Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  “Not so dumb,” Kendall said. “I had a boyfriend that played the bass so loud that I’m lucky I can hear anything anyone says.”

  The mood had been fraught with tension. The small talk was an opportunity to break the ice. Joe and his dad were there, she knew, because of the video blog Brenda had released.

  Kendall extended her hand to Erwin, but he declined to greet her with a handshake. Joe, whom Kendall decided favored his mother with his coloring—hair and eyes—reached out.

  “Detective, we saw the thing on YouTube,” Joe said.

  “I should have called you,” Kendall said.

  “You should have,” Erwin said, standing with his arms wrapped around his chest in a defensive pose.

  Erwin looked at his son. “He wants to know about her.”

  Kendall looked at Joe and offered a quick, sympathetic nod. She turned her attention to Erwin.

  “Let’s talk, okay?” She asked. “Follow me.”

  The aftermath of murder is never predictable. How people behave when the unimaginable transpires is a source of endless pondering and discussion among those who deal with it every day. Sometimes people act as though they’ll never recover, that the death of the loved one is that line in the sand that will forever mark the rest of their days. Other times, relief seems to rear up, and the one closest to the victim starts planning a garage sale for the deceased’s effects before a single word of a eulogy is a puff of vapor in front of a church service.

  Erwin was bitter about his wife’s betrayal, and Kendall understood why he felt that way. Her plan to just disappear with Brenda Nevins and give up everything he thought they’d shared had to have been a terrible shock. If the video blog Brenda had made about a potential affair with Sandra Sullivan had been true, then he’d have had to live with his part in what might have pushed Janie to do what she did. Their son, on the other hand, was an innocent. He’d loved his mother, and the fact that she walked away from him forever brought the kind of hurt that no child, no matter the age, could just pass off.

  She led them to her office. No one wanted water or coffee. It wasn’t going to be that kind of a visit.

  “Look, Detective, I want to say one thing flat out. Brenda Nevins is a goddamn liar. That’s what she is. I didn’t have an affair with anyone.”

  Before Kendall could answer, Joe spoke.

  “Get a grip, Dad,” he said. “This isn’t about you. No one cares about what you did or didn’t do with Sandy.”

  Erwin kept his eyes on the detective. “I didn’t do anything with her but talk.”

  “Whatever,” Joe said. “I don’t care. No one cares. We’re here because we’re sick of the press. We’re sick of nobody telling us what’s going on. No one even called us to tell us what was on YouTube. I got a text from a girl I used to date.”

  Kendall felt sorry for Janie’s family.

  “I’m sorry about that, Joe,” she said. “I really am. I should have notified you the minute I knew of the existence of the recording. I don’t have any great excuse, but I want you to know that it will never happen again.”

  “That’s fine,” Erwin said, eyeing his agitated son. “Things happen very fast, Detective. We’re all still reeling from everything. Did you know that there were thirty-six media people on our front lawn this morning?”

  Kendall didn’t. “Are they on your property? You can tell them they are trespassing.”

  “I did,” Erwin said. “They aren’t leaving.”

  “They’ll go away in time. They always do.” she said. “In the meantime, if you have any problems—if any of the media harasses you—we can send a deputy out to make them comply.”

  Joe started to tear up, but he turned away so Kendall couldn’t see. His father put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Erwin said.

  “It isn’t your fault, Dad. “I just . . .”

  Kendall’s heart went out to the young man. He was fighting for composure in the way that young men do. No one can see them cry. No one can observe any trace of a weakness. Young men retreat into their own armor when they face disappointment, hurt, and the deepest kind of tragedy.

  “We’re committed to finding Brenda Nevins and bringing her to justice,” Kendall said.

  Erwin spoke up. “We know. I told Joe that.”

  Joe turned to look his father in the eye. “Dad, you didn’t even love Mom. You got rid of all her stuff. You’re hanging out with Sandy all the time now.”

  “Sandy and I are friends,” Erwin said, pulling back a little.

  “I don’t want to argue about that anymore,” Joe said. “I don’t believe you, and you can say whatever you want, but if you had taken better care of Mom none of this would have happened.”

  Kendall tried to defuse the building resentment.

  “No one could have predicted what happened,” she said. “We’ve gone over everything. The FBI has too. There’s no electronic bread crumb to follow that would lead anyone to believe something was happening between the two of them.”

  “Electronic,” Erwin repeated. “Why did you use that word?”

  “That’s how we do things,” Kendall said. “We look through data records—computer and phone, for example. There is nothing there.”

  Erwin shrugged. “That’s because Brenda Nevins didn’t have a phone or email.”

  Kendall couldn’t disagree. “Yes, that’s probably part of it.”

  “All right, no electronic trail, but what about other evidence? I mean, I think my mom was tricked,” Joe dried his eye on his shirtsleeve. “She might have been coerced, you know. There’s no real proof that she was really into that sick chick.”

  This was difficult. Very. Janie Thomas was dead. No matter what Erwin said, he had, in fact, moved on. Joe, however, was in limbo. He didn’t want to rewrite everything that he’d believed was true. That his mom and dad loved each other. That the smiling pictures of the family that he’d rescued from the trash where his father had discarded them were proof of something.

