Alter Ego

32

“So who’s Troy?” Cab asked Maggie as they drove to the Central Hillside apartment that Peach Piper had rented. “I heard Serena mention him to you after the meeting.”

“Troy is my Mosquito,” Maggie explained.

“Ah. Recent breakup?”

“Christmas,” she said.

“Very recent. So what happened?”

She wiggled the fingers of her left hand. “He wanted to put a ring on that.”

“And you don’t want anything on your finger?”

“Nope.”

With only one hand on the wheel, Maggie nearly lost control of the Avalanche. The truck bumped halfway onto the sidewalk before she steered it back into the street. In the process, she breezed through a stop sign and nearly collided with a panel van coming down the steep hillside toward the lake. The back of the Avalanche fishtailed, and the van’s angry horn blared in their ears.

“I think I just saw my dead grandmother,” Cab remarked.

“You and Stride. Always with the crap about my driving.”

“Not at all. Next time I rob a bank, you’re my getaway driver. Utterly fearless. So what’s the deal with Troy? Is he a tall suave blond like yours truly?”

Maggie chuckled. “Troy’s not much taller than me and not much smaller than Guppo. He could also bench-press the two of us put together. He’s a widower with two daughters and a heart the size of Alaska. So in other words, he is nicer and sweeter than me in every possible way.”

Cab was silent for a long time. “If you hadn’t sworn to me that you wanted nothing but casual relationships, I would almost think that you were still in love with him.”

“That is not a good way to get laid tonight, Bolton,” Maggie replied sharply. “Can we drop it?”

Cab grinned. “Consider it dropped.”

Maggie spotted the apartment building ahead of them and pointed the Avalanche at it like a torpedo. She parked at a forty-five-degree angle on the street with one wheel over the curb and then swiveled her head to stare at Cab, as if daring him to say something. He was smart enough simply to smirk and keep his mouth shut.

She let them into Peach’s ground-floor apartment.

“Stride and I searched the place after she went missing,” Maggie told him. “Then Guppo did another search after we found the body. If Guppo didn’t find anything, there’s nothing to be found.”

“Well, I know how Peach thinks.”

“I get that, but John Doe got here ahead of us. He took everything.”

Cab didn’t look discouraged. He wandered around the apartment, picking things up and putting them down, as if they would give him inspiration. Peach hadn’t left behind many personal items. Near the sofa was a pair of red Crocs, and Cab turned them over with the toe of his shoe and examined the bottoms. Then he kicked them away. He saw a rubber band on the carpet and picked it up and stretched it between his hands. He went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, which contained nothing but a pint of mocha chip ice cream, a Heggies pizza, two Lean Cuisine dinners, and a package of frozen spinach. Cab opened the ice cream container and dug around inside with one of his fingers.

“You think she hid something in there?” Maggie asked.

“No, I just like mocha chip,” Cab said.

He licked away the ice cream and then took the package of spinach and popped it in the microwave and zapped it on high.

“You want some spinach, too?” Maggie asked dubiously.

“I love spinach,” he said with a little smile, “but more importantly, Peach hates it. When I first met her, I watched her pick it off a pizza at a motel in Lake Wales, Florida.”

Maggie cocked her head and did a double take. “I’ll be damned.”

She waited next to Cab while the little brick of spinach went around and around in the microwave. A few minutes later, the timer dinged, and Cab retrieved the mushy package and put it on the counter. He carefully unsealed the wrapper and opened the white plastic carton inside. Then, using the tines of two forks, he carefully picked through the green wad of spinach.

“Et voilà,” he said.

“What the hell is that?” Maggie asked.

It was a small package of plastic wrap, no more than two inches by two inches, that Peach had secreted inside the spinach and then resealed. Still using the forks, Cab carefully peeled back the folds of the plastic until it was open on the counter. Inside was a rhinestone button shaped like a crystal flower, the kind that might appear on a woman’s dress.

Maggie began to feel sorry that she’d never had a chance to meet Peach Piper. The girl was clever.

“A button,” she said. “I wonder where she got it. And who it belonged to.”

“I have no idea, but Peach obviously thought it was important.”

“Do you think there’s anything else in the apartment?” Maggie asked.

“Yes, I do,” Cab said.

They left the kitchen and went into the bedroom, and this time Cab didn’t even hesitate or look anywhere else. He went straight to the white mannequin standing behind the door with her arm cocked seductively behind her head.

“Sexpot,” he said, as if talking directly to the mannequin. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Maggie asked.

