Face Off

by Brenda Novak

  Amarok didn’t seem eager to let their conversation end on such a sour note. “Don’t be discouraged.”

  That was impossible. But he was trying so hard to keep her safe. She didn’t want him to think she didn’t appreciate his efforts. “I’m just tired.”

  “You need to get some sleep.”

  “So do you.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, and from that she knew she probably wouldn’t see him until very late. He’d drop off Makita so she wouldn’t be alone once she got home, and he’d continue working—sifting through everything they’d ever learned about Jasper, trying to figure out if there was anything more he could do for Sierra. He felt the need to catch Jasper as much as Evelyn did and knew they could be running out of time.

  She rolled her chair closer to her desk. “I’ll see you later.”

  “When will you be home?” he asked before she could hang up.

  “Soon.” She’d rather not spend another night at the bungalow without him, but at least it wasn’t storming. She’d be able to tell if someone was trying to break in, especially if Makita was there with her. And if the weather turned in a few hours, as it so often did in Alaska, she’d just have to cope. She refused to spend another sleepless night at the office.

  “I’ll stop by to see you,” he said.

  “Okay.” When she put down the receiver, Russ shoved the letter he was holding in front of her.

  She recognized the handwriting. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  He blinked at her. “What?”

  “This is from Fitzpatrick.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t think he’s writing me, too? You don’t think I’ve already heard it all?”

  After tossing the letter on her desk, he plopped into the seat across from her. “I feel so bad, Evelyn. He’s pleading with us.”

  She shoved the letter back toward him. “A lot of convicted murderers never stop maintaining their innocence, Russ.”

  “Let’s not forget everything Tim’s accomplished. He’s a renowned psychiatrist. That’s why you enlisted his help to get this place approved and built. You were too fresh out of grad school to do it all on your own.”

  Tim might have been well respected at one time, but he’d definitely tarnished his reputation. “I understand that. I’m grateful to him for his help in bringing Hanover House into existence, but—”

  “Before you go into all that, can I just tell you what I’m thinking?” Russ broke in.

  She gestured for him to continue.

  “Since it was Jasper who murdered three of your friends twenty years ago, it’s far more likely that he also murdered Mandy Walker and Charlotte Zimmerman Pine last winter. The psychopath you’ve described to us all, in great detail, would love the idea of scaring you that way, of returning to the place where he committed his very first atrocities and taking two more lives—two more people you knew—as a little reminder.”

  Russ wasn’t telling her anything new. She’d been over all of that in her own mind, thousands of times. But there were other considerations. “The murders in Boston stopped after Fitzpatrick was arrested. How do you explain that, Russ?”

  “If it was Jasper and not Tim, how would you explain it? You’d say it was Jasper’s way of laughing at the system, of hurting another innocent by letting Tim take the fall and of keeping you anxious and unsure at the same time, right?”

  Right. But was that giving Jasper too much credit? Had she built him up too much, made him almost superhuman?

  “You’re forgetting how terribly Fitzpatrick let us all down in the end,” she said. He became so obsessed with her, he’d started creeping around her house, watching her through the windows, even taking pictures of her in various stages of undress. He’d also undermined her authority whenever possible. He’d actually superimposed her face on pornographic pictures of women involved in sex acts, which he’d shown to the psychopaths he was studying, instead of using other pictures that were meant to determine how they reacted to certain stimuli. He should’ve lost his license and would have if she hadn’t kept quiet for the sake of the institution. The only reason he hadn’t been fired was because he quit.

  Russ lifted a placating hand. “Adjusting to Alaska hasn’t been easy for any of us. I understand he made some poor choices.”

  What he’d done went beyond “poor choices,” but Evelyn didn’t care to dredge up the details, so she let the statement go.

  “That doesn’t make him a murderer,” Russ finished.

  “Have you looked beyond what he’s been telling you—at the evidence?” she asked. “He was following Charlotte Zimmerman Pine. Calling her and hanging up. And the police found his shoe print at the scene of the crime in her blood!”

