by Brenda Novak
Her cat mewed and shifted at her side, startled when she reached up to check for blood. And then she remembered. She wasn’t in the shack. She was in her living room, separated by two decades and almost five thousand miles from the horrific event that had left such an indelible mark on her life. There’d been terrifying events since then, but nothing quite so bad as that.
Amarok was around somewhere, too. When he’d pressed her to lie down, he’d said he’d stay. She trusted that he would, so she was, for the moment, most likely safe—but she couldn’t forget that someone else, the owner of that hand, had just lost her life.
Breathe. Come on, Evelyn, in and out through your nose. You know the routine.
Although it had been a long time since she’d had a panic attack, she’d experienced them often in earlier years. The coping mechanisms she’d developed usually worked, more so recently, but only because of maturity and the perspective she’d gained on all that had transpired in Boston. That severed limb had carried her back, unraveled some of her determined progress. It reminded her that Jasper had popped up again last summer and was still out there somewhere.
Was Lorraine’s death and that severed arm his work? That was a question she had to ask herself, especially because the hand had been taped to flip her off. Whoever left it was making a personal statement—and who’d want to give her the finger more than Jasper? The person she’d come to know during those final three days at the shack would never willingly let her go on with her life, no matter how much time passed. He’d proven that by tracking her down five months ago.
“You okay?”
Amarok. There he was. Although she couldn’t see him in the dark, from the gravelly sound of his voice he’d been sleeping in the overstuffed chair in the corner. Neither of them was prepared to go back into the bedroom. Since he’d finished processing the scene—and bagging the severed limb, which was in his truck until he could have someone take it to Anchorage—he’d closed the door to that part of the house. In the morning, when she’d had some rest and could summon the nerve, she’d pack a bag and move to Amarok’s until they could figure out what was going on. Then she’d decide what to do from there.
When he’d made the offer to let her stay with him, she’d agreed almost immediately. She didn’t have anywhere else to go. Nowhere she would feel as safe as she would with him. Jasper—or whoever else—had invaded the sanctity of her home and destroyed her fragile sense of safety, and it didn’t matter that she’d had a security system. He’d picked the lock to her back door and dismantled the alarm, and he could’ve taken all day to do it since she was home only late at night.
Having the sergeant nearby, waiting to help get her things, reassured her that nothing terrible was going to occur in the next few minutes. But the relief occasioned by that thought made her feel selfish. Poor Lorraine. And Danielle. That limb, with its purple fingernail polish, was obviously from a much younger woman than Lorraine. Evelyn had no doubt Danielle was dead, too.
“Evelyn?”
She hadn’t answered. Wiping the sweat from her upper lip, she strove for calm. “I’m fine.”
“You are?”
“Yes.” She’d rather he not know that finding that arm had further shattered the sense of well-being she’d struggled so hard to rebuild, bit by painstaking bit, over the years. She’d done everything possible to overcome her ordeal, to give what she’d suffered meaning by letting it spur her in a direction she would never have chosen otherwise. It didn’t seem fair that, after so much time and effort, Jasper could harass her again last summer and follow her all the way to Alaska.…
“You didn’t sleep long.”
Maybe not, but she couldn’t take a sleeping pill, as he’d suggested earlier. No way would she do anything that could impair her ability to think and move. Amarok didn’t understand what she was up against, how important it was that she remain vigilant always. Unlike some of the other psychopaths she’d studied, Jasper was armed with effortless brilliance. His agile mind and gregarious nature were partly what had drawn her to him.
He wouldn’t get the better of her again.…
That reminded her—she’d had her GLOCK in her hand when she lay down. It wasn’t there now and, although she patted the area around her, she couldn’t find it. “Where’s my gun?”
“Here. After you fell asleep, I took it away. I didn’t want you to shoot me because I got up in the night to go to the bathroom.”
Jostled by her movement and supremely irritated as a result, Sigmund jumped down.
“I’d only shoot you if you tried to harm me,” Evelyn said. “After what I’ve been through, I’d shoot anyone. If only I could kill Jasper.”
Her cold determination seemed to take him aback. And she could see why. Her willingness to resort to violence alarmed even her. But she believed the only sure way to be rid of the monster who’d tormented her was to end his life. She’d seen far too many psychopaths con their way out of a long prison sentence and achieve parole.
“Why would I ever try to harm you?” Amarok asked.
He wouldn’t. She knew the difference between him, and Jasper and the other men at HH. At least her conscious mind did. What happened in her subconscious she couldn’t control, or she would’ve been able to make love last night.
Briefly closing her eyes, she tried to overcome the fear that had momentarily strangled her internal editor. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t mind me. I’m … I’m a little freaked out and defensive.”
“You have every right to be. I just want to make sure you can keep the good guys separate from the bad guys.”
What you suffered when you were sixteen, and then this last summer, has you so frightened of men you can’t trust ’em anymore. He’d said that at his place. And he was right.
“Amarok, I have to tell you something.”
