Alter Ego Read online

  Alter Ego

  Copyright © 2018 by David Archer.

  All right reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  Published by: David Archer

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  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  WHAT'D YOU THINK?

  READY FOR THE NEXT MYSTERY?

  ALSO BY DAVID ARCHER

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  PROLOGUE

  “We can’t go in there.” The girl who spoke looked at the foreboding old building, her fingers intertwined with those of the boy who was trying to pull her forward.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “You said you wanted to be alone with me, right? You said you wanted to spend some time off by ourselves? Well, nobody’s going to look for us in there.”

  She stared at him, her eyes wide. “That’s because everybody else would be too smart to go in there in the first place. Jimmy, that place is scary. You know they say it’s haunted, right?”

  “It’s not haunted, Jill,” Jimmy said derisively. “Me and a bunch of the guys started that rumor years ago, when we were kids. It kept everybody out so we could use it for our clubhouse. Only a few of us still come out here, but I know nobody will be here today.”

  The old factory building had sat on the edge of town for much longer than either of them could remember, and had been empty for more than twenty years. It had once been one of the biggest employers in the county, turning out more than a hundred thousand oil filters every week. Those filters had helped keep millions of cars on the road, but new technologies had come along that made the old paper filters less necessary. Orders had trickled off, until finally there weren’t enough steady customers to justify keeping the factory open. It had closed down and started the small Colorado town down the path to poverty.

  There had been several attempts to resurrect it into something that would create jobs, and a few of them had been successful for short periods, but none of them lasted. The most recent attempt had been to turn it into a shopping center, but it was too far off the beaten path. The few stores that tried to open inside it were closed within just a few weeks, but that had been two decades earlier.

  “Oh, fine,” Jill said. She let Jimmy pull her forward, and he pushed open the big, heavy door by the old loading docks.

  The truck drivers used to spend hours waiting for their loads sometimes, so there had been a lounge set up for them just off the loading area. While a lot of the roof of the building had developed leaks, the roof over the lounge area was still intact. All the original furniture was gone, but adventurous boys had scavenged up some old couches and brought them in over the years, and the light coming in through the windows turned it into a fairly cozy space.

  “Somebody’s been here,” he said. He pointed to a pile of rags in the corner. “I find out who it is, I’m going to kick some butt. Everybody knows to clean up after themselves.”

  He pulled her past the pile, intent on getting her to the couch in the corner, but Jill suddenly froze.

  “Jimmy? There’s somebody under that stuff.”

  Jimmy stopped, then turned to look. A hand was sticking out from underneath the pile, and he suddenly got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. While he had never seen an actual dead body, other than at his grandmother’s funeral, he had enough sense to know that healthy fingers shouldn’t look purple.

  “Stay back a minute,” he said. He let go of her hand and stepped closer to the pile of old blankets, then squatted down beside it. He looked at the eerily discolored hand for a moment, then reached out and lifted the blanket away.

  It was a girl, and her equally discolored face had been beaten and bloodied. Jimmy put the back of his left hand to his mouth as he gagged, but managed not to throw up. He didn’t recognize her, but he knew she wasn’t alive. The shirt she was wearing had been ripped open, and she was naked from the waist down, but the real sign that she was dead was the dozens of stab wounds in her chest and abdomen.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said. He got to his feet and grabbed Jill’s hand again, dragging her back toward the door they had just come through. “We gotta go, we gotta get the police. Somebody killed that girl, we gotta go get help.”

  They ran through the woods toward his car and jumped inside while Jill frantically dug for her phone. She got it out and dialed 911 as Jimmy got the car started.

  “Hey, this is Jill Stevens,” she said when the operator answered. “Me and Jimmy Chalmers were just out at the old Wellington filter plant, and there’s a dead girl out there!”

  “A dead girl?” the operator asked. “Are you still there?”

  “No, we just got to the car,” Jill said. “We’re on our way to the police station.”

  “No, wait there,” said the operator. “I’m sending police out to you now, just wait there for them.”

  Jill turned and looked at Jimmy. “They want us to stay here,” she said. “The cops are coming.”

  Jimmy rolled his eyes and then turned the engine off again. “Okay,” he said. “But they better hurry. I ain’t sitting here too long.”

  The first police car arrived five minutes later, and Jimmy and Jill got out as he pulled up beside Jimmy’s Subaru.

  “Jimmy,” said Kevin Edwards. Kevin had been a cop in the small town for as long as Jimmy could remember, a friendly man with a big belly and the grin to go with it. He wasn’t grinning at the moment, however. “You found a body in there?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jimmy said. “In there where the couches are.”