  It was only the remnant, the veneer of a lie.

  “We don’t know everything about what happened before Ms. Thomas and Brenda Nevins left the institution.”

  “But it’s possible that Mom didn’t go willingly, right?” Joe asked.

  Janie’s son wanted some glimmer of hope that his mother was someone that he knew.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it doesn’t appear that way at all. We have no evidence of coercion.”

  The younger man couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to rewrite all that he’d thought about his mother.

  “It looked like my mom was totally coerced in that video,” he said, his voice rising a little. “It didn’t look like she wanted to be there. I don’t know how you can say what you’re saying. She wasn’t like that. My mom was a good person. Everyone on the Internet and on TV is making fun of her, calling her names, deciding that she was a worthless, stupid piece of garbage, but that isn’t who she is at all.”

  Present tense had slipped into his words. Joe Thomas hadn’t accepted his mother’s death.

  “She was manipulated, Joe,” Kendall said. “She might have gone willingly with Brenda—and I believe she did—but once Brenda got what she wanted, your mom was no longer of value to her.”

  “She was of value to me,” Joe said.

  “To me too,” Erwin added.

  Joe’s composure once again started to crumble. “What kind of person just uses someone like they are nothing? Like they are trash? Disposable?”

  “She’s a monster,” Erwin added.

  Kendall took in their words. It was a hard question to answer. Janie’s husband was correct to a degree. There were very few people in the world who behaved the way Brenda Nevins did. In reality, that kind of evil was rare. It only seemed like there was a legion of them in the Pacific Northwest. It owed more to bad luck and a plethora of crime writers in the vicinity than to the gloom of the long winters. Indeed, there had been so many serial
killers like Gary Ridgway and narcissists like Diane Downs who killed to such a degree they’d become legendary. Book worthy. Film worthy. Brenda Nevins was clearly headed in that direction. She might, Kendall thought, be the most notorious of them all.

  “Look,” she said, focusing her eyes first on Erwin, then Joe, “we’re all doing what we can to apprehend her and bring her to justice. I’m on it. The FBI is on it. No one is going to stop looking for her.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Snuggled in her robe after a long, hot shower, Amber Turner wrapped a fluffy white towel around her head and flung herself on her bed to answer Elan’s call. Calls were rare. Texting was the preferred mode of communication between the two of them.

  “Hey you,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” Elan asked.

  “If you really want to know,” she said, shifting her weight on the bed and unfurling the towel, releasing her long red hair. “I just got out of the shower.”

  “I can picture that,” he said.

  “I’m sure you can,” she said back, putting him on speaker as she worked a wide-toothed comb down the length of sectioned hair.

  “Want to hang out today?” he asked.

  Amber continued with her hair, first with her fingertips as she parted safe passage sections for the comb. She loved her hair. It made her stand out in a crowd. She’d only colored it once, a dreadful burgundy that she regretted when it made her hair look the color of a strawberry popsicle.

  “So not a good color for you,” her friend Kelly had said in what was surely the understatement of the year. She thanked God it was only a temporary color and that after three weeks of washing her hair nightly it had returned to the beautiful and natural ginger tones that made the green of her eyes all the more lovely.

  “I guess so,” she said to Elan. “I have cheer at two, and that’ll last two hours.”

  “I could come and hang out at the track while you practice.”

  She smiled. “Sounds good to me,” she said.

  “Bye, Amber.”

  “Later, Elan.”

  Kelly had texted while she was talking to Elan.

  Kelly: You want to do something after cheer?

  Amber: Elan and I are going to do something.

  Kelly: OMG! Elan and you. What’s going on?

  Amber: Nothing. Not really. I guess I like him. He’s cute.

  Kelly: Yeah. Quiet. But cute.

  Amber: Not so quiet but definitely cute.

  Kelly: See you at school.

  Amber: K.

  Amber slid to the edge of her bed and looked around, her hair ready for the dryer. Her room needed a makeover. Her mom still treated her like a little kid, with white wicker furniture and white eyelet edged curtains. She’d asked a million times if she could do something to change things, up. Even paint. But her mom always deflected her requests by passing them off to her stepfather, Karl. He couldn’t care less about Amber. Everything was about Bryn, the new baby. Bryn this. Bryn that. Whatever they said, Amber had an answer. Never aloud, though. Always just inside her head, where remarks went unchallenged and, most important, unpunished.

  “We need to save up for private school for Bryn.”

  I didn’t get to go to private school.

  “Thank God Bryn got some melanin in her skin. She won’t burn like her big sister.”

  I don’t feel like a big sister. I wear sunblock, and it isn’t like being a ginger is a skin disorder.

  “We might need to move you downstairs so Bryn can be closer to us.”

  I’m not moving.

  “Bryn is the cutest baby ever.”

  She is cute. Maybe not the cutest ever.

  Amber finished getting dressed, grabbed her pom-poms and made a beeline for the door. Her mom, Sue, called over to her from the kitchen where Princess Bryn was being served something that smelled pretty good. Sue had been making homemade baby food, which she had never done for her eldest daughter.

  “Hey! You need to eat, Amber!”

