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 re searching 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 police 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.