by Brenda Novak
She’d left the light on. Since that was all she had as far as creature comforts, besides the bed and blanket, she wasn’t willing to turn it off. She didn’t like the idea of being alone in the dark. She’d never experienced such total blackness. It felt like a tomb, and she was afraid that’s what it would become.
Once on her feet, she steadied herself by putting a hand to the wall. She’d gotten up too fast, hadn’t given her heart a chance to pump enough blood to her brain.
Bending over, she took a moment to ward off the dizziness but straightened as soon as she could, her eyes riveting on the small slot she’d noticed before.
Someone was out there.
“Hello?” she called.
No answer.
She crossed the small space to bang on the door. “Hello? Who’s there? Let me out, please!”
Again, she got no response, but as the slot came open she realized that it was the slide of the bolt that had awakened her.
She crouched down, trying to peer out, but the door was so thick it was like looking through a pipe. She couldn’t see anything except the midsection of a man. He seemed fit, was most likely in his twenties or thirties and wore camouflage pants with a black T-shirt. She didn’t know if that meant he was in the armed forces, had once been in the armed forces or merely liked the military. She couldn’t see his face—not that his face would necessarily answer that question.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Have we ever met?”
He stepped out of sight before reappearing with a metal tray of food, which he slid through the opening.
She didn’t want to take it. She wanted some type of explanation or understanding of her situation. But she wasn’t sure when she’d have the opportunity to eat again and didn’t dare let the food fall to the floor, for fear that would be all she got. Even if she was too upset to eat right now, she had her baby to think of, couldn’t go too long. For all she knew, she could be locked up here, subsisting on very little, indefinitely.
She grabbed the tray before he let go, and was glad she did. She got the impression he didn’t care whether she accepted it or not, that he would’ve let it clatter to the floor if she hadn’t caught it. That would teach her to be quicker the next time.
The slot closed and the bolt that held it shut slid home. As far as she could tell, that was the end of the encounter.
“Wait!” She pounded some more. “Don’t leave! Just … tell me who you are. Why I’m here. What do you want from me?”
She put her ear to the door and thought she heard movement, but the walls of her prison were so thick she could’ve been imagining it. “Hello?” she yelled, pounding some more.
Nothing.
Her knuckles were sore, her voice hoarse, by the time she gave up and slid down to the cement, still holding her food tray with her free hand. What was going on? Was this about revenge? Rape? Torture?
She stared at what looked like a hastily prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of plain potato chips, some carrot sticks and an apple. A carton of milk, like what a child might receive in a school lunch, took up one of the small sections of the tray.
Tears welled up, but knowing they’d do her no good, she battled them back. After carefully setting the tray beside her, she opened her milk. “Amarok, please come for me,” she whispered. “Please.”
She imagined him arriving home to find her shoe in the driveway, along with her purse, and knew he had to be frantic. He’d do anything to save her. She trusted that.
But this had come as such a surprise. How would he even know where to start?
3
Hilltop, AK—Tuesday, 4:15 p.m. AKDT
“What do “you want with me?” Jasper asked, obviously surprised when Amarok walked into the room. Protocol for a prisoner as dangerous as Jasper dictated that prison staff follow certain safety precautions to the letter, and one of those precautions was speaking to him from the other side of the room, behind plexiglass. That was where Evelyn normally sat whenever she met with inmates of his classification. But Amarok wasn’t prison staff, and this was a unique case—a very personal one. He wasn’t about to let Jasper believe he had any fear of him.
He didn’t have any fear. He was hoping Jasper would attempt to harm him. Then he’d have an excuse to unleash the pent-up rage he’d long felt toward the monster who’d hurt Evelyn so terribly, not to mention the thirty or so other women he’d tortured and murdered over the years (no one besides Jasper himself could give an exact number and he wouldn’t admit to anything).
