Blind Spot

by Brenda Novak

  But Amarok knew it was more about protecting their own asses. They were hoping to avoid the bad press; that was why they were still doing all they could to dodge the really difficult questions.

  It was so hot and muggy that Amarok turned on the air-conditioning full blast the second he climbed back into his car. He’d been checking his phone ever since he arrived at the hospital, but he hadn’t yet heard from Lewis.

  What the hell was taking so long? They needed that search warrant. If Emmett had left behind a computer or even some receipts or notes, maybe they’d be able to figure out where he was staying.

  He tried to call Lewis but got sent straight to voicemail. Although he was instructed to leave a message, he didn’t.

  “To hell with it. Some things have to be done regardless of the consequences,” he mumbled as he put Emmett’s address into his GPS.

  Anchorage—Tuesday, 2:30 p.m. AKDT

  “What can we do to get him to delay moving so that when someone comes looking for you they might actually have a chance of finding us?” Evelyn asked Edna. She wasn’t necessarily expecting Edna to come up with the solution they needed. But she was trying to draw the older woman out, get her to think about surviving and then start planning on surviving, so she’d be more motivated to fight for her life.

  As it was, Edna lacked any determination, seemed so damn fatalistic, as if she wanted to crawl into the corner and die, since she no longer had her husband, anyway. She’d been struggling to go on without him even before this happened, and that only made the situation more difficult for Evelyn. It was hard enough to keep her own spirits up and now she had to constantly encourage a stranger.

  “We can’t do anything,” Edna replied. “No one’s coming. I didn’t tell anyone I was stopping here. This is probably the last place they’ll look.”

  Evelyn rubbed her belly. Delivering the baby could potentially delay the move Lyman had in mind. At least, she hoped Bishop would be humane enough to wait for her to have the baby if she were to go into labor prematurely. But there were no guarantees. Because of that and the other risks, which were far worse, she couldn’t bring herself to even hope for the baby to come early. “Even if we can’t get him to stay any longer, maybe we could get him to tell us a little about where we will be going so we could somehow leave that information behind.”

  Edna gestured at the four walls. “How? Written in our own blood?” she asked, her voice shrill. She was clearly teetering on the edge of insanity.

  Evelyn thought of what she’d done to get Emmett to believe she was having the baby so he’d come into the freezer. A couple of her fingers still hadn’t finished healing. But she said nothing about that. She didn’t want to remind Edna that she’d stabbed Emmett, knew that was part of the reason Edna was falling apart.

  It was almost as though Edna regarded her as just another strange character—like all those encountered by Alice in Wonderland after she slid down the rabbit hole.

  “If necessary, yes,” Evelyn responded. “Or maybe we could escape during the drive. There’re two of us now. It’ll be harder for him to subdue us both.” If Bishop planned to take Edna with them. He probably didn’t, but she saw no need to mention that.

  Edna remained on the bed, slumped against the wall with the blanket wrapped around her. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said glumly.

  Evelyn was tempted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. She had to rally and soon. “Don’t say that.”

  One age-spotted hand reached out from the blanket to touch the hem on her pants as if she still couldn’t believe the stains she saw were blood. “It’s true.”

  “Not necessarily. When your daughter can’t get hold of you, she’ll call the police.”

  “It could be a day or two before she even tries. She’s so busy. It’s not like we talk every single day.”

  Evelyn refused to be defeated. “They’ll come eventually. And when they do—”

  Edna wouldn’t let her finish. “They’ll ask that … that monster who hit me if he’s seen me, and he’ll say no.”

  “So?” Evelyn came right back at her, trying to rile her. “That won’t be the end of it. When you don’t turn up, they’ll come back, question him more fully and get a search warrant.”

  “My father was a police officer. It could take a week or longer for it to escalate to that point. Meanwhile the man you call Lyman is already making plans to take us from here. We’ll be long gone by then.”

