“So…”

“When I couldn’t reach her by phone, I drove home to see what was going on.”

“And…”

Somewhat reluctantly, Amarok continued, “And when I got there, I found her purse spilled all over the front yard and one shoe on the drive, just outside her vehicle. She pulled in and got out—but never made it into the house.”

“Someone grabbed her right in the middle of the day.”

Amarok sensed some admiration in his voice but tried to ignore it. “This time of year, it’s light until late, but yes—at a time when I wouldn’t be home.”

“Whoever kidnapped her knows you,” he said simply.

“He knows where we live, but that isn’t hard to find out, not in a town the size of Hilltop. You did it easily enough.”

“So did Lyman Bishop,” he said. “He got your address from that waitress he killed and hanged in the center of town to distract you so that he could get to Evelyn, remember?”

How could he ever forget? He’d known Sandy and her family for most of his life. None of them had forgiven Evelyn for bringing such dangerous men to town. “You didn’t hear?”

“What?”

“He suffered a brain hemorrhage from the beating you gave him. These days, he’s almost a vegetable.”

At first Jasper seemed pleased by the idea of having hurt Bishop that badly, but then his eyes narrowed with obvious skepticism. “Who says?”

Amarok came to his feet. “It’s documented. A brain hemorrhage shows up on an MRI. They have the scans.”

“Maybe he did have a hemorrhage. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s completely incapacitated. He could have exaggerated the effects. That’s what I would’ve done. And even if he didn’t fake more damage than he sustained, hemorrhages affect people to greater and lesser degrees. It could be that he’s improved—to the point where he’s capable of plotting revenge.”

The odds of that were remote, which was why Amarok hadn’t seriously considered Bishop when he thought of him earlier. But perhaps he’d discarded the possibility too soon. The Zombie Maker was no ordinary psychopath. He’d been a cancer researcher with a genius IQ. Was it possible he still had enough brain cells to escape and come after Evelyn? Or, as Jasper suggested, had he been exaggerating his impairment from the beginning to avoid being locked up for the rest of his life?

If so, it could be that he’d been lying low this whole time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike—which meant he’d had a whole year and a half to recover and prepare.

If Bishop was behind Evelyn’s abduction, she was in even more trouble than Amarok had assumed. Lyman Bishop used an ice pick to give his victims a frontal lobotomy. That was why they called him the Zombie Maker. Sometimes scrambling the brains of his victims killed them; other times they survived, severely impaired. Death had never been his goal. What he craved was total acquiescence, total control, total enslavement. “You think it’s him.”