“Peach had a collection of mannequins,” Cab explained. “It was a little weird, and she’d be the first to say so. She had six of them in her bedroom in Florida. Ditty, Petunia, Harley, Bon Bon, Rickles, and Sexpot. I don’t know how the hell she got Sexpot up here with her, but there was very little that Peach couldn’t do.”

He put his hands on his hips and studied the mannequin, which was made of fiberglass and was connected to a heavy glass stand by a jointed metal rod. He began to undress it.

“Something you want to tell me about your fetishes?” Maggie asked.

Cab winked at her.

When Sexpot was naked, he carefully detached the mannequin’s cocked arm from the rest of the body. He studied the metal plates on both sides, then reattached the arm and did the same thing on the other side. Then he removed the head and segmented the torso from the legs. When he found nothing, he lifted the entire mannequin off the metal rod that secured it on the glass base. Two screws with plastic caps held the rod in place on a metal pole that jutted out of the base, and Cab loosened both screws and separated the rod from the base. It was hollow.

He peered inside the small square tube.

“Can you grab me a wire coat hanger from the closet?” he asked.

Maggie found one and handed it to Cab, who straightened the hook end and stretched the rest of the hanger until it was no wider than the mouth of the rod. He shoved the hook end inside the rod and wiggled it around. Then he yanked. The coat hanger slid out of the rod, and so did a wad of gum. After that, a small piece of plastic and metal dropped into Cab’s hand.

A flash drive.

Maggie smiled. “I like this girl.”

“So did I,” Cab replied. “Do you have a laptop in your car?”

“I do.”

Maggie left the apartment and jogged back to her Avalanche and retrieved a laptop from underneath the backseat. She came back and found Cab sitting at the weathered oak desk near the window. She dragged another chair next to him, and together they booted up the laptop. The wallpaper on Maggie’s computer screen showed a photo of Troy Grange with his bulging squirrel cheeks and shaved head in the cockpit of his time-share Cessna, wearing pale green headphones. He grinned at her from the computer, and Maggie winced.

“Guess I better change that,” she said.

Cab said nothing. He inserted the flash drive into one of the USB ports. A few seconds later, the drive opened and spilled a list of dozens of JPEG photos down the screen across Troy’s face. He switched the view to thumbnails, and when he opened the first of the photographs, he saw the double front doors of a house. The picture had been taken at night, with the faces of two women dimly illuminated by a porch light.

“Do you recognize this place?” Cab asked.

Maggie squinted. “Looks like the house Casperson is renting.”

“What about the women?”

“I don’t know them.”

Cab clicked to the next picture, which showed the same angle on the house, with a man on the porch with his back to the camera. Each of the next several photographs showed different people entering the house. Maggie spotted a couple of individuals she recognized from the film set, but most were strangers or their faces weren’t visible in the pictures.

“Looks like she’s documenting a party,” Maggie said. “What’s the date on the files?”

Cab checked. “A week ago Saturday.”

He went slowly through the photographs one by one. Maggie studied the faces where she could see them, but they told her nothing. After fifty nearly identical pictures, the people began to blur. Then, as Cab clicked to the next picture, her mind caught up with her eyes.

“Hang on, go back one,” she said.

Cab used the touch pad to return to the earlier photograph, which showed a man just inside the open door, slipping off a coat to reveal the shoulders of a red dress shirt. He was partly blocking a tall young woman next to him, who was in profile. She caught a glimpse of long reddish hair covering most of her face, but she could also barely make out a hint of her glasses. They were turquoise blue.

“I think that’s Rochelle Wahl,” Maggie said. “She was there, just like Serena thought.”

“Who’s that with her?”

“I can’t be sure from the back, but it looks like Jungle Jack to me.”

Cab enlarged the photo and studied the man. “I think you’re right.”

“Skip ahead. Is there anything with Casperson?”

Cab scrolled through the array of photographs. He opened up several with different angles, but they were mostly dark exterior shots of the house. Peach had zoomed in on a second-floor room where the lights were on, but it was impossible to make out any details behind the curtains.

“That’s Casperson’s bedroom, but we can’t see inside,” Maggie said. “What about photos of people leaving? If the girl Curt Dickes saw was really Rochelle Wahl, she had to be helped out of the party.”

“They wouldn’t have taken her out the front door,” Cab said.

Maggie nodded. “You’re right. Are there any photographs that focus on the side of the house?”

