2

Hilltop, AK—Tuesday, 3:50 p.m. AKDT

Time was everything. Each and every second was valuable, and yet second after second zipped away from him. Amarok had never in his life felt such urgency, such desperation. Nothing could be more shattering than realizing Evelyn was gone, because she wasn’t just “gone.” Her cat, Sigmund, was home, but she’d been taken, and, considering the kind of person who’d most likely taken her, he knew what that probably entailed. He had to get her back before she was harmed or, worse, killed. But how? This had come out of nowhere! There wasn’t anything to indicate who’d abducted her or why, not with Jasper behind bars.

As a police officer, he understood how critical the first few hours were, but the fear flooding his body was quickly robbing him of strength and clarity when he needed them most. His feet felt like they were encased in concrete and his chest constricted, making it difficult to breathe.

Makita licked his hand in sympathy and followed as he somehow forced his legs to carry him back to the truck. The woman who’d been about to become his wife and the mother of his child was counting on him. He could be all she had as far as help. But he didn’t have anything to go on. He’d checked the security video on his computer—thanks to the Internet, he’d been able to install a camera at his front door for a fairly modest price—but it showed only the stoop and Evelyn hadn’t made it that far. She never even entered the frame. He’d also called everyone he could think of in town. No one could say where she was. No one had seen anything suspicious or spotted any strangers in the area.

So where did that leave him?

Flipping on his strobe lights and siren, he ordered Makita to sit still in the seat so he couldn’t get hurt prancing around as he tore out of his own driveway and raced over to Hanover House. Fortunately, his strength began to return as a white-hot anger welled up, overcoming the hormones that had swamped him at first. Once that happened, he felt like he could tear apart the person who’d taken Evelyn with his bare hands—if only he knew who to blame.

There had to have been something to precipitate this, he told himself. And he was going to find out what it was. He wouldn’t lose the woman he loved, not after everything they’d survived so far, especially when she was carrying their child! That she’d been able to conceive despite the skepticism of her doctor had been a miracle, a source of joy and hope to them both. He wouldn’t allow anyone to rob them of that.

His gut twisted as he remembered touching her belly after they made love last night. Their child had been moving, and she’d been eager for him to feel it. Usually when she tried to show him, he couldn’t discern anything. At only six months along, the baby wasn’t big enough to kick very hard.

But last night had been different. The faint sensation that had registered on his palm was his first contact with their child, and it had affected him deeply, made the fact that he was going to be a father real in a way he’d been afraid to hope for in the first trimester and even after. The doctor had gone over the risks of this particular pregnancy with them both. Evelyn would be turning forty this year. Her age, in conjunction with what her body had been through when she was tortured, made miscarriage more of a possibility than it would be otherwise. Amarok had been trying to maintain some emotional distance, so he wouldn’t be devastated and could help her through the heartbreaking ordeal, should that happen.

The guards at the checkpoint, startled when his tires screeched and his back end swung around far enough to almost clip the fence, stepped out.

“What is it, Sergeant?” Officer Bailey asked, obviously concerned by the lights and the noise as well as Amarok’s seemingly reckless driving. “What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Evelyn today?” he asked without preamble.

“Not for several hours.” Bailey looked over at his younger counterpart, Officer Derby, who stood in the shade of the building. “You?”

Derby moved into the sunlight with Bailey. “She left after lunch. Must’ve been one or so. I’m not sure exactly, I can check the logbook—”

“No. I’ve spoken to Penny,” Amarok told them. “I know when she left. The bigger question is … has she come back?”

Bailey exchanged another glance with Derby. “No, sir.”

“Did she have anyone with her when she left? Did she seem upset or say where she was going?”

Both correctional officers looked utterly bewildered as they shook their heads. “No. Has something happened?”

“I think so.” What other answer was there? She wouldn’t stand him up, especially when they were planning their wedding, wouldn’t skip out on work when she was expected back, wouldn’t drop her purse in the front yard and walk away with only one shoe.

“What is it?” Bailey asked, wide-eyed.

“That’s what I’m here to find out. Can you tell me if Jasper Moore is still locked up?”

