Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  She smiled at the gesture. “Coffee’s fine.”

  “Right back,” he said, returning a beat later with a couple of Seahawks mugs. He set one on the table in front of her.

  “You need to use the bathroom?” he asked. “Long drive and all.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  Brad sipped his coffee and waited as Kendall settled in. “I wish I could say I’m glad you’re here,” he said, “because the truth is I don’t get much company. At least not any company I really want to keep.”

  “The media?” she asked.

  Brad set down his coffee mug. “Them too. But it’s mostly the cars with the looky-loos that drive by, pointing out where Joe lived, where he and Kara were last seen alive. Things had quieted down since, you know, everything happened. It’s been a lot of years.”

  “Seven years isn’t a long time when something like what happened to you and your family occurs,” Kendall said, wondering if he knew that a story like Brenda’s had the potential to last beyond his lifetime in the way that other serial killers’ had.

  Brad didn’t disagree. “I guess you’ve dealt with this a lot in your job,” he said. “Or, no offense, maybe you think you have. But I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure—and I go to a support group, and I’m kind of an expert—someone like Brenda doesn’t come along very often. Someone as conniving, cold, and evil as her is a freak of nature, and God doesn’t make many of them.”

  Brad Nevins got it. He was right. Brenda was in a league of her own.

  “And now she’s back,” Kendall said, easing him toward the conversation she’d come to have.

  “Right. Like the resurgence of the plague.”

  A plague. That was an apt description, she thought.

  “You think they’ll catch her?” he asked, hope rising slightly in his voice.

  She noted how he’d said, “they’ll” instead of “you’ll” when he phrased the question.

  Kendall turned off her phone and set it inside her purse. “She can’t hide forever,” she said.

  Brad allowed a slight smile to crease his jawline. “You don’t know Brenda. She can do whatever she wants. She always has.”

  * * *

  For the next hour and a half, Kendall Stark and Brad Nevins talked about everything that had happened to his son and granddaughter. How the sum of Brenda’s reign of terror had ended up killing his wife, too.

  “I tell people it was the breast cancer that took her,” he told her, “but I know that she could have survived it if she’d had more to live for. Brenda took away everything. I’m not saying my wife didn’t love me, but you are at that point in your life to know that the love she felt for her son and granddaughter was of a different measure. Brought more joy. And, really, a lot more hurt.”

  Kendall understood. Losing her own parents had been devastating. She cried a thousand tears over the loss and the sense of being left alone. Yet, deep down, she knew she’d lost them in the natural order of things. Parents die before their children. At least that’s the way it is supposed to go.

  Kendall had read the files and news accounts of Brad’s son’s and granddaughter’s murders. What he and his wife went through was beyond horrific. She’d devoured every word of the trial. She’d scoured the Internet for all she could find. She felt she had to know the details of those crimes for a better understanding of how Brenda operated.

  To know her better was to find her. At least Kendall hoped so.

  “I’m sure you’ve laid in bed and thought about this over and over,” she said. “Tell me about her.”

  “There probably isn’t enough time in the world to tell you what makes her tick, if that’s what you’re after,” he said.

  “I am,” Kendall answered. “I want to know. What do you remember about her metamorphosis from daughter-in-law to killer?”

  He’d finished his coffee and got up from his chair. He didn’t really need another cup. He needed to think. After disappearing into the kitchen, he returned, a peculiar look on his face.

  “That’s just the thing, Detective Stark,” he said, looking right at her with those sad eyes of his. “I don’t think there was any metamorphosis—your word—I think there was always ugliness behind everything she did.”

  “Talk to me. Tell me what you remember about her. We don’t need to revisit the crimes that killed your son and granddaughter. There has been plenty written about all of that. I’ve read it.”

  “There’s about to be more,” he said.

  The remark puzzled her.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “A book,” he answered. “Someone is working on a book. Movie people have called too. But I don’t want a damn thing to do with them. They couldn’t get it right if they tried. No one would believe it.”

  “Believe what?” she asked.

  “The things she did.”

  “I need an example, Mr. Nevins,” Kendall said. “I want to stop her. I want to understand just who she is and what is underneath her skin, what it is that drives her and, more than anything, how to stop her.”

  “Tall order,” he said. “Skyscraper tall.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  He sat back down in his chair. “Want to know the first time I met her?”

  “That’s a start,” she said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Brenda Holloway was sixteen when Joe Nevins first brought her home to meet his parents. He’d begged them ahead of time not to call him “Little Joe” as they had since the day they brought him home from the hospital.

