Blind Spot

by Brenda Novak

  “You gotta move.” M. Cadiz stood at his shoulder, Taser out and ready to fire. “Now.”

  Jasper knew he might get tased, but he couldn’t leave quite yet. He held up his hand. “Hang on. Please.”

  “Please? You’re saying please to me? You tried to spit in my eye yesterday. Hell, no. You’re not going to get one extra second.”

  Ignoring his response, Jasper quickly typed: “Terry Lovett” into the search bar. He hoped the autopsy had been completed and the cause of death had been firmly established. Otherwise, he’d have to wait for more information on that, too.

  Chances were Lovett’s death had nothing to do with Bishop, but this incident was the only thing pertaining to Beacon Point that was at all recent, so Jasper wasn’t going to rule it out until he knew for sure that he should. If Bishop had escaped Beacon Point, he’d have to do it some way and there would be ripples, small evidences that something was up.

  “Get off the computer, or I’ll zap you,” Officer Cadiz said. “Consider this your only warning.”

  Jasper glanced up at him. He couldn’t go back to his cell right now. He’d just spotted a link that indicated the autopsy had been finished, which spoke volumes in and of itself. Generally, autopsies could take days, sometimes weeks, depending on the backlog. The authorities had to be worried about something for it to have been done within two days.

  “Inmate Moore?” Cadiz prodded.

  “Quit being an asshole,” Jasper growled.

  His response shocked Cadiz enough that he gaped at him instead of pulling the trigger. The guards here at Hanover House didn’t like to pick fights. They were dealing with hardened criminals, knew they lacked the same killer instinct and wouldn’t come out on top if they went too hard on the more determined inmates, and they understood Jasper was one of those.

  Cadiz’s hesitancy gave Jasper enough time to click the link and scan the article.

  Jasper came to his feet just as Officer Cadiz had worked up the courage to act on his threat. He yelled, “Taser, Taser, Taser!” and fired.

  There was a clicking sound as the hooks hit him and fifty thousand volts of electricity locked up his body. He couldn’t move a single muscle and would’ve fallen if Officer McKim hadn’t responded to what was happening from the other side of the room and hurried over to catch him.

  The intense, biting pain infuriated Jasper. But he had what he wanted. Terry Lovett hadn’t committed suicide. He’d been killed by a knife to the chest.

  As soon as the clicking stopped, so did the pain. Jasper’s muscles felt stiff, as though he’d been through an exhausting workout, but he could move again. He proved that by flipping off Cadiz.

  “What, you didn’t get enough?” Cadiz cried. “How about another shot?”

  “You made your point,” McKim warned, his voice a low rumble. “You’ve already shown him who’s in charge. Don’t get carried away.”

  Gritting his teeth as they dragged him to his cell, Jasper swore under his breath that he’d find a way to get even. He never forgot an insult or injury. But he couldn’t retaliate now, so he remained focused on his original goal. Had those extra few seconds on the computer been worth it? Did what he’d found mean anything?

  Possibly. Terry Lovett had been killed after Evelyn was kidnapped. That suggested that maybe it wasn’t connected. But a murder was also an anomaly, something that didn’t typically happen at Beacon Point, and it had occurred in the same week.

  That had to be more than a coincidence.

  14

  Hilltop, AK—Saturday, 5:00 p.m. AKDT

  Amarok had spent Friday and all of today supporting the search parties, who were finished with Hilltop but were still in Anchorage, and trying to find a way to track Lyman Bishop. He’d called the Minneapolis Police Department to enlist their help. They claimed the hospital hadn’t contacted them about Bishop’s disappearance until Terry Lovett was found dead, but they did confirm that Bishop was gone and had been since early Thursday morning.

  They’d also checked Bishop’s bank accounts and had called Amarok back to say that, sure enough, Bishop wasn’t simply lost and wandering through the streets without knowledge of where he was at or what he was doing. He’d withdrawn all the money from his savings at a bank five miles from the hospital. They were currently trying to get video footage from the bank to see if he could both walk and talk normally, so they’d all have a better picture of what they were looking for when they sent out the BOLO, or “Be on the Lookout.”

