Her Darkest Nightmare

by Brenda Novak

  The emergency alarm went off before she could open her mouth, anyway.

  “Damn it,” he groaned. “It’s always something. What the hell’s wrong now?”

  Anthony Garza had been the reason for the last alarm. Evelyn prayed he wasn’t to blame for this one, or Fitzpatrick would do his best to make her feel responsible for whatever Garza had done.

  “I’m going to find out,” she said, and hurried back to her office so she could call the warden.

  Getting through to Ferris took several minutes. By then, the alarm had been shut off.

  “What’s going on?” she asked as soon as she had him on the line.

  “You’re not going to like it,” he replied.

  Her ears were still ringing. “Tell me anyway.”

  “Anthony Garza just shanked Hugo Evanski.”

  Stunned, Evelyn felt behind her for her seat. “How?”

  “With a pen he made into a weapon.”

  That wasn’t what she’d meant. She knew the inmates made homemade weapons out of whatever they could. They even filed their toothbrushes into sharp points. “I mean … how was it that they were together?”

  “They were exercising in the yard.”

  This was so unexpected, so unbelievable! It never should’ve happened. “Hugo’s not dead—”

  “No. Not yet. He’s on his way to Medical.”

  Not yet? “How serious are his injuries?”

  “Hard to say. I didn’t see him, but from what I’ve heard he’s lost a lot of blood.”

  Her mind raced as she struggled to sort out this information. “But … Anthony shouldn’t have been in the yard.” Technically, after attacking her, Hugo shouldn’t have been there, either, but she remembered telling the COs to return him to his cell. Since she left the prison right after, without giving instructions for his privileges to be removed, it was conceivable they’d let him carry on as usual.

  But Garza? Who the hell had put him in general population? “Why wasn’t he on lockdown? He hasn’t behaved since he arrived.”

  “Someone had him transferred out of solitary.”

  She shot to her feet again. “Who?”

  “Let me check.” There was a pause, then a worried sigh. Obviously, Warden Ferris was as flustered as she was. She could hear him opening and closing file drawers, imagined him searching through the myriad paperwork that crossed his desk and was retained in his office. Finally, he asked someone to help him find the transfer order.

  Evelyn had to wait more than fifteen minutes, but she clung to the phone, wasn’t about to hang up.

  “I’ve got it right here,” he said when he came back on the line.

  “Who signed it?”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Warden Ferris?” she prompted.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Talbot.” She couldn’t help noticing how much his tone had changed.

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe you don’t remember, but … you did.”

  16

  I wasn’t going to rob her, or touch her, or rape her. I was just going to kill her.

  —DAVID BERKOWITZ, THE SON OF SAM

  Amarok had a lot of people to interview, but first he wanted to see what Shorty knew about Danielle and her behavior. She had to meet the men she had sex with somewhere, and since Amarok had seen her at the bar himself in recent weeks, he was guessing she’d met them at the Moosehead.

  Was that where she had also met her killer?

  Possibly. Even if it wasn’t, perhaps Amarok would be able to gain information he could use to either corroborate or disprove what he found out when he spoke to those who’d been with her. For starters, he hoped to learn how many people were aware of her activities. It hadn’t escaped him that she might have been murdered and cleaved to pieces by an angry wife or girlfriend. But he received a call from Phil Robbins, one of his Public Safety Officers, whom he’d commandeered to help with the investigation by hanging out at the trooper post to man the phone.

  “Sergeant Amarok?”

  He remained in his truck. The music was so loud inside the building he doubted he’d be able to hear if he didn’t. “It’s me, Phil.”

  “I’ve got the medical examiner’s office on the phone—a Dr. Wilson. Says she’s the pathologist assigned to look at that head you sent over a couple of days ago.”

  “What about the arm?” he asked.

  “She didn’t know about the arm till I told her I dropped it off yesterday.”

  “And now?”

  “She’s going to look for it, see if that case was assigned to someone else.”

  “Did you tell her we’ve identified the first victim?”

  “Course. I told her it was Lorraine Drummond who managed the kitchen at Hanover House. Do you have anything I can pass along on the second victim yet?”

  “Not a thing. Tell her I haven’t found enough of the second victim to be able to identify her, but a younger employee of HH, a Danielle Connelly, has gone missing.”

  “And we think it’s her, right?”

  “That’s what we think,” Amarok said. “I’m hoping we’ll be able to confirm it soon.”

  “Okay, hang on a sec.”

  Amarok stared off into the distance as he waited—until movement at the entrance of the bar caught his eye. Shorty was coming out with a large trash bag, which he disposed of at the side of the building. As he trudged back, he caught sight of Amarok and cut over.

  Leaving the heater blasting, Amarok rolled down his window. The air outside was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

  “What’s happening?” Shorty called out as he approached.

  “I’m on the radio.” Amarok held up the mic. “Everything okay here?”

  “Been quiet since the other morning. Thank God. Hopefully, you’re here to tell me you’ve caught the bastard that’s scaring the shit out of everyone.”

  “We need to talk.”

  Shorty spat at the hard-packed snow. “Am I going to like what you have to say?”