Instead of confronting him or threatening him in any way, however, Jasper took a step back. No doubt he could tell that Amarok wasn’t messing around today, that he was more than willing to take his chances in a physical altercation. To prove it, Amarok asked the CO standing outside the door to come in and remove Jasper’s shackles and belly chain.
“Are you sure?” Officer Hatch was already unhappy that Amarok had insisted on meeting Jasper on this side of the plexiglass. He wasn’t eager to forgo yet another layer of security.
“Positive.”
Reluctantly, Hatch did as he was told. “Anything else, Sergeant?”
“That’s it.”
The CO hesitated. “Maybe I should stay in the room, in case you need backup.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“But this one’s wily, sir. Always trying to cause trouble in subtle ways.”
Jasper snapped his teeth, causing the guard to jump, at which point Jasper laughed and Hatch gave him a baleful glare.
“It’s not a good idea for you to be in here alone with him, and there’s no need,” Hatch said. “We have a place where you can talk to him safely.”
Amarok’s cheeks ached as he forced a smile. “No one knows this bastard better than I do, Officer Hatch. I’ll be fine.”
“Evelyn knows me better,” Jasper crooned. “After all, I’ve felt her warm blood pump out all over my hands.”
When he closed his eyes as though savoring the memory, it took every bit of willpower Amarok possessed to keep from grabbing Jasper by the collar of his prison-issue jumpsuit and shoving him up against the wall. His muscles bunched, but he didn’t move. As much as he was tempted, he couldn’t be the aggressor. “Which is why, if anything happens to her, I’m going to hold you personally responsible, even if you’re not to blame.”
Jasper lifted his eyebrows. “Now you’re just giving me a hard-on. I admit I’ve never had sex with a man, but I’d be happy to make an exception for you.”
“I’m out of your league,” Amarok said.
The amusement fled Jasper’s face.
“Sergeant, I really don’t think this is a good idea.” The CO glanced suspiciously at Jasper before returning his attention to Amarok. No doubt he could feel the powerful animosity between them.
“You can go,” Amarok said.
With a heavy suit yourself sigh, Hatch moved to the door. “I’ll be right out here if you need me.”
“I won’t need you—but he might.”
“In that case, if I hear someone yell, I’ll take my damn sweet time,” he muttered. “Because I won’t lift a finger to save that animal.”
When the door closed behind the CO, Jasper took another step back. He was no longer so cocky, so ready to taunt. He was on his own, and he knew it. “So … you’ve finally come for revenge?” he asked uncertainly.
Amarok didn’t feel like sitting down. He had too much adrenaline flowing through him. But he forced himself to adopt a casual demeanor as he walked over to the only furniture in the room—a metal chair bolted to the floor. It faced the desk on the other side of the plexiglass, so he sat sideways, in order to see Jasper. “That depends…”
“On…”
“You.” Amarok had never felt anything even remotely akin to the hatred he reserved for the man who’d tortured Evelyn for three days before cutting her throat and leaving her for dead when she was only sixteen, so it wasn’t easy to speak in a civil manner. Maybe that was
why, after Jasper’s initial arrest, he’d never paid the man a visit. The investigators in Peoria had approached him to see if he would be willing to try to get a bit more information out of him, but Amarok had left that up to Evelyn, who was better at it, anyway.
The reason? He didn’t trust himself.
“How does it depend on me?”
“If you give me what I want, we might not have a problem. Today.”
Jasper was sizing him up. Amarok could tell. Amarok didn’t get the impression Jasper was scared of him, exactly. Jasper didn’t experience fear, at least not the way most people did. But there was little question he understood, even though he was no longer restricted by chains, that he didn’t have the upper hand in this situation. Since Amarok knew who and what he was, Jasper couldn’t ply the normal tools of his trade—surprise, lies, trickery, flattery, manipulation. Even brute strength wouldn’t be the asset it was when stalking women; Amarok was bigger and probably stronger, too. “What is it you want?”
