Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

“Lori,” Serena murmured. “Please stop this. You don’t have to hurt anyone else.”

“So you see, Jonathan Stride ,” Lori continued, her voice rising into a shout, “it doesn’t matter whether those women were innocent. That’s just what tigers do . I came back to Duluth to destroy the people who destroyed my father. Art Leipold. And you. I wanted Art to know just what it felt like to be wrongly accused, to be set up for something you didn’t do, to have everyone turn on you, to be hated by every person who looks at you. I wanted him to suffer the way my father did. And I wanted you to be the one to do it to him. I wanted you to feel absolutely helpless, like I did. To know that people died and you couldn’t stop it. I wanted you to carry that with you for the rest of your life.”

“I do.”

“I didn’t want you to rescue me in the box,” Lori said. “I was supposed to die, too. That was supposed to be the end. I was supposed to be with my father when it was all over.”

The gun quivered in Lori’s grip. She looked down the hallway again toward the bedroom and the cage. All Serena could see in the shadows was one eye, fierce and red, like the eye of a monster.

“No one else needs to die, Lori,” Serena told her. “Not Aimee. Not you. Put down the gun. Put your hands on your head and let me come upstairs.”

Instead, Lori stood up.

“Stop stop stop!” they both shouted at her, their voices overlapping.

“I can still feel her,” Lori said. “She’s still inside my head. I have to get her out .”

In one sudden motion, Lori spun away and disappeared into the darkness. They heard footsteps overhead and the slamming of a door. Serena didn’t have time to fire. She thundered up the stairs two at a time, with Jonny immediately behind her. There was no light on the second story, and the flashlight beam showed a maze of closed doors. Then, from the end of the upstairs hallway, came an explosion.

A gunshot.

“Aimee!” Serena shouted.

A second shot followed the first. Then a third.

Serena sprinted for the end of the hallway and slammed through the closed door into the gloom of a small child’s bedroom. The beam of her flashlight bounced crazily. All she caught were horrible, disconnected images of cartoon animals on the old wallpaper, colored butterflies hanging on ribbons from the ceiling, and an eight-foot by eight-foot padded cage taking up most of the bedroom floor. Lori Fulkerson fired her gun over and over into the soundproof foam, kicking up a cloud of synthetic white snow.

Serena jumped across the bedroom and hit her from behind, crushing the woman’s body against the metal bars of the cage. The gun fell. Serena knocked it away with her heel. Behind her, she was aware of Jonny scooping it up. She threw Lori bodily to the ground and landed on top of her with her knee in the small of her back, and as Lori struggled, Serena grabbed her handcuffs and pinned her wrist in the metal grips.

There were other noises in the house now. More shouts. The thunder of heavy footfalls.

She heard Jonny shouting. “All clear, all clear, all clear!”

“The key!” Serena screamed at Lori Fulkerson. She grabbed Lori’s shoulder and shoved her over onto her back and bellowed into her face. “Where’s the key?”

The pause was only a second, but it felt like forever. Then Lori murmured, as if in surrender, “My pocket.”

Serena squeezed her hand inside the right front pocket of Lori’s pants until her fingers closed around a tiny piece of metal. She pulled it out and crawled to the cage, where she fumbled in the darkness, trying to fit the key into the lock that held the door in place. She tried it again and again, dropped the key, and picked it up. She cursed loudly. Then Jonny was behind her with a firm hand on her shoulder, shining a flashlight onto the lock.

She picked up the key. She put it in the lock.

She opened the box.

The light inside showed Aimee Bowe on her back on the straw floor of the cage. Serena gasped in horror. Blood was everywhere. One of the bullets had hit her thigh. Another had gone through her shoulder. Another had hit her neck. Her breathing was ragged. Serena bent over her, and Aimee’s skin was bone white and frigid to the touch. Her eyes were closed.

She heard Jonny calling for an ambulance.

“Hang on, you’ll be fine,” Serena murmured. She took off her coat and draped it over Aimee’s body, trying to keep her warm. “Help’s on the way.”

Aimee’s eyes opened and tried to focus. The pain caught up with her and overwhelmed the numbness. Her lips murmured something, but Serena couldn’t hear it. She bent down near Aimee’s mouth and listened to what she was saying.

“I felt you coming,” Aimee said.

Serena smiled and held her hand. She stayed there, holding on, as Stride and Guppo applied pressure to Aimee’s wounds and tried to stop the bleeding. She felt too much time ticking away, too much blood pooling around them and soaking her clothes. The box was wet and cold and awful and evil.

And then, cutting through all of that, she heard a tiny flutter of wings and a greeting from the darkness of the cage.

Hey there.

Like a good angel, a chickadee landed on the bars next to Aimee’s face and began to sing.

“You don’t have to drive me all this way,” Cab said to Maggie. “I can afford a cab, you know. Catch-a-Cab Bolton, that’s me.”

Maggie shrugged behind the wheel of her Avalanche. It was late afternoon, and the sun already had set. They were on I-35 heading south out of Duluth toward the Minneapolis airport. Cab’s flight to Fort Myers was in four hours. She glanced in her rearview mirror at the highway behind her, which she shared with only one other vehicle. The storm had loosened its grip, but the roads were quiet.

“Admit it,” she said. “You’re afraid of my driving.”

“Terrified.”

“Well, buckle up, buttercup,” she replied with a grin.

Maggie passed the Grand Avenue exit. Not long afterward, she could see Mort Greeley’s house in the valley on the left side of the freeway. There were still police cars outside. She continued up the hill. Spirit Mountain loomed ahead of them; it was perfect skiing weather. Cab stared through the windows, and neither of them knew what to say. They had two hours alone in the car together, but she figured they would need all of it to figure out what came next between them. That was mostly because she was certain they would avoid the subject altogether until she was dropping him off at the curb at Terminal 1. Neither she nor Cab was an expert at emotions.

“So your mother released a statement?” Maggie asked.

“Yes, Tarla said she regretted not having come forward sooner to tell everyone about Dean Casperson. She wished she would have saved other women the trauma she’d gone through.”

“Except it wouldn’t have done that,” Maggie said. “Dean would have destroyed her career and gone on abusing other women just the way he did.”

“You’re right, but I was pleased to see Tarla say it.”

Maggie tried to keep the truck inside the lane, but the white line went in and out of view as she steered with one hand and snaked her other hand onto Cab’s knee. She glanced in the rearview mirror again.

“I really am sorry about Peach,” she told him.

“Thanks.”

“She didn’t suffer. That’s something.”

“I know.”

They’d found the scene of the crime in the daylight. Guppo had led the search behind the Hermantown apartments. They’d located a spruce tree thirty feet inside the dense woods that bore the red-black sheen of frozen blood. That was where John Doe had killed her.