Alter Ego

6

“Thanks for meeting me on short notice, Chris,” Stride said.

Chris Leipold shrugged and drank from the bottle of beer in front of him. He gave Stride a mellow smile. His tie was loose, and his suit coat was draped over the chair next to him. “Why not? No one in L.A. ever says, ‘One more drink? Oh, no, really, I couldn’t.’”

They were in the upstairs bar at Grandma’s restaurant in Canal Park. In January, the midevening drinkers were mostly locals, not tourists. Frost clouded the windows of the glassed-in patio, giving a hazy glow to the lights of the hotels outside. Lake Superior was a vast dark stain beyond the city’s boardwalk.

While Chris drank beer, Stride drank coffee. He could see that Chris was a different man when he was away from the set and the movie stars. More of his Duluth roots came out. His Minnesota accent slipped back into his voice. You could take the boy out of the Midwest, but you couldn’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

“It freaks me out when I come back to Duluth,” Chris reflected in a slightly drunken monologue. “Seeing the old places. Seeing old school buddies from Denfeld. Of course, no one knows what to say to me anymore. Some of them think I’m a stuck-up alien because I live on the Coast. Some think I must be homicidal because I’m Art’s son. One of these days I’m going to wise up and remember that I just don’t belong here anymore. It’s all in my past.”

Except it wasn’t in the past. Not by a long shot. Stride knew that, but he let Chris get his frustrations out.

“And yeah, I know, it’s my fault,” Chris went on. “I did it to myself. I wrote the movie. I pushed to get the filming done here. Maybe you’re right, Lieutenant. Maybe this really is all about Art. I told myself all along that it wasn’t, but here I am. I’m right back where the son of a bitch wanted me to be.”

“No matter what he did, Art was still your father,” Stride said.

Chris took off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them and positioned them on his face again. His brown eyes glistened. “I know. I’m stuck with that. When my mom called to say that he’d hanged himself, I actually cried. Not for long. One burst of tears and I was done. Mom didn’t cry at all. She knew he was a bastard long before the rest of us did. She was smart enough to get out of that marriage years ago.”

Stride kept silent. He hadn’t liked Art, not from the very beginning, but he didn’t need to say so.

“It goes without saying,” he told Chris, “but I’ll say it anyway. You’re not your father.”

“Maybe so, but it’s hard living with bad genes.”

“Art was careless about people’s lives long before he became a killer,” Stride said. “I saw him report stories that were reckless and wrong, but he never seemed to have any regrets about the collateral damage. That’s the kind of man he was. He didn’t have a conscience. But it’s not the kind of man you are. Anyone can see that in your movies.”

Chris picked up his beer bottle and then put it back down without drinking. “Well, thank you for that.”

“It’s true.”

“I know. You’re right. Sorry for pissing and moaning about my family tree. Generally, I don’t do that. I think it’s because I’m back home. You know, I did something last week that I haven’t done in years. I went out to see the cabin in the woods where Art brought all the victims. I guess I wanted to see it before we started filming.”

“There’s not much left out there,” Stride said. “Somebody torched the cabin years ago.”

“Yeah. Good riddance. People still go out to see it, though. Did you know that? There were footprints in the snow everywhere. It must be some kind of morbid tourist attraction.”

“The movie’s been in the news,” Stride replied. “There have been a lot of stories about the murders. People are curious.”

“So it’s my fault again,” Chris said with a wry smile. He put both hands flat on the table and shook himself to clear his head. He made the knot of his tie a little tighter as if it were time for business. “Well, anyway. I’m sure you didn’t call to listen to me go on about Art. I saw Serena at the party tonight.”

“I know.”

“I heard about Jack hitting on that teenage girl who lives with you guys. Sorry about that. I’m glad Serena intervened. You get something of an entitlement culture with celebrities. I’m not defending it or defending Jack. I’m just saying it is what it is. You might want to keep your girl away.”

“Oh, believe me. We will.”

Chris stared at his beer bottle again as if it were calling to him. He tilted it to his lips and finished it and wiped his mouth. Then he waved at the waitress to order another. “Do you know anything more about what happened to Haley Adams?” he asked.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. The more we learn about Haley, the more questions we have.”

“There are rumors flying around the set, you know,” Chris said.

“Like what?”

“People are saying she’s dead. Is that true?”

“I hope not,” Stride replied.

“Do you have any reason to think she might be?”

“For now, we just want to find her.”

“You guys seem awfully interested in an intern who simply stopped showing up for work,” Chris pointed out. “That makes me think there’s something more going on here.”

“Nothing that I can talk about,” Stride said.