  “It’s embarrassing,” he said. “I’m not little.”

  That was true. He wasn’t. At seventeen, he was a six-footer, packing on muscle to a frame that needed very little padding. He had somewhat chiseled features like his father’s, but his dark, dark hair was thick and wavy. Just like his mother’s. Joe had been an achiever. He’d been on the debate team, was student body president, and was at the top of his class academically. He was also an athlete, having finished in the top five at the all-state track meet in two events—long jump and pole vault. His thighs bulged with muscle and he’d worked hard the summer he brought Brenda over to build up his chest through a weight-lifting regimen at a local gym.

  “I don’t think he would have taken steroids without a major push from that one,” Brad Nevins said to Kendall Stark as they sat in the living room of the family home.

  “That one” was Brenda, of course.

  Joe was an only child, the answer to his mother’s dreams after a pair of miscarriages early into the Nevins marriage. The couple waited an excruciatingly long five years before they tried to conceive again.

  “My wife had a lot of depression about losing those two babies. It bothered me, too. Really it did. But not like her. After the second one, she took a job at the Merry-Go-Round, a children’s clothing store downtown. It was like she had to have the hurt flung at her over and over. I don’t know, like a person who’d had gastric bypass surgery goes to work at the Cheesecake Factory or maybe an ice cream store? Just seeing what you can’t have over and over was like a strange punishment she put on herself. I told her we should try one more time to have a baby of our own, but honestly, I wasn’t really sure it was a good idea.”

  “But it worked, right? That was Joe?” Kendall asked.

  “Right,” Brad said. “Thankfully there were no more miscarriages. Just a beautiful little boy.”

  Once Joe came home from the hospital, Brad said the boy stayed in their bedroom in a crib until he was almost two. His wife knew that babying a boy wasn’t a good idea, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “‘He’s my miracle,’ my wife said, over and over, as she rocked him to sleep. ‘We waited so long for him and now that he’s here, nothing will ever hurt him.’ ”

  Those words were almost a curse, Kendall thought.

  * * *

  The day Brenda showed up for the first time was the beginning of the end of the Nevins family’s hard-fought happiness, th
ough it would take some time for her to do what she wanted to do.

  “Don’t judge me,” Brad told Kendall, “because what I have to tell you has the tendency to not go over too well, you know, with women.”

  “Trust me,” Kendall said, “I’ve heard everything from everyone.”

  “Fine,” he said, still sizing her up. “I’ll tell you exactly how it went down, and at the end of what I have to say, you’ll wonder why it was that we didn’t try to cut that relationship off at the knees. I have an answer for that. But first, the story.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was the middle of summer, and eastern Washington was on full blast, preheat. It had been six days straight of egg-frying-on-the-asphalt weather. In fact, a couple of kids made the news by actually frying two eggs on the hood of a cop car parked outside the precinct. That hot.

  But not as hot as Brenda.

  She wore a cropped top and cutoffs that she’d made from Levi 501s. Her hair was different then, a coppery color with blond streaks. On anyone else, it would have looked ridiculous, but not on Brenda. She somehow managed to find a way to attract attention and still appear as if she wasn’t even trying.

  Both parents noticed that their son behaved differently around this new girlfriend. Different than he had been around others. He’d always been a gentleman when it came to how he treated girls. With Brenda, he was even more attentive. Almost too much. She was only sixteen, but it was clear she’d mastered the art of getting a man to do whatever she wanted him to do.

  “Joey won’t take me to a concert at the Gorge that I want to go to,” she said as she sucked Pepsi through a straw.

  “Don’t have the dough right now,” he said.

  “Dan says he wants to take me.”

  “Then go with him,” Joe said.

  “But, baby, I want to go with you. It would be zero fun without you.”

  “I don’t have the money.”

  “You have a birthday coming up,” she said, looking over at Elise Nevins.

  A little startled, Elise answered. “Yes, you do. I think tickets to the show would be a great gift, don’t you?”

  Joe stared at his feet. “Pretty expensive, Mom.”

  “You only turn eighteen once,” Brenda persisted.

  A few minutes later, Brenda and Brad were alone in the living room. Mother and son were in the kitchen. Brenda sat in the sofa directly across from the recliner where Brad took his place.

  “So hot out there,” she said.

  “A scorcher,” he said.

  “I thought you guys had air-conditioning,” Brenda said.

  “We do.”

  “Feels hot in here.”

  “Set at a constant seventy-four,” Brad answered. “Could be cooler, but we don’t want the power company to get every last dime we have.”