“What’s that?” He’d been so busy photographing her bedroom, dusting for fingerprints and getting that severed arm out of her house that she hadn’t told him the real significance of what she’d found. Unable to cope with the sickening sense of déjà vu that had come over her, she’d been too busy vomiting into the toilet.
“Lorraine. Danielle. This is Jasper’s work.”
“Whoa, we don’t even know Danielle’s dead. That hand could have belonged to someone else.”
“It’s most likely hers. Who else has gone missing?”
“There could be someone. I have to confirm it.”
“No. Jasper’s here. He didn’t get the satisfaction he was aiming for last summer, so he followed me to Alaska.”
She heard some rustling, guessed Amarok was getting up. A moment later, he pulled his chair into the soft light filtering in from the kitchen. “Evelyn, if Jasper’s here, why didn’t he kill you the moment you walked in? Be done with it?”
“After last summer, he’s got to be even angrier than he was before. He wants to terrorize me first, make sure I understand who’s in charge.”
“Why take the risk of letting you get away again?”
She could see why Amarok might not understand. Psychopaths were consistently difficult for anyone with a conscience to relate to. “For the pleasure of it. To feel as if he had the last laugh. To win. You have to remember, people like Jasper—psychopaths—don’t experience what we do. They want to prove their superiority. They can’t even feel the loss of the love and empathy that eludes them.”
“Do they know that they’re different?”
“If they do, they celebrate their differences. They view those differences as giving them a leg up in the contest of life. I’ve met some who claim a sense of ‘emptiness,’ but most say they feel sorry for the rest of us. They consider us ‘suckers,’ simply because we can be so easy to manipulate. Our desire to be a good person and to please others puts us at a disadvantage. People are mere pawns to someone like Jasper.”
“Pawns … winning. You’re saying tonight was all a game?”
She pictured the one bluish finger of that hand pointing
up when all the rest were taped down. “Yes, for Jasper it’s like chess. He thought he had checkmate when I was sixteen—”
“But you survived, didn’t let him destroy you.”
“Exactly. I fought back, carried on.”
“And you made something of your life. Something that is in direct opposition to what he is.”
“I believe that’s why he came back.”
“Or he could be after revenge,” Amarok said. “Living on the run can’t be easy. He could blame you for ruining his life, especially because you’re still publicizing what he did, making it more difficult for him to avoid detection.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. Psychopaths often blame their victims for provoking their behavior, resisting, or merely being available to satisfy cravings for sex, murder, money, drugs”—she lifted a hand—“whatever.”
“But Jasper’s smart, right? He got away with killing three people, more if you count that woman that was found in a shallow grave not far from where he took you last summer. There’s got to be more. So he’s having his fun. Why would he keep coming back to you and risk getting caught?”
“Because his desire to beat me, to see me demoralized, shamed and reduced to a quaking mass of fear, is too compelling. After last summer, he’s probably even more obsessed with the idea of ultimate victory and has gone to great lengths to plan out how it will go. That’s another reason I think it might be him. The staging. The theatrics. The scare before the kill. If what we have going on up here plays out in the media, if it goes public in a big way as this is likely to do if we can’t get on top of it quickly, that would only make him feel more powerful.”
“He’s still risking capture. Alaska has never had the death penalty, but—”
“It wouldn’t matter even if Alaska did have the death penalty. He isn’t deterred by fear.”
“Even when it comes to his own preservation? I thought psychopaths were narcissistic.”
“They are, but they often don’t see their limitations realistically. Jasper considers himself too clever to get caught. He’s escaped justice before—twice now. He acts out regardless of the consequences because he’s too impulsive to let those consequences influence his behavior. You’ve heard of Dr. Hare’s studies.…”
“No. I’m afraid that wasn’t required reading for becoming a state trooper.”
She heard a hint of sarcasm in that statement. Was he taking a jab at her Ivy League education? Or was it merely more evidence of his cynicism toward psychology in general?
Tempted to address that cynicism, she paused but ultimately decided they had more important things to discuss at the moment. “Robert D. Hare has been at the forefront of psychopathy research for more than thirty years. He developed a checklist used by many prisons and mental hospitals to diagnose sociopathic tendencies.”
“Diagnosing someone a psychopath is as simple as a checklist these days?”
“Nothing in psychology is as simple as a checklist. But having a checklist can help. It gives us certain traits that seem to be common among psychopaths.”
He leaned forward. “What happens once someone’s been identified? They go in for treatment?”
“There are no effective treatments … yet. That’s why we need more research.” She didn’t add that the treatments tried so far only made matters worse. In one study, 82 percent of the psychopaths who’d undergone anger management and social skills training before being released from prison reoffended. Psychopaths who didn’t have the training had only a 59 percent recidivism rate.
“So this test you mentioned. What’s it like?” he asked.
“It’s a manual and rating booklet with interview instructions, and it’s designed to assess the presence of twenty different personality traits.”
