So he calmed down and pretended as if he hadn’t just kidnapped the psychiatrist so many people would recognize from TV.
He hoped he’d escaped without anyone spotting his car. It seemed like it. No one had come running. But even if he had gotten away cleanly, there was the issue of his banged up vehicle. It was obvious that it had been in an accident. As soon as possible, he needed to get off the road and stay off the road.
Which he planned to do as soon as he reached Waltham. That would take fifteen minutes. It’d be another five or ten before he could get to his hideaway.
Jasper didn’t want to stop before he reached his safe spot, so he wasn’t pleased when Evelyn started to scream and kick at the trunk lid. He’d disabled the release the manufacturer had installed, so she couldn’t get out, but she could certainly draw attention, which meant he had to do something.
After pulling into an alley, he opened the trunk and covered her mouth with a rag dosed in a homemade version of chloroform.
“That should do the trick,” he muttered when she went limp, and hopped back behind the wheel.
***
As soon as Amarok got home for the night, he tried calling Evelyn. It’d been only thirty minutes since he’d talked to her before, but he couldn’t reach her. “Hey, it’s me again,” he said as he turned on the TV and lay down on the couch. “You’ve probably gone to bed. You could use the sleep. Good luck finishing the move out of your office tomorrow. Wish I was there to haul things around for you.”
When he hung up, he didn’t expect to hear from her until morning. So he was surprised to receive a call from her number only seconds later. “There you are,” he said, and silenced his TV with the remote.
The person who responded wasn’t Evelyn; it wasn’t even a woman. “Who is this?”
“Who is this?” Amarok responded.
“Officer Pierce Schwartz, of the Arlington Police Department.”
Amarok sat up. “Police department! Why do you have Evelyn’s phone?”
“Can I get your name, please?”
“Of course. It’s Sergeant Benjamin Murphy. I’m an Alaskan State Trooper living in Hilltop. I’m also a friend of Evelyn Talbot’s. What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid she’s been in an accident,” came the response.
Amarok’s stomach twisted into knots. “Where? How? Is she okay?”
“We don’t know,” he said. “She’s gone.”
***
Once he pulled deep into the copse of trees to make sure his car would remain hidden even if someone came out to this remote area, Jasper left Evelyn in the trunk and trudged down the hill to get the wagon he used to transport supplies. It was dark and there was no one around—he’d never seen anyone here—so he was breathing easier now that he was off the beaten path. But he was growing worried about the fact that she hadn’t woken up yet. Had he used too much chloroform?
Those chemicals could be dangerous. And he’d been acting so fast. It wasn’t as if he’d had the opportunity to measure...
As soon as he got her into the wagon, which wasn’t easy since it’d been created for children and her limp body sprawled all over, he checked for a pulse—and breathed a sigh of relief when he found one. Good. Her heart was beating. That was fortunate.
Using a flashlight to avoid the briers and bigger rocks, he carted her down the hill and dumped her on the bed inside the shack.
“Welcome home,” he said. “I think you’re going to like what I’ve done to the place. For one, I haven’t set it on fire yet, so that’ll be an improvement.” He’d been tempted. That visit Hillary had received from the police had sent him into a full-blown panic. But he was glad now that he’d held off and hadn’t gone too far. Since he’d been home he’d kept a close eye on the news. He’d also spoken to the detectives who’d come by, and they didn’t seem particularly suspicious of him. They were checking every car within a twenty mile radius of the kidnapping that had the same make and model as what the witness had seen and, fortunately, a lot of people in the Boston area had blue Toyota Camrys.
“Can you believe we’re back together? After so long?” he said to Evelyn’s inert form. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? We haven’t seen each other since high school.”
He took out the picture he kept in the secret compartment of his wallet and taped it to a chair, which he put in front of the bed. He wanted that to be the first thing she saw when she woke up, wanted her to know he’d be coming back for her. Then he set about tying her to the iron frame like he had the last woman. He didn’t think she’d mind the old, crusty pools of blood. It wasn’t easy to get a mattress down here.