by Brenda Novak
“Not yet. She must’ve checked her voice mail or caught the news, though, because she knows about the murders. She sounded pretty upset.”
Some of Evelyn’s optimism faded. Was her program headed for the scrap heap?
She hurried to her office, piled everything on her desk and stared down at the phone. Then she drew a deep breath and dialed.
Janice answered on the first ring. “Evelyn?”
“Yes?”
“What the hell’s going on up there?”
“It’s been a … a rough week.” She explained everything about the murders, Danielle having sex with the inmates and what happened with Fitzpatrick, how he’d been disappointed when she rejected him and that disappointment had smoldered into resentment.
“But he quit?” Janice said when she was done.
Evelyn slid her skirt up a few inches to study the bruise she’d gotten when Glenn kicked her. Her ankle actually seemed to be healing faster. “Yes, he walked out on Friday.”
“Thank the Lord.”
Evelyn went into a bit more detail, about the file she’d found in his office and what he’d done in his sessions with Hugo.
Janice listened silently, so silently that Evelyn was afraid to stop talking for fear of what she might say in response. But that moment had to come at some point and, when it did, Evelyn braced herself.
“You’ve had one hell of a time,” Janice said.
“As if the weather up here isn’t bad enough,” Evelyn joked.
“So what now?”
“I’d like to replace Martin and Tim and keep working. Of course, Warden Ferris will take care of the job openings on the prison side.”
“The media has had a field day with this,” she mused.
“I’m aware of that. I’m sorry.”
“What they don’t understand is that corruption can happen in any prison.”
A ray of sunshine came through the window, and it was so rare for this time of year that Evelyn got up to look out and enjoy it. “True. But what Fitzpatrick did will cost the mental health team a great deal of credibility.”
“I haven’t seen Fitzpatrick on the news. Does anyone besides us know about what he did—in his sessions, I mean?”
Surprised by this question, Evelyn forgot about the sun. “No. I mean, Hugo did, but—”
“Hugo’s dead.”
“Yes.” Amarok knew, too, of course, but she wasn’t about to mention that. He wouldn’t tell anyone.
“You said Fitzpatrick deleted the files that were stored there at the prison, so it’s unlikely any of the rest of the team will ever look back.”
“There’s still the cloud—”
“Which no one will have any reason to bother checking. It’s not like we have to fire him and worry about showing cause. He quit.”
“True.…”
“Then, from my perspective, the whole Whitcomb/Kush/Petrowski thing has nothing to do with you, the other mental health professionals or the patients you’re studying. Those were correctional officers, so it’s a prison matter, something I should be discussing with the warden.”
Evelyn opened her mouth but wasn’t quite sure what to say.
“Ferris has to get a handle on his staff,” Janice continued. “We can’t afford this type of negative publicity at any prison, but least of all at Hanover House. Tell him he can expect to hear from me when I get back to the states.”
Too shocked to respond right away, Evelyn covered her mouth. She couldn’t believe it. She was being left alone to continue as she’d been before?
She’d been so sure there would be severe repercussions!
There probably would’ve been, had Janice learned what was going on any sooner.…
“Dr. Talbot?” her boss said. “Hello? Are you still there?”
She cleared her throat. “Yes, I’m here. How was the wedding?”
“I’d enjoy the festivities a lot more if I liked my son-in-law,” she said. “Good luck finding the right people to fill the vacancies on your team.”
“Thank you. Have a safe trip.”
Janice had disconnected when Penny walked in, but Evelyn was still in a state of shock.
“Dr. Fitzpatrick called while you were on the phone.”
Evelyn couldn’t help grimacing. “Don’t tell me he asked to speak to me.”
“No, he knew you wouldn’t want to talk to him.”
“So … was he after the files he left behind, or what?”
“He asked if I’d deliver his sincerest apologies, for everything, and tell you that he’ll be moving back to the Lower Forty-eight as soon as possible.”