  “He was following Charlotte because Mandy Walker had just been killed and he didn’t want Charlotte to be next. He’d found a picture in your yearbook, one where you were painting a Homecoming sign with all your girlfriends, and he knew she was the only person in that picture, besides you, who was still alive. As far as he was concerned, that meant she had a bull’s-eye on her forehead. So he was trying to keep her safe. He was calling to scare her enough to make her cautious, hoping she’d pressure the police to keep an eye out, too.”

  “What about the blood with his shoe impression on the bathroom floor?”

  “Tim claims he was sitting in his van at the end of the block, watching the house where Charlotte was babysitting, when a vehicle came tearing past him. Something about the fact that it was obviously a rental car and it looked as though it’d come from around the block, where someone could’ve approached the house without his knowledge, made him go closer to check. That was when he saw the door standing ajar and went inside to find Charlotte lying in a pool of her own blood.”

  “The jury didn’t buy that explanation, and I’m not convinced I should, either. That isn’t the story he initially gave police.”

  “He admitted to following her and calling her. He also explained why he did both. So what if he didn’t tell them he’d been inside the house? Would you? The police were already looking at him as a person of interest. He didn’t want to become their primary suspect!”

  “If he hadn’t been trying to insert himself back into my life, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near her!”

  “He wasn’t trying to insert himself back into your life. He was trying to be useful again, to recover from his previous mistakes and find meaningful work. Can’t you have a little compassion for him?”

  She couldn’t help being offended. It was easy for Russ to forgive Fitzpatrick; Russ hadn’t been victimized by him. “I do have some compassion for him. I just don’t want to be blinded by it.”

  “The knife used to kill Charlotte has never been recovered. And there was no evidence tying him to Mandy’s murder. None whatsoever.”

  “So?”

  “So both those things speak in Tim’s favor.”

  “That the knife was never found speaks in no one’s favor.”

  “It says he didn’t have the murder weapon in his house or car or anywhere the police searched. And whoever killed Mandy killed Charlotte. Not only was Charlotte murdered shortly after Mandy, they were both friends of yours, both in that same yearbook picture.”

  Evelyn couldn’t argue that Charlotte’s and Mandy’s murders weren’t connected. They had to be. But she had so much responsibility on her shoulders already. She didn’t want to feel she had to take on the justice system in addition to everything else, especially for Tim. “Just because there’s nothing to suggest Tim killed Mandy doesn’t mean he didn’t. He didn’t have an alibi for either night.”

  “He lived alone. Rarely went out. Not having anyone to corroborate his whereabouts wouldn’t be unusual for someone like that. Heck, I live pretty much the same way, so there’d be no one to vouch for me, either, if I was in trouble.”

  With a sigh at his persistence, she propped her chin on her fist. If not for Fitzpatrick’s behavior with her and that shoe impri
nt, she would’ve been absolutely convinced it was more likely Jasper who’d killed Mandy and Charlotte than Fitzpatrick. Jasper had a history of killing people; Fitzpatrick didn’t. And she could imagine someone in Tim’s situation following Charlotte in an attempt to be involved in something he felt might resuscitate his career. At the time, he’d been eager to reclaim his former prestige.

  But he’d behaved so terribly when they worked together. How could she ever believe in him now?

  “The justice system is supposed to determine his guilt or innocence, not me. And he’s already had his day in court.”

  Russ took one of her tissues and tried to wipe away a stain on his shirt—part of his lunch, no doubt. “The system isn’t perfect. You know that. If he is wrongly imprisoned, his jury won’t be the first to get it wrong.”

  Did she have more responsibility in this situation than she was willing to take? “Okay, look,” she said. “I’m not having the best day, and you’re asking me to help someone I no longer admire. But I believe there’s a chance Tim might be innocent. So I’ll get in touch with an attorney friend of mine, see if he’ll look into it.”

