At noon, Stride got the call. They’d found a body.
He stood on the shoulder of Lavaque Road, surrounded by a posse of ambulances and police cars. Up and down the road in both directions, he saw nothing but evergreens, naked birches, and a few ash trees whose dried yellow leaves had clung to their branches deep into the winter. They were less than a mile north of the accident site where they’d found the Impala in the ditch.
A narrow break in the trees led east into the woods. The deep snow was littered with the boot marks of cops and the paw prints of search dogs. Stride skidded down the slope and followed Guppo on the trail.
“We got lucky,” the oversize cop called over his shoulder as he wheezed his way through the snow. “We were two hundred yards in and about to turn back when one of the dogs picked up the scent and dived into the trees.”
“John Doe was smart,” Stride said.
The remoteness of this location didn’t feel random. Without the car accident and the Glock to prompt a search, it was unlikely that a body ever would have been discovered up here even after the spring snowmelt. Hikers simply didn’t wander through these woods. Haley’s disappearance never would have been solved. Without evidence of foul play, they would have had no reason to consider it a murder. She just would have been one more unexplained lost soul.
Stride continued behind Guppo into the teeth of the wind. He wore sunglasses against the bright sun, had put on earmuffs, and his green cap was low on his forehead. Ahead of them, the footsteps veered into the thick of the forest. Guppo turned, and so did Stride. There was no path; they slogged through dense, sharp branches and low weeds. The shadows from the crowns of pines overhead made it hard to see more than a few feet in front of them.
Guppo stopped abruptly. Stride stopped, too, nearly running into the man’s back. He saw crime scene tape awkwardly looped around tree trunks. There was no clearing. Looking down, he saw only a pink athletic shoe jutting out of the brush to let him know that they’d reached the body.
“End of the line,” Guppo said. “This is where he dumped her.”
Stride bent down under the tape and took two steps forward, careful to stay in the footprints that had been left by the police officers who’d already been there. The young woman was at his feet, practically invisible until he was looking directly down at her. John Doe had covered her in feathery snow, but the wind had brushed it aside in patches, like a terrible treasure being revealed. She was frozen solid. Where he could see her limbs, she looked bony to the point of anorexia. Her milky white face stared at the sky, blue eyes wide open, mouth parted in surprise between colorless lips. She had blond hair in a short, boyish cut. There were a few freckles across her forehead, but mostly he saw the burned bullet hole in the center that had killed her.
“Is that Haley Adams?” Guppo asked.
Stride studied the body and realized he had no idea. He hadn’t seen a single photograph of the girl from the movie crew, and none of the descriptions they’d gotten matched one another. He bent down to get closer to the girl’s face. Her features weren’t familiar. She wasn’t a match for any of the Florida driver’s license photos that Maggie had pulled. So far, she was as much a mystery as John Doe.
They had two dead strangers in town. One killer. One victim.
“The age and physical appearance are consistent,” Stride replied, “but that’s all I can say right now. We’ll have to get people on the movie set to see if they can identify her.”
Guppo shook his head. “She looks like a sweet kid. I don’t think she knew what hit her.”
“I guess that’s a good thing,” Stride said.
Some faces of the dead were hard to get out of his brain. This girl was going to be one of them. Guppo was right. She looked innocent and lost, not like a spy. She had a loneliness about her, as if it were somehow inevitable that she would end up in a lonely place. One small body among the miles of wilderness.
He’d suspected all along that she was dead, but there was a terrible finality about finding her here. Every missing persons case held out faint hope until they located a body.
“I assume this isn’t where he did it,” Stride said.
“No, she wasn’t killed here,” Guppo told him. “We widened the search area and found a Flexible Flyer and some bloody plastic sheeting about fifty feet away. That was how he dragged the body in. He weighted it all down with heavy branches and covered it up with snow.”
“John Doe must have scouted the area in advance to figure out where he was going to dump the body. The guy was definitely a pro.”
“If he was so smart, what was he doing in Duluth in January without a decent coat?” Guppo asked with a chuckle.
Stride laughed, too. Not many people were prepared for the reality of a Minnesota winter. It had been six days since the air temperature had climbed above zero.
“I guess he figured, why buy a coat if you’re heading home to Florida?”
“Do you think he really was from Florida?” Guppo asked. “The ID was a fake. He could have been from anywhere.”
“Maybe, but the Sunshine State keeps coming up everywhere we look. John Doe had a Florida license. Haley Adams told Chris she grew up in Florida. And Dean Casperson has a mansion on an island down there. That’s a lot of connections.”
“So why did Haley get killed up here?” Guppo asked.
Stride frowned. “Good question. It’s a long way to go to commit murder. It might help if we knew who the hell she really was.”
*
By the time Stride made it back to the highway, Maggie had arrived at the crime scene. She had Aerosmith booming on the radio, but she clicked it off as he climbed inside her Avalanche and warmed his hands in front of the vents. When he’d thawed out, he showed her the photo of the girl in the woods.
“Damn,” she murmured with regret in her voice. “I hate it when we find snow angels.”
“Yeah.”
They didn’t talk for a while. For all of the prickliness about Maggie, she had a soft spot for victims. A death like this always got to her. He also could see in her face that the weight of everything was catching up with her. Her lack of sleep. Her breakup with Troy. And it was hard not to feel depressed here in the dead of winter, when the days were short, bitter, and gray. If the sun shone at all, it wasn’t around for long.
“I called Serena,” she said eventually. “I told her about the body.”
“Thanks,” Stride said. “Was she able to get any more information out of Aimee Bowe?”
Maggie nodded. “One little tidbit. It sounds like there might have been something going on between Haley and Jungle Jack.”
“Well, I’ve been looking for an excuse to have a little chat with him,” Stride said.
“Try not to break his face, boss. He’s a jerk, but he’s pretty.”
“No guarantees,” Stride replied. “What have you been able to find out about Jack?”
Maggie didn’t bother consulting her notes. She could recite everything from memory. “Where Dean Casperson goes, Jack goes, too. They’re thick as thieves. Jack has worked every Casperson movie for more than fifteen years. He’s a stunt double, but the relationship goes much deeper than that. When they’re not filming, Jack lives with Dean and Mo.”
“At their estate on Captiva?”
Maggie nodded. “That’s what his ID shows. Like I said, they’re close.”
“Does Jack have a record?”
“Not that I could find. It sounds like he’s the bad boy on every set, but being a pig isn’t a crime. From what I could find out, Jack gets away with a lot because he’s tight with Casperson. Nobody wants to cross him, and Casperson has the money and influence to make bad things go away.”
“Speaking of bad things, did you track down the other intern Chris Leipold mentioned? The one who quit after saying she’d been assaulted.”