She decided to believe that whoever had taken her was negotiating with Amarok, that Amarok was trying to free her, and picked herself up off the floor in order to cross to the bed. She was so weary she could barely move. Fatigue had become an issue since she’d started her third trimester. Never before had she been tempted to put her head down on her desk for a catnap during the middle of the day, but she’d done so twice the past week.

“We’re going to be fine,” she whispered to her baby as she rubbed her stomach. “We just need to be smart. To eat whenever we get the chance. To get plenty of rest. To conserve our strength for the right moment.”

She heard the heat kick on, felt the warmth blowing through the small vent overhead and was slightly reassured. She’d been given only one thin blanket. It was nice to know she wasn’t going to be miserably cold on top of everything else. It wasn’t as though she could tell anyone if she was getting uncomfortable. Even on the temperature, she had to tolerate whatever someone on the outside decided.

Scooting down in bed, she pulled the blanket over her and fell into a troubled sleep.

4

Hilltop, AK—Tuesday, 7:10 p.m. AKDT

From Amarok’s best guess, Evelyn had been gone for five hours or so. Five hours wasn’t long in most respects, but in this regard, it was an eternity. On the way back from the prison, he’d stopped at his house to scour the empty land around it, just in case Evelyn had been killed quickly, her body dumped nearby. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. No drag marks through the summer moss, no footprints. Not a trace of anything different at all.

He had Makita with him as usual, but Makita wasn’t an official police dog. He hadn’t been through the training in New Mexico that so many police dogs had. That training, together with the price of the dog, could cost upwards of fifteen thousand dollars—money the state wasn’t willing to spend.

But Amarok had been around dogs all his life, so he trained Makita himself, step by painstaking step, teaching him to help enforce the hunting laws, which was a large part of a trooper’s job in Alaska, especially in a small outpost like Hilltop. Because he had to confront groups of hunters who were often drunk and jacklighting—shining spotlights on deer or bear, causing them to freeze so they could easily be shot—or doing other illegal things, he’d trained Makita to hide behind him and remain completely silent. If the hunters who were breaking the law wouldn’t obey verbal commands and grew threatening, ganged up or started to shoot, he’d whistle for his dog just as other cops would call for backup, and Makita would come charging out of hiding, take them by surprise before they could shoot and put an end to the fight, most of the time before it could even get going. Makita knew how to knock a man down. If Amarok really got into trouble and gave a certain command, he could put his opponent out of commission permanently.