Alter Ego Read online

  ALTER EGO

  ALSO BY BRIAN FREEMAN

  THE FROST EASTON SERIES

  The Night Bird

  The Voice Inside

  THE JONATHAN STRIDE SERIES

  Immoral

  Stripped

  Stalked

  In the Dark

  The Burying Place

  Spitting Devil (e-short story)

  Turn to Stone (e-novella)

  The Cold Nowhere

  Goodbye to the Dead

  Marathon

  THE CAB BOLTON SERIES

  The Bone House

  Season of Fear

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Spilled Blood

  The Agency (as Ally O’Brien)

  West 57 (as B. N. Freeman)

  New York • London

  © 2018 by Brian Freeman

  Jacket design by Ervin Serrano

  Jacket art:

  Glass by Ivan Bliznetsov / iStock.com;

  Landscape by Jill Hyland / Arcangel;

  Man by Ilona Wellmann / Arcangel

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  eISBN 978-1-68144-127-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931639

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  For Marcia

  Know you? I wonder do I know you? Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul.

  —OSCAR WILDE, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  From the Author

  1

  The man in the Australian oilskin coat and black cowboy hat didn’t realize it yet, but fate already had dealt him the thirteenth tarot card. A skeleton on a white horse rode his way, bringing death. He had ninety seconds to live.

  He struggled through knee-deep snow past skeletal birches and evergreens that shook their hunched shoulders at him. The bitter, driving wind in his face was so cold, it actually burned. Under the clouds, the night was black, with no moon or stars. He used a flashlight to make his way back to the lonely highway. When he looked behind him, he saw wind and snow filling in his footsteps. Soon there would be no evidence that he’d been here at all.

  An owl hooted above him. The bird was close by, but then it lifted invisibly over the high trees as if alarmed by his arrival. Its mournful calls got farther away. Owls were another harbinger of coming death, but he didn’t think about that.

  He was a summer man in a winter place. It was January in the empty lands northwest of Duluth. The coat he wore would have been fine for a Florida cold front but not for the subzero temperatures here. His leather gloves were unlined. His feet inside his boots were wet from the deep snow. The cowboy hat left his ears exposed, and he wore no scarf over his face.

  He’d been outside for half an hour. Skin froze in ten minutes.

  The trail back to the road felt endless. He didn’t recall traveling so far on his way in, but if you were hiding something you didn’t want anyone to find, you had to look for the most remote section of the forest. Adrenaline had propelled him at first, but now he was simply numb. He was ready to get away and go back home to the South. In his imagination, warm sunshine glowed on a long stretch of sand by the still waters of the Gulf.

  Sixty seconds remained.

  The light of his flashlight finally glinted on his rented Chevy Impala on the shoulder of Highway 48. Its windshield was already dusted over with fresh snow. He trudged the last few steps and climbed inside. He switched on the engine and waited for warm air to blast through the vents. In the mirror, he saw his face, which was mottled white. He left his hat on. He peeled off his gloves, threw them on the seat, and struggled to bend his fingers. He kicked off his boots and rolled off his wet socks. He’d drive barefoot.

  The windshield wipers pushed away the snow that had gathered while he was gone. He glanced at the woods from where he’d come and couldn’t see his trail in the darkness. A few more minutes, another inch of snow, and the white bed would look virginal again. He drove away fast, kicking up a white cloud behind him. His speed was reckless. The pavement was almost invisible in the blizzard, and the plows wouldn’t be out until morning. Even so, he wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the place where he’d stopped.

  He grabbed his phone from the inside pocket of his coat. The signal was weak here, but he punched a single speed-dial number with his thumb. He’d used the phone only to call that one number. When he got to Minneapolis, he’d find a place to ditch the phone for good. No one would ever find it.

  He heard a ringing on the other end. It was the middle of the night, but his contact was waiting for the call.

  “It’s me,” he said. His numb lips slurred the words.

  “Any problems?” the person on the other end asked.

  “No.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m leaving town.”

  “Okay. Good luck.”

  That was all. He hung up the phone.

  If he’d glanced out the window next to him, he might have seen the skeleton keeping pace with his car and counting off the last few seconds with the bones of its hand. Ten, nine, eight—

  Headlights shone in the opposite lane. There were only two vehicles out on the snow-swept road: his Impala and a truck roaring northward toward him.

  He
leaned forward, squinting.