  “Can’t imagine you will.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. I’ll be waiting.”

  Phil came back on the radio, so Amarok lifted a finger to let Shorty know he’d be there in a minute and rolled up the window to block the damn cold. “What was that?” he said to Phil.

  “Dr. Wilson says she’s got the limb and will take both cases, since continuity could be important.”

  “I don’t suppose she can provide any information from what she’s seen so far.…”

  There was a crackle as Phil relayed the question. “’Fraid not,” he said when he returned a few seconds later. “’Cept you were right—you got a second victim on your hands. That limb didn’t come from no fifty-five-year-old. She said that was for sure.”

  “Would she say twenty-four sounds about right?”

  He waited through the same process.

  “If she had to guess,” came the response.

  “Is there anything else? Can she give me some idea of what the murder weapon might have been?”

  Silence. Static. Time. Then Phil said, “There are no gunshot wounds to the head. It’s battered enough that she can’t rule out blunt force trauma, but that’s just one possibility. Without the rest of the body, which could have other wounds, she can’t give you anything conclusive.”

  Amarok was feeling too desperate not to be irritated by the lack of answers. “And it was severed by…”

  “This is some gross shit,” Phil complained, but he went through the relay process again. “I wish it was a meat cleaver,” he said at length.

  “Why?” Amarok demanded.

  “Because that would be easier to find up here than a hunting knife, wouldn’t it?”

  He had a point. “What did Dr. Wilson say?”

  “She’s guessing it was a knife. Hell, I coulda told ya that much.”

  “She’s the expert, Phil. I have to ask her.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “So have her t
ell me this. Is there anything about what she’s seen that strikes her as strange? Any other cases that’ve come through her office with the same type of dismemberment?” He sure as hell wished she could tell him where to look for the rest of both bodies.…

  “Nope,” Phil said when he came back again. “She hasn’t seen anything like this since she started working at the medical examiner’s office—and that was fifteen years ago.”

  So it was Hilltop’s problem and only Hilltop’s problem. Great. “What about the eyes?” he asked Phil.

  “There were no eyes in that head,” he replied.

  Amarok bit back a sigh. “There was one. The other was gouged out. Ask Dr. Wilson if she thinks Ms. Drummond’s murderer used a knife for that, too.”

  “She says, now that you mention it, no. There are no superfluous cuts, no gouges to the occipital orb.”

  “How’d he get the eye out?”

  “Probably used his fingers,” Phil said when he replied. “She claims it’s not hard. And that makes sense since the killer rubbed so much blood through her hair. Shit, I think I’m gonna barf now.”

  Amarok ignored that. “What tells her all that blood in the hair wasn’t incidental?”

  “Really?”

  “Ask her, Phil.”

  “Just a minute.”

  “Well?” Amarok said, growing impatient when this took a bit more time.

  “The coverage. It’s too uniform,” Phil said at length.

  Amarok nearly retched himself at the thought of someone gouging out one of Lorraine Drummond’s eyes and then combing her own blood through her hair. “Sick bastard.”

  “Tell me you have some idea who this sick bastard is.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “That’s why I need all the help I can get. Tell Dr. Wilson if she happens to notice anything else, anything at all, to give me a call right away, okay?”

  “I will.”

  He hung up and zipped his coat as he plunged into the cold.

  * * *

  Evelyn would never have put Anthony Garza in general population. She hadn’t even had a chance to evaluate him. The U.S. Marshals who’d brought him to Alaska had warned her about how difficult he was. She’d had proof when he head-butted an officer and broke the man’s nose—not to mention when he threatened her. He wasn’t someone who could be trusted around other people.

  She paced in her office, waiting for Warden Ferris’s assistant to bring her a copy of the order proving she was responsible. She wanted to see that signature for herself, to check the date and time the document was signed, and see if she could guess who might’ve filled it out since she had not. Sure, she’d been stressed lately, but not stressed enough to put a dangerous prisoner, one she was self-conscious about because of the way he’d come to be part of their prison population, in with other men when she had no doubt doing so would create an unsafe situation.

  “Dr. Talbot? Dede brought this for me to give to you.”

  Penny was at her door again. She had the order in hand.

  Evelyn met her in the middle of the floor. “Thank you.”

  Penny stayed despite her dismissal. No doubt she was hoping to be reassured by Evelyn’s reaction. For the first time since they’d started working together three months ago, she seemed shaken in her loyalty.

  Evelyn tried not to take it personally, but she was so flustered just about everything felt like a betrayal.

  “This isn’t my signature.” She could tell immediately. It was similar enough to understand why the COs had acted on it, but there were significant differences.

  “You can tell this isn’t my signature, can’t you?” She held the document out to Penny for verification. The slant was off. So was the size of her E.

  Penny picked at her cuticles. “If you look closely you can tell it’s not your usual. But”—the volume of her voice dropped—“maybe you were in a hurry.”

  Evelyn grabbed it back. “Seriously? You’ve seen my signature hundreds of times! How can you say that?”

  Her assistant scuffed one of her boots against the other. “That’s just what I see.”

