Serena twisted the knob and opened the front door at Aimee Bowe’s rental house. She knelt in the doorway and checked the lock to make sure there were no signs of tampering, but the latch was old and no longer clicked securely into place.
Inside, she took off her boots on the mat and explored the house in her stocking feet. There was dried mud on the floor, but she and Guppo had brought that in. She retraced their search from the previous night in her head and realized that they’d looked for Aimee only in the obvious places. The bedrooms. The bathrooms. The porch. There were plenty of hiding places for someone who didn’t want to be found.
Serena didn’t know whether to believe Aimee’s story about someone hiding inside. The actress had been drugged and nearly delusional the previous night, so she could have imagined the whole thing. However, Serena had seen footprints in the snow outside when she’d responded to Aimee’s first call. Someone had been there. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that whoever it was had come back.
The trouble was everything else that Aimee had said.
I knew they were going to be put me in the box.
They’ve been watching me for weeks.
Sometimes I channel other people.
None of it made sense.
She made sure that the house was really empty. She checked the places she’d overlooked the night before. The closets. The basement. The garage. She even brought in a ladder and pointed her flashlight around the attic. She found nothing up there but dust and spiderwebs.
As she stood on tiptoe on the ladder steps, however, she heard something unusual in the house. She swung around quickly and nearly lost her balance. Her flashlight lit up the shadows of the hallway.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
Serena climbed down the ladder and returned to the living room. Through the porch windows, the bed of snow stretched down the hillside. The dark lake merged with the dark clouds. She flipped on a light switch, but the light was broken. The house felt cold. She spotted the thermostat on the wall and found that the inside temperature was fifty-nine degrees. Aimee hadn’t set it that low. Not a Los Angeles girl.
There was a bitter draft from somewhere.
She checked the porch and found the back door was open. Raw air chilled the space. When she tried to shut the door, the wind nudged it open again. There was no mystery about it. She did a tug-of-war with the breeze as she tried to secure the latch, and finally she grabbed a chair and wedged it under the doorknob. The chair rattled, but the door stayed closed.
Then she heard a noise again.
It was almost right behind her. She spun and saw nothing as she peered into the living-room shadows. She didn’t move, and her hand edged closer to the butt of her gun as a precaution. As she stood there, the same noise beckoned her into the other room. It was a whistle, like someone softly alerting her that she wasn’t alone. It happened twice. Hey there, hey there.
“Is someone in the house?” she called loudly. “This is the police.”
But the living room was empty. She wondered if her mind was playing tricks on her. There was no way anyone could have gotten inside without her hearing him, and she was certain that she’d searched the entire house.
Hey there.
The low whistle taunted her again. This time it came from the master bedroom at the end of the hallway, as if whoever it was had traveled invisibly from one end of the house to the other. She’d already been in the bedroom, and she knew it was empty, but she retraced her steps and assessed the gloomy interior from the doorway.
Hey there.
Serena smiled in relief. A black-and-white chickadee had perched atop the curtain rod by the bedroom window.
“Well, hi,” she said to the bird. “Did you come in through the back door?”
Hey there, hey there, the bird replied.
“And I bet you want to get out again, don’t you?” Serena asked. She went to the casement window, which had no screen, and cranked the metal handle to open the window toward the winter air. As if the bird could smell freedom, it vanished quickly through the opening with a flutter of wings. Serena shut the window and locked it. It was one of the few locks in the house that seemed to work.
She laughed at her own anxiety. The dark house. The open door. The whistle of the bird. In the end, it had all proved to be nothing. Yet her unease refused to let go, and she wasn’t sure why.
Then she remembered.
It was something Lori Fulkerson had said.
There was a bird inside the box. Did they tell you that? A chickadee. You can’t see it, but it flies around, and it sings to you. It’s like this one beautiful thing that keeps you alive and reminds you of the outside world.
Aimee’s drugged delusion was that someone was going to kidnap her and put her in the box just like Art Leipold’s other victims. And now here was a chickadee trapped inside her house.
Serena knew it was a coincidence. Tiny little chickadees were one of the few songbirds tough enough for Minnesota winters, and they were common even in January. The lock on the back door didn’t work. The wind pushed it open. The bird flew inside. That was all it was.
Unless someone was playing a very strange game.
*
Stride found the small self-storage complex on a dirt road north of the city. It had been built on cheap land surrounded by acres of forest. There were three long, low buildings with rows of red garage doors. Piles of dirty snow had been plowed up to the edge of the trees, but the gravel driveways were slick with ice. He saw a gray Mercedes parked halfway down the third building, and he drove up next to it in his Expedition. He opened his window.
Chris Leipold was inside the Mercedes. He could see in Chris’s face that the stress and long hours of the movie production were taking their toll. Behind the man’s small wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were watery. His skin was pale, and his thinning blond hair was greasy and unwashed. Chris opened the Mercedes window, and when the cold air hit his lungs, he unleashed a rattling cough.
“You okay there, Chris?” Stride asked.
“Flu. A little welcome home present from Minnesota.”
“Yeah, it’s going around. You should get some rest.”
“I’ll rest when we’re done filming,” Chris said.
“Is that going to be soon?”
Chris shrugged. “Depends on Aimee Bowe. We weren’t counting on losing her today, so we have to rearrange the shooting schedules. Hopefully, she’ll be back on the set tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t count on that. She almost died.”
“Death’s a pretty good excuse, but short of that, actors have contracts.”
“Does Aimee have any scenes left with Dean Casperson?” Stride asked.
“One,” Chris replied. “Why?”
“I just thought it might be difficult for her.”
Chris shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come on, Chris. It’s just the two of us out here. Off the record. No notes, no reports. You can’t tell me it’s not all over the set that Aimee was drugged.”
“I talked to Dean. He says Aimee was clearly high on something when she arrived at his place last night. He asked me to try to keep it under wraps as best as I can. The last thing Aimee needs is to have people start saying she’s unstable. If that gets around, no one will hire her again.”
“So Casperson already has his knives out,” Stride said. “Discrediting her. Making sure she doesn’t talk.”
“He’s protecting her,” Chris replied.
Stride sighed in frustration. Everyone around Dean Casperson did his dirty work for him. Chris Leipold was essentially a good man, but in Hollywood, even good men made compromises. Everything was a trade-off. Sometimes talent came with perversions and secrets, and you had to live with it. If you wanted to get a film made, you couldn’t risk being blackballed, so you kept your mouth shut.
“Why did you want me out here?” Stride asked Chris, gesturing at the self-storage units.
“I got a call from the owner this morning. He came over here and saw one of the units with an open door. Somebody broke in overnight. It was my unit, so he wanted me to know about it.”