  Evelyn didn’t argue; Edna happened to be right. It wasn’t as though a child had gone missing. Edna was a mature adult. For all anyone knew, she could’ve taken a long road trip to pull herself together after her husband’s death—or gone to visit extended family in the Lower 48.

  What would there be to rule that out? They’d find no signs of foul play at her house; she’d come to the ranch voluntarily. Unless someone had spotted her in the area or her car was discovered close by, the police wouldn’t have any reason to suspect this location over any other. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Edna didn’t even have a cell phone the authorities could track. When Evelyn had revealed her shock at that discovery, she’d said she preferred landlines and didn’t see any reason to adapt at this late date. As far as she was concerned, it’d be just another bill to pay.

  “Regardless of how many days it’ll take, we need to hold out as long as we can,” Evelyn said to avoid agreeing or disagreeing.

  Edna pulled the blanket tighter. “We’ll be dead by the time they come.”

  The depression she’d suffered since her husband passed away was swallowing her whole. The difficulty of sleeping in shifts or somehow managing with only one narrow cot, one pillow and one blanket between them, wasn’t helping. Neither was the lack of any kind of consistent meals. They were hungry or thirsty almost all the time.

  After acting as though he was mad at Emmett for doing such a poor job of taking care of her, Lyman had done even worse. The food, when he brought it, tasted better. Evelyn had to give him that. But he was too preoccupied and freaked out by Edna’s creating a new wrinkle in his plan to make sure he fed them regularly.

  At least he’d brought them both toothbrushes. Evelyn had never realized what a luxury a toothbrush could be. They had to use bottled water and spit into the toilet or the drain, but being able to clean her mouth was a wonderful feeling.

  With a sigh, she turned away from her cellmate and began to pace in the cramped space. “This is nothing compared to what I’ve been through before,” she said, still trying to encourage Edna. “We’re going to get out of here. I’m going to go back to my fiancé, and you’re going to go back to your kids.”

  Edna said nothing. When Evelyn glanced over, she looked as though she were shrinking with her hollow cheeks, the dark smudges below her eyes and the way her head barely peeked out of that blanket.

  Evelyn stopped pacing and went over to sit next to her on the cot. “Listen to me,” she said, taking the other woman’s frail, cold hands.

  Edna’s eyes shifted to Evelyn’s face but only for a second before she flinched and went back to staring at the wall.

  “We are going to get out of here,” Evelyn repeated more emphatically. “And this is how we’re going to do it.”

  When Edna looked over this time, Evelyn could tell she’d finally piqued her interest. “How?”

  “We’re going to use Bishop’s own personality, his own needs, against him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He wants to be liked, admired. He craves it like a drug. That’s why he does what he does. He’s been shunned and ridiculed his whole life, has a strong fear of abandonment and a great deal of resentment for the fact that other people don’t recognize his genius. So he does what he does to punish the people around him and to make them stay at the same time. Sort of like … Dahmer with the men he killed, right?”

  “Dahmer?” Edna said with a shudder. “You’re referring to the man who ate his victims?”

  Evelyn immediately regre
tted what she’d blurted out. She didn’t need to remind Edna of even more frightening people. “Never mind. The bottom line is this: when Bishop brings us food, we need to get him to talk, make him waste time, give him a false sense of security—”

  A frown creased Edna’s thin face, but, ignoring it, Evelyn forged on.

  “And … and see if we can’t get him to discuss his house hunting with us as if we’re all friends and want to be here with him. That’s his fantasy, what he’d like to believe. So let’s play into it. He doesn’t want to face that we hate him and would do anything to get away from him, so let’s pretend we don’t.”

  “How could he possibly believe that?”

  “You’d be surprised at the delusions I’ve encountered in my work.”

  “But even if he tells us what he’s found, how will we leave that information behind? We don’t have any paper or pencil, and if we write on anything else—in blood, since that’s all we’ve got—he’ll see it.”

  “Not necessarily. We could write what we know on the bottom of this mattress. I doubt he’ll think to flip it over.”

