Just Evil

by Vickie McKeehan

  As if given a precious gift, she looked at Jake and said, “I’m great.”

  “Then go back to work. I’ll take Boyd on a tour of the house. Let him see the damage for himself and meet you back there in about an hour and a half. Okay?”

  Kit didn’t argue, didn’t hesitate, but rather gave him a quick kiss on the mouth before starting the car. As if they’d been together for years, she said simply, “Don’t be long.”

  As Kit drove out of the circular driveway, Jake hung back, let Connor Boyd take the lead to the front door.

  Jake watched as the man dug into his trouser pocket, pulled out yet another key ring, and used it to unlock the front door as if he’d done so before.

  A thought ran through Jake’s mind, and he wondered if St. John had ever bothered to check how many people had keys to Alana’s house.

  CHAPTER 18

  Going back inside the house, this time with Boyd leading the way, Jake felt as if he’d stepped back into a time warp when Kit had lived there as a child. He looked at the house differently than he had before. Now knowing what she’d endured in this house, unlike earlier, that creepy feeling had him downright pissed off.

  What had it been like for Kit to grow up here, endure here, and suffer here?

  As he accompanied Boyd through the tour of the downstairs, Jake nodded politely at the right times, used a civil tone whenever he responded to the man’s weak attempt at outrage about the condition of the house, but Jake’s mind was clearly elsewhere.

  His thoughts wandered to the upstairs, to the alcove, to the closet where Kit had been locked up. He’d walked right past it earlier, unaware of its existence.

  As he followed Boyd up the front staircase right off the foyer, he became more aware of his surroundings. Once he got to the second floor landing, raw emotion swept over him and his apprehension about the place grew stronger. He separated from Boyd and continued walking down the long hallway covered with thick, white Berber carpet that softened his every step. He walked past several bedrooms and closet doors until he got to the rear of the house.

  When he reached the landing that led to the back staircase, he realized he’d gone too far and backtracked. On the left, tucked away off the beaten path of the main corridor, was the alcove, a small niche of a space with a sloped ceiling and a door at the far end. Away from the bedrooms, thought Jake.

  He walked down the small passageway, his heart thudding faster with every step. He told himself it was probably nothing more than a poorly-located linen closet. But for some reason he was drawn to the space. Stopping directly in front of the door, he took several deep breaths before turning the knob. He noted that unlike the other closets along the main corridor this one had a deadbolt lock installed on the outside of the door. A deadbolt lock to keep a little girl locked inside.

  This had to be it. Kit’s Closet.

  He swallowed hard, opened the door, and peered inside. The space was no more than three feet by three feet, and with the sloped ceiling, it was even smaller than a normal closet. For a closet in a house where the owner had lived for thirty years or more, this space was completely empty. That seemed strange to Jake.

  There was no Berber carpet here, no tile either, but rather a concrete floor. There was no rod for hanging clothes, no shelves for storage. He looked around for a light switch, and realized there wasn’t one. A tiny closet with no light and a deadbolt lock on the door. As he studied the inside, he thought he saw something on all three walls near the baseboard. He lowered his head and wished he had a flashlight. Stepping inside the tiny space, his large frame took up most of it.

  He bent down and sat on his heels to get a better look in the dim light. Just above each baseboard inches off the floor, nicks and holes and scuff marks lined each of the three walls, as if the walls had received blows, too many blows to count. The inside of the door contained quite a few more irregular nicks in the wood and more scuff marks. With his fingertips, he felt the rough edges of each of the indentations, the holes in the peeling paint and plaster, and the damage left by a child’s small kicking feet and hands.

  How much time had she spent locked inside this closed up space? And immediately he understood why she was claustrophobic. Then he remembered her reaction at Crandall House when she’d opened up that door only to find that tiny closet.

