Face Off (Dr. Evelyn Talbot Novels)

by Brenda Novak

  “They didn’t. If she broke in here, it was because she had to. There was no way to keep the stove going without more wood. When we left, I thought she had enough to get by, but that was before it started to storm.”

  Amarok stepped back through the hole in the door, then lifted the lock, which still hung on the latch. “What was the combination the rental company provided?” he yelled. “Do you have it?”

  “I can get it.”

  The cabin gave off a faint glimmer in the dark, so Leland didn’t need a flashlight to trudge back to it. He hurried off and returned a few minutes later with a crumpled sheet of paper.

  Sheltering the paper and holding the flashlight so they could both see what they were doing, Leland read the digits while Amarok tried the lock—which opened easily.

  Leland’s jaw dropped at the sight. “How’d you do that? I tried at least ten times. Peter came out and tried, too. Didn’t work for either of us.”

  So why did it work for him? Amarok refastened the lock and used the combination again—with the same result.

  “This is nuts!” Leland cried. “Totally crazy!”

  Amarok needed to bag the lock, too. “Are you sure you did it right?”

  “Positive. It’s a standard combination lock, for Christ’s sake! Must not have worked for Sierra, either. Why else would she hack down the door?”

  She could’ve been hiding in the shed for her own safety, and he could’ve been the one to use the ax. Maybe that was why she’d thrown up. She’d been terrified.

  Apparently, Leland could tell what Amarok was thinking because he raised his hands. “I know how this looks, but I didn’t do anything to my sister. I swear it! I love her!” He gestured at the damage to the door. “And I can swing an ax a hell of a lot better than whoever caused this damage.”

  Amarok couldn’t help believing him. Leland had seemed sincere from the start. Besides, he had two buddies who confirmed that Sierra had been fine when they’d left this morning and that the three of them had never been separated during the time they were out hunting.

  Leland looked white as a ghost in the glow of the flashlight. Amarok worried that Sierra’s brother might be dealing with shock on top of the extreme weather. “Go get in the truck,” he said. “I have to take some pictures and bag the ax and the lock. Then we’re out of here.” He also planned to take a sample of that vomit, just in case it was needed for DNA testing.

  “What do you mean?” Leland cried. “We can’t leave without Sierra!”

  Amarok hated to say it, but there was nothing more they could do right now. Not until the storm blew over. “We have no choice.”

  “Yes, we do!” Leland tried to block him. “We have to keep looking. She could need help!”

  This cheechako didn’t understand. Alaska wasn’t Louisiana. If they didn’t get their asses off this mountain, and fast, they could wind up in serious trouble themselves.

  Amarok grabbed hold of Leland’s coat and jerked him hard. “If you want to survive so you can find your sister, you’ll do exactly as I say. Do you understand?”

  Tears filled the other man’s eyes as the reality of their situation pierced through the panic—and he nodded.

  * * *

  She’d lost phone service again. Born and raised in Boston, where her parents and sister still lived, Evelyn was used to being able to communicate easily, move around easily and interact with a wide range of people. She hated feeling cut off, whether it was because of the size of the town, the distance to the closest urban hub, the weather or all three. She wasn’t ready for another hard winter. Going without cell service was difficult enough. She hadn’t owned a smartphone since she’d moved to Hilltop two years ago, and she missed the conveniences it provided. But a big storm often knocked out even regular phone service, which was the case tonight.

  “Why couldn’t the government have decided to build Hanover House in Texas instead of Alaska?” she muttered. That was one of the other states the site committee had considered. In West Texas, which had been suggested, the worst things she would’ve had to deal with were a few hot summers. Or some dust and wind and bigger than normal bugs.

  But then she never would’ve met Amarok.…

  She bit her lip as that thought crossed her mind. Maybe there’d come a day when she’d wish she hadn’t met him. As much as she loved him, grateful as she was for the fact that he’d rebuilt her trust in love and intimacy, sometimes she was overwhelmed by a sort of … claustrophobic restlessness. Then she worried that she couldn’t remain in Alaska, couldn’t be completely satisfied here. And if she wasn’t going to stay, she and Amarok were racing toward a brick wall. In those moments, she knew she was crazy to be thinking about having a baby with him.