  “Uh-huh. Any idea who it is?”

  Jimmy shook his head, and so did Jill. “No clue. It’s a girl, and she’s pretty tore up.”

  Kevin glanced toward the building, then pulled a big flashlight off his belt. “Okay,” he said. “You two wait here. The chief and a deputy are on the way, so you tell them where I went.”

  He turned and walked toward the building, the flashlight hanging loosely in his hand. The two kids watched as he stepped into the building and left the door open behind himself.

  It was only the middle of the afternoon and plenty of light was coming through the windows, b
ut Kevin turned on the flashlight anyway. He shone it down on the floor as he made his way toward the lounge, looking for anything that might indicate who could have entered the building recently. There were cigarette butts, a few candy wrappers and other trash laying around, but nothing that was likely to point to a particular person.

  The lounge door was off to the left, and he made his way toward it. It was standing open, just the way the kids had left it, and he saw the pile of old blankets as soon as he stepped inside. Jimmy had dropped it back onto the body, so the cop stepped around to where the single hand was still protruding from it.

  He let out a sigh. That was a tiny hand, and there was a simple little ring on the index finger. Kevin was terrified of what he was going to see when he lifted the blankets, but it had to be done. He used the butt end of the flashlight and stuck it under the edge of the blankets, then flipped them back.

  “Sure as shit,” he said. The brown hair was the first thing he saw that told him this was the girl who’d gone missing three days earlier from Fort Collins, twenty miles away. Brenda Starling, that was her name, and she was only fourteen. Everybody thought she had run away, what with her dad being a drunk and all. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  A sound behind him made him turn and look, and he saw Chief McFetridge step into the room. Don Porter, the Sheriff’s Deputy, was right behind him.

  “What have we got, Kevin?” McFetridge asked.

  “Looks like the girl from Fort Collins,” Kevin replied. “She’s definitely dead, but I think it gets worse than that.”

  The two other officers came close and looked down at the body, then McFetridge asked, “Anybody touch anything?”

  “Don’t think so. I think Jimmy may have touched the edge of the blanket, just enough to see what was under it, but then they split and called in.”

  McFetridge nodded and turned to Porter. “We’re going to need crime lab, and you better call out the county medical examiner. With her clothes ripped off, she was probably raped before she was killed.”

  Porter nodded, visibly holding back the bile that was rising in his throat. He turned quickly and left the room, and they heard him talking on his portable radio a moment later.

  “This is the last thing we needed right now,” McFetridge said. “Newspapers will tear us up, small-town cops dealing with a murder case. Best thing we can do right now is just secure the scene, don’t let anybody do anything until the crime lab gets done.” He glanced around the room, then turned back to Kevin. “Lucky for us, this old place is out in the county. We can let the sheriff take charge.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “That’s exactly what I thought. I haven’t touched anything, and I’m not about to.” He looked down at the battered face of the dead girl. “You probably want to get somebody out here to keep the reporters away. And you might want to tell those kids outside not to talk to anybody about this just yet.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” McFetridge said. “I’ll do that, if you don’t mind staying here until the lab shows up.”

  “Yeah, go ahead. I’ll keep everyone away. I got the strongest stomach around here, anyway.”

  McFetridge left the room and stepped out of the building, and then let out a sigh. There were half a dozen kids standing around Jimmy and Jill, which meant they had called their friends and told them what they found. Any hope of keeping it under wraps had just gone up in smoke.

  The Medical Examiner arrived a half-hour later, and the crime scene techs from Fort Collins were right behind him. Dale Hargrove, the Larimer County Sheriff, came along, as did Detective David O’Rourke from his office. He’d been the county’s top homicide detective for the last five years, but he handled other things as well. He’d been in charge of looking for the girl after she went missing, and had been certain she had just run away with some friends and would turn up any time.

  Brenda Starling had last been seen by a couple of her girlfriends from school, when the three of them left the library where they had been studying together. The trio had walked together for a short distance, and then Brenda had turned to go down the street toward her own house, which was only a couple of blocks away. That had been around five o’clock in the afternoon, and when she hadn’t turned up at her house by dinnertime at seven, her mother had called her friends to see if she was hanging out with them and had forgotten what time to be home.

