Alter Ego

30

“Jonathan Stride, meet Cab Bolton,” Maggie told him.

Stride shook hands with the tall blue-eyed detective, whose linen suit and loud purple tie looked in perfect shape despite a three-hour plane ride and the long drive from the Minneapolis airport. It was hard to imagine this man as a former homicide investigator. Cab’s gelled blond hair and diamond earring looked better suited to a Miami nightclub than to a grubby police conference room filled with paper coffee cups and pizza boxes. Stride felt as if the entire city had been invaded by aliens, first from Hollywood, now from Florida. Their knowledge of Minnesota probably began and ended with Fargo.

“Welcome to Duluth, Cab,” Stride told him. “Cold enough for you up here?”

As if Cab could read his mind about Fargo, the man replied with a nonchalant smile, “You betcha.”

“I appreciate your making the trip. Maggie says you know Dean Casperson a lot better than we do, and right now we could use all the help we can get. Casperson thinks we can’t touch him.”

“He’s probably right,” Cab replied. The man didn’t hide his directness, and Stride liked that. “Casperson has been at this a long time without a whiff of suspicion. He’s not afraid of us.”

“Well, maybe you can help us even the odds,” Stride said.

“I will if I can, Lieutenant, but the detective you really needed on this case was Peach Piper.”

“I know this is personal for you. I’m sorry about Ms. Piper.”

Cab tilted his head in thanks without saying anything more. Stride could see that he was open about some things but not about grief.

They all took their seats around the conference table. Stride. Serena. Guppo. Maggie. And Cab Bolton. Maggie and Cab sat next to each other, and Stride sensed an unusual dynamic between them. It was as if Maggie had one foot in Duluth and one foot in Cab’s more glamorous Florida world. Serena obviously sensed it, too. She studied them across the table and made an under-her-breath comment that Stride missed.

He grabbed a square of Sammy’s pizza from the box on the table and popped the tab on a can of Coke. “So where do we stand?” Stride asked them.

“This won’t come as a surprise,” Serena began, “but Aimee Bowe has nothing to say about an attempted assault by Dean Casperson. She claims not to remember a thing about what happened at his house. Plus, she says she took the drugs herself. So she put Casperson completely in the clear.”

“Do you believe her?” Stride asked. “Could our — witness — have misinterpreted what was going on between them?”

Serena shook her head. “I don’t think so. Aimee’s lying. Whatever she does or doesn’t remember, she simply won’t implicate Casperson. She thinks it’s career suicide.”

Cab interjected from across the table: “This has been part of Casperson’s playbook for years. He exploits young actresses. He figures they owe him something for helping their careers. According to my mother, it’s an open secret in Hollywood but no one wants to say anything on the record.”

“And his wife is living in denial about all of it,” Maggie added. “Mo wouldn’t hear a thing against Dean. To her, he walks on water despite his infidelity. She puts all the blame on the actresses, not on him. They’re all just manipulative bitches trying to get ahead.”

“Rochelle Wahl wasn’t an actress,” Stride said. “She was a fifteen-year-old girl. Is that part of his pattern?”

“The underage part?” Cab said. “No. But Haley Adams wasn’t an actress, and neither were the other women who were murdered when Casperson was filming in various cities. He just likes young, beautiful women. If Rochelle was attractive, Casperson would have put the moves on her. He also would have been terrified once he found out how old she was. If there’s one thing that could destroy his public reputation, it’s having sex with an underage girl. Fans don’t have a lot of tolerance for that, even with superstars.”

“Do we have anything more that could actually tie Rochelle to Casperson? Have we found anybody who saw her at Casperson’s place?”

“Nobody will admit it,” Serena told him, “but I found circumstantial evidence that she was there. I reviewed the medical examiner’s report about the contents of her stomach. She ate sushi the evening before she died. Including uni, which you’re not going to find among the California rolls at Super 1.”

“Uni?” Stride asked.

“Sea urchin gonads,” Cab added helpfully.

Stride repeated that phrase very slowly. “Sea... urchin... gonads.”

“Yes, really quite good if you can get past the texture,” Cab said. “It has sort of a custard consistency. Imagine a saltwater flan.”

Guppo took a look at Stride’s face, which was a mask of disbelief, and smothered a laugh.

“Anyway, nobody flagged it at the time, because the death didn’t look suspicious,” Serena went on, “but I checked with the catering company that did the party at Casperson’s place. They had a whole table of sushi set up. Including sea urchin.”

“Which isn’t enough on its own to prove anything,” Stride said.

“Exactly. For now, the only other evidence we have is what Curt Dickes told me. He saw a girl who matched Rochelle’s physical characteristics getting into a car with John Doe outside the party. Unfortunately, he couldn’t identify her.”

“Plus, it’s Curt,” Stride added. “Not everyone’s favorite witness.”

