Hanover House, Hilltop, AK—Sunday 2:00 p.m. AKDT
Jasper could feel Roland’s eyes on him but refused to look over. Winters in Alaska were so damn long they didn’t get much yard time. In such a cold climate, it was too expensive for the government to provide the necessary outerwear—that was what the guards said—but Jasper knew it had more to do with the difficulty of policing a large group of inmates in the dark, especially those housed at this facility. And in Alaska during the winter, it was almost always dark. Since he planned on making the most of summer and the added rec time they received because of the longer days, he wasn’t about to let Roland or anyone else cause a problem for which he could be thrown in the hole.
What was it with Roland? he wondered as he took in all the men who were playing basketball or chess or just working out. Roland’s interest in Jasper seemed to have grown since Evelyn disappeared. It was almost as though he resented Jasper for slitting Evelyn’s throat, even though he’d done it more than twenty years ago, and wanted to make him pay for it. But Roland wasn’t anything to Evelyn, had barely come to know her.
Or maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe now that he’d been at Hanover House for a couple of months, he’d grown comfortable enough to become bored. He was a patient man, evidently, liked to wait and watch and think things through. Could be he’d had it in for Jasper from the beginning, ever since he learned Jasper’s history, but was only starting to make his move.
Jasper had worked in corrections; he knew some inmates were like that. They felt it was their responsibility to mete out punishment to those they considered worse than themselves—as if that changed what they were.
When Roland didn’t shift his attention after a reasonable length of time, Jasper had to return his gaze. In prison, staring was almost as bad as shoving. If he didn’t respond, Roland would know he was reluctant to become enemies, and then he’d be forced to put Roland in his place.
Otherwise, he’d become Roland’s bitch, and Jasper couldn’t let that happen. If he lost status at Hanover House, he’d be far more vulnerable than he was now. Everyone in this place preyed on the weak.
Making sure he gave no sign of the intimidation he was feeling, he glared back so Roland would know he wouldn’t go down without a fight. He hoped that would be enough and Roland would go pick on someone else. He was one of the very few who’d ever made Jasper feel unsure of his own ability to come out on top.
He was just so damn confident.…
Roland didn’t back off, however. He smiled as though Jasper’s response amused him and sauntered over, going so far as to sit at the cement-like table where Jasper had his legs outstretched and his face turned up toward the sun.
“Enjoying yourself today?” he asked.
“I was until you decided to be a prick,” Jasper replied.
Roland chuckled.
“You think that’s funny?”
“No. What I think would be funny is to see how you behave when I have my knife at your throat and my dick up your ass.”
Watching him warily, Jasper sat up straight. “What have I ever done to you?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” He started scraping the dirt from beneath his fingernails. “I have a problem with men who victimize women and children. It’s a fucked-up thing to do.”
“What I’ve done or haven’t done is none of your business,” Jasper growled, but Roland didn’t get angry in return.
“According to what I’ve read online, you’ve murdered at least thirty women. Some you raped and tortured for days or even weeks. That true?”
Jasper could hear his own blood roaring in his ears. He was tempted to lash out, to teach Roland he was no one who could be messed with. That was how he’d met every challenge in the past—by coming right back at whoever stood up to him, louder and fiercer. But he was no longer in the outside world where most people played by the rules. No longer had the advantage of being the only one willing to go to any lengths necessary. “Why do you ask?”
“Thirty’s a lot.”
“I’m not saying it was thirty.”
“Well, we know there was at least one. Dr. Talbot has that scar on her neck to remind us. And you’re the one who put it there.”
Jasper could see where this was going. He just couldn’t see how to derail it.
“Don’t you ever wonder how they felt?” Roland asked when Jasper didn’t respond.
“No.” He didn’t care. It wasn’t about them. They didn’t matter. It was about the pleasure having that much power brought him.
“Well, maybe you should.”
“Are we going to have a problem, you and I?”
Roland didn’t so much as blink. “You catch on quick.”
Jasper narrowed his eyes. “You’re not going to do anything to me, not if I get to you first.”
“We’ll see how well that works out for you.” With another smile, he got up and walked away, and all through the rest of their time in the yard, Roland wouldn’t quit staring at him. The other inmates were catching on to his interest, murmuring that he was Roland’s next target and even placing bets as to who would survive in an incident between them.
If they were betting on Roland, they were betting on the wrong man, Jasper told himself. He never let anyone beat him.
Anchorage, AK—Sunday, 3:30 p.m. AKDT
Lyman Bishop hadn’t had a second’s trouble getting license plates for the van. He’d taken the ones he needed to get rid of with him in the rental car and, on his way back from running errands, when he was no longer in a parking lot where there might be surveillance cameras, he drove down street after street until he found an old truck in a quiet neighborhood and made the swap.
No one else had been around; no one had seen him or tried to stop him. He doubted even the owner would notice the difference. License plates weren’t something most people paid attention to, except cops. So once he got back to the chicken ranch, painted the van and put on the new plates, he’d return the rental car and be fairly safe.