  Amber looked over at her mom. Bryn had a big smile on her face, and Amber couldn’t help but return a smile of her own. She hated that she did. As much as things had changed since Bryn’s arrival, she couldn’t blame it all on the baby. Her mom was in her early forties and, as far as Amber could see, had no business getting pregnant again. Seventeen years apart didn’t make for great sibling relationships. In fact, it made for exactly what had transpired.

  A house divided.

  “I’m on cheer, Mom,” she said, on the move again. “We don’t eat. We all have eating disorders. Bye!”

  Sue made a face, a kind of exasperated expression that was the counterpart of an eye roll, without rolling the eyes, that is.

  “Not funny!” she said.

  The door shut, and Amber got into her car.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The image was dark. So dark that it would be doubtful just how much enhancement any decent tech lab could manage. The woman’s voice sputtered a few times, dipping in and out of what could be heard and what someone might imagine.

  “It’s me. Janie Thomas. I’m the superintendent of the Washington Corrections Center for Women, in Gig Harbor, Washington. I know that what I’m about to say will find little sympathy among some—if anyone sees or hears my message. I made a terrible mistake. Don’t even know how things went so wrong. Brenda Nevins has me. She’s made me do some terrible things. Really the worst things that a human can do to another, I did it. I’m so very, very sorry. I thought she loved me. I still think she might. But I also know there’s something tremendously wrong with her. She’s not normal. She’s not like other people. She has an on-and-off switch that she alone controls. I really thought that I could help her and by the same token, she could help me. I was wrong. I have blood on my hands. I’ve done things that I would never have thought possible, things for which I will need to atone for the rest of my life. I’m sorry, Erwin. I’m sorry, Joe. God knows that what I’ve done has hurt you both. Forgive me. Erwin, I forgive you for the affair with Sandy. I wasn’t there. I know that now.”

  Again, some movement of the device and another short pause.

  “She’s in the shower. She’ll be out in a minute. I don’t know where we are. She drugged me. I swear she did. Wherever we are, we have no cell service. Not at all. I’m recording this with the hope that I’ll find a way to upload when we move locations again. Tonight, I think. She’s coming now. She’s crazy. She’s dangerous. I love her.”

  In the background, Brenda’s voice is heard.

  “What in the hell are you doing now, Janie? God, I can’t leave you alone for a second, can I?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything, Brenda.”

  “Give me that.”

  “What?”

  “Give it to me!”

  “Brenda, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “You ungrateful bitch, you’ve been calling someone, haven’t you? Give me the phone.”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Ask if I care, you idiot.”

  “I love you, Brenda.”

  “You don’t know what love is, you stupid bitch. You make me sick. You’ve betrayed me, and I want to know who you’ve called.”

  “I didn’t call anyone!”

  Brenda’s face appeared on the black screen of the video, filling it with her beautiful, but menacing eyes. She blinked. She looked away, presumably in the direction of Janie Thomas.

  “Made a video, huh? Aren’t you the clever one, Janie? I never knew you had any aptitude for multimedia. I think I’ll watch your little video to see what you’ve said.”

  “I was just playing around, Brenda, honest,” Janie said. “Don’t bother.”

  A long pause.

  Brenda pointed the camera over to Janie, who appeared to be cowering on the bed. The bedspread was a solid blue without the benefit of a pattern to provide any clues as to where the taping had taken place. The framing of the shot was so tight that even the headboard had been crop
ped out.

  “I’ll decide just what you were doing,” Brenda said, “and I’ll also decide what I’m going to do about it.”

  The video went black.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Brad Nevins’s wizened face looked like it had been carved out of limestone. It was craggy, pale. He wore a Seahawks sweatshirt and Levi’s frayed along the edges by the heels of his shoes. His frame was angular and limp at the same time. It was as though all the life had been sucked out of him.

  From the window he watched Kendall as she parked on the street in front of the house in the Tri-Cities where he and his late wife Elise had raised their son Joe, who had been their pride and joy. He wasn’t like the other boys on the block. He was a homebody. A helper. He loved going out to the small ranch where the family kept some cattle and a few horses. When he was five and got his first pair of cowboy boots, he didn’t take them off for a week. Slept in them even.

  “You Stark?” he called over to her.

  “That’s me,” Kendall said, pressing the button on her key fob to lock the car and then feeling a little silly for doing so.

  Brenda’s former father-in-law’s neighborhood could not have been more tranquil. Every house was well maintained. Every bush trimmed with a delicate precision. It was had to believe, Kendall thought, as she walked up to meet Brad, that evil seeps its way so easily into a place like that. But it could. It did.

  The evil was Brenda Holloway Nevins.

  “Nice place,” she said.

  Brad smiled. “Kind of have to keep things nice around here. The neighbors set a high bar, and you’re banned from the block party if you don’t keep things just so.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

  “I wish,” he said. “But yes, I guess a little.”

  Brad led Kendall inside. Fresh track marks cut into the pile of the tawny brown carpet, indicating that Brad Nevins likely did a last-minute vacuum run over it before she arrived.

  “Made some coffee if you’d like a cup,” he said. “Don’t have any fancy teas if that’s what you’d prefer.”