“Someone else will.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know!” he snapped. “And I wouldn’t tell you even if I did.”

Evelyn was pushing her luck, but she had to find out as much as possible before she faked labor and plunged a sharp instrument into this man’s neck. “Why is it a secret?”

“Look, this is just a job for me. Nothing more. Now take the food, or you’ll go hungry until dinner.”

She believed him, so she accepted the tray. “Please. Don’t go.”

“I told you. You have to sit tight.”

He closed the slot with such force she nearly dropped the tray. “Give me a few more seconds!” she yelled. “If this is only a job for you, if this is all about money, maybe we can work something out between us!”

She waited, hoping the slot would open again, but it didn’t.

“I’ll pay you to let me go!”

More silence. “Hello? Can you hear me?” She held the tray with one hand while banging on the door with the other—until she was too exhausted to continue.

“Damn it!” She slid down the wall and stared glumly at her food. Who’d hired the gym rat on the other side of the door?

She took a bite of her sandwich before realizing that in all the excitement, he hadn’t given her any water. She had to have something to drink. She was already thirsty.

She set down the tray and stood to beat on the door some more. “I have to have water! Hey! Can you hear me? I’m not getting enough to drink!”

A moment later the slot opened and he handed her a small bottle.

“So you can hear me!”

“Why don’t you make it easy on both of us and go back to sleep or something?”

Did that mean he’d looked in at her earlier? Found her sleeping?

That he might’ve been watching her sleep and she hadn’t heard him made her skin crawl. “Because I’m frantic! Who’s coming and what will he do to me?”

“He won’t do anything to you! He wants you to sign something so he can get his sister back, okay?”

Evelyn froze. “His sister?”

“Yeah. He’s trying to regain custody of his retarded sister. I guess you had her put in some sort of facility.”

Her hands and feet began to tingle and the room started to spin. She leaned against the wall to hold herself up. “Where? In what facility?”

“I don’t know,” he said as if it didn’t matter, but Evelyn knew it did. She’d only ever been in one situation where she’d had to make sure a dangerous psychopath could no longer victimize his mentally disabled sister, whom he’d used as a sex slave for years—after giving her a frontal lobotomy to make her completely docile, compliant and unable to think for herself.

This guy had to be associated with Lyman Bishop! But how could that be? Lyman had suffered a massive stroke and was in an institution himself. Sure, he’d once been a brilliant cancer researcher and a cool and calculated killer, but these days he couldn’t think any better than his sister, Beth, and had no motor skills to speak of.