Amarok had heard Evelyn mention Jasper’s eyes—how dead they were, how bereft of any kind of humanity. She said that was common among psychopaths. Since they didn’t feel the same emotions as other people, that lack of feeling often revealed itself in their eyes, making them sort of dull in appearance, like a shark’s.
But Amarok was surprised to see just the opposite. He could hardly believe that someone so twisted could look so normal, even in the eyes. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing about Jasper that would warn an unwary stranger that he or she was dealing with a deadly predator. No doubt that was part of the reason he’d been such an effective killer. He was handsome and muscular with blond hair and blue eyes. He looked anything but dangerous. “Information.”
Jasper’s expression grew suspicious. “Go to hell. I’m not confessing to anything, and I’m not talking about where certain women might or might not be buried.”
“This is about something else entirely.”
“What else could you want from me?”
“Someone’s taken Evelyn.”
His mouth dropped open. “Taken her? You mean she’s been abducted?”
His surprise seemed genuine. That was one of the reasons Amarok had come to see Jasper; he’d needed to be sure Jasper wasn’t involved in any way. “That’s what the evidence indicates.”
“What evidence is there?”
Jasper didn’t seem to feel any pleasure at the news of Evelyn’s abduction. He probably still had plans to kill her himself and didn’t want anyone else to remove the pleasure of that possibility. “I don’t feel like going over that with you,” Amarok said flatly. “I just want to know if you’ve heard anything in this place, anyone talking about having it in for her, threatening to get even with her, bragging that they will soon have their revenge or anything like that.”
Jasper started to laugh. “That’s all anyone talks about. Most of the men in here are sadists!”
“I’m asking if anything in particular stands out in your mind, if there’s something I should be aware of.”
“Oh my God! You don’t know who took her! You don’t have even the first clue, or you wouldn’t be standing here, talking to me.”
Amarok clenched his jaw. “Have you heard anything or not?”
“What will I get out of it if I tell you?”
“I can make your life in here a hell of a lot easier.” He hated to bargain with the devil, but right now, as desperate as he was, he’d sell his soul, if only it would help. He didn’t have the luxury of time, needed to find some direction.
Jasper began to pace across the small room. “Tell me what happened. You’ve got to give me something to go on, something that might jog a memory or inspire an idea.”
Again, Amarok was tempted to refuse. But since he’d already stooped, in a sense, to taking Jasper into his confidence, he figured he might as well swallow all his pride. He’d do anything to save Evelyn and their child, and, while the culprit could be any of the antisocial assholes she’d studied over the years—or even consulted on peripherally, whether it was by doing a Violence Threat Assessment or something else—she’d been in Hilltop for the past three years. The odds were much better that her abduction had to do with someone associated with Hanover House. “She was supposed to meet me this afternoon at the Moosehead, and she didn’t show up.”
“So…”
“When I couldn’t reach her by phone, I drove home to see what was going on.”
“And…”
Somewhat reluctantly, Amarok continued, “And when I got there, I found her purse spilled all over the front yard and one shoe on the drive, just outside her vehicle. She pulled in and got out—but never made it into the house.”
“Someone grabbed her right in the middle of the day.”
Amarok sensed some admiration in his voice but tried to ignore it. “This time of year, it’s light until late, but yes—at a time when I wouldn’t be home.”
“Whoever kidnapped her knows you,” he said simply.
“He knows where we live, but that isn’t hard to find out, not in a town the size of Hilltop. You did it easily enough.”
“So did Lyman Bishop,” he said. “He got your address from that waitress he killed and hanged in the center of town to distract you so that he could get to Evelyn, remember?”
How could he ever forget? He’d known Sandy and her family for most of his life. None of them had forgiven Evelyn for bringing such dangerous men to town. “You didn’t hear?”
“What?”
“He suffered a brain hemorrhage from the beating you gave him. These days, he’s almost a vegetable.”
At first Jasper seemed pleased by the idea of having hurt Bishop that badly, but then his eyes narrowed with obvious skepticism. “Who says?”
