Alter Ego

19

Stride found Cat on the three-season porch of the cottage when he got home late in the evening. The porch wasn’t heated, so the air was freezing, and needles of frost made feathers across the windows. The girl sat on the old sofa he kept out there. She had a wool blanket pulled up around her neck. Her head bobbed slightly; she’d fallen asleep. When he sat down next to her, she stirred, but her voice was tired.

“Oh, hey,” Cat said.

“Hey yourself. What are you doing out here? It’s way too cold.”

“I figured you’d be home soon,” Cat said.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just wanted to talk.”

He put an arm around her shoulders and stretched out his legs on the wooden floor of the porch. He pulled off his wool cap; his black-and-gray hair was mussed. Outside, a metal light fixture near the door cast a dim glow into the snowy backyard. He could barely see the woods and dunes that led to the lake. The wind was high.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Cat stretched out with her head in the crook of his arm. She brushed her hair out of her face. “Something weird happened last night when Aimee Bowe was over here.”

“How so?”

The girl took a long time to say anything. “Do you believe in psychic stuff? I know Serena doesn’t. That’s why I didn’t talk to her. She would just tell me I’m crazy or I imagined it or something.”

“Well, what kind of psychic stuff are we talking about?” Stride asked.

“I don’t know. Like people who can sense the future. Aimee knew Haley Adams was dead before you found her body, right?”

“I’m not really sure it took psychic abilities to guess that. We were all pretty worried that something had happened to her.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“What happened, Cat?”

“Oh, it was just strange. I was talking to Aimee about what it’s like to sense things. And as she was leaving, she asked me to give Serena a message. Then something came over her face, and she said, ‘Save me.’”

Save me.

Those words had an ugly history for Stride. All of Art Leipold’s victims had said the same thing in the audiotapes. Save me, Jonathan Stride.

“I didn’t understand what she meant,” Cat went on, “but when I asked her about it, she acted as if she didn’t even know she’d said it. Honestly, it creeped me out.”

“Are you sure she wasn’t just having fun with you?” Stride asked.

“I don’t think so. And I didn’t imagine it, either.”

“I believe you.”

“What do you think it means?” she asked.

He ran one hand back through his hair. “I wish I could tell you, Cat. Years ago I would have laughed it off, but I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older that there’s a lot I don’t know. Remember when Serena got shot in the graffiti graveyard? And you and I held hands and you kept praying?”

“‘Do not take her,’” Cat murmured.

“That’s right. I was sure she was dying, but she came back to us. The doctors and scientists would all tell me that what you did had nothing to do with that. Me, I’m not so sure.”

“So you think what happened with Aimee was real?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Aimee didn’t realize she’d said it out loud. Keep in mind, she’s been going to some dark places in this movie. She has literally been trying to put herself inside the minds of women who died excruciating deaths. That has to take a mental toll on an actor.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“The one thing I know is you’re not going crazy,” Stride told her.

Cat smiled. “I hope not.”

They sat a while longer in the cold. He could tell that Cat still had things on her mind. Getting inside Cat’s head was like slowly peeling off the layers of an onion, one by one.

“Maggie left a message for you today,” she said finally. “I overheard what it was.”

“Oh?”

“I wasn’t trying to snoop or anything. I was doing homework when it came in, and I heard it on the machine. She suspects Dean Casperson of doing some really bad things. Rape. Murder. I couldn’t believe that. Is it true? A big star like him?”

“You know how it works, Cat. Suspicions aren’t facts, and facts are the only things that count in these investigations.”

“Except Maggie wouldn’t say it unless she believed it,” Cat said. “Do you believe it?”

“I can’t talk about that. It’s also important that you not tell anyone about what you heard. Okay? We’re in the midst of a serious investigation, and it’s important that we not derail it and not smear anyone’s reputation without evidence.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Cat said, “but I just don’t get it. He is so good. I love him, I love his movies. There was an article about him in People a few months ago that talked about him and Mo and how long they’ve been married. He does all sorts of charitable work, too. I mean, he seems like a good guy. A nice guy. I can’t believe someone like that could be mixed up in such awful things.”

“I’d like to say it never happens, Cat, but it does. Good people can always disappoint us. And evil people can do some remarkable things in other parts of their lives. We just have to decide for ourselves what tips the scale.”

“You’ve never disappointed me,” Cat told him.

Stride chuckled softly. “I disappoint myself all the time. I was talking to a woman today who reminded me about some of the worst things I’ve done in my life. I didn’t like hearing those things used against me, but what really got me angry was knowing many of them were true.”

“Who was she?” Cat asked.

