She shook her head at her outburst and turned her anger back on herself. She felt like this entire case had a wall around it that they couldn’t break through. “I’m sorry, Max. Call the officer back and get Jungle Jack on the phone. I want to talk to him myself.”
“You got it.”
Serena stamped through the snow into the middle of the yard. She shivered in the wind and studied the house and grounds from a distance. Footprints were everywhere, overlapping. They told her nothing. Some went around the house; some crossed the yard diagonally; some went downhill toward Skyline Parkway. Most probably had been made by kids.
Then she remembered what Aimee had said about someone breaking into the house. Whoever it was didn’t just look through the windows. He came inside, too.
What if he was waiting for her when she got home?
Who?
There was no sign of a struggle, but in Aimee’s condition, she wouldn’t have been able to put up a fight. Except there was almost no time between Jungle Jack leaving and Lori Fulkerson arriving for anyone to kidnap Aimee.
She saw Guppo hustling toward her through the snow. He gave her his phone and said simply, “Jack.”
“Mr. Jensen,” Serena barked into the phone. “This is Serena Stride with the Duluth Police. We’re at the house that Aimee Bowe is renting, and she’s not here. Where is she?”
There was a long pause on the line. “I don’t know what to tell you, Detective. I was there less than twenty minutes ago. I dropped her off.”
“Describe the house,” Serena said.
“Blue, single story, way up on the hill.”
Serena nodded. The description was right. “What exactly happened when you got here with Aimee?”
“She got out of the car. She headed for the front door. I left. End of story.”
“What was her physical condition?” Serena asked.
“She said she was fine. I mean, she was wobbly and all, but I figured she’d simply had too much to drink.”
“Did you get out of the car yourself? Did you help her?”
“She didn’t want any help,” Jack replied. “You may find this hard to believe, but Aimee Bowe doesn’t exactly like me. She wasn’t crazy about the idea of my driving her home. She told me to go.”
“Did you wait until she got inside the door?”
“No, I just left.”
Serena shook her head in frustration. “Were there any other cars on the street?”
“I don’t remember any, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
She hung up the phone and handed it back to Guppo. “It’s freezing out here. We need to find her, Max. If Jack’s not lying, Aimee was heading for her front door when he left. At most, we got here fifteen minutes later. And Lori Fulkerson was here before that. In that time, Aimee managed to disappear.”
“But she never got inside the house,” Guppo said. “The floor mat inside wasn’t wet. She didn’t carry in any snow.”
Serena looked around at the large, sloping expanse of yard and felt a new sense of urgency. “Then she may be outside. Have the men check the perimeter of the property. Hurry.”
Guppo whistled with his fingers and shouted at the officers near the house. Serena headed through the snow for the lot line, where the yard was ringed with evergreens whose branches hung to the ground. Even in the moonlight, a body could lay there, unfound. The wind on the hill roared, fast and cold, cutting through her heavy coat and biting at the exposed skin on her face. Anyone outside in this weather didn’t have much time.
“Go, go, go!” she shouted. “Spread out!”
The police officers separated on the hillside, one small shadow after another. Serena headed for a sweeping ash tree near the street and had to duck to walk underneath it. The snow was deeper there. She saw nothing, so she pushed her way back into the open yard. Guppo was checking the fir trees near the neighbor’s house. Two officers hiked down the steep backside of the slope toward Skyline Parkway. Another was in the wooded land across the street.
Serena thought: Footprints.
If Aimee was out here, she had to leave footprints.
She focused on the bed of snow filling the yard and tried to separate out the prints that didn’t matter. The tracks of animals. The tracks of kids cutting through the yard from one street to another. The random dimples of ice blown off the trees. The cops who had trampled most of the area near the house. She looked for prints that started near the front door and veered off in a single, lonely track. Just one set, wandering away, getting lost.
She almost missed them.
The ground was higher than she was, making the seam on the hillside almost invisible, like a wrinkle in the snow that the wind was already whisking away. Yet she knew it was footprints. She ran. She took large steps, and when she reached the tracks, she saw an uneven row of small indentations, spread far apart, vanishing toward a stand of blue spruces.
Fifty yards away, where the trees spread their branches and the footprints ended, she saw an almost indistinguishable mound in the snow.
“Over here!” Serena called.
She charged downhill, and as she reached the small mound, she dropped to her knees. The wind had mostly covered the body in drifts already, and Serena had to brush aside snow to find the arms, the chest, and finally the face. It was Aimee. Her eyes were closed, the lids white with ice. Her skin was already way too cold. Her mouth was parted and unmoving, the lips slightly open. Serena patted Aimee’s cheek and called her name into her ear.
“Aimee, it’s me. It’s Serena.”
There was no answer.
“Get an ambulance!” she shouted over her shoulder.
Serena stripped off a glove and tried to take a pulse, but her fingers were too numb to find it. She put her cheek down next to Aimee’s mouth, and as she did, she felt the one thing that made her heart leap. Even in the frigid air, she could feel the steamy puff of a breath as Aimee exhaled.
She was alive.
28
In the middle of the night, Stride finally made it back home to the cottage. He went into Cat’s room and found the girl still awake, sitting up in the darkness in her T-shirt and sweatpants. One of the front windows was cracked an inch open, letting in icy air. She’d adopted that habit from him.
“Aimee’s alive?” Cat asked. “She’s okay?”
Stride sat down next to her and turned on a nightstand lamp to give the room a soft glow. “Yes, she’s in the hospital now. Serena’s with her. It looks like she’ll be fine.”
“Thank God. I was so scared.”
Cat stared at him with wide, vulnerable eyes. She shoved an index finger between her teeth and chewed on a nail, and that made her look younger than she was. He knew part of it was an act. When she was in trouble, when she felt guilty, she tried to look like a little girl.
He didn’t know what to say to her this time. He’d seen Cat do bad things in their two years together. She’d stolen. She’d lied. She’d protected people who didn’t deserve protection. This was different. It wasn’t about herself; it was about someone else. He wanted to ground her for her recklessness, but at the same time he was proud of her.
“That was a brave thing you did tonight,” Stride told her.
Cat looked down, embarrassed. “Thanks.”
“It was also very, very foolish.”
“Well, Aimee said I would do something like that. I guess she was right.”
He noticed that she didn’t apologize, and he wasn’t going to make her do that.
“Tell me why you did it,” he said.
“I don’t know. I was so angry about that article about you. I wanted to help. I thought if I saw something, if I could spy on Dean Casperson for you, I could help you prove what kind of person he really is.”