But they failed.
Kristal died of dehydration before they could find her. Stride received a photograph of her body with a message scrawled across the back:
Next time came two months later. Tanya Carter was a twenty-five-year-old waitress at Bellisio’s in Canal Park. Stride had received another CD with a message from Tanya: Save me, Jonathan Stride. As before, he and his team had no idea where she was being held and no clues about the killer’s identity. And as before, they didn’t find her.
Better luck next time.
It happened all over again just before Thanksgiving with a thirty-one-year-old publicist for a nonprofit organization named Sally Wills. The third victim.
After that, for six weeks the killer went silent, but they knew he wasn’t done. In January, during one of the city’s most bitter stretches of cold weather, the next audio CD arrived. This time the woman was Lori Fulkerson, a twenty-two-year-old bookkeeper.
The message was the same: Save me, Jonathan Stride.
The only thing that was different was that the killer finally had made a mistake. They found a small broken shard of plastic from a pen in Lori Fulkerson’s apartment. The killer must have dropped it, stepped on it, and then tried to pick up the pieces. Maybe he was hurrying because of the cold, but he missed a piece. The fragment of plastic had a partial fingerprint on it, and the fingerprint led them to Art Leipold.
From there, they’d located Art’s hunting cabin in the remote woods. That was where they found Lori Fulkerson.
“Brings it all back, doesn’t it?” said a voice at his shoulder.
Stride turned and found Chris Leipold standing next to him.
“It does,” Stride agreed.
“Is it strange to see yourself in the movies?”
Stride shrugged. “It’s not me.”
“You know what I mean,” Chris said.
“I do, but it must be worse for you.”
“Well, the movie’s not about Art. It’s about you and Lori and the other women. Definitely not Art.”
Chris was the screenwriter and executive producer behind The Caged Girl. He was also the son of the man behind the crimes, Art Leipold. Chris had been a creative writing student in Duluth during his father’s killing spree. He’d sat in court every day as a trove of DNA, fingerprint, and soil evidence made the case against Art. He’d left Minnesota for Los Angeles soon after his father was convicted to get away from the notoriety of being the son of a serial killer. On the West Coast, he’d gotten lucky. He’d written back-to-back screenplays that became indie award winners at Sundance. From that point forward, he’d been in demand.
“I wasn’t trying to make peace with my father by making the movie,” Chris went on. “I was trying to get inside the heads of people whose lives are affected by someone like him.”
“I’m not a fan of people getting inside my head,” Stride said.
“That’s not exactly news, Lieutenant.”
Stride’s lips twitched into a smile. He’d resisted Chris’s invitation to talk about the case as Chris did the research for the screenplay. He had no interest in having his life dramatized for the world to see. After nine months of playing hard to get, he’d finally relented. Stride’s new wife, Serena, had encouraged him to do it. So had Cat Mateo, the teenage girl who lived with them. When Serena and Cat teamed up, Stride found it hard to say no.
So he and Chris had spent a weekend talking about what Stride had gone through as each victim died. Along the way, they’d become friends.
Chris wasn’t a big man. He was slight, five foot six, with a narrow face and thinning sandy blond hair. He wore tiny wire-rimmed glasses over his brown eyes that made him look like a scientist rather than a writer. A decade of L.A. weather had thinned his blood. He looked cold even in a heavy down coat and a Fargo-style hat with ear flaps.
Stride, by contrast, wore only his decades-old leather jacket and a dark green wool cap that bore the word NORTH in red stitching. Fifty-one years in Duluth had made him oblivious to the frigid temperature.
“I’m glad you decided to check out the filming,” Chris went on. “I wasn’t sure we were ever going to see you out here.”
“Actually, it’s not a social call,” Stride said.
“Oh? How so?”
Stride peeled off his gloves and took a phone from his pocket. “This is hard to look at,” he warned Chris. He found a photograph and enlarged it to show the face on the screen.
Chris took a look, then winced and turned away. “Oh, man. Is that guy dead?”
“Very.”
“Who is he?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Stride said. “It’s tough to make out the details of his face in this condition, but I was wondering if you knew him or if he was connected to the film in any way.”
Chris steeled himself and took another glance at the photo. “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him before. Why would you think he’s part of the movie?”
“He had an article about the film from the National Gazette in his car when we found him.”
Chris couldn’t hide the distaste on his face. “That rag? Well, we’ve had one of their reporters nosing around the set to drum up gossip, but the reporter’s a woman, not a man. What happened to this guy, anyway? Was he murdered?”
“We’re simply trying to identify him.”
“Well, I can ask around if you text me the photo. Maybe someone else knows him. You get a lot of hangers-on at every film set, particularly when you’ve got big-name stars.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Meanwhile, as long as you’re here, would you like to meet your alter ego?” Chris asked.
Stride spotted Dean Casperson on the other side of the field, surrounded by an entourage. The actor was drinking from a bottle of Fiji water, and like Stride, he seemed unaffected by the cold. Their eyes met. Casperson knew who he was. The actor lifted the water bottle in a toast. He pushed his cowlick away from his eyes and gave Stride the boyish grin that every moviegoer in the world recognized.
“Sure,” Stride said. “Why not?”
Dean Casperson.
He’d been one of the biggest box-office draws in the world for almost forty years, ever since his scene-stealing turn in a Robert Altman film as a teenage concert violinist blinded by a blow to the head. He’d left the audience in tears. From that moment forward, he was a star who grew quickly into a legend. Over the years, Casperson had made a specialty of accepting wildly different roles with every new film. It didn’t matter whether he was a hero or a villain or whether the film was a thriller or a comedy. He was simply one of those charismatic players who made you not want to look away from the screen.
He was also one of those rare Hollywood actors who was as popular offscreen as he was in his movies. He steered clear of politics. He had an easy laugh and a humble way about him when he appeared on the nighttime talk shows. He’d been married to his high-school sweetheart, Mo, for decades. Casperson had survived three decades in the world’s most backstabbing business with a reputation as a nice guy, but that was partly because few people really knew him. He and Mo rarely ventured outside their bubble. They kept a small, tight circle of friends. They lived in Florida, not Malibu. They were careful never to let their public masks slip.
Chris Leipold waved Casperson over, and the seas parted for the actor as he crossed the field toward Stride. He carried an aura that made other people defer to him. Casperson extended his hand as the two men met.