  At that moment, he decided to tear the walls out and make the space fifty times the size. On instinct, sitting inside on his heels, he closed the door and blackness descended. As a full grown adult, who had to bend at the waist to fit in the tiny space, Jake tried to imagine what Kit must have felt like as a child locked in, unable to get out. But the only feelings he could manage were the obvious ones: the fear she must have felt at the thought of not ever getting out, and the anger for being put there in the first place.

  Suddenly, he felt like throwing up.

  On the drive back to the store from Bel-Air to San Madrid, Kit had calmed down enough to think about what she needed to do. Jake had said her dream had uncanny similarities to the murders that had taken place back in 1969. She needed to find the connection to those murders and the old couple who lived on the property called The Sundown Ranch.

  When she got back to the shop, Baylee was out front helping a customer. Kit waved and nodded as she quickly walked past them, headed straight for her office upstairs, and closed herself off with her computer.

  When she Googled the murders from 1969, she got over four million hits. She couldn’t believe the vast amount of information written about the grisly 1969 murders committed over a two-day period on August 9th and 10th in Benedict Canyon and Los Feliz.

  Chills ran down her spine as she read the gory details. When she found several of the actual newspaper articles from that timeframe, she realized many of the details from the crime scenes had been made public. Days after both murders, it was common knowledge that the killer or killers had left behind graffiti, specifically the words PIG, DIE, and DEATH written in the blood of the victims. The articles also revealed that the killer or killers had used both a gun and a knife, that there were multiple victims at both crime scenes, and that the murders were savage and senseless, and robbery didn’t appear to be the motive.

  Also, at the second murder scene, the one in Los Feliz, the police initially believed it to be the work of a copycat killer, someone who had mimicked the first murders in Benedict Canyon.

  What if someone read the newspaper articles got the idea to copycat the murders using the details described in the papers? If they’d been planning murder months beforehand, getting a built-in description of the other crime scenes might come in handy when they needed to cover up one of their own, like the one that night at the Sundown Ranch.

  Granted, it was a far-fetched idea. But she didn’t have anything else to hang her hat on at the moment. She couldn’t explain it, but the more she thought about it, the more the idea stuck.

  And Jake was right about the similarities between the 1969 crime spree and the murders of the old couple in her dream. But there were also major differences. Elated at her findings, Kit pulled out pen and paper from her desk drawer, and began making a list.

  More than an hour later, Baylee knocked on Kit’s office door. When Baylee walked inside, she saw the intense look on Kit’s face. Mistaking it for distress, believing Kit was upset about going back to Alana’s house, she put the blame for that on the one person she felt responsible, Connor Boyd.

  “Why the hell would you listen to him anyway? Just because he phones and tells you the house has been broken into, you drop what you’re doing and take off by yourself. What were you thinking? And don’t give me that stuff about demons. If you felt that way, then why go alone? Why didn’t you let me go with you? I knew it was a bad idea for you to go back there.”

  “I thought I could do it, Baylee, and go inside by myself. But I couldn’t. Jake showed up. Thanks for calling him. I knew you did, even though he didn’t say so. He said he followed me, but after I calmed down, I knew you must have s
ent him. I was never so glad to see anyone when he walked up to the car. I couldn’t go in. Obviously, I haven’t put a thing behind me after all this time, all that therapy, just a waste of time and money. Sitting in the car, it was as if it had happened yesterday. And Baylee, I could hear Alana laughing.”

  Tears came suddenly. She got to her feet and started toward Baylee, who met her halfway. The two women hugged and Kit buried her face in Baylee’s hair. Baylee let her cry it out as she had scores of other times, annoyed at seeing her so vulnerable, having to revisit memories no one should have to relive.

  Jake found them like that, Kit wrapped up in Baylee, as he stood watching from the open office doorway. Her tearstained cheeks, red nose, and water-filled eyes told him she still hadn’t recovered from her visit to Beverly Hills. Seeing how upset she was incensed him all over again.

  But when Kit spotted Jake in the doorway, she abruptly left Baylee and sought comfort in his arms.