  Evelyn turned her focus to the date and time: January 15, 4:43 p.m.—right after she’d met with Hugo. Unfortunately, she had been at the prison when this was executed. But she hadn’t been thinking about any of the other inmates. From what she remembered she’d simply been trying to hold herself together long enough to get out of HH and into her car. She hadn’t been making any executive decisions.

  Another voice, a deep male voice, caused her to lift her head.

  “I just bumped into Dede from Warden Ferris’s office. She seemed upset, in a hurry. What’s going on?”

  For once, Evelyn was grateful to see Fitzpatrick. Maybe he could help her solve the mystery. “Someone forged my name on this transfer order,” she told him.

  “Why would anyone do that?” He glanced at Penny, probably because she was the only other person in the room.

  Penny stepped back and put a hand to her chest. “It wasn’t me!”

  “I can’t imagine who would do such a thing,” Evelyn said. “But this is not my signature.” She shoved the proof at him.

  His eyes moved as he read over the document. “This is for … Anthony Garza?”

  “That’s right.”

  He looked up. “Why would you transfer Garza into gen pop when you know it would mean trouble?”

  “I wouldn’t! That’s the point!”

  He let go, and the paper fell to her desk. “I would like to believe that, Evelyn. But I never thought you’d circumvent our usual procedure to get him transferred here in the first place.”

  She massaged her temples in an attempt to ease the tension building there. Fitzpatrick wasn’t going to forgive her for ignoring his mandate even though she’d considered it more of a suggestion—at least when it came to her. Never would she willingly have given up her ability to choose her own subjects. That was part of the reason she’d had HH built—so she’d have that kind of freedom—and he knew it. She’d only gone along with the rules he’d been making to allow him to feel he had the kind of power he deserved. That night he’d tried to kiss her and she’d refused, he’d accused her of leading him on just to get him to support her professional aspirations. She’d been afraid he might quit and leave like Martin had, had been hoping to get beyond that little glitch in their relationship and make sure he felt fulfilled in his work, since that was what fulfilled her.

  “Let’s not argue about Garza’s transfer,” she said. “This is something else entirely. This is a serious mistake, but it’s not my mistake.” She grabbed the transfer order and held it out to him again. “Check the date and time.”

  Deep grooves formed on his forehead as he did as she requested. “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “That’s right. Immediately following the attack by Hugo Evanski.”

  “So?” he asked. “What does that prove?”

  “That it couldn’t have been me!”

  “How do you know? You were so upset I’m not sure you were paying much attention to what you were doing.”

  “I was reeling, I’ll give you that. But I wasn’t signing any transfer orders, especially for an inmate other than Hugo.”

  He put down his briefcase. “Maybe your hands were moving without your brain. When I popped in, you were riffling through various files and stuffing your satchel—”

  “So I could leave!”

  “Yes—but if I had to give an opinion on your state of mind, I’d say you were completely distraught.”

  Even “completely distraught” didn’t cover it. But she needed Fitzpatrick’s support, needed him to believe her.

  “I didn’t sign this,” she insisted. “I wouldn’t have signed this no matter what frame of mind I was in. The only thing I did was gather up my stuff and call Officer Whitcomb to ask him to walk me out of the building.”

  “Okay.” He agreed but gestured as if he was only relenting to save them further discord. “Either way, I’ll have h
im moved back into solitary until he proves he can be trusted, and we’ll just be glad we caught this before—”

  The look on her face must’ve given away the truth, because he stopped mid-sentence.

  “There hasn’t already been a problem.…”

  Penny looked more uncomfortable than Evelyn had ever seen her, as if she was dying to tell him what’d happened, like a child running to her father—a father she’d found too strict only moments before. But, lucky for Penny, since Evelyn wouldn’t have tolerated that, she held back and let Evelyn break the news.

  “Anthony just stabbed Hugo in the yard, Tim.”

  Fitzpatrick flushed a bright red. “Tell me he isn’t dead!”

  She wished she could, for her own reassurance as much as his, but she had no idea how Hugo was faring. “A lot of blood” could mean anything. “I haven’t heard from Medical. I don’t want to disturb them when they’re in the midst of such an emergency.”

  Fitzpatrick never cursed. His language was too formal for that. But he muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like, “Fuck!”

  “You weren’t here for the alarm?” Penny asked sheepishly.

  “What alarm?” He kicked over his briefcase in an uncharacteristic show of temper. “I just arrived.”

  Evelyn watched him stalk to the window, where he presented them both with his back. “Someone forged my name, Tim. I’m not responsible for this.”

  He scowled at her over one shoulder. “I can see why you’d want me to believe that, Evelyn, but … why would anyone bother to forge your name on something like a transfer order?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know!” she said.

  “Listen.” When he turned to face her, he seemed to be making an effort to choose his words carefully. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure. Trying to do too much. Working too long. Pushing yourself too hard. And, let’s be honest, it’s caused you to make a few poor judgment calls. You’ve been breaking protocol left and right.”

  So what? That was his protocol. The panic she’d been feeling rose higher. “I didn’t do it.”