Chris pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay. I get it. What do you want to know?”

“Who hired Haley to work on the crew? How did she get the job?”

“The production manager hires local film students as interns. It’s pretty common. They’re usually cheap and enthusiastic. Haley was the best of the bunch. Mature. Reliable. It was strange, though. For a UMD student, she didn’t know much about Duluth.”

“What do you mean?” Stride asked.

“Being from Duluth myself, I made it a point to be friendly with the local kids. I talked to them when I could. Last week I was talking to Haley, and I made some offhanded joke about lefse. She didn’t know what it was. I laughed. I said, ‘How can you grow up in Minnesota and not know what lefse is?’”

“What did she say?”

“She said she’s from Florida, not Minnesota. She came to Duluth to go to college. Apparently, one of her high school teachers grew up here and was telling her what a great area it is.”

Stride frowned. “Okay. Maybe.”

“Yeah, maybe. The thing is, the next day I took some of the crew across the bridge to get burgers at the Anchor Bar. Haley went along and made a comment about never having been there. I mean, really? A UMD senior who has never been to the Anchor Bar? Hell, I was thrown out of there twice before the end of my freshman fall semester.”

“So you think she’s not who she said she was?”

“It raises some red flags,” Chris said. “It makes me wonder whether she was telling us the truth about her background.”

Stride eased back in the chair and drank his coffee, which was getting cold. “Odd question, but can you think of any reason Haley would have been spying on Dean Casperson?”

Chris stared at him. “Was she?”

Stride waited a moment and then said, “It looks that way.”

“What kind of spying do you mean?”

“Focusing a high-powered telescope on his bedroom window,” Stride said.

Chris’s brown eyes widened. “Wow. That’s disappointing. I thought better of the girl than that. But yeah, that kind of stuff happens all the time. It’s a real problem during location shooting, when celebrities don’t have the same privacy protections they do at the studio.”

“What would someone be looking for?” Stride asked.

“Anything. Sometimes it’s paparazzi trying to get candid photos they can sell. There’s big money in that. Sometimes it’s tabloid reporters looking for gossip and dirt. They’ll spy, bribe, hunt through garbage, whatever it takes. You already mentioned something about the National Gazette today, didn’t you? Believe me, this kind of crap is their specialty.”

Stride thought about the possible motives. Photos. Gossip. Dirt. Scandal. That would explain Haley Adams peering through the bedroom window at Dean Casperson. It didn’t explain why she was missing. It also didn’t explain John Doe and the recently fired Glock.

“Have there been any leaks about the film or the cast?” he asked.

“There are always leaks.”

“Anything serious or embarrassing?”

Chris shook his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. The weather has put us behind schedule and hurt our budget, but that’s par for the course. I don’t get too worried if something like that shows up in Variety.”

“What about other problems? Things that you wouldn’t want to see in a tabloid headline.”

Chris hesitated. “I’m sure I don’t know half the crap that goes on when the cameras are off. And I don’t ask.”

“That seems like a cautious response, Chris.”

“Well, filming a movie is like a nonstop high school dance. There are rumors, fights, hookups, romances, parties, breakups. Most of the time, you simply try to drag the project across the finish line before complete chaos ensues. By that standard, things have gone pretty smoothly so far.”

Stride heard something in Chris’s voice that hadn’t been there before. It was an airy lightness that sounded forced and insincere. He wasn’t talking like a Minnesotan anymore. He was keeping secrets.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Stride said.

Chris took a long time to answer. “Okay, you’re right, but it has nothing to do with Haley.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Chris sighed. His mouth squeezed into an unhappy frown. He played with the beer bottle between his fingers. “One of the other interns quit the crew after two days. There was an incident.”

“What kind of incident?” Stride asked.

“She went out drinking with a cast member. Things got out of hand. At first she claimed she was sexually assaulted. Then she changed her story and said it was simply a misunderstanding.”

“Rape’s not a misunderstanding.”

“I’m only telling you what she said. She didn’t want to pursue it and didn’t want the police involved. She quit. That was the end of that.”

“What was her name?” Stride asked.

“I’d rather not say. She won’t talk to you anyway.”

“Why not? Was she paid off? Is that why she changed her story?”

“I can’t say anything more,” Chris said. “Our lawyers would freak. I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”

Stride shook his head in disgust. He hated seeing people played like pawns. “Which cast member? Who assaulted her?”

“There was no assault,” Chris insisted. “Please don’t characterize it like that.”

“Who?”

Chris looked over his shoulder as if to make sure they weren’t being watched. Spies were everywhere. His voice sank to a whisper.

“Jungle Jack,” he said.