  But when she was feeling lucky to have found him, when she was in his arms enjoying his incredible strength and tenderness, she wondered why any woman wouldn’t want to have a child with Amarok. Even if it meant living in a frozen wilderness for the rest of her life.

  Absently, she petted Sigmund, who was curled up in her lap while Makita lay at the edge of the room, as far from the heat of the fire as he could get. Makita accompanied Amarok a good 80 percent of the time, hated to be away from his master. At every noise—a tree branch scraping against the house, an icicle cracking and falling from the eaves, the whistle of the wind as it whipped the snow—he’d lift his head and stare at the door with his ears cocked. As if he expected Amarok to realize he’d been left behind and come back for him.

  “Are you going to sulk all night?” Evelyn asked.

  When Makita realized she was talking to him, he barked in response, and she laughed. “He’ll be back,” she told him, but her smile lasted only as long as it took to say the words. She was trying to convince herself and the dog that Amarok would soon be joining them. She knew that going out in a storm like this was dangerous, or he would’ve taken Makita. The fact that he’d left his dog behind made Evelyn worry about him even more.

  To keep from obsessing about his safety, she returned her attention to the papers strewn across the kitchen table. It used to be that while she was at work Amarok spent a great deal of his time searching for Jasper. He’d kept his efforts secret to protect her from all the ups and downs that went with such a long and painstaking investigation. Since Jasper had never been apprehended, she’d been disappointed so many times.

  But last winter, Amarok had caught a break. While researching every murder in the United States that carried Jasper’s particular signature, he came across an investigation into the deaths of five women in Peoria, Arizona—all of whom had been disposed of at a remote location in the desert, all of whom had been tortured before being murdered and all of whom had looked a great deal like Evelyn. Feeling that he was finally on to something, he told her what he was doing and started digging openly. He went so far as to confront Jasper’s mother at her home in San Diego. Although Jasper’s parents had never been cooperative, Amarok managed to get Maureen Moore to admit that she knew more about her son’s whereabouts than she’d ever revealed. She’d pulled back after letting that slip, but Amarok had believed, if given another opportunity, he could get more out of her. He’d planned to follow up—until Jasper eliminated that possibility by killing both his mother and father and then setting their house on fire.

  That had been a terrible setback just when Evelyn’s hope was the highest it’d been in years. That Jasper could murder the two people who’d risked so much to help him proved how narcissistic he was. It also proved he’d stop at nothing to evade capture. So here they were, eight months later. He was always one step ahead of them, but Evelyn knew Amarok wasn’t giving up and neither was she. If she ever wanted to feel safe, truly safe, they had to find him and get him off the streets before he made another attempt to kidnap or kill her, as he had shortly before she moved to Alaska.

  Fortunately, the Peoria investigation was ongoing. By testing Jasper’s parents’ DNA against the genetic material found under one of the victims’ nails, the p
olice were able to confirm that Jasper was indeed the one who’d murdered the five women outside of Phoenix. The police then used Jasper’s DNA to connect him to another case in Arizona, one in which he’d attempted to kidnap a woman who managed to fling herself out of his van while he was driving away.

  News of the match between his parents’ DNA, the Peoria murders, which gave them Jasper’s DNA, and the attempted abduction in Casa Grande an hour south, had come only this week. Due to a backlog at the lab, the samples from Stanley and Maureen Moore had taken eight months to be processed. But at least now they knew for certain that Jasper was in Arizona when those crimes occurred and might still be living there. What they’d learned also confirmed something else, something that had troubled Evelyn all along—he hadn’t quit killing, just as she’d always said he wouldn’t. He enjoyed it too much. Lust killers didn’t stop; they kept going until someone or something else intervened.