“Yeah, that, too,” Serena said.

“So what’s your theory about Peach?” Cab asked them. “How did she fit into this? She was only there to keep an eye on Casperson and see if she could get evidence of his sexual assaults.”

“Well, she was watching the house on the Saturday night when Rochelle Wahl died,” Stride said. “If she saw Rochelle and John Doe together — and then saw the news about Rochelle’s death — she may have put it together and started digging into it. If that got back to Casperson, he would know he had a big problem.”

Cab nodded. His mouth was a grim line.

“Have we found out anything more about John Doe?” Stride asked.

Maggie pushed a manila folder across the table. “We still have no direct ties to Casperson, but the coincidences keep piling up. We already have John Doe linked to Peach’s murder and the murder of Haley Adams in Florida. Cab also identified at least five other murders or disappearances of young women in areas where Casperson was filming. One of those was a woman who vanished in Nashville. The Tennessee police had a witness who saw a man waiting in a car near where the woman was last seen, and they had a police artist draw a description. Guess who it looks like?”

Stride opened the folder. The artist’s sketch inside was a perfect likeness of the John Doe who died in the car accident on Lavaque Road. Right down to the black cowboy hat.

“But we can’t identify him?” Stride asked. “No actual name? No background?”

“No; he’s still a ghost.”

“What about John Doe’s local contact in Duluth? They were communicating by burner phone.”

“The burner phone hasn’t come online since the last call from John Doe,” Guppo told them. “The only other call in the phone records was that Sammy’s Pizza order, but we don’t have any records to nail down who made it. We’ve tracked down most of the store’s delivery drivers. The film people have generated a lot of business this month, but nothing we could tie specifically to the phone call.”

Stride rocked back in his chair. He wasn’t happy. “Anything else?”

There was silence in the room.

“Well, we’ve got barely two days,” he went on. “We better get busy. Once the film crew wraps up and leaves town, the odds of our putting together a case are next to zero. If that’s true, Dean Casperson is going to get away with murder again.”

As the meeting broke up, Maggie felt Serena tug on her sleeve and pull her away from the others in the room.

“So?” Serena whispered in her ear. “Anything you want to tell me?”

Maggie grinned. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Come on, is it that obvious?”

“It is to me.”

“Well, I’m going through the breakup blues with Troy, and Cab’s doing the same thing with his ex. We figured we might as well enjoy a little physical therapy together.”

“I’m sorry about you and Troy,” Serena said.

“Yeah, that’s on me. As usual.”

Serena shot a quick glance across the room at Cab Bolton. “He’s easy on the eyes, that’s for sure. He doesn’t exactly fit in Duluth, though, does he? I can’t see him diving into a tater tot hot dish.”

“Um, hello,” Maggie pointed out. “Does someone remember walking off the airplane from Vegas in her baby blue leather pants?”

Serena winked. “I’m a hot dish, too, baby.”

“Go away.”

Serena chuckled and strolled out of the conference room. Maggie and Cab were the only two people left inside. The room was warm and still smelled of pizza. Cab sat where he had during the meeting, laying out photographs from a file one by one across the table in front of him. Maggie came around the table and could see that the photographs had been taken in the woods where Peach Piper’s frozen body had been found.

Cab, who was as smooth and glamorous a man as she’d ever met, was crying.

“It’s probably better not to look at those,” Maggie murmured as she sat down next to him.

“I need to see it.”

Cab didn’t say anything. He picked up one of the photographs, which showed a close-up of Peach’s face, still dusted with snow crystals, looking angelic and peaceful. It was easy to imagine her smiling and opening her eyes as if this were just a game, except for the bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. He stared at it and couldn’t seem to put it down.

“I’ll arrange for the body to come home,” Cab said softly. “Peach had no family. I want to take care of everything.”

“Of course.” Maggie added after a pause, “Regardless of what happens to Dean Casperson, the man who actually did this to her is dead. There’s justice in that.”

Cab finally turned the photograph facedown. He retrieved all the pictures and returned them to the file folder, then closed it and put his hands on top. His blue eyes turned to Maggie, and his jaw hardened in determination. Grief was done. Time to move on.

“What about Peach’s notes?” he asked. “Did they give you anything useful?”

“We didn’t find any notes,” Maggie replied. “John Doe got to her apartment first. He cleaned everything out.”

“You found nothing at all?”

“No. The only evidence left in her apartment was the Chinese food receipt that took us to the house where she was spying.”

Oddly, Cab didn’t look unhappy at this news. In fact, a smile crept over his face, and Maggie didn’t understand it.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Peach was one of the most secretive people you’ll ever meet,” Cab explained. “Her nickname was Peach Paranoid. She hid everything. She had backups of everything. Trust me, I know that girl. Peach left something behind. We just need to find it.”