As he drove back, he was looking forward to having a chance to rest and recover from all the activity and stress of the past few days—and getting to know Evelyn a bit better. He hoped she’d be friendlier when he spoke to her again. If she wasn’t, if she was too stubborn for her own good, they would both lose out.
The show tune “Let the Memory Live Again” came on the radio, so he turned it up.
Boy, had it been a long time since he’d heard that song. He loved Broadway musicals! He and Beth used to sit and watch them over and over. They were a lot better than the negative crap on television these days. But there was something nostalgic about the lyrics of this particular song. It made him sort of melancholy to hear that line—how did it go?—about the memory of knowing happiness once upon a time.
He’d never known. Sometimes he not only felt estranged from those around him, he also felt estranged from the whole human race. What kind of a kid was so unlovable that even a mother wouldn’t want him?
For the first time in ages, he thought of his mother. He’d believed he’d finally be happy after he gave her what she deserved for choosing her new husband over her children, but he’d never forget the look on her face when he stepped out of the bushes of her yard with that gun. It was almost as if she was glad to see him, but since he’d shot her right away, he had no idea what she was about to say.
Fortunately, his mood became less self-reflective as “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables came on. He was foolish for thinking of his mother. She didn’t deserve the longing that sometimes sprang up.
He was tapping the steering wheel to the beat of the drums when the road curved to the right, but as he navigated that turn and the chicken ranch came into sight his heart jumped into his throat.
Everything wasn’t as he’d left it. There was a white Explorer parked out front, and whoever had gotten out of it had somehow managed to open the gate he’d locked when he left—he distinctly remembered doing it—and gone inside.
Hilltop, AK—Sunday, 3:35 p.m. AKDT
Amarok was so torn. He wanted to fly to Minnesota and take the face close-up from the Quick Stop video around to each and every employee at Beacon Point himself. So much of police work involved reading body language and using his intuition about the people he met, whether they were being honest or not. But he was afraid to leave Alaska for fear the searchers would finally turn up something and he wouldn’t be around to act on it.
He knew Evelyn was probably in Alaska somewhere, too, which also made it hard for him to leave. He didn’t want to go any farther from her than he had to. He wished he could be in two places at once, but Detective Lewis insisted he was handling everything on his end as quickly as possible, and he had remained in close touch.
“The media is about to go crazy with this,” Amarok told Lewis on the phone.
“It’s already been on the news here several times. And I’m being bombarded for updates on the case.”
“It won’t be long before an army of journalists flood into town. They’ll be banging on the doors and windows at my trooper post, plus trying to stop me whenever they see me.”
“That type of thing doesn’t make our jobs any easier.”
Amarok rubbed a hand over his face. “When you’re as small as Hilltop, there aren’t a lot of places to go in order to avoid them.”
“Is there someone else you can refer them to so you can stay focused?”
He’d refer them to Shorty. Shorty could be tight-lipped when necessary; Phil couldn’t. Phil was too kind and gregarious for his own good. “I’ll muddle through.”
“Maybe the media coverage will be a blessing. They’ve been running the video you sent me. I’m hoping it will help us identify him. So far, it’s brought in quite a few dead ends, but I have a lot more leads to sift through.”
“That video is pretty blurry.”
“Still, there’s an identifiable person in it.”
“Maybe you’re right. We need to ID him fast. Evelyn has been gone for five days. Her chances dwindle with each passing second.”
So did his hope of getting her back.…
“When’s the last time you slept?” Lewis asked.
Amarok had slept in snatches—a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there when he simply couldn’t go on—but he hadn’t been resting or eating as he should. He could tell by the way his clothes fit him that he was already losing weight. He hadn’t bothered to shave, either. For the first time since he was twenty-two, he had a beard.
The only good news was that the swelling in his hand had finally gone down. He was beginning to think he hadn’t broken it. It hurt when he tried to use it, but it seemed to be healing. “I have no idea. It’s not as though I’m keeping track.”
“Well, I can tell you it’s not enough.”
Shorty, Molly and Phil had been saying the same thing. They were almost as distraught by what was happening to him as by what had happened to Evelyn. They’d already alerted his father to the fact that he wasn’t taking care of himself. Hank had called him twice and begged him not to run himself into the ground. He was threatening to come to Hilltop and stay with him, to try to force the issue, but they all knew there wasn’t anything Hank or anyone else could do.
“I don’t want to talk about sleep, okay? I’m fairly certain this is the last day I’ll have a search party at my disposal. They haven’t found a thing—and that includes someone who’s seen or recognized the man in the video I sent you. There might be a few who’d be willing to go out again tomorrow, but it’s the start of a new week, and this is the fourth day they’ve been at it. People have to get back to their own lives at some point.”
“I understand where they’re at, and I understand the desperation you feel.”
“Right,” Amarok mumbled, but he didn’t believe that anyone could truly understand. Not unless they’d been through something similar.