  Russ used both arms to shove himself to his feet. “You have a friend who might be able to help?”

  “It’s been a few years since we’ve talked, but yes. His name’s Ashton Cooper, and he has an enviable record when it comes to winning difficult cases.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “When I first started my practice, I was sometimes asked to give expert testimony for the prosecution. I came up against him in court several times, so I know how good he is.”

  “You became friends even though you were on opposite sides of every case?”

  “Basically. He consulted with me on other cases I wasn’t involved in when he had a psychology question and, over time, we developed a rapport.” He’d even asked her to dinner once or twice—not that she’d ever accepted his invitations. He was loud, caustic, argumentative and intense. Not her type. But she liked how hard he tried, in his own gruff way, to make the world a better place. “He used to donate one day a week to pro bono cases, some that focused on trying to free inmates who might be innocent. Provided he still does that, I can ask him to take a look at Fitzpatrick’s case.”

  Giving up on what’d turned out to be a futile attempt to remove the food stains on his shirt, Russ threw the tissue in her wastebasket. “Why didn’t you mention this guy before?”

  Because she’d been hesitant to ask Ashton for such a huge favor. What if Fitzpatrick was guilty? She didn’t want him to waste his time trying to free someone who deserved to be in prison. “I didn’t feel going to Ashton would change anything. But just this week, Amarok and I received confirmation that DNA recovered on some open cases in Arizona showed a familial relationship to that of Jasper’s parents.”

  “Wait.… What are you saying? You have Jasper’s DNA profile?”

  She couldn’t help smiling. With everything that’d happened recently, she hadn’t taken the time to celebrate that small victory—and she should have. It could turn out to be a big victory. “We do.”

  “That’s fabulous! Then … we just need to have it tested against all the DNA found at both crime scenes. If we can place Jasper at either one, it’ll prove Tim is innocent.”

  “To us. We know the murders had to be connected, and if Jasper was at one or the other, he was the culprit for both. But where Fitzpatrick’s concerned, that’ll need to play out in the legal system.”

  “There’s always a lot of red tape with that sort of thing. But if Jasper was there—the psychopath who killed three of your other friends—we should be able to free Tim, especially with a good attorney.”

  “I think so, too. But what if Jasper’s DNA doesn’t match? Does that mean it was Fitzpatrick who killed Mandy and Charlotte?”

  “Not necessarily,” Russ argued. “Jasper could’ve murdered both women without leaving his DNA.”

  “Exactly. Then we won’t know any more than we know now, and Ashton will say there’s nothing he can do. I’m wondering if we should wait and see if we have Jasper’s DNA at the scene before we approach him. That’s what I’ve been planning to do.”

  Russ shoved his hands in his pockets. “Let’s not wait. Having Cooper involved should make the whole process go quicker. He’ll know how to get hold of the evidence, get the DNA tested, file whatever papers are required to move the process along, et cetera.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “If we have to depend on Detective Dressler, who wholeheartedly believes he put the right man behind bars, we could run into some resistance and delays.” The detective hadn’t even called Amarok back! She’d tried to reach him Friday morning herself, before they’d visited the cabin, and he hadn’t returned her call, either.

  “Maybe Cooper will look at the evidence and all the testimony and believe in Tim enough to take on the case, anyway.”

  She gave Russ a doubtful look. “He won’t be able to get past that shoe imprint in Charlotte’s blood—unless he can offer up another plausible culprit.”

  “You can’t say that for sure,” Russ said. “Who knows what this might start? Can I tell Tim what’s going on? That you’re doing what you can?”

  She locked her desk. “It might be smarter not to get his hopes up until—”

  “He could use some good news right now. He’s really depressed. He needs to feel he’s got a fighting chance.”

  “Fine.” She handed him back the letter he’d dropped on her desk. If Russ wanted to encourage Fitzpatrick, that was his choice. Even if Tim was innocent, even if she was going to try to help him, she didn’t have any desire to remain in touch.