  “We’re going to get you,” she murmured, but she’d been saying that for over twenty years. It was difficult not to feel discouraged, especially after learning of Maureen’s and Stanley’s fate last February. Maureen had indicated to Amarok that Jasper was a “family man” these days, implying that he was no longer a danger to society. That was what had tipped Amarok off, telling him she knew more than she’d said earlier. Jasper’s parents had wanted to believe that what he’d done in his youth had been caused by drugs. That he’d gotten past that terrible incident and grown into an upstanding citizen. But Evelyn knew Jasper would never be anything other than what he was—an anger-excitation sexual murderer. Torture and killing brought him sexual satisfaction. She could only hope his being married meant he was tied to the area, so she and Amarok, and the police who were investigating in Peoria and Casa Grande, could narrow the search and eventually find him.

  Even pinpointing one particular county or counties didn’t make the job easy, however. The metropolitan Phoenix area was huge. Where, specifically, should they look? She believed Jasper worked in Casa Grande, since the murders in Peoria were older and the Casa Grande attack happened around the time he murdered his parents, but there were no guarantees.

  With a sigh, she put down her summary of the police interviews with the people who lived closest to the abandoned farm where those five Peoria victims had been found and checked her watch. Amarok should’ve been back by now. He’d been gone for hours, and it was getting late.

  Unable to sit any longer, she nudged Sigmund out of her lap and got up to pace. Makita whined as if he shared her concern over Amarok’s prolonged absence—the storm was only getting worse—so she went over to give him a pat. “He’s smart, and he’s tough,” she told the dog. “He’s lived here his whole life. He knows how to deal with the weather.”

  That was all true, but something as simple as breaking down or getting stuck could cause a person to freeze to death, and he’d push beyond what was safe if it meant finding that missing woman.

  Evelyn’s hand went to her stomach as she stood—a symbolic gesture, she supposed, since they’d been hoping for a baby. It was at times like this that she hated Alaska.

  But it was also at times like this that she felt she couldn’t live without Amarok.

  5

  Rigid with fury, Jasper could barely move. As if he hadn’t had a bad enough day, now he couldn’t go home. He had two bodies in the back of his truck he needed to get rid of, and yet he had to stay over in Hilltop. He didn’t like that, didn’t like being so close to Amarok, not when a quick glance under the tarp in the bed of his new F-250 would so easily expose him. Amarok was totally committed to hunting him down. The trooper made Jasper far more wary than the detectives working his case in Boston, where he’d first killed, or Peoria, where they’d found the remains of five of his victims, or San Diego, where he’d murdered his parents. He could outsmart all of those investigators. They didn’t communicate, didn’t coordinate. They put in their nine to five and went home feeling safe and happy, no worse off for not getting the job done.

  Amarok, however … That bastard was different, more of a challenge. Jasper had to be careful of Evelyn’s lover; he certainly didn’t relish the idea of driving around town in possession of two dead women, especially when the one he’d just killed had been screaming for someone called Leland before he choked her. If “Leland” ever returned to the cabin, he’d no doubt report the woman missing—if he could get off the mountain. Jasper was hoping Leland was snowed in and wouldn’t be able to sound the alarm until the cargo in the back of the F-250 had been dumped in a safe place. But Jasper couldn’t dump the bodies right away. They’d closed the road to Anchorage. He’d gotten partway there and had to turn around. It wasn’t as if he could take an alternate route, either, not in the middle of a blizzard. Only 30 percent of Alaska’s public roads were paved. That equated to less than five thousand miles, which hadn’t sounded all that minimal when he’d been reading about the state before moving here. After he’d arrived, however, he’d realized just how vast Alaska really was.

  Fortunately, the proprietor at The Shady Lady, a diminutive Eskimo named Margaret Seaver according to a placard at her elbow, told him she had an opening. Since it was the only motel in town and it was small—twelve tiny cabins strung loosely together—he hadn’t been confident he could even get a room. A large number of the other COs commuted, like he did. If they’d stopped for a drink at the Moosehead or lingered at the prison before heading home, as they sometimes did, they could also be stuck for the night.