There was an awkward silence, as if Lewis could tell his comment had been deemed meaningless. Then he said, “Look. You have to trust others to help you. You can’t do everything. I get that you don’t know me very well, and you can’t see everything I’m doing here in Minnesota, so you’re afraid to rely on the fact that it’s getting done.”
“That’s not—”
“I’m giving this case top priority, okay? Things don’t happen in an instant just because we need them to. So relax and let me do my job. It’s better to have two people on this than one, regardless of what your opinion is about how hard I’m going after it.”
Lewis had a point, but Amarok was unwilling to concede. He’d convinced himself that the real answers, the ones that might actually net him something, were to be found in Minnesota, since the kidnapping had to have been planned while Bishop was at Beacon Point.
“Were you ever able to reach Terry Lovett’s widow?” he asked Lewis. He didn’t want to waste time with a pep talk, regardless of whether he needed it. “Because I can’t get her to call me back no matter how many times I reach out to her.”
“I got her on the phone just a few minutes ago.”
“And?”
“She claims she’s never heard of Lyman Bishop or Evelyn Talbot and she has no idea who’d want her husband dead.”
“Did she say if Terry had been acting strange lately?”
“She wouldn’t say much of anything, wouldn’t give me more than two minutes of her time, but I’m not all that surprised, to be honest with you. She’s just lost her husband.”
“According to the article I read on Terry careening into that ravine, she wasn’t getting along with him.”
“Doesn’t mean she’d want him dead.”
“Then why won’t she call me back?”
“Who knows?”
“Did you ask her if you could at least text her a photo of our suspect? See if she recognizes him?”
“I already sent it.”
“And?”
“I haven’t heard anything yet, but I sent it only an hour or so ago. I’ll follow up as necessary. I’ll attend the funeral, too, see if anyone suspicious shows up. Maybe I can talk to her a bit more when it’s all over, bring a hard copy of the photo with me in case she doesn’t respond to the text.”
“When is the funeral?”
“On Friday.”
Amarok came to his feet. “That’s five days from now!”
“I know, but I can’t force her to talk.”
“Why wouldn’t she want to? Maybe she had something to do with it.”
“The murder of her husband?”
“And/or the kidnapping of Evelyn.”
“I’d be really surprised if she did. From what I’m getting from the neighbors, she’s a regular mom with two kids, and she has no criminal history.”
“They were having marriage problems, needed money, too. And we know Bishop withdrew the thirty-three hundred he had in savings.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He’d need money to get to Alaska, too—although, as I’ve told you, his name doesn’t show up on any of the flight manifests.”
“You’re monitoring the major carriers to see if that changes, right?”
“Of course.”
Amarok rubbed his eyes. They knew Bridget Lovett was at her children’s school when her husband was killed, so she hadn’t been the one to stab him. Could she be involved in some other way? Or was she as clueless as to why her husband was now dead as she pretended to be? “She has to take a look at the photo I gleaned from the Quick Stop video. If she doesn’t get back to you, I’ll fly there myself and make sure she does.”
“Wait a sec. Something just came in. Hang on.…”
Amarok dug some old trail mix out of his drawer and tossed a handful of nuts and raisins into his mouth while he waited for Lewis to get back on the line. Makita trotted over because he knew Amarok kept doggy treats in the same drawer, and Amarok tossed him one.
“Sergeant Murphy?”
“Yes. What was it?”
“The surveillance video from the bank.”
“Lyman’s bank?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you send it to me?”
“Already did.”
Amarok waited for Lewis’s e-mail to come in and clicked on the attachment as soon as it did. “He’s getting around pretty damn good for a vegetable,” he said, his eyes glued to the screen image of Bishop walking into the lobby and approaching a teller.
“I noticed that,” Lewis responded.
Bishop had a limp. He looked heavier than before, too, but some of that could be attributed to the thick black sweatshirt he wore with the hood pulled up to obscure his face.
“Someone had to have helped him,” Amarok said. “You need to ask Bridget Lovett if her husband bought anything like that sweatshirt recently.”
“I’ll keep trying to get her to talk to me.”
Amarok froze the playback and enlarged the picture. What little he could see of Bishop’s face became so blurry it almost defeated the purpose, but he recognized those dark, lifeless eyes. “You bastard,” he mumbled.
“I assume you’re not talking to me,” Lewis said dryly.
“How did he recover?”
“I wish I had that answer. No one saw this coming.”
“So Bishop meets a janitor at Beacon Point, talks him into getting him street clothes and maybe a cell phone and letting him out.”
“Then he stabs Lovett so he can’t talk.”
“But how does the man with the scar fit in?”
Lewis mulled it over for a few seconds. “He has to have a connection to Beacon Point.”
“Or a connection to Terry Lovett.”
Amarok knew Lewis agreed with him when he said, “Right. I’ll keep working on the widow.”
“Thanks.”
As soon as Amarok hung up, he asked Phil if he’d look after Makita and Sigmund for a few days and went online to book a flight to Minneapolis first thing in the morning. As much as he hated to leave Alaska, he had to do it. He was convinced that the answers he needed to save Evelyn were in Minnesota.