  Amarok was waiting for that, as well as some word on that scarred man and who he might be. He’d figured out how to make a copy of the video footage he’d seen at Quigley’s Quick Stop, which he’d sent to the detective in Minneapolis yesterday morning—along with a request that he check with Beacon Point to see if the man driving that stolen van was a current or former patient or employee.

  God forbid Bishop had a more distant relationship with the man than that. The more distantly related he was, the harder it would be to figure out who he was and where he was now.

  When his phone rang, Amarok was so deeply immersed in composing another e-mail to Detective Lewis in Minnesota, the same detective who’d taken over the case once his predecessor had been fired for planting the panty evidence, that he startled.

  Makita scrambled up and barked before Amarok grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Sergeant Amarok?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Dr. Ricardo at Hanover House.”

  “Have you heard anything?” he asked.

  “Not from Dr. Talbot, if that’s what you mean. And, to my knowledge, neither has anyone else here. But Jasper Moore has been raising hell, demanding to speak with you.”

  Makita curled up on his bed as Amarok went back to his e-mail imploring Detective Lewis to move faster. He needed to see if Lyman Bishop had made a flight reservation. “What does he want?” he asked, still slightly distracted.

  “From what the warden said, he won’t speak to anyone except you. I told Ferris to tell him you’re too busy right now. I won’t allow him to sabotage your investigation by demanding your attention when it should be elsewhere, but he insists it’s about the investigation. He seems to think he can help. So … I figured I’d let you know so you could make the decision.”

  “Jasper is trying to help me?” The irony was almost too good.

  “Yes. He may not love Evelyn the way you do, but he is fixated on her, and I bet he’d be devastated if she was suddenly removed from his life, especially now that he’s here and can’t prey on anyone else.”

  Amarok wasn’t going to pretend he could understand the psychology behind a guy wanting to kill Evelyn so badly he’d be destroyed if someone else got to her first.

  But he also wasn’t going to ignore or turn away anything that could potentially help him find her, especially because Jasper had been right about Bishop. Lyman was definitely up to something, and Jasper could predict how he might act far better than Amarok could. “I’ll be right over,” he said.

  Anchorage, AK—Saturday, 5:15 p.m. AKDT

  After giving Evelyn a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—why Emmett couldn’t have arranged for better food Bishop didn’t know, but that was about all there was in the staff room—and several bottles of water, Lyman returned to the front of the store, where Emmett’s corpse was lying in the weeds. He had to do something about him. Fortunately, he didn’t think it would be too difficult.

  He put on the pair of latex cleaning gloves he’d purchased when he stopped by the hardware store for the bolt cutters and other supplies. Then he reached into Emmett’s pocket and took out the keys to the store and the van, his money and his cell phone. He considered sending all of Emmett’s contacts a message that he was going to be out of town for a few days in order to buy some time before everyone started searching for him.

  But the phone was locked. All he could do was destroy it so that anyone who might come looking for him wouldn’t be able to track it. Ly
man guessed that Terry’s wife, at the very least, would try to reach her brother. She might have done so already, given the fact that Terry was dead and she had a funeral to plan. But even if she’d called the police, they wouldn’t have started looking for Emmett yet. He couldn’t have been dead more than a day and a half.

  Lyman stood as he slipped Emmett’s cash—seventy-eight dollars—into his own pocket. That was a nice little windfall. He wished he’d thought to empty Terry’s pockets, too, but it was better that he hadn’t. Anyone who investigated the wreck in the ravine would be less likely to believe it was a suicide if Terry’s belongings were missing. His wife kept him on such a short leash, he probably never had more than ten or twenty bucks in his wallet, so it wasn’t as though Lyman had missed much of an opportunity.