“And these twenty personality traits are…”
She ticked them off on her fingers. “Glib charm, sexual promiscuity, callousness, poor behavior controls, denial, a failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions, juvenile delinquency, many short marriage relationships. There are more.”
“Most of the people I know exhibit those traits. That doesn’t make them psychopaths.”
“Your friends, as well as mine, may have some of the traits, but not all of them, at least not to a large degree.”
“Still, you realize that calling someone a psychopath has huge ramifications. What if the test is wrong? Or the results are taken too far?”
“My own research suggests the PCL-R is probably an oversimplification. There’s more involved than it can cover. But it gives us a starting point. Think of all the victims who would never be victims if we could figure out why some people have no conscience. Psychopaths show a great deal of criminal versatility. As far as I’m concerned, knowledge is power against those who could or would destroy human lives without compunction.”
“But what are you willing to pay for that knowledge?” he asked. “It’s the old paradox—if you want more security, you have to pay for it with less freedom.”
“Coming from someone who has never known the terror I’ve faced…”
He dropped his head in one hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Which makes it easy for me to say. Point taken.”
“Very young children can exhibit psychopathic traits,” she said. “I’ve interviewed as many parents of psychopaths as possible. The majority of them have told me that their child was always different, eerily devoid of compassion, difficult to connect with, prone to be a troublemaker from the beginning. Everyone would like to believe that such individuals must have had an underprivileged upbringing, or were abused. Why else would they harm others for the pleasure of it? But that isn’t necessarily the case. Psychopaths come from strong, loving families as well as dysfunctional or abusive ones. And no one can explain why. We need to learn more, to keep attacking the problem.”
“But do you honestly think the appearance of these ‘psychopathic’ traits in children can predict future behavior?”
“It’s possible.”
“So why not make Hare’s test compulsory? Administer it to all kids when they turn a certain age and put away anyone who doesn’t score the way we’d like? Think of the crime that could be averted.”
He was being facetious. He didn’t see the value in any checklist—only the danger of certain zealots taking it too far. Living up here in Alaska, he prized his freedom even more than most other people and resisted anything that might threaten it. It was the old “it could never happen to me, so don’t disturb my world” response. But she was living proof that it could and did happen, and far too often.
“I don’t think you truly understand what these people are capable of,” she said.
“I do. I just don’t want the ‘cure’ to be worse than the problem.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. She wasn’t in any frame of mind to argue with him, but she felt strongly about this subject. No one could fix the problem without first understanding it. “In one of his early experiments, Dr. Hare had a group of regular people and a group of psychopaths, as defined by his checklist, watch a timer. When the timer hit zero, the subjects received an electric shock. Nothing truly harmful, but painful.”
“People volunteered for that?”
“Fortunately. Because he discovered something that sheds a bit of light on the dark mystery of the psychopathic mind.”
“And that is…”
She’d captured his interest in spite of his tendency to play devil’s advocate. “The regular people would begin to sweat as the clock counted down. They were anticipating the negative result.”
“And the psychopaths?”
“Since they don’t fear punishment, they had no physiological reaction. That’s one reason they are so likely to reoffend. They don’t learn from their actions—unless it’s to figure out better ways of avoiding detection.” Which was why all that anger management training had backfired. “They want what they want, regardless, and their lives are all about getting it.”
Amarok rubbed his face. Obviously, he was as tired as she was. This was the second night they hadn’t gotten much sleep. “I get what you’re saying. I just … I’m not convinced any generalization can adequately cover the diversity of human nature.”
“So … what? We let it go and hope for the best? Catch whatever murderers, rapists and thieves we can and put them in prison? What happens when they get out? Someone like Jasper would just keep torturing and murdering.”
“I admit I don’t have the answers you’re looking for.”
“But you’re pissed this is happening, and you want to blame me.”
“I want to protect you!”
She could hear the scowl in his voice. “Even though you knew better than to let me come to town in the first place?”
He grimaced. “You didn’t want this to happen any more than I did.”
“What if Jasper followed me here, Amarok? I’ve pissed him off, taken away the thrill of his kill twice. You saw what he left me, the way he taped the fingers of that severed hand. This is just the beginning.”
“Flipping someone off is pretty personal. But why does that mean it has to be Jasper?”
“Who else could it be?”
“Anyone. One of the men in Danielle’s little black book. Maybe someone who has a complex about being listed as having only three inches.”
Although he was joking, she got the point. “What would any of those men have against me? Why would any of them want to flip me off in such a-a terrifying way?”
“Because they’re angry at something that has to do with you. Hell, when you were building that damn prison, I felt like flipping you off. Not like this, of course, but—”
“Why didn’t you?” she broke in. He hadn’t put much effort into hiding his displeasure, but he had never challenged her outright.
“I let those I cared about—the people here—persuade me that the trade-off would be worth it.” He released a sigh. “And then I met you.”
There’d been a fatalistic note in his voice. “Why is that significant?”
“You honestly don’t know?”
