Alter Ego (Jonathan Stride #9)

She walked into the living room with Guppo beside her. A narrow corridor led to the bedrooms, and they checked each one, expecting to find Aimee sprawled on the bed or the floor. The actress wasn’t there. Serena checked the two bathrooms, but they were empty.

They did a search of the rest of the house, which didn’t take long. It was obvious that Aimee had never made it home. Serena continued to the rear porch, which had a view out onto the dark mass of Lake Superior. Frost coated the windows, and wind whistled through a seam in one of the frames. It sounded like the cry of a witch. She was hoping she’d find Aimee stretched out on a wicker sofa under a blanket, but no one was there.

“Is Jungle Jack back at Casperson’s house yet?” she asked Guppo.

“As of two minutes ago, no.”

“Where did the son of a bitch take her if it wasn’t here? Get a car over to the apartment Jack’s renting in Hermantown. I want to make sure he didn’t decide to finish what Dean Casperson started.”

Guppo nodded. “I’ll make the call.”

The sergeant turned around and left the house, leaving Serena alone.

Serena stood on the back porch, thinking about Aimee Bowe. There was something odd about her, and she had no idea how to explain it. It wasn’t rational, and Serena believed only in rational things. She thought about the story Stride had told her about Aimee and Cat. Save me. It was so unbelievable that Cat hadn’t even wanted to tell her about it, because she knew Serena would tell her it wasn’t real.

And now Lori Fulkerson.

It’s the strangest sensation, like I can feel her inside my head. Like we’re connected.

Not rational.

Serena closed her eyes. She tried to open her mind, as if she could feel a connection with Aimee simply by being there. Aimee’s presence was in this house. A hint of her perfume floated over the cold. Serena listened to the wind and thought: Where are you? Tell me.

Aimee didn’t answer, because things like that weren’t possible. Serena felt silly for even having considered it. What mattered was evidence you could feel, touch, taste, hear, and see.

She went back out the front door. Guppo was waiting for her. Lori Fulkerson finally had driven away.

“Have we found Jungle Jack?” Serena asked.

“The uniform at Casperson’s place just checked in. Jack’s back. That means he didn’t have time to go to Hermantown.”

“So where is Aimee Bowe?”

“Jack says he dropped her here,” Guppo told her.

Temper flared on Serena’s face, which wasn’t like her. “Well, she is not here.”

“I know, Serena,” Guppo replied quietly.

She shook her head at her outburst and turned her anger back on herself. She felt like this entire case had a wall around it that they couldn’t break through. “I’m sorry, Max. Call the officer back and get Jungle Jack on the phone. I want to talk to him myself.”

“You got it.”

Serena stamped through the snow into the middle of the yard. She shivered in the wind and studied the house and grounds from a distance. Footprints were everywhere, overlapping. They told her nothing. Some went around the house; some crossed the yard diagonally; some went downhill toward Skyline Parkway. Most probably had been made by kids.

Then she remembered what Aimee had said about someone breaking into the house. Whoever it was didn’t just look through the windows. He came inside, too.

What if he was waiting for her when she got home?

Who?

There was no sign of a struggle, but in Aimee’s condition, she wouldn’t have been able to put up a fight. Except there was almost no time between Jungle Jack leaving and Lori Fulkerson arriving for anyone to kidnap Aimee.

She saw Guppo hustling toward her through the snow. He gave her his phone and said simply, “Jack.”

“Mr. Jensen,” Serena barked into the phone. “This is Serena Stride with the Duluth Police. We’re at the house that Aimee Bowe is renting, and she’s not here. Where is she?”

There was a long pause on the line. “I don’t know what to tell you, Detective. I was there less than twenty minutes ago. I dropped her off.”

“Describe the house,” Serena said.

“Blue, single story, way up on the hill.”

Serena nodded. The description was right. “What exactly happened when you got here with Aimee?”

“She got out of the car. She headed for the front door. I left. End of story.”

“What was her physical condition?” Serena asked.

“She said she was fine. I mean, she was wobbly and all, but I figured she’d simply had too much to drink.”

“Did you get out of the car yourself? Did you help her?”

“She didn’t want any help,” Jack replied. “You may find this hard to believe, but Aimee Bowe doesn’t exactly like me. She wasn’t crazy about the idea of my driving her home. She told me to go.”

“Did you wait until she got inside the door?”

“No, I just left.”

Serena shook her head in frustration. “Were there any other cars on the street?”

“I don’t remember any, but I wasn’t paying attention.”

She hung up the phone and handed it back to Guppo. “It’s freezing out here. We need to find her, Max. If Jack’s not lying, Aimee was heading for her front door when he left. At most, we got here fifteen minutes later. And Lori Fulkerson was here before that. In that time, Aimee managed to disappear.”

“But she never got inside the house,” Guppo said. “The floor mat inside wasn’t wet. She didn’t carry in any snow.”

Serena looked around at the large, sloping expanse of yard and felt a new sense of urgency. “Then she may be outside. Have the men check the perimeter of the property. Hurry.”

Guppo whistled with his fingers and shouted at the officers near the house. Serena headed through the snow for the lot line, where the yard was ringed with evergreens whose branches hung to the ground. Even in the moonlight, a body could lay there, unfound. The wind on the hill roared, fast and cold, cutting through her heavy coat and biting at the exposed skin on her face. Anyone outside in this weather didn’t have much time.

“Go, go, go!” she shouted. “Spread out!”

The police officers separated on the hillside, one small shadow after another. Serena headed for a sweeping ash tree near the street and had to duck to walk underneath it. The snow was deeper there. She saw nothing, so she pushed her way back into the open yard. Guppo was checking the fir trees near the neighbor’s house. Two officers hiked down the steep backside of the slope toward Skyline Parkway. Another was in the wooded land across the street.

Serena thought: Footprints.

If Aimee was out here, she had to leave footprints.

She focused on the bed of snow filling the yard and tried to separate out the prints that didn’t matter. The tracks of animals. The tracks of kids cutting through the yard from one street to another. The random dimples of ice blown off the trees. The cops who had trampled most of the area near the house. She looked for prints that started near the front door and veered off in a single, lonely track. Just one set, wandering away, getting lost.

She almost missed them.

The ground was higher than she was, making the seam on the hillside almost invisible, like a wrinkle in the snow that the wind was already whisking away. Yet she knew it was footprints. She ran. She took large steps, and when she reached the tracks, she saw an uneven row of small indentations, spread far apart, vanishing toward a stand of blue spruces.

Fifty yards away, where the trees spread their branches and the footprints ended, she saw an almost indistinguishable mound in the snow.

“Over here!” Serena called.

She charged downhill, and as she reached the small mound, she dropped to her knees. The wind had mostly covered the body in drifts already, and Serena had to brush aside snow to find the arms, the chest, and finally the face. It was Aimee. Her eyes were closed, the lids white with ice. Her skin was already way too cold. Her mouth was parted and unmoving, the lips slightly open. Serena patted Aimee’s cheek and called her name into her ear.

“Aimee, it’s me. It’s Serena.”

There was no answer.

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