  He stretched his neck. It’d been a rigorous few days for someone accustomed to lying in a hospital bed. He’d never been so exhausted in his life. No amount of therapy could’ve prepared him for this. He was becoming weaker and more uncoordinated as the day wore on.

  But that didn’t matter. He had to get Emmett’s body into the henhouse. Just because someone hadn’t discovered it yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t. Once rigor disappeared, the amount of decomposition would make for a much nastier, messier job, anyway.

  He looked around the ranch until he found a pallet and a hand truck that had probably been used to move cases of eggs. After fitting the pallet onto the end of the hand truck to create a wide base, he rolled Emmett’s body onto it.

  It took more effort than he’d thought it would. A dead man was so heavy. Lyman had to stop time and again to rest, at which point more blood and other bodily fluids would leak out of the body.

  Apparently, it’d been warm enough to speed decomposition. But he finally managed to move the corpse around back.

  When he heard the dogs barking as he approached that particular henhouse, he changed his mind about putting Emmett in there. While he liked the idea of the dogs eating the corpse so he wouldn’t have to worry about someone discovering it, he’d been bitten before, as a child, and he was afraid he’d get bitten again if he threw open those doors and went in with a bloody body.

  So he put Emmett in another henhouse and covered him with manure. Only once he could move cautiously and wasn’t weighed down with a hand truck and 240 pounds of deadweight did he approach the dogs. He fed them from the sack of food Emmett had left sitting outside and, while they were busy gulping down their dinner, filled their water bowls before making sure they couldn’t get out and hobbled back to the plant.

  He was dying to rest, but he had yet to clean up the blood on the sidewalk outside the store. He also had to decide what to do about the van. He couldn’t afford to keep the car he’d rented, but it was dangerous to drive a stolen vehicle. He could easily attract the kind of interest he most needed to avoid.

  Still, he decided he’d keep it, for now. He wouldn’t take it out of its vine-covered hiding place unless he absolutely had to, and he’d trade the license plates with those of another vehicle—one of equal age so the number sequence wouldn’t be a red flag to law enforcement—while he had the rental car and could easily move from place to place without fear of being pulled over. Maybe he’d paint the van, too. It wasn’t as if he had to do a good job. Someone had already blacked out the name of the company. He just had to make sure the rest of the carpet-cleaning logo wasn’t visible, and he could do that with a can of black spray paint.

  Heck, why not spray the whole thing? No one would think twice about such a poor paint job, not on a clunker like that.

  The van issue settled in his mind, he summoned a little more energy to clean the blood from the entryway of the store so that the owner of the property, if she happened to stop by, wouldn’t see anything suspicious. Once that mess was gone and he’d settled in, he’d call the owner and tell her that Emmett Virtanen had quit and he was taking over with the temporary dog shelter. Then he should be safe—for a while. As much as he wished he could stay indefinitely, he’d have to find somewhere else eventually. He needed to move to a place that wasn’t up for sale.

  But that would be much easier after Evelyn had the baby. Only then could he safely cut into her brain without risking the loss of the child, and he definitely didn’t want to lose the child. That Evelyn was pregnant added a whole new dimension to what he had planned. If he raised her baby from birth, the child would never know it had had another father, especially if Evelyn wasn’t capable of remembering or articulating that information.

  Even if he lost Evelyn, even if she didn’t survive the “adjustment” she would require in order to be happy living with him, he’d have her child waiting in the wings, would never be alone again. And he wouldn’t have to disable the child’s brain in order to gain the control he craved—he’d only have to shape it.

  Hilltop, AK—Saturday, 5:30 p.m. AKDT

  Amarok had Jasper’s chains removed, but this time it wasn’t because he hoped it might provide him with an opportunity to vent his rage over the past. He’d done it because Jasper had been right. From the beginning, Jasper had suggested Lyman Bishop might be behind Evelyn’s abduction, and if it hadn’t been for Jasper asking his girlfriend to drive over to Beacon Point, Amarok would still be searching through Evelyn’s files right now, looking for that one piece of evidence that would give his investigation some direction. And he’d be wasting his time, because what he sought couldn’t be found there.

