The heading for the next article read, “Meet Victim Number Four” and was written by a journalist for The Boston Globe.
Dr. Evelyn Talbot, a beautiful young woman, sits across from me at a corner coffee shop wearing an elegant, tailored suit. When I called her office, she readily agreed to speak with me because “there needs to be more awareness, more information on how to spot and avoid the dangers psychopaths pose,” she said over the phone. This morning she tells me, “The conscienceless live among us. They make up four percent of the population. That means that most people will meet at least one during the course of his or her life. Fortunately, not all of them are serial killers. Some are subclinical and don’t kill at all. But they do act in their own self-interest, which means they often get arrested for other crimes, crimes like embezzlement, robbery, assault. Bottom line, they destroy innocent lives, and we need to figure out why they don’t possess the same behavioral controls as the rest of us.”
After examining the photograph of Evelyn as she’d been that day in the coffee shop, Amarok read the caption: Evelyn Talbot was kidnapped at sixteen, held in an abandoned shack and tortured for three days before her abductor slit her throat and left her for dead.
He pictured the scar on her neck as he moved on to another article. This one focused on the fact that Evelyn was not abducted and tortured by a stranger. She was nearly killed by the man—or boy since he was only seventeen at the time—that she’d been dating for several months.
“I thought I knew him. I thought he loved me as I loved him,” she was quoted as saying. “It wasn’t as if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was just living my life as a normal teenager, going to school, attending prom and planning for my senior year, when someone I trusted proved to be very dangerous. Not only did he murder my best friends, he decided, once I saw what he’d done and he couldn’t lie his way out of it as he’d initially planned, that I could no longer live, either. Then he’d taken great pleasure in making what he thought were my last days hell on earth.”
Never did Evelyn say what kind of torture she’d experienced. Amarok figured that was too gruesome for the papers. But he was curious. Exactly what happened in that shack? What had she been forced to endure?
“Bastard,” he grumbled as he studied the photograph of Jasper that had been posted in the yearbook that year. From everything Amarok could find, he’d been a popular boy, an intelligent boy, even a talented baseball player. There’d been nothing to warn Evelyn that he might turn on her, which was probably the reason she’d become so obsessed with finding out why psychopaths like Jasper did what they did.
Amarok clicked on another link, which gave a little more information on Jasper’s wealthy and powerful banker father. Apparently, right after the incident they’d pulled up stakes and moved to California, and every time they were asked after that, they claimed to have had no contact with their son.
Amarok wasn’t buying it. Jasper’s parents had helped him. They had to have. They claimed he might’ve killed himself off in the woods somewhere, but if he did that, why hadn’t his body been discovered in the past twenty years? Amarok also found it highly suspect that it was his family who put forth the idea, who claimed that he was suicidal. Evelyn insisted on the exact opposite. She said he’d enjoyed inflicting pain on her, said that he’d laughed at the people who were searching for her during the time he had her tied up in that old shack.
Makita lifted his head and barked, signaling he had company even before Amarok heard the outer door open. Sometimes in the afternoons, Phil Robbins, who did the cooking at the local diner in the mornings, volunteered to act as a receptionist of sorts in the afternoons. Summers were always busy, what with the influx of hunters and fisherman. But even if Phil was off at the diner by now—it had to be getting to be that time—it was Saturday. He’d be going to Anchorage to visit his mother, so Amarok was on his own.
“Hello?” he called to draw his visitor toward him.
Ken Keterwee stepped into his office and crouched to give Makita, who’d circled around to greet him, a scratch behind the ears.
“Hey,” Amarok said. “What’s up?”
Ken straightened and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. “Saw your truck outside. You’re working today, huh?”
“I’m taking care of a few things, yes. What are you doing?”
“Just had some pancakes down at The Dinky Diner.”
There weren’t many places to eat in Hilltop. Just The Dinky Diner, where Phil worked and Ken had just had breakfast, which was only open until three each day, a drive-in and the limited menu of appetizers and burgers Shorty served at The Moosehead in the evenings. For anything else, folks had to drive to Anchorage.
“Is this about last night?” Amarok asked, since he didn’t generally hear from Ken a whole lot.