Amarok came to his feet. “It’s documented. A brain hemorrhage shows up on an MRI. They have the scans.”
“Maybe he did have a hemorrhage. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s completely incapacitated. He could have exaggerated the effects. That’s what I would’ve done. And even if he didn’t fake more damage than he sustained, hemorrhages affect people to greater and lesser degrees. It could be that he’s improved—to the point where he’s capable of plotting revenge.”
The odds of that were remote, which was why Amarok hadn’t seriously considered Bishop when he thought of him earlier. But perhaps he’d discarded the possibility too soon. The Zombie Maker was no ordinary psychopath. He’d been a cancer researcher with a genius IQ. Was it possible he still had enough brain cells to escape and come after Evelyn? Or, as Jasper suggested, had he been exaggerating his impairment from the beginning to avoid being locked up for the rest of his life?
If so, it could be that he’d been lying low this whole time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike—which meant he’d had a whole year and a half to recover and prepare.
If Bishop was behind Evelyn’s abduction, she was in even more trouble than Amarok had assumed. Lyman Bishop used an ice pick to give his victims a frontal lobotomy. That was why they called him the Zombie Maker. Sometimes scrambling the brains of his victims killed them; other times they survived, severely impaired. Death had never been his goal. What he craved was total acquiescence, total control, total enslavement. “You think it’s him.”
“It sure as hell isn’t anyone in here—unless there’s been an escape I don’t know about.”
“Not all psychopaths are locked up. There are still plenty of people like you on the outside,” Amarok said dryly. “Evelyn was on the news several times while fighting to establish this institution. The challenge could’ve drawn someone else. It doesn’t have to be Bishop.”
“True. But you have to ask yourself, who’d want to get to Evelyn worse than Bishop?” Jasper pursed his lips, making a show of considering his own question—and then he answered it. “Only me.”
Anchorage, AK—Tuesday 7:00 p.m. AKDT
Evelyn tried to remain calm. Whoever had kidnapped her wasn’t Jasper. It couldn’
t be Jasper; he was locked up. And she wasn’t quite as scared of anyone else. She took some solace in that.
When nothing happened, no one else came for quite some time, she slowly began to relax, despite the questions that swirled in her mind. Who’d taken her? What was his intent? And why hadn’t he confronted her? What could he possibly be waiting for?
She had no answers and the unknown was driving her crazy. In an attempt to occupy her mind, she started doing math problems. “If Suzie plans to unload a refrigerator from the back of her truck, and the truck’s thirty-eight inches from the ground, the ramp sixty-four inches long, what is the length of the distance from where the ramp touches the ground to the back of the truck?”
She solved that before making up a bunch of others, which required such focus that more frightening thoughts couldn’t intrude. But she’d skipped breakfast, been kidnapped before she could have lunch and hadn’t been given enough dinner, so she was hungry again.
She returned to the tray her captor had left before and nibbled at the core of the apple she’d discarded. While such a small amount of food didn’t do anything to ease her hunger, it tasted good.
Her body ached from sitting on the ground. She’d stayed close to the door, wanted to get out so badly she hadn’t dared move away for fear she’d miss her one and only chance. But she was beginning to believe she was wasting her time. It wasn’t going to open anytime soon. Her captor or captors didn’t seem to be on the premises. If they were, they were good at ignoring her presence in what used to be a walk-in cooler.
Why would someone kidnap her but not harm her? she asked herself. Was she being ransomed?
She hoped she had been taken for money. If that was the case, maybe Amarok could raise the funds to get her back. They weren’t wealthy, but they both had decent jobs. And he could go to her family and friends. Her parents had a significant fortune. While she hated the thought of anyone having to sacrifice for her release, especially her parents after all they’d been through when she went missing for three days in high school, if the only thing her captor wanted was money maybe she wouldn’t be put through the hell she’d experienced before.