“Last I saw, he was,” Derby said. “I searched his cell yesterday when I searched the whole block.”

That was good news. Jasper getting his hands on Evelyn was the worst possible scenario. After being so terribly scarred and traumatized by what he did twenty-three years ago, she was finally beginning to conquer her fear of him. Amarok couldn’t remember the last time she’d come awake thrashing around and crying in bed due to another nightmare. It’d been months.

But it could be that someone just as bad was the culprit this time around—maybe even someone she’d dealt with before she moved to Alaska, which would mean he’d really be searching for a needle in a haystack. He’d have to go through all her old files and records before he could do anything else, and by then—

He cut off that thought. “Can you let me through?”

“Of course. One sec.”

Amarok gripped the steering wheel, squeezing tightly to keep his hands in place as Bailey circled the truck with the pole-mounted mirror to check the undercarriage. Such tight security felt like a waste of time. As far as Amarok was concerned, the worst had already happened. It was all he could do not to pull his gun and demand he be allowed to pass. And Makita could tell he was on edge. He barked, then gave a low growl to signify he was ready to fight, too, if necessary.

Fortunately, Bailey gestured the all clear and he was able to roll through only seconds later, without having to do anything that could cost him his badge.

He didn’t bother parking. He pulled under the covered sally port, rolled down his windows so it wouldn’t get too hot for Makita, told his dog to stay put and left his truck at the curb before he jogged in.

“Hello, Sergeant.” … “Amarok.” … “How’s it going?” … “What’s up, man?”

Most of the COs, even though the majority commuted from Anchorage, had grown familiar with him. Not only had he been to the prison a number of times on official business, but he also stopped by occasionally to bring Evelyn lunch, visit with her or pick her up if there was a storm.

As he put his firearm and belt on a tray so they could circumvent the X-ray machine and walked through the metal detector, he asked everyone the same questions he’d posed to the guards at the gate and received the same answers. Evelyn had left around one, she’d been alone and she hadn’t seemed upset or distressed in any way. And, yes, Jasper was locked up.

He told them to bring Moore to an interview room. Then he got on the elevator and headed straight up to Evelyn’s office on the third floor.

As soon as he pushed through the double glass doors that separated the mental health headquarters from the rest of the prison, he encountered Penny, who was agitated and moving around the office instead of sitting at her desk, working, like usual.

“Have you heard from her?” she asked right away. “I’ve tried calling her at home several times. She doesn’t pick up.”

“She’s not there,” he replied. “And I haven’t heard from her. Have you checked with the rest of the mental health team?”

“I’ve spoken to the ones who aren’t in the middle of a session with a patient or doing research that shouldn’t be interrupted.”

“And?”

“They don’t know anything.”

“Interrupt the rest,” he said. “I don’t care what they’re doing. Tell them I need to talk to them now.”

The color drained from her face. “This is that serious?”

“It appears so.”

She covered her mouth. “She’s pregnant!” she whispered between her fingers.

He could barely speak for clenching his jaw. “I’m well aware of that.”

Determined to keep a cool head, so that fear and despair wouldn’t gain the upper hand again, he dodged Penny in order to reach Evelyn’s office. “Do you know what she’s been working on lately and who she’s been working with?”

She hurried to keep up with him, but she was less than five feet and he was nearly six three. She had to take two steps for every one of his. “Do you mean inmates or—or doctors?”

“Both.”

“She interacts with all the doctors, but probably Dr. Ricardo more often than the rest. Seems like he’s always in her office for one reason or another.”

He switched on the light and crossed to the desk. “Like…”

“She says they aren’t ready to publish their findings, but he keeps pushing her. They’re also doing a lot of testing together, some of them empathy tests and … and IQ tests to determine how mental acuity might interface with psychopathy. They’ve even been doing a lot of experiments to see if psychopaths can better fool a lie detector and why that might be the case. Lots of stuff.”

He checked Evelyn’s desk calendar, saw her appointment with him at the Moosehead and the four fifteen Penny had mentioned, which was with Dr. Ricardo, but nothing else, and began going through the papers on her desk, her phone messages, her drawers. “And inmates? Which ones has she been focusing on lately?”