  “I’d like to stomp Connor Boyd into dirt right about now,” Baylee said to Jake.

  “You’d have to get in line.”

  Kit snuggled up to Jake as close as she could before saying. “Thanks for coming after me, Jake. I didn’t tell you that before.”

  “No need to thank me. I’d have been upset with Baylee if she hadn’t called. Why’d you go over there alone anyway?”

  “See,” Baylee pointed out, “there seems to be a consensus on that. Next time…”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Kit told them. “It’s better if I just put that place out of my mind. Gloria’s right. I’ll get one of those estate liquidators to go in there and take care of all the furnishings, get them ready to sell.”

  “Well, after getting a look inside there won’t be that much furniture to liquidate.”

  Kit wiped her face with the back of her hands and seemed not to care about the house or the furnishings at all, so it was Baylee who asked, “Connor said someone broke into the house, but they vandalized the furniture, too?”

  “Didn’t say they broke in, but somebody sure turned it upside down looking for something.”

  Kit wasn’t paying a bit of attention to either one of them. She went back to her desk and picked up the list she’d been working on. “I’ve done some research online. You were right about the murders being similar to Manson’s crime spree. There are definitely similarities to the murders of the old couple, but there are also differences, enough, I think, that my old couple was killed by a pair of copycat killers that wanted the police to think the murders were part of the killing spree. And it worked. ”

  Jake stared at her. “That’s a helluva leap, Kit.”

  But Baylee wanted to know, “What old couple?”

  Kit ignored her. “No, I don’t think so. Hear me out. I think the killers wanted to take advantage of the fact that these murders took place back to back, the ones that were so obviously plastered all over the newspapers at the time. They had to act quickly. Timing was everything. The papers published detailed accounts of the crime scenes. The killers could have read the newspaper stories about both murders, gotten all the gory details they needed, including the words found printed in blood. Now that’s a detail the police might have kept to themselves, but they didn’t. I mean, you’ve got the entire city of L.A. gripped with fear over these gruesome murders. The public thinks there’s a killer out there targeting the wealthy, or celebrities, and they’re just scared. So the killers in my dream jump on the bandwagon—seize the opportunity, so to speak. All I know for sure is my killers in the dream have nothing to do with the Manson family, other than maybe the fact that they’re all just evil. They have that in common.

  “But the killers in my dream drive a Mercedes. I see all this detail from the dream enough to know the killers are women.”

  She ticked off what she saw. “When they get out of the car, they walk like women. When one of them writes graffiti on the wall in blood, she gets upset when the blood stains her clothes. Then there’s the champagne. They crack open a bottle of champagne afterward in the kitchen. Come on, that’s such a girlie thing to do, don’t you think? I can see guys having a beer, or a shot of whiskey, but champagne?”

  Jake and Baylee gaped at her, then at each other. Kit quickly relayed every aspect of the dream, even the ones she’d held back until now. It was Jake who said, “You’ve seen a lot more detail since you first told me about it. And in your dream you’re sure the one left in the bedroom with the knife stabs the old couple even after they’re dead?”

  As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the last sounded downright gruesome.

  “Yeah. If they were going to pull this off, make it look like a continuation of the crime spree, it was an essential part to make it look like the knife played a role in their deaths. But if we could find out who owns that ranch, The Sundown Ranch, maybe look for any murders of an elderly couple immediately after the more famous ones. We’d have names, a place to start, come up with maybe a motive.”

  Impressed, but still skeptical, Jake told her, “Okay, we’ll check the newspaper archives for any murders that might have occurred after the crime spree hit the newsstands, search the files they keep on microfiche, try to narrow down the timeframe.”

  “What does this old murder have to do with Alana?” Baylee asked.

  “Oh, she’s connected. But guess what Baylee, get this, Alana and John Griffin were never married.”

  Now that had Baylee more shocked than all the talk about murder. “Say what?”