  Unless he decided to take it with them. Why would he leave it behind only to have to buy another one? But it was a chance—and it could be their only chance, which meant they had to take it, regardless.

  A spark finally entered Edna’s eyes and a bit of color showed in her cheeks. “Do you really think he’d reveal where he plans to take us?” she asked hopefully.

  Evelyn held her breath for a second. She needed to fan the small flame she was attempting to build inside of Edna—and yet she couldn’t outright lie to her. That wouldn’t be fair and could cost her credibility later, possibly when she needed it most. “Have you ever heard the saying ‘You miss every shot you don’t take’?” she asked.

  “No,” Edna replied. “But I get the point.”

  “Then let’s do all we can, take every opportunity. I’d rather decide my own fate, wouldn’t you?”

  When Edna squeezed her eyes closed, several tears escaped and ran unheeded down her cheeks, but she nodded.

  Anchorage, AK—Tuesday, 3:45 p.m. AKDT

  Lyman had driven Edna Southwick’s SUV to a strip mall—one obscure enough that they weren’t likely to have video surveillance and yet big enough that they had a fairly busy parking lot where he could leave the SUV among plenty of others.

  After he parked, he got out and went shopping, purposely staying in the store for over an hour so that anyone who’d seen him go in would be unlikely to still be there when he came out.

  Once he did emerge, it was raining, which meant people were paying even less attention to what was going on around them as they rushed to avoid getting wet.

  Relieved, he drew a deep breath and called an Uber to take him and his groceries back to the ranch.

  He knew the police would find his landlady’s Explorer eventually. When it didn’t move after several days, an employee would likely report it. That could happen even sooner if the police turned to the media to help them find Edna and the make and model of her vehicle were heavily publicized, but Lyman hoped he’d have at least a few days before that. Even if the police came upon it right away, there was nothing inside it to lead them to the ranch. He’d checked. The SUV was registered to her home address. He had her purse in the staff room, so no one could stumble upon that. And he’d worn gloves so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints when he drove. He’d even gone to the trouble of running her car through a car wash, getting the tires and hubcaps sparkling clean in the area set aside for cheapskates and fussbudgets who didn’t want to pay the detail guys. He’d seen several forensics shows—while lying in bed day in and day out at Beacon Point—where some tiny weed or bug helped authorities track a vehicle to a particular crime scene, but that wasn’t going to be what happened to him.

  Common sense suggested he’d be gone before such extensive forensics could be performed, even if the investigation started right away. But it never hurt to be careful. He didn’t want chicken shit in the tire treads to remind the authorities that there’d been a chicken ranch operating in the area not too long ago and bring them right to his door.

  Getting rid of the Explorer without drawing any attention and knowing Edna was in the cooler, where she couldn’t cause him any trouble, should have improved his mood. He’d overcome so many obstacles; he deserved a chance to enjoy his success. But it didn’t look as though he was going to catch a break quite yet. He wasn’t having any luck on the house hunting, which was cause for concern. He didn’t want to stay in Anchorage, where Emmett’s body was and Edna’s soon would be, which cut off Alaska’s biggest housing market. Anchorage was too close to Hilltop and Amarok, anyway. He preferred Juneau, the capital. At about thirty thousand residents, it was still big enough that he wouldn’t stand out. But there weren’t a lot of houses for rent in Juneau, not during the summer when Alaska experienced an influx of seasonal labor, mostly young single people arriving to work on tourist excursions.

  Maybe he’d have to go to Fairbanks. Similar in population to Juneau, it was the biggest city in the interior. But it was only 196 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The northern lights, which appeared an average of two hundred nights per year, according to what he’d read online, sounded lovely, but the chinook winds, which could bring rapid temperature changes in the winter, the dense wildfire smoke in summer and the ice fog, did not sound appealing.