Grateful that he had the integrity to at least acknowledge his mistakes, Evelyn nodded. “Thank you,” she said, and waited for her assistant to go back out before calling Detective Green.
“You have the credit card?” Evelyn asked without preamble.
“I do,” he replied. “Now that it will no longer do us any good as far as convicting Garza.”
“At least his victims will know he was the one, and that he’s gone. That should bring them some closure.”
“And save the government a pile of money. I owe you a drink, Dr. Talbot. Maybe someday I’ll come up there and take a peek at Hanover House.”
“I’d like that.”
“I also wanted to tell you Elaine’s daughter is having a baby—and plans to name it after you.”
That made a good morning even better. A baby brought hope, healing, especially because Evelyn wasn’t sure she would ever have a child herself. “How nice.”
“You deserve that and more.”
“I only did what I should’ve done.” She was just saying good-bye when the warden knocked on her open door. “Morning,” she said, and waved him in.
He eyed her carefully as he approached the desk. “Is it a good morning?”
Curving her lips into a smile, she gestured toward the window. “It is indeed. Haven’t you seen the sun?”
EPILOGUE
“I had a compulsion to do it.”
—ED GEIN, SERIAL KILLER (INSPIRATION FOR PSYCHO AND SILENCE OF THE LAMBS)
Jasper Moore, who was now going by the name of Andy Smith—he’d used several aliases over the years—sat at the table with his wife’s two little girls while she made them all breakfast.
“What are you reading, Daddy?” Miranda, the oldest at eight, leaned over to see the newspaper.
He looked up from the piece he’d read twice already. “An article about a lady who’s running a prison in Alaska.”
“Where’s Alaska?” Chelsea, Miranda’s younger sister by two years, got up on her knees.
“It’s a place that’s far away, where it’s really cold,” he replied.
“Colder than here?” she asked.
He chuckled. “We live in Arizona. Almost every place is colder than here.”
Her little heart-shaped mouth puckered. “Not today. It’s raining.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “Even we get a storm every once in a while.”
“How many people live in Alaska?” Chelsea asked.
“Not a lot,” he replied. “It’s the last frontier.”
“What’s a frontier?”
He should’ve known that question was coming next. “A vast wilderness with lots of animals and wide-open spaces.”
Miranda frowned as she studied the picture of Evelyn. “Why would such a pretty lady want to start a prison, especially where it’s so cold?”
“This is a new kind of prison, one where they like to peek inside a man’s head,” he explained.
Chelsea scrunched up her nose. “Can they do that?”
“They like to try.”
She seemed horrified. “Wouldn’t it hurt?”
Hillary, his wife, carried a skillet over from the stove. “I don’t think a place like that is meant to be pleasant. That’s where they put bad people, honey.”
“A prison doesn’t sound like a very nice place,” Chelsea said.
“It wouldn’t be uncomfortable for Evelyn Talbot,” Jasper pointed out. “She isn’t locked up. My guess is that she likes her work, that she thinks she’s really doing something.”
“You don’t agree?” Hillary asked.
The lines that were already forming in his wife’s face bothered him. He wished she’d get some Botox or something. She didn’t have a whole lot to offer besides a willing body whenever he demanded sex and the living she made as a nurse. Her income was the only way he could get by when he was out of work, and he was more often out of work than not, which was part of the reason his first wife had left him. “Psychiatry is all hocus-pocus to me. How can you tell what a man’s going to do by giving him a test?”
“A test?” she replied. “Psychiatrists study behavior. As screwed up as so many people are, someone has to try and dig for answers.”
She always acted as if she knew more than he did. That bothered him, too. But he let it go. He’d learned which people were important, if only for practical reasons and the creature comforts they could provide, and which were expendable enough to fulfill certain … other appetites.
Miranda gave a little shiver. “I wouldn’t want to go to a prison in Alaska.”