  She listened to the soles of Russ’s shoes squish as he left her office. She was eager to head home, but she had Ashton Cooper’s cell phone number, so it wasn’t as if she had to wait until Monday. Maybe Cooper could get the DNA tested right away. He’d certainly have a better chance than she would.

  Setting her briefcase to one side, she took a moment to call him.

  13

  Amarok was having a second bowl of chili and a piece of corn bread at the Moosehead when Evelyn came in. He wasn’t all that hungry anymore, but he had to visit The Shady Lady to give Leland another update, to let him know he was finished with the field and hadn’t found anything, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  He stood as Makita trotted over to welcome Evelyn. “Hey, what’s up?” Amarok hadn’t expected to see her until he swung by the house.

  She slid onto the stool next to his. “I noticed your truck outside, so I decided to stop in.”

  He checked his watch. “It’s barely five. What are you doing off so early?”

  “You know I don’t have to work on Saturday. And I told you when we were on the phone that I’d be leaving soon.”

  “You put in so many hours, the day of the week doesn’t seem to matter to you,” he said dryly. “And once you’re engrossed in one of your studies, ‘soon’ could be four or five hours.”

  She rolled her eyes but smiled to let him know she understood he was teasing. “Since I met you, I’ve taken a lot more time off than I ever did before. Anyway, tonight when I said ‘soon,’ I meant it. I have a raging headache.”

  The concern he felt for her deepened. He had to determine what had happened to Sierra—and eliminate the threat of Jasper before Evelyn could unravel mentally or emotionally. She was already struggling. And yet he had this thing with Sierra, which may or may not be connected. “You need to eat, and you need sleep,” he told her.

  She rested a hand on his thigh. “So you keep telling me.”

  “It’s true.” He gave her a menu. “What would you like for dinner?”

  She pushed the menu away without even looking at it. “A bowl of vegetable soup.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. And I’m going to bed as soon as I get home.”

  “Good.” He wished he could go with her, that they could curl up together and s
hut out the world. When it was just the two of them, nothing else seemed to matter. But he didn’t have the luxury of relaxing. Once he’d figured out what was going on with Sierra, he could throw all his effort and energy back into hunting down Jasper. He couldn’t wait to return to that. Although he’d been protective of Evelyn all along, he wanted to capture Jasper now more than ever. Jasper was keeping him from starting a family with the woman he loved, and Amarok took that personally.

  He waved to get Shorty’s attention and ordered the soup.

  Evelyn asked Shorty how he was doing, but Amarok could tell that she was beginning to feel self-conscious around the locals again. “Shorty likes you, you know that,” he murmured after the owner of the Moosehead had moved away.

  “The news of Sierra Yerbowitz’s disappearance has everyone thinking about Sandy,” she said.

  “That may be true, but Shorty doesn’t blame you for what happened to her, and he won’t blame you for whatever’s happened to Sierra. Plenty of people here wanted Hanover House in the area. They were desperate for the jobs and prosperity it would bring.”

  “Not everyone,” she said with a pointed look.

  He’d been opposed to the facility’s close proximity to his hometown, and he’d been vocal about it. But the prison was here now. So was Evelyn, and he didn’t want to lose her. “It’s all going to work out,” he insisted, and changed the subject. “I got a message from your sister.”

  “She called you?”

  “I’m the one who called her, remember? You were too busy.”

  “I was procrastinating.”

  “Why? Don’t you want her to come?”

  “Of course I do. It’s been over two years since I’ve seen her. But I don’t want her to plead with me to go home.”

  Neither did Amarok. “She knows you’re committed to what you’ve created, that you plan to stay for another three years.” He hoped Evelyn was committed to him, too, and for a lot longer than that. “She won’t try to talk you into returning to Boston. She misses you and would just like to spend some time with you.”