  Something strange was happening. The truck’s lights blinked at him. A shadow came and went in front of them. He heard a bass horn, a thud, and a quick screech of tires. His heart pounded, but the truck passed him safely with a shudder of wind. For a millisecond, the deserted highway stretched out in front of him, just wilderness on both sides and snow swirling in his lights like thousands of flies.

  He remembered that he was going home.

  That was the last conscious thought of his life. In the next instant, his neck snapped and he was dead.

  *

  Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police zipped her down coat to her chin as she hopped from the driver’s seat of her beat-up yellow Avalanche. The jacket draped to her knees. It was bright red, making her body look like a tube of lipstick. She pulled the fleece hood over her head, but the wind chill hit her like a shovel to the face. The air temperature was twelve degrees below zero. In the wind, it felt like forty below.

  “Why the hell do we live here?” she asked Sergeant Max Guppo, not hiding her crabbiness.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” Guppo replied cheerfully. “A little nippy maybe.”

  Guppo was as round as he was short, and he had the advantage of 250 pounds of padding on his frame. He seemed blissfully unaware of the cold, although the bulbs on his cheeks looked extra rosy tonight.

  The highway around them was closed. Clouds of snow blew past the lights of the emergency vehicles. A trailer truck was parked safely on the shoulder a hundred yards to the north. The Impala, which had spun when the driver lost control, was lodged tail first in the drifts at the base of the highway shoulder. Its windshield was completely shattered.

  Maggie could see the forlorn brown carcass of the deer where the first responders had dumped it in the snow after prying it from the front seat of the Impala.

  “Tell me again what happened here,” she said.

  “Freak accident,” Guppo replied. “The truck back there hit a deer, and the thing went airborne. Must have been like a missile. The deer landed on the Impala, went through the windshield, and took out the driver. Broke his neck, practically decapitated him. Talk about your bad luck.”

  Maggie shook her head. “Yikes. Killed by a flying deer two weeks after Christmas. What do you think? Dancer? Prancer? Vixen?”

  Guppo choked back a laugh. “I heard the EMTs saying they should stick a red nose on the deer before you got here.”

  Maggie grinned. She had a well-earned reputation for sarcasm. When you’re a forty-year-old detective small enough to buy your clothes in the teen section—and you have to boss around twenty-something Minnesota cops who look like Paul Bunyan—you learn pretty fast to develop a smart mouth.

  “Who called in the accident?” she asked.

  “The truck driver. He saw the car go off the road in his mirror.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Fine. The deer barely dented his truck.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “The deer? I don’t think so.” Guppo laughed as Maggie’s bloodshot eyes narrowed into annoyed little slits. “No, the truck driver was sober.”

  “Okay, you want to tell me why we’re here?” Maggie asked. “This looks like nothing more than a weird traffic accident. I’m guessing there must be some other reason the highway cops called us in.”

  Guppo nodded. He hoisted a hard-shell plastic case in his gloved hand and set it on the hood of Maggie’s Avalanche. “The cops found this case in the snow a few feet from the wreck of the Impala. It must have been ejected through the window when the car went off the shoulder. As soon as they saw what was inside, they called me.”

  Guppo popped the lid of the case. Inside, nestled in foam cushioning, was a black Glock and a spare ammunition clip.

  Maggie leaned forward and gave it a whiff. “This thing’s been fired recently.”

  “Yeah. And it gets more interesting. I checked the guy’s pockets after they pulled him out. He had ten thousand dollars in cash wrapped up in a tight roll. His wallet had nothing in it except a Florida driver’s license under the name James Lyons at an address in Miami. No credit cards. No other ID. I made a call to the Miami PD to check him out for me. They’re supposed to call me back.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He was barefoot. His boots were soaking wet and covered with pine needles. So were the legs of his pants. He’d been walking through the woods not long before the accident.”

  “In the middle of the night? In a blizzard like this? I don’t like that. Have we checked the trunk of the car?”

  “No, it’s buried in the snow. We won’t be able to get to it until we get a tow truck out here.”

  “What about a cell phone?” Maggie asked.

  “The EMTs found it on the floor of the car. The call log shows half a dozen calls to the same Duluth number. That was it, nothing else. I dialed the number. No answer.”

  “And the car?”

  “It was rented ten days ago at the Minneapolis airport. He also had a receipt in his pocket from a cheap place that rents efficiency apartments up on the hill in Hermantown. Paid cash. He’s been in town since he rented the car.”