Hillary peered over his shoulder as she dished up his eggs. “Why are you so interested in Hanover House? If anything on that place ever comes over the news, you’re riveted.”
She had no idea.… “I’d like to visit there someday.”
“The prison?” she asked in horrified surprise.
“Alaska,” he said with a benign smile.
Read on for an excerpt from Brenda Novak’s next book
HELLO AGAIN
Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
1
“We are all evil in some form or another.”
The Night Stalker made that statement. Although Dr. Evelyn Talbot had never interviewed Richard Ramirez personally, like she had so many other serial killers, and the opportunity was now lost to her since Ramirez died of cancer in 2013, she’d watched video footage of the interviews he’d done with others. In her opinion, he’d been pandering for the camera when he tossed out that little nugget, had been hoping to sound profound and far deeper than he actually was.
She ran into that a lot. So many of the psychopaths she studied pretended to be more than they were. Most weren’t smart enough to pull off the charade. Even those who’d gone years before being caught and punished for their crimes hadn’t done so because of any great intelligence. Often it was sheer luck, basic survival instinct, or a lack of solid police work that got in the way. Or they looked completely benign—like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy—which deflected attention.
But the newly convicted Lyman Bishop, the inmate she’d just met with.… She found him to be far more unnerving than any of her other patients. He was brilliant and so calculating—she grimaced at the pictures in his file, which lay open at her elbow—not to mention absolutely unflinching in his brutality.
Taking off her glasses, which she used now and then to avoid eyestrain, she leaned her head on the back of her chair and stared up at the ceiling of her office. It wasn’t quite lunch and yet she felt like she’d put in a whole day. She’d been up late last night, preparing for her interview with Lyman Bishop. She had to stay one step ahead of him where and when she could, or she’d earn his contempt instead of his respect. If that happened, she might as well have him transferred somewhere else, because he’d do her no good at Hanover House. If she couldn’t develop some type of rapport, she’d never reach who he really was. He’d merely toy with her.
With a sigh, she put her glasses back on and continued typing up her thoughts and impressions. Although she typically welcomed every inmate who was transferred to Hanover House upon his arrival, she’d been in Anchorage yesterday with Amarok, her boyfriend and Hilltop’s only police presence, visiting his father, who was ill. Lyman Bishop had spent his first night at Hanover House before she could meet him. And whether this would be good or bad in the overall scheme of things she couldn’t say, but he was everything she’d expected him to be.
“When I tell a new acquaintance what I do for a living, I hear the name Hannibal Lecter far more than I do B.T.K. or John Wayne Gacy or any psychopath who ever really lived,” she wrote. “Everyone seems to associate ‘psychopath’ with Silence of the Lambs. I’ve always eschewed that fictional representation. The men who commit murder for the sake of enjoyment are typically much more mundane. Even though I’ve met many dangerous men over the years, men who have committed stomach-turning atrocities, none has ever reminded me of Thomas Harris’s character. Until Lyman. He’s the only killer intelligent enough to elicit the association.”
She paused to remove the small black and white picture she kept in her top drawer, clipped from her high school yearbook. Jasper Moore, her first boyfriend, smiled back at her from twenty-one years ago. Young. Handsome. Seemingly guileless. So unlikely a killer. By looking at him, no one would believe he’d murdered her three best friends and tortured her for three days before slitting her throat and leaving her for dead the same year that picture was taken. He’d been seventeen, she sixteen. That she’d survived was nothing short of a miracle. She’d been alive to name her attacker and to say what he’d done to her, and yet he’d slipped away, had never been apprehended in the two decades since, despite all her efforts with private detectives and the full focus of police.
She had her theories about how he’d managed such a feat; his wealthy parents must’ve gotten him out of the country right away. But with or without help, he was the only other psychopath she’d ever met that she would categorize as being as smart as Lyman Bishop. Which was what made Lyman so intriguing and frightening for her. After hundreds of disappointments—like Anthony Garza who’d exhibited similar behavior even if he wasn’t quite as intelligent—having the opportunity to examine a mind so similar to Jasper’s was thrilling.