  Both of them said they hadn’t seen her since they parted company on the walk home, and Brenda’s mother became concerned. When she still hadn’t made it home by nine o’clock, the police were called. They canvassed the neighborhood where she had last been seen, but found no one who remembered spotting her as she walked down the road. By morning, she was considered a genuinely missing person, but she had been known to run away before. O’Rourke had interviewed her parents and learned that Brenda had been arguing with her dad earlier in the day, and figured she had just snuck off with friends again. Just as she’d done in the past, he figured she’d come home within a couple of days, at most.

  And now she was dead. O’Rourke was shocked that he had been wrong, and it showed in his face.

  “Dave,” McFetridge said. “You come to lend a hand?”

  O’Rourke nodded. “Figured I might,” he said. “It’s going to end up my case whether I want it or not.” He shook his head. “This just sucks, Benji. The little girl had made noises about running away for the last two months, I was just sure she was going to come home anytime, safe and sound.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it, Dave. Ain’t no way you could have known.”

  “That don’t matter. I was so sure she was just off on a tear that I didn’t even really bother to look for her. If I had, maybe…”

  “Wait and see what the ME says,” McFetridge said. “Be perfectly honest, she looks to me like she’s been dead a while.”

  O’Rourke nodded again. “He’s in there,” he said. “Mind if I go inside and see what he’s thinking?”

  “Go ahead. I’m more than happy to let you guys take this. Besides, I’ve seen enough for right now, I’m just gonna stand out here and have another cigarette.” He glanced down at the half dozen butts that were already laying around his feet.

  O’Rourke walked into the building and followed the sounds until he found the medical examiner and crime scene people. They were all gathered around the body, and he forced himself to look down at the girl before he turned to the ME.

  “What have we got, Doc? How long she been like this?”

  “I’m just guessing at the moment, based on a visual inspection of the decomposition. We’ll know more after an autopsy, but right now I’d say she’s been dead about two days. Forty-eight hours, give or take.”

  “Damn,” O’Rourke said. “You think that’s all?”

  “Like I said, we’ll know more after the autopsy. Not more than three days, anyway, I can say that with decent certainty.” He looked at the detective. “On the other hand, I can tell you she didn’t die here. There’s almost no blood around the body, so this was just where she got dumped. Another thing, somebody had her tied up for a while.” He pointed at the girl’s wrist. “Both of her wrists are marked like that. Ligature marks, probably from some coarse rope. Her hands were tied together at some point, so you’re probably looking at an abduction.”

  O’Rourke shook his head. “I’m gonna be handling the case, and working with the locals,” he said. “The sheriff and Chief McFetridge already okayed it, so send me everything you find.” He turned to Samantha Dickens, the crime scene investigator. “Sammy? You got anything for me yet?”

  The short brunette rolled her eyes at him. “Hell, Dave, we just got here. Let us do our jobs, will you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a sour look on his face. “Now, if only I had done my own.”

  The news was all over the region within a couple of hours, and O’Rourke had to go back and confirm it to the poor girl’s parents. Brenda had been in minor trouble a couple of times, so her fingerprints were on
file. It hadn’t taken long to confirm that the body was hers.

  The crime lab wasn’t one of the biggest or best in the area, but they were decent. By morning, they had confirmed that Brenda had been raped more than once before she was killed, and had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest. Any one of several would have been fatal, but the perpetrator had first beaten the girl half to death, then finished her off with what seemed to be a butcher knife. The wounds were consistent with that type of blade, and there were minute traces of carbon steel to be found in some of them.

  While there were no recoverable fingerprints on the body, the CSI team had found other bits of evidence. The girl had definitely been violated, though it appeared the rapist had used a condom. Still, they found trace amounts of bodily fluids, and Samantha explained that could happen from the condom slipping off or somehow leaking. In addition, they found what appeared to be broken whiskers inside her bra, and recovered a few grayish pubic hairs that were not her own from her genital area.

  “We sent the rape kit and hairs off for DNA analysis,” Samantha told O’Rourke the next morning. “There’s at least a decent chance we will be able to catch this guy. With all the DNA databases out there nowadays, there are dozens of ways DNA can be collected. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “I hope so,” O’Rourke said. “I’d hate to think this guy is out there somewhere, looking for his next victim even now.”

  “But you know that’s probably the truth,” Samantha said. “I don’t know who we are dealing with, but somebody who does this kind of thing probably does it for the thrill. Once he’s felt that, he’s going to do it again.”

  O’Rourke nodded sadly. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  “Hey, Dave?”

  O’Rourke looked up to see a uniform standing in his office door. “Yeah?”

  “We just got something that might be related,” the officer said. “Maintenance worker from the highway department just found what looks like a lot of old, dried blood out behind the state garage. Could be where the girl was killed.”