Her Darkest Nightmare (The Evelyn Talbot Chronicles #1) - Brenda Novak Page 0,2
going in a circle, but she had to keep moving, keep struggling—had to find someone to help her.
Not until she was in the road did she realize that she’d reached her goal—and then it occurred to her only because a car horn sounded as a vehicle came at her. The blast was intended to get her out of the way, but she couldn’t take another step, couldn’t even raise her arms to signal her distress.
She heard the brakes squeal as the driver swerved to miss her, heard the crunch of gravel as the car came to a stop. Then she crumbled and would’ve died right there on the dotted yellow line separating the two lanes of pavement if not for the man who came rushing toward her, shouting, “Oh my God! What happened to you?”
1
We are all evil in some form or another.
—RICHARD RAMIREZ, THE NIGHT STALKER
Twenty years later …
He’d kill her if he could. He’d attacked her once before. She had to remember that.
Dropping her pen on top of the notepad she’d carried in with her, Dr. Evelyn Talbot slipped her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t gotten much sleep last night; she’d had another of her terrible nightmares. “The plexiglass is there for a reason, Hugo. It will always be between us. And we both know why.”
This wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for. Impatience etched lines in his handsome face, with its wide forehead and innocent-looking brown eyes, but he was careful not to raise his voice. In fact, he did the opposite: he lowered it in appeal. “I won’t lay a hand on you, I swear! I just have to tell you something. Come over to this side so I can whisper. It’ll only take a minute.”
It would take even less time for him to get his hands around her throat or put her in the hospital, like he did when she first met him at San Quentin.
Reclaiming her pen, she replied in the same measured tone she always reserved for her subjects. “You know I can’t do that. So say what you have to say. Do it right here, right now. We’ve been going around and around with this for two weeks.”
He twisted to look up at the camera being used to monitor his behavior. Whenever she met with an inmate, a correctional officer in a room down the hall viewed the proceedings on closed-circuit TV. The inmates thought they were being watched for security purposes, but these sessions were also recorded. The video enabled her to study the nuances in their body language, which was, in addition to their speech patterns, the focus of her research.
“I can’t,” he insisted. “Not in front of the cameras. I’m a dead man if I do.”
Someone had him convinced. She believed that much. Although, with the way her subjects lied, she could easily be wrong. Maybe he was making it all up. “But who would harm you?” She leaned closer. “And how?”
Evelyn had been studying Hugo Evanski since Hanover House opened three months ago, in November. He’d been among the first of the psychopaths transferred here, had scored a whopping 37 out of 40 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R. But to look at him or talk to him no one would know he was capable of murder. From the beginning, Evelyn had found him to be intelligent, tractable and, for the most part, polite. He was even helpful, when he could be.
The thought made her a bit uneasy, but if she had a friend among the psychopaths she’d come to Alaska to analyze it would be Hugo. Maybe that was why she was tempted to trust him, even after what he’d done before and everything else she’d been through.
“I was right about Jimmy, wasn’t I?” he said.
A month and a half ago, he’d warned her that another inmate was planning to hang himself with a sheet. If not for Hugo, Jimmy Wise would be dead.
“Yes, but you didn’t demand I risk my life to get that information.”
“Because Jimmy was no threat to me!”
“So who is?”
Squeezing his eyes closed, he tapped his forehead against the glass.
Evelyn waited.
“What can I do?” he asked when he spoke again. “How can I get you to believe me? To give me just a moment of privacy?”
He’d strangled fifteen women and he’d injured her. That meant there was nothing he could do, because she wasn’t stupid enough to put herself in jeopardy.