  He couldn’t say he respected Jasper. He would always hold him in the greatest contempt. What he’d done to Evelyn and other human beings was unforgivable, especially because he’d do the same again, if he got the chance. But Amarok had to acknowledge that Jasper was both intelligent and capable, in many regards, and he was grateful to him in this one instance. If Bishop had yet to come to Alaska from Minneapolis, there was a possibility Evelyn was alive and well, and that hope—the hope that he might get her and their child back safely—was worth everything to him.

  “Your girlfriend called me,” Amarok said without preamble. He assumed Jasper had brought him to Hanover House to tell him what Chastity had found, so Amarok wasn’t planning to waste a lot of time with this. He’d only taken the meeting in case she’d mentioned something to Jasper she hadn’t thought to tell him—or Jasper had made more of it. “I know Bishop is gone from Beacon Point, if that’s what this is about.”

  “He is? That clever son of a bitch.” Jasper shook his head in apparent wonder.

  So he hadn’t had any communication from Chastity? “You didn’t know?”

  Jasper’s mouth twisted into a wry grin. “No. I got tased trying to wait for Chastity’s e-mail at the library.”

  Amarok shrugged. “That sucks, man, but I don’t feel sorry for you. Not after the pain you’ve inflicted on other people. If it helps, I’ve been tased before.”

  “As part of your training. That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “You volunteered. You don’t hate the bastards who did it to you.”

  The promise in those words reminded Amarok that he and Jasper weren’t on the same team, even now. “Maybe they enjoyed it. You would, right?”

  He laughed softly. “Cadiz is too big a pussy to enjoy it. He nearly wet his pants he was shaking so badly.”

  “I hope you didn’t call me over here to bitch about how you’re being treated. Evelyn needs me.”

  “How sweet,” he said, his voice dripping with irony. “I just wanted to tell you that you have a very small window in which to find her.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “So have you been able to track Bishop?”

  “Not exactly. But I know he withdrew all the money he had in savings on Thursday morning.”

  “Interesting. You understand what that means.…”

  “Of course. He’s on his way. But he still has to get here. I’m praying the logistics will buy me some time.”

  “Praying?” Jasper rolled his eyes as if that were the stupidest thi
ng he’d ever heard.

  “I can see why you might not care to believe in a higher power. True justice would suck for someone like you, wouldn’t it?”

  “True justice would suck for any of us. Anyway, forget about praying. Getting your ass in gear and finding out what you can about Terry Lovett would be a better idea.”

  Amarok was in such a hurry he’d already started to leave, but hearing that, he paused with his hand lifted to knock so the CO on the other side would let him out. “Who’s Terry Lovett?”

  “A janitor from Beacon Point.”

  “And?”

  Jasper rolled his eyes. “Do I have to do all your work for you?”

  Amarok arched his eyebrows. “Quit grandstanding and answer the question.”

  “I like you, you know that? I can see why Evelyn likes you, too. Those blue eyes, that nice body. You got a big dick for her? Or was mine the biggest she ever had?”

  “From what she’s told me, she wasn’t overly impressed with yours.” He lifted his little finger. “But I’m done playing games, dude. If you want to pretend you’re somehow in control here, or that you’re smarter than me, you can have those delusions back in your cell.”

  A dark expression descended on Jasper’s face. “I’m bigger than that.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Amarok said. “Are you going to answer the question or not?”

  “Lovett was murdered this week, probably the same day Lyman Bishop escaped.”

  “Hm. So you’re thinking Lovett might’ve helped him and Bishop killed him to keep him silent.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking, especially because he made it look like a suicide. Imagine that. If it had gone down the way it had been planned, maybe I wouldn’t have connected the two incidents.”

  Jasper had a point. “Go on,” Amarok said.

  “It was only because his family insisted on an autopsy that it came out he’d been stabbed in the chest before driving his car into a ravine.”