“Jasper is trying to help me?” The irony was almost too good.

“Yes. He may not love Evelyn the way you do, but he is fixated on her, and I bet he’d be devastated if she was suddenly removed from his life, especially now that he’s here and can’t prey on anyone else.”

Amarok wasn’t going to pretend he could understand the psychology behind a guy wanting to kill Evelyn so badly he’d be destroyed if someone else got to her first.

But he also wasn’t going to ignore or turn away anything that could potentially help him find her, especially because Jasper had been right about Bishop. Lyman was definitely up to something, and Jasper could predict how he might act far better than Amarok could. “I’ll be right over,” he said.

Anchorage, AK—Saturday, 5:15 p.m. AKDT

After giving Evelyn a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—why Emmett couldn’t have arranged for better food Bishop didn’t know, but that was about all there was in the staff room—and several bottles of water, Lyman returned to the front of the store, where Emmett’s corpse was lying in the weeds. He had to do something about him. Fortunately, he didn’t think it would be too difficult.

He put on the pair of latex cleaning gloves he’d purchased when he stopped by the hardware store for the bolt cutters and other supplies. Then he reached into Emmett’s pocket and took out the keys to the store and the van, his money and his cell phone. He considered sending all of Emmett’s contacts a message that he was going to be out of town for a few days in order to buy some time before everyone started searching for him.

But the phone was locked. All he could do was destroy it so that anyone who might come looking for him wouldn’t be able to track it. Lyman guessed that Terry’s wife, at the very least, would try to reach her brother. She might have done so already, given the fact that Terry was dead and she had a funeral to plan. But even if she’d called the police, they wouldn’t have started looking for Emmett yet. He couldn’t have been dead more than a day and a half.

Lyman stood as he slipped Emmett’s cash—seventy-eight dollars—into his own pocket. That was a nice little windfall. He wished he’d thought to empty Terry’s pockets, too, but it was better that he hadn’t. Anyone who investigated the wreck in the ravine would be less likely to believe it was a suicide if Terry’s belongings were missing. His wife kept him on such a short leash, he probably never had more than ten or twenty bucks in his wallet, so it wasn’t as though Lyman had missed much of an opportunity.

He stretched his neck. It’d been a rigorous few days for someone accustomed to lying in a hospital bed. He’d never been so exhausted in his life. No amount of therapy could’ve prepared him for this. He was becoming weaker and more uncoordinated as the day wore on.