“Find who?” he asked, coming to his feet.

“Lyman Bishop!”

Amarok felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “You’re in Minnesota?”

“Yeah. Took me four hours to get here, and it’s all for nothing. I just left Beacon Point Mental Hospital. He’s not there.”

“That’s not true,” Amarok argued. “I’ve checked myself.”

“Then you’d better check again, because I just tried to visit him and they told me he was no longer a patient.”

“That’s because they can’t give out any information. They can’t even let on that he’s a patient.”

“You don’t understand. I slipped past the security desk at the door and went up in the elevator. I asked a nurse at some nurses’ station where my ‘father’ was—said he was supposed to be on the third floor, but I couldn’t find him—and she looked in her computer. She said she didn’t show him as a patient anymore.”

“Where did he go?”

“How am I supposed to know? The nurse had no idea.”

“That can’t be true,” Amarok insisted, but the doubt she’d placed in his mind was quickly turning his stomach to acid.

“If you say so. I don’t even know the dude, so I don’t care. I was just helping out my boyfriend. Anyway, I’ve gotta go. I have another long drive ahead of me.”

There was a snapping sound that led him to believe she was chewing gum. “How old are you?” he asked before she could hang up.

“Eighteen.”

She said that with a touch of belligerence, as if she was also saying, I’m old enough to do what the hell I want.

“If you’re smart you’ll stay away from Jasper and anyone like him,” Amarok said. “You’ve heard what he did to his high school girlfriend, haven’t you?”

“He hates Evelyn,” she said with a shrug in her voice. “He would never do that to me.”

“Don’t be stupid. He would if he had the chance,” Amarok said, and disconnected.

“What is it?” Molly was still there, watching him closely. “Anything that could help Evelyn?”

“Depends.” If Lyman Bishop was involved in Evelyn’s abduction, maybe Amarok could track him in some way. Lyman didn’t have any family to speak of and probably very few friends, but everyone needed money. He might be able to trace him through bank or credit card transactions.

Amarok looked up the number for Beacon Point and called them. It took twenty minutes of wrangling with different nurses and supervisors, but eventually he learned what “Chastity” had been trying to tell him: Lyman Bishop wasn’t at Beacon Point anymore—and no one could say where he’d gone.

Anchorage, AK—Thursday, 11:00 p.m. AKDT

Evelyn had made her situation even worse!

Now she was going to die in this cooler—the long, slow way. It had been hours and hours since she’d stabbed the muscular man with the scar over his eye, and no one had come. She’d had no water, no food, hadn’t heard a sound.

Had she killed him? Or had he taken off without telling anyone where to find her?