He enlarged the window and leaned forward to get a better look at the thumbnails. At some point during the evening, the photographs shifted, showing people heading out the house’s front door. Peach had shot all of them one by one, but Maggie didn’t see Rochelle Wahl, and she didn’t see a man wearing a burgundy shirt. Then, near the end of the array, the camera switched to a different angle.

“There,” she said.

The photograph showed a sedan parked in the driveway beyond the main entrance, in the shadows of the north wing. There was only low light glowing through the house windows, making the details hard to distinguish as Cab enlarged the picture.

“I’m pretty sure that’s John Doe’s Impala,” Maggie said.

The next picture confirmed it. The driver’s door and a rear door were both open, lighting up the car and two people around it. She saw John Doe loading an unconscious woman into the back of the Impala. Peach had taken several photographs one after another, catching the action in progress; she knew she was witnessing something important. Most were out of focus. One photograph, however, caught the girl’s face turned toward the camera, eyes closed, hair spilling across her face, blue glasses dangling off one ear.

“That’s definitely Rochelle,” Maggie said. She added in a subdued voice, “She doesn’t look fifteen, does she?”

“No.”

“I wonder if they found her school ID in her purse and panicked,” she said.

“Look at her dress, too,” Cab added, zooming in as far as the resolution of the photograph would take him.

The dress was hard to make out in the enlargement, but it was either navy or black. At first, Maggie didn’t understand what she was looking for, but then she spotted tiny silver glints running in two rows down the front of the dress.

“Are those buttons?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Is that what Peach hid in the freezer?”

“Could be,” Cab said.

Maggie rocked back in the chair, lifting the front legs off the carpet. “Where did she find it?”

Cab kept scrolling. He saw a shift in the character of the thumbnails on the screen. Night changed to day. The location was different, too. Peach had staked out a location across a rural highway from a small complex of rental cottages.

“That’s where John Doe was staying,” Maggie said. “What day were these pictures taken?”

“Monday.”

“So that’s the day after Rochelle’s death hit the evening news and one day before Peach disappeared.”

“Except how did she know where to find John Doe?” Cab asked. “I can’t believe he was hanging around the movie set. Casperson would have wanted to keep him under wraps.”

He opened more photographs. It was obvious that Peach had staked out the apartment complex for hours, taking photographs of every vehicle coming and going from the highway. The pictures stretched through the afternoon hours and into the evening. The darkness made the details harder to distinguish, but Peach stayed there as if waiting for someone.

“Look at that,” Maggie said, pointing at one of the pictures, which showed a familiar face outside the cottages. “She wasn’t staking out John Doe; she was staking out Jungle Jack. She saw Jack arrive with Rochelle and saw her getting helped out to the car. And the next day, Rochelle’s death was all over the news. Peach knew that girl didn’t freeze to death in her PJs. She was at Casperson’s party.”

Cab clicked a few more pictures forward. “Look who’s talking to Jack,” he said.

“John Doe. They’re together. We’ve got Rochelle at the party with Jack, John Doe driving her away, and then Jack and John Doe together at the apartment complex two days later. And in between, Rochelle’s death was staged to look like an accident instead of murder.”

“Is that enough to bring Jack in?”

Maggie reached over and put her hand over Cab’s and moved the touch pad down to reach the last file on the flash drive. It was a video, time-stamped the same evening.

She played it.

Peach was on the move, obviously wearing a video camera clipped to her coat. She was in the parking lot of the complex, outside John Doe’s car. In the audio background, Maggie could hear Peach breathing. The interior of the car was too dark to make out any details, but as they watched, Peach used a slim jim to dig into the driver’s side window and unlock the vehicle.

She opened the door. The dome light went on. They could see Peach turn nervously back to watch John Doe’s rental cottage, which was only a few feet away. The lights in the cottage were off.

“Aw, hell, Peach, what were you doing?” Cab murmured.

Peach opened the car’s back door, and the video followed her as she began searching the interior of the car, where Rochelle Wahl had been stretched out unconscious after the party. She dug her fingers into the seats, and they could hear her frustration at finding nothing. Then she began peering under the seats, and she pulled out a penlight and shone it along the car’s floor.

They heard a tiny squeal of excitement, and Peach’s hand disappeared under the seat. When it came out, there was a rhinestone button pinched between her fingertips. They could hear her voice on the video, just a whisper.

Maggie realized it was the only time she’d ever have a chance to hear Peach Piper speak.

“Gotcha,” Peach said.