“Take your pick,” Stride said.
Maggie pushed the button for the second-floor apartment. A few seconds later, a male voice crackled through the intercom. “Yeah?”
“Police,” Maggie replied. “We’re looking for Haley Adams.”
“Downstairs.”
“Can you let us in?”
The front door buzzed, and the lock clicked open. Stride and Maggie went inside, where it wasn’t much warmer than it was outside. A set of wooden stairs led to the second floor in front of them, and a song by Imagine Dragons boomed from an upstairs radio. On their right was a white door that needed paint. Stride knocked sharply.
He called out, “Haley Adams?”
There was no answer. He turned the knob. The door was open.
They went inside carefully. Stride found a light switch that turned on a small overhead dome fixture. There wasn’t much to see and no sign of a disturbance. The furniture looked as if it had come with the apartment and had been there for years. The apartment consisted of a living room, a kitchen, and a doorway that led to a small bedroom and bathroom. It was impersonal. No artwork. No books. No pictures. Nothing that said anything about the girl who had been living here.
There was a beat-up oak desk near the window overlooking the street. Maggie began pulling open drawers. Stride checked the kitchen.
“So you met Dean Casperson, huh?” Maggie called to him as they searched.
“I did.”
“You know, I always figured Russell Crowe would play you in a movie. Tough. Emotionally sensitive.”
“Ha,” Stride retorted.
“So what’s he like?” Maggie asked.
“Casperson? You’d expect him to be charming, and he is.”
“Did you watch them filming?”
“Yeah. Ten seconds of Casperson running across a field. That probably cost a few hundred thousand dollars.”
Maggie was quiet for a while as she rifled through the desk drawers, and then she said, “Is this whole thing as hard on you as it is on me?”
Stride closed the refrigerator, which was virtually empty, and turned around. Maggie was staring at him from the other side of the apartment.
“I mean, watching that case come to life again,” she went on.
“I know what you mean. Sure it is.”
She shook her head. “Art Leipold. It still blows my mind all these years later. We knew him.”
“We thought we did,” Stride said. “We were wrong.”
He’d known Art Leipold long before the killings began. When Stride was a young cop in his late twenties, Art was a television reporter and a friend of Stride’s partner, Ray Wallace. Art got inside tips from Ray, so he was in and out of police headquarters all the time. To Stride, the relationship between Art and Ray was always too cozy. They were both cocky bastards who manipulated stories to put pressure on suspects and get TV ratings. But Stride was a junior cop back then, and Ray was the boss. He’d never complained.
Art climbed the media ladder to a gig as one of the anchors on the local morning show. In a town like Duluth, that made him famous. He’d always been arrogant, but he began to get drunk on his celebrity.
That was when women began dying.
“Anything in the desk?” Stride asked, joining Maggie on the other side of Haley’s apartment.
“No; it’s been cleaned out,” Maggie said. “This looks like John Doe’s place. Either Haley skipped town or someone else got here first.”
Stride wandered into the girl’s bedroom. Without light, he almost reached for his gun as he found himself staring at a human figure hidden behind the bedroom door. Then he realized it was a mannequin. When he switched on a lamp, he saw the white statue clearly. She was sculpted in a provocative pose and dressed in a negligee, with a blond wig hanging down to the small breasts.
He opened the closet door. Inside, on hangers and shelves, he found a wild array of clothes and wigs that would have suited everyone from a schoolteacher to a stripper.
Maggie joined him and whistled as she assessed the wardrobe. “That’s quite the collection. Haley liked to play dress-up?”
“Apparently.”
“Was she an extra on the movie?”
“Chris didn’t mention it. These clothes don’t look like anything they’d use in the film.”
Stride used his phone to take pictures of the clothes and the mannequin. “I’ll text this to Serena and see if she can get some answers for us. I asked her to go to the cast party tonight and find out more about Haley.”
Maggie mocked the sexy pose of the mannequin. “So you’re sending your happily married wife to a Hollywood party, and meanwhile, your unattached partner gets to play with dolls?”
Stride grinned. “None of those actors would be safe around you, Mags.”
“That’s what I was counting on.”
The two of them quickly checked the rest of the bedroom. Stride opened each drawer in a heavy oak dresser against the wall and found nothing but jeans, sweaters, and a few button-down shirts. The clothes were ordinary compared with what Haley kept in the closet. In the bathroom, he found shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, makeup, and some over-the-counter pain relievers, but there were no prescription medications and nothing for birth control.
Haley was a mystery. There was nothing in the apartment to tell them where she was, who she was, or whether she was alive or dead.
He was about to leave when he noticed a metal wastebasket shoved against the tall oak dresser. The plastic bag inside the wastebasket was empty. Looking back to the living room, he noticed that Haley’s desk was in a direct line ten feet away. There was no other garbage can near the desk. The only other trash container he’d seen was in the kitchen, and that one was empty, too.
“How good a shot do you think she was?” Stride asked.
“What?”
He grabbed a blank piece of paper from the notebook in his jacket, crinkled it into a ball, and shot it across the room like a free throw. He deliberately aimed high. The paper rolled across the varnished surface of the dresser and disappeared in the narrow gap between the dresser and the wall.
Maggie knew what he was thinking. She dragged the dresser away from the corner, and they found a collection of garbage on the carpet behind it. Tissues. Wadded-up paper from yellow pads. Restaurant receipts. Stride bent down with a gloved hand and began sifting through the trash. Most of it told him nothing. Then he picked up a crumpled delivery receipt from China Cafe. When he smoothed it out, he glanced at the details and stopped.
“Hang on.”
“What’s up?” Maggie asked.
Stride pointed at the receipt. “It’s Thursday now. This order was from five days ago. Saturday night. The name says Haley Adams, but the delivery address isn’t her apartment. She had the food sent somewhere else.”
Maggie checked the address. “That’s over near Congdon Park. Isn’t that where some of the cast members rented houses?”
Stride nodded. “Maybe Haley Adams has been sleeping somewhere else while the film crew is in town.”
4
Serena Stride parked on the shoulder of the scenic highway between Duluth and the town of Two Harbors. The black water of Lake Superior loomed only steps away, where a snow-covered trail led down to the beach. They were a dozen miles north of the city. The highway was dark and empty through the long stretch of forest, but the Lakeside Café glowed with light across the street. Serena could hear the chatter of voices floating from inside. The cast and crew of The Caged Girl were at the party.
Beside her, Cat Mateo could barely contain her excitement.
“You are the best!” Cat exclaimed. “I can’t believe I get to meet these people!”
Serena smiled at the girl’s enthusiasm. She remembered what it was like to be a teenage girl meeting celebrities. She’d felt the same way when she moved to Las Vegas, where every party had someone famous on the guest list. She also remembered, as a cop, how easily those parties could get out of control.
“Do I need to review the list of noes?” she asked Cat.