  Maggie shoved the hood back from her head. The wind made a mess of her black hair. She’d worn bowl-cut bangs for most of her life, but she’d been growing her hair out for six months. Her stylist had added some spiral curls. Now she looked like Lucy Liu if Lucy wore no makeup and hadn’t gotten any sleep in days.

  She wandered over to the ambulance and gestured for the EMTs to open the rear doors. She clambered inside, where the body of the Impala driver lay under a sheet on a metal gurney. She drew the sheet back to study his face, which was difficult to distinguish because of the dried blood. She could make out scars and a dimpled square jaw. His blondish hair was short and shot through with gray, and it had a ridge where he’d worn a hat. He wasn’t old but probably was north of fifty.

  “What were you shooting at?” she murmured. Then she stared through the back of the ambulance at the empty forest land that went on for miles. “And what were you doing out here?”

  Maggie pulled the sheet back over the body and climbed out of the ambulance. She slid down the slick slope from the highway to the wreck of the Impala, which jutted into the air at a forty-five-degree angle. The front doors were cracked open; the back doors were entombed in drifts. All the windows were shattered and empty. She peered inside and saw that the front seats were covered in glass and blood. Through the back windows, she saw a cowboy hat upside down against the rear window. On the rear floor, she noticed a crumpled piece of newspaper. She reached in through the broken window to grab the paper with her gloved hand. Blood had soaked the pages. When she smoothed out the four-page sheet, she recognized an entertainment tabloid called the National Gazette. The newspaper was at least a week old.

  “That’s what you were reading?” she murmured. “Really?”

  She turned over the sheet and saw an article outlined with black marker. The headline read:

  NEW DEAN CASPERSON THRILLER DOGGED BY WINTER WEATHER

  The rest of the article was illegible, but Maggie didn’t need to read it. She knew all about the film that was being shot on location around Duluth. It was called The Caged Girl, and it was based on a series of murders that had taken place in the city more than a decade earlier. She’d lived the case; she’d been part of it. Of course, in typical Hollywood fashion, the role of the Chinese cop was now a bit part given to a redheaded bombshell. Life was unfair.

  She heard the labored breathing of Max Guppo as he slipped down the snowy slope to join her beside the car. She pointed at the article in the tabloid.

  Guppo read the headline, too. “You think this is about the movie?”

  “Could be.”

  “You going to call Stride?”

  “Sure,” she replied. “Why should he get to sleep when we’re awake?”

  “I’ve got something else,” Guppo added. “I just got a call back from the police in Miami.�
�

  “And?”

  “The driver’s license is for someone named James Lyons, but the real James Lyons died five years ago. Our corpse is a John Doe with a stolen identity. He’s some kind of ghost.”

  2

  In what felt like an out-of-body experience, Jonathan Stride watched himself sprint toward the hunting lodge on the shore of the small lake. He could see himself from the side, where silver sprays of snow washed across his face. His black-and-gray hair was pushed back by the wind. He could see himself from above, running along the narrow dirt road through ruts of ice. He could see his face screwed up with intensity as he neared the tiny cabin.

  There, inside an eight-foot by eight-foot cage, a young woman was near death and running out of time.

  It wasn’t real, of course.

  None of it was real except the Duluth snow. The detective on the road was actually a Hollywood star named Dean Casperson. A camera followed Casperson on railroad tracks built beside the road. A drone filmed him from overhead as he ran. Microphones picked up the sound of his breath and the whistle of the wind. As Stride watched, Casperson reached the wooden door of the shed and ripped it open.

  Cut.

  End of scene.

  The actor, the director, the camera operators, the sound engineers, the gaffers, the grips, the production designers, and the location manager all began to reset for the next take. The crew worked quickly. It was already midafternoon, and the natural light wouldn’t last long. Days were short in January, and time was money on a movie set.

  The Caged Girl.

  Inspired by actual events.

  Eleven years earlier, Stride had rescued a young woman named Lori Fulkerson from a cage that was almost identical to the one on the set. It had been built by a serial killer named Art Leipold. Lori had been his fourth victim. Stride had been too late to save the three earlier women who had died while Art played his game of cat and mouse with the police.

  The movie script took liberties with what had really happened when Stride rescued Lori. He hadn’t been alone. Maggie Bei and half a dozen other police officers had stormed the remote hunting lodge with him. The real cabin wasn’t anywhere near a lake; it was hidden inside a few acres of forested hunting land. But this was the movies, where reality didn’t mean a thing. The only thing that mattered was what looked good on the big screen.