She frowned as she watched him. He wasn’t being particularly careful to leave things as he’d found them. He was in too big of a hurry. “She’s been frustrated with Mary Harpe, our only female psychopath.”

“The former nurse who murdered those babies.”

“Yes.”

She rounded the desk, pulled open the filing cabinet against the wall and handed him Mary’s file. He’d heard Evelyn talk about Mary. Other than Jasper, she liked Mary less than any other psychopath she’d ever studied. “Is there anything in particular Evelyn has been saying about her?”

“Not really.”

She watched as he leafed through Mary’s file, skimming Evelyn’s handwritten notes on their sessions—mentions of her lack of remorse, her total indifference to the parents of the babies she’d killed as well as the pediatric doctor whose practice she destroyed. He also came across several graphs showing the number of deaths that had occurred in the hospital where she worked before the hospital got rid of her—by laying her off while still giving her a recommendation—and she went to work for the pediatrician.

“Nothing stands out to you as unusual or worrisome?” he pressed. Evelyn often talked about her work when they were relaxing together in the evenings, but he hadn’t heard anything of note lately, certainly nothing that would put him on high alert.

Penny seemed at a loss. “She just told me that some psychopaths are more charming than others and Mary is way down the list.”

Essentially what Evelyn had said to him. “Does Mary dislike Evelyn?”

“She dislikes everyone, but maybe she dislikes Evelyn more than the other doctors. Evelyn sees through her crap from the get-go. The men give her more leeway, more understanding.”

“Does Mary get many letters or visitors? Have any family to speak of?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to check with Dr. Jones.”

Amarok glanced up. “Why Dr. Jones? Has he been working with her, too?”

“Yes, and they seem to be on friendlier terms.”

When Amarok closed Mary’s file he noticed another file sitting on top of the cabinet, as though Evelyn had recently accessed it. He grabbed it so he could read the name on the tab. “What about this guy—Robert Knox?”

“He’s not a violent offender. He’d be unlikely to harm anyone.”

“But he is a psychopath. A con artist or con man, right?” He’d heard Evelyn mention Knox before, too. Knox had callously bilked several old ladies out of their retirement savings with his investment schemes.

“Yeah. But Evelyn seems to like him okay.”

“Does he have any visitors, mail, that sort of thing?”

“I have no clue. You’ll have to check with the mailroom. Or I can do that for you.…”

“Please do,” Amarok said, but he was skeptical that Bobby Knox was behind what’d happened today—that he’d hired someone, or convinced someone, to kidnap Evelyn. Amarok was grasping at anything. “Have you heard of him or anyone else making threats or creating any particular problems for Evelyn?”

She wrung her hands as she thought the question over. “No. Since you caught Jasper last November, everything has been peaceful around here—or as peaceful as it’s going to get in a maximum-security prison that houses so many psychopaths. There’s always danger, but we have protocols to minimize that. To be honest, I’ve never seen Dr. Talbot so carefree and happy, not in the two and a half years that Hanover House has been open.”

He felt the same about Evelyn’s state of mind. After twenty-three years of feeling as though it was only a matter of time before Jasper followed her to Alaska and attempted to finish what he’d started when he attacked her the first time, that threat had been eliminated. They’d both felt more secure knowing he was finally behind bars.

So what the hell was going on? This shouldn’t be happening!

“Sergeant Murphy?”

Dr. James Ricardo, a slender, rather nondescript man in his late forties with close-cropped dark hair, and the only neurologist on staff, appeared in the doorway of Evelyn’s office. Although none of the doctors on Evelyn’s team had any more authority than the others, James had made it clear that if Evelyn ever left Hanover House, he wanted her job. He’d stated as much when things went awry last winter. “Yes?”

“Where the heck is Evelyn? She was supposed to join me on the situational-versus-dispositional empathy tests I’m running right now, but I’ve been waiting for fifteen minutes.”

Preoccupied with the desperation he felt to find some clue, something to tell him what he should do next, Amarok turned in a full circle. “We don’t know where she is, Jim. That’s why I’m here.”

