“Why not let one of the other members of the mental health team you’ve assembled take over? Dr. Fitzpatrick has fifteen years on you, much more experience, and he’s a man—not someone those ghouls will be likely to salivate over and dream about raping. Let him take the lead.”
She put a hand to her forehead, felt the bandage. “He’ll be a great help. I couldn’t have brought Hanover House into existence without him. But I won’t relinquish control of what I’ve worked so hard to create.” Not when she was so determined to find the answers she craved: Why was there such a thing as a psychopath? How did such people come to be? Was it nature, nurture or a combination of both that created this fearful anomaly? Was the rate of psychopathy increasing, as some studies indicated? And how was it that such people could very often kill their own mothers, or even their own children, and not feel a second’s remorse?
Evelyn’s curiosity about those things in particular drove her worse than a relentless thirst. And now that the government had agreed to build a high-security federal institution where she and a team of other psychiatrists and forensic psychologists could make an in-depth study of those for whom murder was a delight instead of merely a means to an end, maybe she’d finally find out what made them tick.
Her mother sank into a chair. “What’s it going to take to get through to you? Jasper’s still out there, Evelyn. He could see you on TV or hear about your work in the papers and take it as a personal challenge to find you and finish what he started twenty years ago. Do you realize that?”
She’d had to lobby publicly, shame lawmakers into doing more to protect victims like her. She couldn’t let her fear of Jasper and what he might do stop her. That would only render her useless. She felt like she’d lived through that ordeal for a reason, had to make it mean something. “I can’t let that stop me.”
“Yes, you can!”
“No.” At this point, her head was throbbing, but Evelyn had to make her point. “He murdered my best friends simply for telling me he cheated on me! I found them, Mother! I saw what he did to them! I refuse to care more about my continued safety than I do about what he did to all of us—and what others like him are getting away with every day.”
Lara seemed dazed now that most of the fire was gone from her anger. “But working in this field makes and keeps it all so present.”
“I’ve had plenty of therapy to help me deal with it.” She didn’t add that there were still some nights when she woke up in a cold sweat, convinced that she was lying on the dirt floor of that old shack, her body bruised and broken, the blood pumping from the wide gash in her throat, creating a warm puddle around her. But she knew her mother wasn’t fooled.
Although Lara sat without speaking, she turned a pointed gaze on Evelyn, burying her beneath an avalanche of disapproval.
“Why are you letting our trip to San Francisco go this way?” Evelyn asked, breaking the silence. “Are we going to end up fighting about this, like we always do?”
Her mother pursed her lips but seemed to soften a little. “At least tell me that you’re not going to have the inmate who did this shipped to Alaska.”
Evelyn recalled the brief glimpse she’d had of the man who’d shuffled into the room before he rushed her. No doubt he thought such a demonstration of his “evil” would scare her away, make her set her sights on someone else and leave him in sunny California.
But that was precisely the reason she wouldn’t go to Alaska without him.
“No. He’s going with me.”
The blood drained from her mother’s face. “You can’t be serious...”
“I won’t let him get the best of me,” she said. “Not now. Not ever.”
“You mean like Jasper did.”
She ignored that. “Hugo Evanski’s ideal for my program.”
“You’re letting it get personal, Evelyn.”
“He made it personal. And as soon as I get out of this darn hospital, I’m going to tell him.”
Chapter 2