He hopped off the sofa and made his way to the kitchen. When he opened the door, he peered around at the mostly empty shelves. “Not much of a chef, are we?”
“Not much.”
“There’s a pizza box in here, but it’s empty,” Cab said.
“Oh, sorry. I guess I finished it. Or maybe the fish ate it.”
Cab took out the empty box and dropped it in the wastebasket. He returned to the sofa and staked out the same spot he’d been in before. “So tell me again about the burner phone.”
Maggie sighed. “We’ve been down that road and haven’t gotten anywhere.”
“Yes, but this is how my brain works. One layer at a time. Think of it as adding pizza toppings.”
“Okay, now you’re talking my language. Here’s what we know. About a week before Rochelle Wahl died, there was a call between the burner phone and John Doe’s cell phone just after nine o’clock in the evening. The call lasted four minutes. It was the day John Doe arrived in town, so we figure it was a confirmation that he was around and available. Almost immediately after that call, the burner phone made a one-minute call to the downtown Sammy’s Pizza. That’s the only call in the phone’s records that was not to John Doe.”
“Got it. So first of all, what does that tell us about John Doe?”
“He was on call,” Maggie said. “They didn’t bring him to town just for Rochelle. They had him around in case a Rochelle situation arose. Which tells me that this wasn’t the first time a problem like this came up.”
“Agreed. I’d be willing to bet we’d find John Doe staying somewhere in the area when most of Casperson’s movies were being filmed.”
“But probably with a different identity each time.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“As far as the pizza order goes,” Maggie went on, “the restaurant doesn’t have trackable records that we could link back to a delivery address. We also don’t know if it was a delivery or pickup order.”
“And the delivery drivers?”
“Guppo interviewed all the drivers who were working that night. None of them remembered anything useful. These guys do dozens of delivery runs every single evening.”
“So nobody remembered a drop-off at Casperson’s rental house?”
Maggie shook her head. “No.”
“Well, that’s not very helpful, is it?” Cab asked.
“No.”
“I’m still hungry,” Cab said. “All this talk about pizza is putting me in the mood for some.”
“So order us a Sammy’s,” Maggie told him.
“What do you like on your pizza?”
“Sausage. I’m a purist.”
Cab rolled his eyes, as if she were a savage for not wanting kale and goat cheese. He took out his phone, ran a quick web search, and then tapped the button to make a call. “I’d like to place an order for delivery,” he said into the phone when the store answered. “Can you do a quattro stagioni?”
There was a long pause, and then he covered the phone with his hand. “They don’t know what that is.”
“Shocking,” Maggie said.
“Just make it an extra large sausage,” Cab said into the phone with pain in his voice. Then to Maggie: “What’s the address?”
She rattled it off, and Cab repeated it into the phone. He said it twice and then hung up. “They won’t deliver to you,” he told her.
“What are you talking about? I order from there like twice a week.”
“They said I should try the location on First Street,” Cab said.
“Why, which location did you call?”
“Duluth Lakeside.”
“Nope, wrong one,” Maggie said.
“I’m sorry, isn’t that the lake right outside? As in Lakeside?”
“You’d think so, but no.” She grabbed the phone from him and dialed the number of the downtown Sammy’s, which she’d memorized long before. She ordered an extra large sausage pizza and then hung up the phone. “Thirty minutes. See how easy that was?”
“I guess I’m not familiar with the intricacies of Duluth pizza ordering,” Cab said.
Maggie grinned at him. “You’re pretty good at other intricacies.”
She hopped off the sofa and headed for the bedroom. “I suppose I ought to be wearing something more than a bra and panties for the driver.”
“I don’t know. Sounds like the making of an adult movie.”
She went to her dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts from the middle drawer and threw them over the rumpled sheets of her bed. Then she stopped. Without putting them on, she went back to the doorway and stood with her hands on the frame. “Cab,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“What if our guy with the burner phone did the same thing?”
Cab turned his phone over in his hands. “You mean, what if he called the wrong delivery location?”
“Exactly.”
“There was only one call in the phone’s records,” Cab pointed out.
Maggie came back and sat down on the sofa. “Yeah, I know. Think about it. He’s talking to John Doe. When he’s done, he decides to order a pizza, and he accidentally uses the same phone and calls the downtown restaurant. Except if it’s Jungle Jack and he’s up in Hermantown, they don’t deliver up there. He hangs up and then realizes he used the wrong phone to make the call.”
“So he calls back to the right location with a different phone.”
“Exactly,” Maggie said. “That’s why Guppo couldn’t find anything. He was talking to the wrong delivery drivers.”
Stride carried his travel mug of black coffee out to his Expedition in the driveway of the cottage. The sun wasn’t up yet at seven in the morning. Four inches of snow had fallen already, and it was still coming down like a dense curtain across the Point. He used a brush to clear the truck. By the time he was done, the windshield was partly covered again by heavy wet flakes.
He drove into the storm. Josh Turner sang on his radio. He followed a snowplow up the hill, but his twenty-minute drive to police headquarters still took forty-five minutes through the slippery streets. By the time he arrived, he was out of coffee. He headed for the building through the parking lot and got more coffee before making his way to his office. When he sat down, he swung the chair around and stared out at the streaks of snow landing on the glass.
His phone rang before he had a chance to do anything else. It was Chris Leipold.
“Good morning,” Stride said when he answered. “Looks like Duluth is giving your film crew a January send-off.”
“It is.”
“If you’re calling about the storage unit, I don’t have any information for you. There aren’t any security cameras out there to figure out who broke in.”
“I’m not calling about that,” Chris said. His voice was still raspy from the flu.
“What’s up?”
“I was wondering if Serena had talked to Aimee Bowe this morning.”
“She took Aimee back to her house from the hospital last night,” Stride replied. “I don’t think they’ve connected since then. Why?”
“We can’t find Aimee. She was due on the set early, but she didn’t show.”
“It’s probably the storm slowing everything down,” Stride said. “It took me twice as long to get to work.”
“No, she wasn’t at her house. We sent a car to pick her up. The driver got there at five-thirty in the morning and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Given what happened to her, I told him to try the door. It was unlocked. He went in and said the house was empty.”
“Aimee was gone?”
“Yeah. He said the bed didn’t even look slept in.”
Stride frowned. “Okay. We’ll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.”
“Keep me posted,” Chris said.
Stride hung up the phone and immediately dialed Serena, who was still back at the cottage. She’d slept late, and her voice sounded sleepy. “It’s me,” he said. “We may have a problem. Aimee Bowe is missing.”