At the same time, as Victor Hugo once said, “Nothing is so terrifying as this monologue of the storm.”
Was there a new storm on the horizon that had nothing to do with the massive cold fronts that routinely socked Alaska this time of year? When she’d met with Lyman, she’d gotten the bone-chilling sensation that he would change her life in some way.…
“He made me feel there is nothing I can do to stop him and others like him, which plays into my worst fear,” she added to her notes. “That what I’ve been through will be for naught. That what I’m doing, sacrificing Boston and the association of the family and friends I have there to live in this frozen wilderness, will in the end, mean nothing.”
The intercom on her desk buzzed, startling her she was so deep in thought. With a glance at the clock, she pressed the button that would allow her to communicate with her receptionist, 4′9″ Penny Singh. “Yes?”
“Jennifer Hall is here.”
Right on time. “Send her in.”
Sliding away from her computer, Evelyn stood in anticipation of greeting her guest. These days, she didn’t visit with many victims or their families, not since she’d opened Hanover House a year ago. Working in the small remote town of Hilltop, an hour outside of Anchorage, made her less accessible. And now that she’d accomplished her goal of establishing the institution, where she and a team of five forensic psychologists and one neurologist could study the “conscienceless” in great depth, she didn’t have to appear on television quite so often. She was no longer constantly in the public eye, lobbying for the necessary funding. She’d dedicated her life to unraveling the mysteries of the psychopathic mind. Now that she was free to pursue that goal as she had envisioned, she was consumed by her work and rarely let anything else interrupt. But when Jennifer Hall, the sister of Janice Hall, one of Lyman Bishop’s victims, contacted her several weeks ago just after Christmas, Evelyn didn’t have the heart to refuse to see her. Having been a victim herself, she couldn’t help identifying with the suffering of others. She wanted to offer what peace and support she could, even if t
hat didn’t amount to as much as she wished.
“Dr. Talbot, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak with me,” Jennifer said the moment she entered the room.
Only twenty-five, with long dark hair and wide brown eyes, Jennifer was attractive, but Evelyn barely glanced at her face. Almost instantly her gaze fell to the other woman’s swollen belly as if dragged there by a magnetic pull. That Jennifer was expecting had nothing to do with their meeting, which was, no doubt, why she hadn’t mentioned it, but Evelyn was transfixed. She’d been thinking about babies a lot lately. Amarok had mentioned marriage for the first time a month ago. She’d pretended not to hear him when he made the comment—something about getting her a ring if she’d ever agree to marry him—and he hadn’t brought it up since, but she’d been contemplating whether she could make that commitment. To him. To anyone. She was thirty-seven. If she was going to have a family, she needed to do so fairly soon. She’d just never imagined such a traditional future for herself. Not with Jasper still on the loose. The most heartbreaking thing she could imagine would be for him to come after one of her children.…
“No problem,” she said. “I can’t believe you were willing to make the trip.”
“Jan was more than my sister. She was my identical twin.”
Fortunately, Lyman’s file contained no post-mortem photographs of this particular victim so Evelyn didn’t have a terrible image of a murdered Janice Hall pop into her head. He’d been convicted on circumstantial evidence alone. He’d been in the area and didn’t have an alibi. He’d kidnapped and murdered other girls who looked similar. And her underwear had been found in his house with his other “trophies.”
“I understand,” Evelyn said. “And I’m sorry. I can only guess at how painful it must be for you to … to carry on without her.”
Jennifer blinked rapidly. “Sometimes I wake up at night, and I’m positive she’s alive, you know? It’s like I can feel her, feel that tight connection. Then morning comes and…”
With it, reality. Evelyn knew all too well how that went. Despite the passage of so many years, she still had dreams of talking and laughing with her best friends from high school, all three of whom were gone, thanks to Jasper. “And you lose her all over again.”