  “The average mean temperature is ten below, for crying out loud,” he muttered as he frowned at the pictures he’d pulled up. It wasn’t as though Minneapolis, his hometown, was warm during the winter, but it was never quite that cold. Fairbanks experienced one of the biggest temperature inversions on earth.

  With a sigh, he searched for homes for rent, just to see what was available, and was pleasantly surprised to find several viable options. Some were in a town called North Pole, though, which came up in the same search. Once he realized that and weeded those out, he found one house, in particular, that looked promising. It was an older three-bedroom, two-bath with a single-car garage for eighteen hundred dollars per month on Nugget Road. A condo would be cheaper, but there weren’t a lot of condos in Fairbanks and he couldn’t risk having close neighbors. That was the beauty of Alaska—the population density was so low he had more privacy than anywhere else and freedom, too.

  He supposed that made up for the cold.

  Whistling “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” which had been Beth’s favorite song for years, he e-mailed the contact on the listing. But almost as soon as he hit Send, the desire to whistle vanished.

  Someone was banging on the front of the building.

  Anchorage, AK—Tuesday 4:00 p.m. AKDT

  Ada Southwick-Rose shifted from foot to foot while she waited to see if her mother’s renter would answer her knock. It looked as though he was home. There was a van in the carport. But it had been painted with black spray paint and was pretty beat up, not the type of vehicle one saw on the road every day. She wasn’t even sure it was drivable. Not only that, but he was taking a while.

  Maybe he didn’t want to be bothered.…

  She felt uncomfortable disturbing a total stranger, but she was worried about her mother. Edna hadn’t been home all day, and none of her friends knew where she was. It wasn’t like her to be gone for long periods of time, especially since Ada’s father had passed away. For one thing, her father had done all the driving, so her mother didn’t feel comfortable behind the wheel.

  She swatted at a mosquito buzzing around her head as she turned to gaze out across the property. Coming here was probably a waste of time, but her mother had been talking about getting a dog and had mentioned that her renter was using the ranch as a shelter. Ada thought it was possible Edna had stopped by to see what breeds he had. If he could cite the time that happened, it would at least help Ada trace her mother’s footsteps. Edna might even have mentioned where she was going next—

  “Can I help you?”

  Startled by the sound, she whipped around t
o see a soft, balding man, shorter than she was, standing in the doorway. “Mr. Edmonson?”

  It took half a beat for him to answer, just long enough for her to wonder if she’d gotten his name wrong. But that was the name on the lease she’d found on her mother’s desk and he finally answered to it.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m, um, sorry to bother you. I was just … I was hoping that maybe you’d seen my mother?”

  He blinked at her from behind thick-lensed eyeglasses with a tortoiseshell frame. “Your mother?”

  “Yes. Edna Southwick? She owns this property.”

  “Oh, my landlady! No, I’m afraid not. I’ve only ever communicated with her over the phone.”

  “She didn’t come to see the dogs?”

  His expression remained neutral. “Was she supposed to?”

  “She didn’t say so specifically, but she was talking about adopting. She’s been … struggling since my father died, so I tried to encourage her, told her I thought it was a great idea. My father was allergic, so they couldn’t have a dog when he was alive. But now … a pet might be just the thing, you know? Mom could use the companionship.”

  “She hasn’t mentioned it to me.”

  The worry that had been gnawing at the pit of Ada’s stomach for the past several hours—after she’d hung out at her childhood home all morning, working on her computer, waiting for her mother, who never showed—grew worse. “Oh. Um, maybe the next time you talk to her, you can help convince her that a dog would be a good thing.”

  “Sure. I’ll point that out,” he said, but he seemed strangely indifferent, as if he didn’t care one way or the other about finding homes for his dogs.

  Ada had never met a less impassioned shelter owner. Because she loved dogs—owned three—she generally connected with others who did, too. But maybe it was that she’d dropped in on him unannounced and he wasn’t pleased. He hadn’t asked her in or mentioned letting her see the dogs in hopes she might get one for her mother.