stop.

Serena listened as the snow hushed every sound. Every few seconds, car lights passed on the freeway overhead with a thunder of tires. Otherwise, it was desolate here. There was no one else around. She could hear herself breathe, and she could see the steam clouding in front of her face. She felt the cold. The lingering flurries brushed like fingers against her cheek.

She put a question into her mind: Where are you, Aimee?

She didn’t expect an answer. That wasn’t how life worked.

Then, in the silent aftermath, she had the strangest experience of her life. It was as if a voice had whispered in her head. She was utterly alone, but she heard it as vividly as if Aimee had been standing next to her and murmuring in her ear.

Save me.

The Yorkshire terrier barked madly as Stride broke into the house. It quivered on its tiny legs with a combination of terror and bravado, making little yips that sounded like an elf coughing. He squatted down, and the Yorkie continued its ferocious din until Stride extended the back of his hand. The dog gave it a quick sniff, decided he was friendly, and began licking his fingers.

“Heck of a watchdog there, buddy,” Stride said.

He climbed the staircase, which was barely wider than his torso, to the second floor. A dark hallway led to the rear of the house. He was there when Serena called to let him know that she’d found footprints in the backyard, and he dialed Guppo to request backup. Then he searched the upstairs rooms. Lori Fulkerson might as well have been a ghost. If she’d ever had furniture upstairs, most of it had been moved out. The rooms were empty, just old paint, worn carpet, and occasional wires poking out of holes in the walls.

There was nothing to tell him who she really was.

According to the city and state records they’d found, Lori Fulkerson had arrived in Duluth eleven years earlier, only weeks before Kristal Beech had been abducted. Before that, she’d been a mystery. She didn’t seem to exist. She had no past, no credit, no previous address. If she’d grown up in Duluth as she claimed, she’d grown up as a completely different person.

He took the stairs back down to the ground floor. The dog followed him.

He went into the kitchen, where mail was stacked up on the table in piles. There were weeks of mail that looked as if she’d never gone through it. Everything was addressed to Lori Fulkerson, but most of it was junk. None of it was personal, from friends or family. He didn’t see a computer or a smart phone anywhere in the house. There was a calendar thumbtacked to the kitchen wall, but she’d written nothing on any of the dates.

The Yorkie ran for its food bowl in the corner. Stride saw that the food bag had been tipped over, spilling its contents onto a plastic tray. The dog had enough food to last for days. Its water dish was a large bucket filled almost to the rim. Lori Fulkerson wasn’t planning on coming back.

She knew the end was near.

Serena was right. There was only one explanation for Lori knowing secrets about the other three women in the cage. She’d put them there herself. She’d murdered Kristal Beech, Tanya Carter, and Sally Wills, and she’d left a trail of bread crumbs leading the police to Art Leipold. She’d manufactured the ultimate alibi by making herself the fourth victim. And then she’d waited for Stride to find her.

The question was why.

Stride went into the living room, which was a sea of old newspapers, dog toys, and CD jewel cases stacked like skyscrapers. Lori had cleared one little spot at a table where she ate her meals. She was a gatherer, someone who was afraid to let anything go or throw anything away. Those were typically people who’d had things taken away from them as a child.

He glanced at the pale yellow living room wall. Three photographs were hung there, all of them from decades earlier. They’d been taken in a children’s park near the house and showed a father and daughter together. Stride took one of the photographs off the wall and held it in his hand and stared at it. He had a hard time recognizing Lori Fulkerson’s face in the young girl in the picture. This ten-year-old looked innocent and happy, nothing like the angry woman she’d become later in life. She stood on the base of a kiddy slide, with her father standing next to her, his arm around her waist.

Her father.

Seeing the man beside Lori Fulkerson was a sucker punch to Stride’s gut.

He knew him. He recognized him all these years later. It was a face he would never forget.

Stride understood. He saw where the stone had gone into the lake and how the ripples had spread. The daughter lost her father, the daughter grew up nursing her rage, and eventually that rage led to revenge and murder. There were plenty of people to blame. Most of all he blamed himself.

He’d let it happen. Years ago he could have stopped it, and he’d done nothing.

Stride took his phone and dialed Serena.

“I know who Lori Fulkerson is,” he told her. “I know what this is about. She’s Mort Greeley’s daughter. Mort lived in a house on a spur road about two blocks from here. I’m betting that’s where she’s keeping Aimee Bowe.”

“I’m already there,” Serena replied, “and I’m going in.”

The footprints reappeared a hundred yards down the spur road, where Lori Fulkerson had emerged from the trees.

Nothing had led Serena to search the road except the feeling that Aimee was there. She walked through the deep virgin snow, seeing no sign of Lori’s trail until she reached the crest of a shallow hill. There she saw the footprints again, leading out of the woods. Lori didn’t try to hide her path. The footprints led to a turnaround at the end of the dead-end road. A two-story 1950s-era house was nestled inside a grove of trees below the slope of the I-35 freeway. Two huge electrical towers guarded the house like soldiers. So did a stand of snow-white fir trees that were twice as tall as the roof.