His eyebrows came together. “What do you mean?”

“She’s in trouble, and I need to get her out of it.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I wish I knew. Is there one inmate, in particular, anyone on Evelyn’s roster, who’s had it in for her lately?” Amarok had heard various names since he’d entered Evelyn’s life, men who’d given them both cause for concern. Jasper Moore, of course, but not only him. There’d been Anthony Garza, Hugo Evanski and Lyman Bishop, all psychopaths she’d studied here at Hanover House. Even her onetime colleague Tim Fitzpatrick, the very psychiatrist whose reputation and support had helped make Hanover House a reality, had become a problem in the end. He’d quit two years ago, before he could be fired, and returned to Boston.

But none of those men were likely culprits. Jasper was in prison and, as an only child who’d murdered his parents not long ago, he didn’t have a lot of friends or family who might be willing to assist him in getting revenge on Evelyn. Anthony and Hugo were both dead. Lyman, nicknamed the Zombie Maker because of his penchant for performing ice-pick lobotomies on his victims to render them dependent and compliant, was in a mental institution, being fed through a tube, after suffering a severe brain hemorrhage. And Tim Fitzpatrick was grateful to Evelyn for helping to get him out of prison after he served time for a crime he didn’t commit. He’d had a thing for Evelyn when they worked together, an obsession that’d caused him to cross certain boundaries. Maybe there was still some of that left. But, surely, he hadn’t had anything to do with this.

“No one that I know of,” Ricardo said. “There’s been nothing out of the ordinary, not since she insisted on having Jasper Moore transferred here.”

The disapproval in his voice prompted Amarok to ask, “You were against that?”

“I thought it would be better for her to get him out of her life at last.”

Amarok had felt the same. But he could also understand her reasoning. If the man she feared more than any other was at Hanover House, she would be able to keep an eye on him, and that was important to her peace of mind. Jasper was so cunning she didn’t trust anyone else to use sufficient caution with him, couldn’t believe he wouldn’t eventually be able to manipulate those around him by convincing a female guard that she should help him escape or whatever. He was a fit, handsome forty-year-old, which made him even more dangerous than a run-of-the-mill sadist. People tended to trust men who looked so well put together and were as intelligent and articulate as Jasper Moore. “What could’ve happened to her?” he asked Ricardo.

The other man lifted his hands palms up. “I have no idea.”

Neither did Amarok. This day had started out like any other and should’ve continued that way. But if he didn’t come up with a lead soon, he might never see Evelyn again.

A CO by the name of McKim rushed into the mental health department. Seeing them gathered in Evelyn’s office, he hurried over. “I’ve got Jasper Moore waiting in Interview Room Eight.”

Word of the emergency was spreading. Amarok could sense the concern in the CO’s manner. Everyone loved the doc, as they called Evelyn. No doubt they were all hoping for a quick resolution. But Amarok had a terrible feeling that wasn’t going to happen. From where he was starting from, which was ground zero, how would he ever find Evelyn in time to save her?

Maybe she was already dead.

If she was in the hands of someone as sadistic as Jasper Moore, he hoped that was the case. He couldn’t bear the thought of her being tortured again. In his mind’s eye, he kept seeing their baby being ripped from her womb, which caused bile to rise up and burn his throat.

“Sergeant?”

Silencing the sinister little voice in his head that insisted he was already too late, Amarok started for the door. He had to do something, had to keep fighting, no matter what—if only to bring the person who’d taken her to justice.

If it came to that, he’d hunt the son of a bitch to the ends of the earth, wouldn’t rest until the bastard was caught and punished, so he figured he’d better get started on his revenge, if that was easier to believe in. “Show me the fastest way to get there,” he said.

Anchorage, AK—Tuesday, 4:00 p.m. AKDT

A noise woke Evelyn. She’d worried herself into a fitful slumber, but she had no idea how long she’d been fading in and out of consciousness. It hadn’t been long. An hour? Two? She came awake quickly and, afraid she’d miss the opportunity to escape, talk her captor into letting her go or better her situation in any other way, jumped off the thin mattress that covered the coils of the cot.

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?