  “Jake pulled the information from public records. That whole private war they had going on wasn’t about a contentious divorce. So why’d they hate each other? Any clue? I mean, you were around my father. You were around Alana. It was a great ruse on their part, wasn’t it?”

  Fist under her chin, Baylee was attempting to remember all the times she’d spent around Kit’s parents. “I’ll say. I’ve got to think about this Kit. They were so…so…horrible to each other, always at odds, always threatening to sue each other, always arguing over custody, making outrageous claims against each other, shouting insults.” She turned to Jake. “You’re sure the records you pulled were accurate?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. They weren’t married, Baylee.”

  Kit scrunched up her nose, and then point-blank said to Baylee, “Maybe I’m the result of a one-night stand that occurred at some Hollywood party, or worse, maybe rape. Maybe that’s why…you know…she…hated me.”

  Jake didn’t know what to say to her now any more than he had when she’d brought up her theory last night, and looking at the expression on Baylee’s face, Baylee didn’t know how to respond to her either.

  Baylee shook her head, walked to the door, and stopped. “Look, let me think about this. I guess you could be right…I mean…it would make sense. But,” she shook her head, “I’ve got to think about this.”

  Once Baylee left them alone, Jake shut the door. In one quick motion, he had Kit up against him, wrapped in his arms. His mouth found hers. Jake broke off the kiss long enough to say, “Now, where were we? I want you…out of those clothes. We can use your desk.”

  Just as teasing, Kit calmly pointed out, “In case you haven’t noticed, my office door doesn’t have a lock. Baylee might come back.”

  Not one to be deterred, he reasoned, “No problem. We’ll put a chair up against the door.” Bringing her with him, he took a couple of steps backward to the desk and leaned on it, positioned her between his legs.

  Kit countered, “What about your desk? It’s a lot nicer. And I know for certain your office door has a lock on it.”

  Logical to a fault, he nibbled her ear while rubbing his hand over the swell of one breast, and rationalized, “No, my office won’t work, at least not until everyone’s cleared out for the day. Besides, there are less people to deal with here than there, and we’d have to move from this spot. No trust me, here would be much better. And we don’t have a lot of time, so start taking off…”

  Kit feigned a pout. “So this i
s a quickie? What happened to the full service treatment to which I’ve become so accustomed?”

  “Define quickie.”

  She put a little more husky tone to her voice, and pronounced each word with great care, “The opposite of slow, taking your time like before, putting all that control you’re so famous for to good use.”

  “Depends on how comfortable this desk is, don’t you think?” Letting go of her breast long enough to run one hand over the desk, he added, “Feels pretty comfortable to me.”

  “If it feels so comfortable then you take the bottom.”

  He shrugged. “Not a problem, baby; I like you on top. I thought I proved that already.”

  With both of his hands resting on her hips, he brought her closer, nudged her top up slightly, then set to work with his tongue exploring her belly button, licking, sampling, tasting.

  “Your belly button is a real turn-on. I’ve got this thing for it,” he teased. All the while, Kit enjoyed the motion of his tongue, kept his head in place between both hands, as if he might somehow get away from her. For the second time that day, he unbuttoned the top button on her jeans, ran the zipper down to its base, and was just moving down to enjoy the possibilities when a knock at the door interrupted their play.

  “Go away,” they both shouted in unison. Clearly annoyed with the intrusive knock, he made his intentions clear, “That’s the second time today we’ve been interrupted. Tonight, we’re having dinner on the boat, sleeping on the boat; no phones, no cops, no well-meaning friends or co-workers. If I have to take us five miles out of port to do it, we’re going to be alone. Got it?”

  Smiling at the prospect, she quickly buttoned her jeans and said, “That’s a great idea. I’ll leave early, go home, and pack a bag. I’ll stop by the market, pick up some groceries. We can fix dinner and have the whole evening to ourselves.”