Serena took a long time to reply. Even in the silence, he could feel her concern.
“Can you meet me over at her house?” she asked.
“I’m on my way.”
Stride got up and grabbed his leather jacket from the hook behind the door. The coat was still wet. He alerted Guppo and then made his way back out to the parking lot. The snow continued to fall, but the engine of the Expedition was warm enough that the snow still melted as it hit the metal. He unlocked the door, but before he got inside, he stopped.
Something was wedged under his driver’s side windshield wiper.
A small padded envelope.
Stride looked around. He hadn’t been away from the truck for more than fifteen minutes. He saw footprints near the front of his truck, but whoever had left the package had kicked his way back through the snow to erase his tracks. None of the imprints of tread was left. He followed the prints until they got lost in the jumble of others coming and going from the building.
Someone had been waiting for him in the parking lot.
He removed the padded envelope from his windshield with his gloved hands. There were no markings on the outside. The flap was self-adhering; they wouldn’t find DNA on the gum. He stood in the darkness and snow, weighing the envelope in his palm. It was light but not empty. When his fingers traced the contents, he could feel something hard, small, and rectangular inside.
Somehow he knew. He just knew.
Stride took a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cut a slit in the narrow bottom of the envelope. He separated the two flaps and looked inside. It wasn’t easy to see the contents, but he recognized what it was. He’d received a package just like this four times before. The envelopes had all been left on his truck in different places around the city.
They were messages from the women locked in the box. Messages to him.
Stride felt an ugly sense of déjà vu. He thought about the break-in at Chris Leipold’s storage unit, where only one item had been stolen. Art’s old cassette recorder. It took on a whole new significance now. What he was thinking was impossible, yet here it was in front of him.
He reached into the envelope and pinched the corner of the contents with his gloves. He pulled it out and covered it with his hand to protect it from the snow. It was just what he feared. A Maxell-brand cassette tape.
Someone had scrawled a message on the label.
Save me, Jonathan Stride.
36
Outside Aimee Bowe’s house, Max Guppo looked like a snowman, completely encrusted in white.
“We’ve checked with all the neighbors,” he told Stride. “No one saw or heard anything last night. Serena had an officer cruise by three times between midnight and five in the morning. He didn’t see anything. No lights. No cars on the street.”
“Where do we stand with the cassette tape?” Stride asked.
“It’s not that easy to find a cassette player these days. I sent somebody over to my grandmother’s place to see if she has one in her attic. Unless you still use one at home, boss.”
“Nothing but eight-tracks for me, Max.”
Guppo chuckled.
The two of them pushed through the snow to the front door of Aimee’s house. Serena was visible at the fringe of the yard, looking like an apparition in the storm as she searched the grounds. Stride and Guppo took off their boots and replaced them with plastic booties as they went inside the house.
“What do we know so far?” Stride asked.
“Serena already mentioned that several of the windows and doors don’t have working locks. If someone wanted to get inside and surprise Ms. Bowe, it wouldn’t have been hard.”
“But?”
“But the bed doesn’t look slept in, and there are no signs of a struggle. If it was a stranger abduction, I’d expect to find evidence of violence. Even so, she didn’t leave voluntarily. Look at this.” Guppo squatted with difficulty and pointed at the leg of an oak end table in the living room. “Right here, where the leg connects to the table, we found hair caught in the seam.”
“So she was dragged along the floor?” Stride asked.
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Which means she was already unconscious,” he added.
Guppo frowned. “Or dead.”
“Any evidence of blood?”
“No.”
Stride wandered over to the fireplace and stared at the cold ashes. Wind whistled down through the open flu. “What else?”
“There was a wooden coaster on the coffee table. We identified minute traces of powder in the ridges. We’ll be having it tested.”
“What’s your theory?”
“According to Serena, Aimee was using the coaster where we found the powder to hold her wineglass. Serena said the open wine bottle in the refrigerator was mostly full when Aimee poured a glass. Now there’s barely two inches of wine left in that bottle.”
“So either she kept drinking a lot after Serena left,” Stride said, “or she had company.”
“Right.”
“She knew whoever abducted her.”
“I think so,” Guppo replied. “And my bet is that when the results come back on the powder we found, it will probably be some kind of sedative drug. Whoever was here drugged her wine.”
“Well, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Make sure we test the sofa for any hair or bodily fluids. I want to make sure Aimee wasn’t sexually assaulted before she was dragged out of here.”
“On it,” Guppo said.
Stride went back to the front door. He reclaimed his boots and headed outside, where the snow stung his face. He crammed his hat down on his head and squinted into the wind. The morning was gray, buried under clouds. He felt the cold with each breath, and it was one of those days when he missed having cigarette smoke in his lungs. Jungle Jack was right. The craving never went away.
At the street, Serena waited for him at his Expedition. Her long black hair was wet. Her hands were shoved into the pockets of her black jeans. She stared upward at the electrical wires strung along the street. She looked tall and strong, the way she always did, but her expression was troubled.
He came up beside her. “Did you find anything in the yard?”
“No.”
“Not finding a body is a good thing,” Stride told her.
“I know that.”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“It is my fault,” she snapped back at him. “I never should have left her alone. I should have trusted my instincts. I was so busy trying to convince myself that Aimee’s mystical talk was all crap that I stopped listening to my own gut.”
“What did it tell you?” Stride asked.
“That she was in danger.”
“There’s no way you could have predicted something like this. And we have no idea what’s really going on. Guppo doesn’t think it was a break-in. He’s guessing she was drugged.”
Serena frowned in confusion. “Do you think this could be Casperson?”
“Maybe, but I don’t know what he would gain by staging a copycat of Art Leipold. He tries to stay out of the headlines.”
He felt his phone vibrating inside his pocket. He checked it and saw that Guppo was calling from inside the house. It was a quick call, and then Stride shoved his phone back in his jeans.
“Max says they were able to find a cassette player,” Stride said. “We can listen to the tape. Let’s get back to headquarters.”
Stride turned away, but Serena reached out and grabbed his arm. “Jonny? What if this isn’t a copycat?”
He stared at her face, which was flushed with cold. Snow gathered on her eyelids and melted into water on her cheeks. “What do you mean?”