Maggie leaned forward and gave it a whiff. “This thing’s been fired recently.”
“Yeah. And it gets more interesting. I checked the guy’s pockets after they pulled him out. He had ten thousand dollars in cash wrapped up in a tight roll. His wallet had nothing in it except a Florida driver’s license under the name James Lyons at an address in Miami. No credit cards. No other ID. I made a call to the Miami PD to check him out for me. They’re supposed to call me back.”
“Anything else?”
“He was barefoot. His boots were soaking wet and covered with pine needles. So were the legs of his pants. He’d been walking through the woods not long before the accident.”
“In the middle of the night? In a blizzard like this? I don’t like that. Have we checked the trunk of the car?”
“No, it’s buried in the snow. We won’t be able to get to it until we get a tow truck out here.”
“What about a cell phone?” Maggie asked.
“The EMTs found it on the floor of the car. The call log shows half a dozen calls to the same Duluth number. That was it, nothing else. I dialed the number. No answer.”
“And the car?”
“It was rented ten days ago at the Minneapolis airport. He also had a receipt in his pocket from a cheap place that rents efficiency apartments up on the hill in Hermantown. Paid cash. He’s been in town since he rented the car.”
Maggie shoved the hood back from her head. The wind made a mess of her black hair. She’d worn bowl-cut bangs for most of her life, but she’d been growing her hair out for six months. Her stylist had added some spiral curls. Now she looked like Lucy Liu if Lucy wore no makeup and hadn’t gotten any sleep in days.
She wandered over to the ambulance and gestured for the EMTs to open the rear doors. She clambered inside, where the body of the Impala driver lay under a sheet on a metal gurney. She drew the sheet back to study his face, which was difficult to distinguish because of the dried blood. She could make out scars and a dimpled square jaw. His blondish hair was short and shot through with gray, and it had a ridge where he’d worn a hat. He wasn’t old but probably was north of fifty.
“What were you shooting at?” she murmured. Then she stared through the back of the ambulance at the empty forest land that went on for miles. “And what were you doing out here?”
Maggie pulled the sheet back over the body and climbed out of the ambulance. She slid down the slick slope from the highway to the wreck of the Impala, which jutted into the air at a forty-five-degree angle. The front doors were cracked open; the back doors were entombed in drifts. All the windows were shattered and empty. She peered inside and saw that the front seats were covered in glass and blood. Through the back windows, she saw a cowboy hat upside down against the rear window. On the rear floor, she noticed a crumpled piece of newspaper. She reached in through the broken window to grab the paper with her gloved hand. Blood had soaked the pages. When she smoothed out the four-page sheet, she recognized an entertainment tabloid called the National Gazette. The newspaper was at least a week old.
“That’s what you were reading?” she murmured. “Really?”
She turned over the sheet and saw an article outlined with black marker. The headline read:
NEW DEAN CASPERSON THRILLER DOGGED BY WINTER WEATHER
The rest of the article was illegible, but Maggie didn’t need to read it. She knew all about the film that was being shot on location around Duluth. It was called The Caged Girl, and it was based on a series of murders that had taken place in the city more than a decade earlier. She’d lived the case; she’d been part of it. Of course, in typical Hollywood fashion, the role of the Chinese cop was now a bit part given to a redheaded bombshell. Life was unfair.
She heard the labored breathing of Max Guppo as he slipped down the snowy slope to join her beside the car. She pointed at the article in the tabloid.
Guppo read the headline, too. “You think this is about the movie?”
“Could be.”
“You going to call Stride?”
“Sure,” she replied. “Why should he get to sleep when we’re awake?”
“I’ve got something else,” Guppo added. “I just got a call back from the police in Miami.”
“And?”
“The driver’s license is for someone named James Lyons, but the real James Lyons died five years ago. Our corpse is a John Doe with a stolen identity. He’s some kind of ghost.”
2
In what felt like an out-of-body experience, Jonathan Stride watched himself sprint toward the hunting lodge on the shore of the small lake. He could see himself from the side, where silver sprays of snow washed across his face. His black-and-gray hair was pushed back by the wind. He could see himself from above, running along the narrow dirt road through ruts of ice. He could see his face screwed up with intensity as he neared the tiny cabin.
There, inside an eight-foot by eight-foot cage, a young woman was near death and running out of time.
It wasn’t real, of course.
None of it was real except the Duluth snow. The detective on the road was actually a Hollywood star named Dean Casperson. A camera followed Casperson on railroad tracks built beside the road. A drone filmed him from overhead as he ran. Microphones picked up the sound of his breath and the whistle of the wind. As Stride watched, Casperson reached the wooden door of the shed and ripped it open.
Cut.
End of scene.
The actor, the director, the camera operators, the sound engineers, the gaffers, the grips, the production designers, and the location manager all began to reset for the next take. The crew worked quickly. It was already midafternoon, and the natural light wouldn’t last long. Days were short in January, and time was money on a movie set.
The Caged Girl.
Inspired by actual events.
Eleven years earlier, Stride had rescued a young woman named Lori Fulkerson from a cage that was almost identical to the one on the set. It had been built by a serial killer named Art Leipold. Lori had been his fourth victim. Stride had been too late to save the three earlier women who had died while Art played his game of cat and mouse with the police.
The movie script took liberties with what had really happened when Stride rescued Lori. He hadn’t been alone. Maggie Bei and half a dozen other police officers had stormed the remote hunting lodge with him. The real cabin wasn’t anywhere near a lake; it was hidden inside a few acres of forested hunting land. But this was the movies, where reality didn’t mean a thing. The only thing that mattered was what looked good on the big screen.
Even so, the Hollywood version made Stride think about the past again.
He hadn’t even been forty years old back then. His first wife, Cindy, was still alive. It would be three more years before she died of cancer. He’d just been made the lieutenant in charge of the city’s detective bureau that summer. The audio CD that had arrived at his desk on a sticky July day was like a grim welcome to the responsibilities of his new position.
The tape was of a woman breathing raggedly, crying, and banging on the walls for freedom. She said the same four words over and over.
“Save me, Jonathan Stride.”
That was what made the case so personal. Every victim used his name.
The voice on the tape belonged to a St. Scholastica journalism student named Kristal Beech. She’d gone missing after the evening shift of her job at Maurice’s at Miller Hill Mall. Stride and his detectives had analyzed the sound recording for clues to her location. They’d done chemical analyses of the envelope, handwriting, and postage stamp. They’d delved into Kristal’s life to find out who could have taken her.
But they failed.
Kristal died of dehydration before they could find her. Stride received a photograph of her body with a message scrawled across the back:
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.