“Nobody. Don’t worry about it.” Then he realized he couldn’t make that demand. Cat needed to know the truth. “Actually, I do need to give you a heads-up about something. There may be some stuff coming out in print about me. You probably already know most of it, but there could be surprises. I don’t know what they’ll dig up and how they’ll spin it.”

“Who would do something like that to you?” Cat asked. Then her pretty brow furrowed. “Is it Dean Casperson? Does he know you’re after him? Is he the one behind this?”

“I have no idea. I just know that I’m a target, and that means my family and friends are targets, too. They may say things about you, Cat. They may talk about your past. I want you to be prepared.”

“I don’t care what anyone says about me,” she replied. “Like you said, it’s all true, right?”

“Well, that doesn’t mean it’s fun having the whole world know about it.”

“What are they going to say?” Cat asked. “That you’re living with a teen hooker?”

“That may be exactly what they say. And more.”

“I don’t care,” she said, but he knew that some of her toughness was an act.

“Well, I do care. If a tabloid has nothing better to do than make headlines out of my mistakes, fine. But you are not one of my mistakes. I’m prouder of you being with me than anything else I’ve done in my life. Got it?”

“Got it,” she said. And then, like any teenager, she found his sore spot and pushed a finger into it. “So what were your worst mistakes?”

“We could be here a long time if you want to hear about those,” Stride said.

“I think I know the personal side,” Cat said. “You and Maggie, right?”

“Right.”

“That was a tough time in your life,” she reminded him.

“There are always tough times. That doesn’t change a thing.”

“Okay, professional, then. Was it my mom? Her dying wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that, but it doesn’t make it any easier to live with. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about my mistakes. One of them was a long time ago — more than twenty years ago, in fact — but Art Leipold was involved. That’s why it’s been bothering me lately.”

“What was it?” Cat asked.

“I was a young cop back then, and a man named Ray Wallace was my partner. Ray did a lot for me when I was growing up. I’ll always be grateful to him, but he was one of those men where you had to balance the scale of good and evil. He did some really bad things, too. He was corrupt. He ended up killing himself right in front of me. The bullet wound in my arm? That was Ray. Anyway, I remember this really difficult case he and I were on. Missing kid. An eight-year-old boy disappeared at the zoo. We all took it hard. Ray and I interviewed everyone in the area, and it didn’t take us long to zero in on the boy’s next-door neighbor. Mort Greeley. Squirrelly type. Aggressive, combative when we talked to him. He was a janitor at the zoo, so we figured he bumped into the kid that day. We were sure he did it, but we couldn’t prove it. We got search warrants, but the searches turned up nothing. After six months, the investigation was at a standstill.”

“So what happened?” Cat asked.

“Ray and Art happened. Ray got it in his head that we needed to push Mort Greeley. Put pressure on him so he’d confess. So he started leaking stories to Art about the case, and Art ran with it. It led the news night after night. Basically, he told the whole city that the police knew Mort was guilty and the only thing we were missing was the boy’s body. This went on for weeks. Months. I should have stopped it. I should have said something, but I thought Mort was guilty, too. So you do what you have to do. I was too young to know how wrong it was.”

“Was he guilty?”

Stride shook his head. “No. Two years later, police in Santa Fe found the boy, living with the guy who’d kidnapped him. It was too late for Mort. He’d already lost his family and his job. He put a gun in his mouth and shot himself.”

“Oh, no! Oh, that’s terrible.”

“I know. Sometimes you can make up for your mistakes, but not that one.”

“I’m really sorry. That is so awful.” Cat threw her left arm across his chest and hugged him tightly. She buried her head in his neck, and then, sweetly, she rose up and kissed him on the cheek.

That was when light exploded through the glass, so sudden and bright that he expected a clap of thunder to follow it. The two of them squinted at the windows in shock. Stride was instantly on his feet.

“Get inside,” he told Cat.

“What was that?”

“Just get inside.”

He took two steps and threw open the porch door. His eyes were still blinded, making the night impenetrable. He blinked, and when he could see, he spotted footprints below the porch windows in the virgin snow. He heard movement from the far side of the cottage. Someone was running away.

Stride jumped off the steps and gave chase. He rounded the corner and saw a man charging through the deep snow toward the street. Something dangled and bounced on a strap from his right hand. A camera. Stride followed, but he was already too late to catch him. The man had a partner waiting. He bolted for a car parked at the curb, and before he’d even closed the door behind him, the car shot off toward the lift bridge.

The driver taunted him with a toot of the horn. Stride ran into the middle of the street, where he could see the red taillights winking at him. The car was too far away to see the license plate, but he didn’t need to. He’d already recognized the make and model.

It was a blue Elantra.

JoLynn Fields of the National Gazette was still spying on him. And now she had pictures.