  Margaret ran his Visa card while he stood across the counter from her in the front office. “Can you believe this weather?” she said as they waited for credit approval.

  Still filled with rage at the woman who’d discovered what he didn’t want found in the woodshed, he took several deep breaths as a way to absorb the impact of his intense emotions and make it easier to modulate his voice. He needed to come across as pleasant, not particularly upset. He didn’t want to say or do anything that would make Margaret remark on her encounter with him to someone else. He needed to hunker down until they opened the road, then get his ass home.

  Problem was, that might not happen soon enough for him to drive home before he had to report back to work. Returning to Anchorage and disposing of two corpses would require several hours, and he couldn’t arrive at the prison late. He’d get written up, and since he was probably already going to get written up for destroying an inmate’s photograph of his grandmother, that would be twice in two days.

  The way Margaret Seaver watched him suggested she was waiting for a response.

  “It’s bad out there, all right.” He wasn’t interested in engaging someone who mattered so little to him. She wouldn’t even be a good candidate for a victim. She was too old, looked nothing like Evelyn. But he was good at playing his part. He’d learned how to act at a very young age; he’d known he was different almost from the start.

  She printed out the slip for him to sign. “You work at the prison, huh?”

  He was still wearing his uniform. He’d strangled the woman he’d found in the cabin, so he wasn’t worried she’d spot any blood on him. His latest victim had urinated just before she died, but he’d expected that and taken steps to avoid getting anything on him. “Yeah. Been there since last February,” he told Margaret. Actually, he’d stayed at this motel once before, two years ago, when he’d come to Alaska to check out Evelyn’s pet project. Margaret didn’t realize it, since her daughter or sister or someone else had been at the front desk when he checked in and out. Jasper had seen Margaret outside the motel once or twice, but only in passing. He spent quite a bit of his free time at the Moosehead. He was trying to become so familiar to the locals they wouldn’t find his coming and going any more remarkable than if he were one of them. And he liked watching Evelyn. She hung out there with Amarok a few nights a week, since Amarok had to be on hand to keep the peace.

  “Where do you live? Anchorage?” Margaret asked.

  Jasper scribbled what passed for his signa
ture these days on the credit slip. “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not a native.”

  “No, I’m originally from Florida.” He’d never lived in Florida, but he lied smoothly, easily. That was one of the tools of his trade, so he took it seriously. Everything he was, everything he did, depended on his ability to deceive.

  “Florida, huh? The cold up here must be quite a shock to you.”

  “It is. Please tell me it isn’t always this bad in October.”

  She frowned at the torrent coming down outside the window. “Not quite this early, no.”

  She returned his Visa card, which read: “Andy Smith”—he’d been Andy for a number of years, had used other aliases before that—and he put it back in his wallet. “My luck, I guess.”

  “Well, you’re not totally unlucky. At least you got a room. This is my last one, so if you’d come in any later, you might not have had anywhere to go.”

  If not for the corpses in his truck, he could’ve returned to the prison. They had a small dorm for situations like this. But he couldn’t go through the checkpoint with two murdered women in the back of his truck.

  He maintained a smile as she handed over an old-fashioned key, rather than one of the card keys used by more modern places.

  “Need any food or water?” she asked. “I stocked up when I heard we had a storm coming.”

  He hadn’t eaten since lunch; he was hungry. Both The Dinky Diner and the Moosehead—the two most common places to grab a bite to eat in this postage-stamp-sized town—would both be closed, since no one was going out in such ugly weather. “How much you charging?” he asked.

  “I’m not charging anything,” she replied. “Just trying to be neighborly.”

  “Nice of you.”

  She winked at him. “We look out for each other here in Alaska.”

  He hoped they didn’t look too closely, not at him. “That’s what I like about this place.”