  She sipped her Pepsi and moved her legs under her on the sofa. In doing so, she allowed a flash of her vagina to show. She wore no underwear. The fabric that held her cutoffs together was like a twist of yarn.

  “That’s better,” she said. “More comfortable now.”

  Her eyes locked on his.

  You did that on purpose, Brad thought.

  * * *

  “You think she flashed you intentionally?” Kendall asked.

  “No women does so unintentionally,” Brad said. “I’m not saying that a woman wearing sexy clothes is an open invitation for some guy to stare at her. Say something to her. But, Detective, you have to know what I mean. There was something about the way she moved her legs, splitting them slightly apart and holding that pose just long enough to make sure I got a good look. It wasn’t anything I’d never seen before. I’ve had my share. But here’s the real deal, she was showing me what she had—not because she wanted me to get all jacked about her hotness—but because she wanted me to see what my son was getting.”

  Kendall was unsure how to respond to that. She’d never pegged Brenda’s former father-in-law as a narcissist, but here he was making it all about him.

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Because of what she did next.”

  Kendall narrowed her gaze. “Which was?”

  “She told me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I’ll never forget it.”

  * * *

  After dinner, after Elise had given an early birthday check to Joe, Brad found himself alone with Brenda in the kitchen cleaning up while mother and son sat in the living room talking.

  “I saw the way you looked at me,” Brenda said. Her voice was low, only loud enough for Brad to hear.

  Brad bristled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You want my pussy,” she said. “Well, you can’t have it. It’s for your son. If you look at me that way one more time, I’ll tell him. I swear that I will. I won’t be victimized by a lecherous old man.”

  Brad tried to keep his cool. It wasn’t easy.

  “You’ve got it all wrong, and you’re really pissing me off,” he said.

  She looked at him like he was nothing.

  “You get pissed off when you don’t get what you want, right? I get that. Boy, do I. My dad’s like that too. But I will tell you one thing for sure. I will never let anyone stop me from what I want. I want your Joe, and if you judge me, push me, tell me anything I don’t want to hear, I’ll make sure you never see him again.”

  Brad could feel his face warm, but he didn’t want to make a scene.

  “Where is this coming from? What happened to you to make you such a paranoid mess?”

  Brenda’s eyes sparkled. She loved the confrontation. It was like having sex in a public place. She had to be quiet. She didn’t want anyone but Brad to hear.

  “I saw the way you looked at me,” she said one more time.

  “I didn’t look,” he said.

  “Right now you’re thinking about my pussy,” she said.

  She’s nuts.

  “I’m not.”

  Joe appeared in the kitchen.

  “What are you two talking about? Looks intense.” He smiled, his disarming Joe-smile.

  Brenda wrapped her arms around her boyfriend. “Your dad was just telling me that he hopes we have fun at the concert.”

  “It’ll be awesome,” Joe said, smiling happily.

  “Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Mom. I’m going to take Bren home now.”

  “So nice to finally meet you, Brenda,” Elise said.

  “Yeah, real nice,” Brad said.

  * * *

  For the next hour Brad Nevins seethed. He drank a couple of beers and let the TV flicker some sports coverage in his face, though he really didn’t—couldn’t—pay attention and would have been at a loss to tell anyone the sport he was watching, let alone the score.

  “Joey,” he said, when his son returned, “I need to talk to you about Brenda.”

  “Dad,” Joe said, “let’s not.”

  “We need to.”

  Joe pushed back. “No, we don’t.”

  “You’re getting into something here that’s not quite right. I’m not sure how to say it.”

  “Look, Dad, I know what you did. She told me. It’s OK. I understand. I’m not mad at you.”

  “At me? What for?”

  “You know. For taking a look. She’s beautiful. It happens all the time. Whenever we go out, some guy comes up to her, comes on to her. Tries to get a peek. She’s hot. But I don’t care. She’s mine.”

  Brad was dumbfounded. His son was mesmerized by the girl. To fight him would only push him closer to her. Even so, he just couldn’t let it go.

  “I never took a look,” he said. “She practically did the splits in front of me with no panties on.”

  Joe gave his dad a look.

  “Don’t go there. She’s not like that. She’s classy.”

  * * *

  “Detective,” Brad Nevins said to Kendall Stark, “there was nothing classy about Brenda. She took an incident and twisted it around to serve whatever it w
as she was after. The concert tickets, I guess. I think that’s why she did that. She knew I didn’t want to pay for those tickets. I wanted something more practical for his birthday. College money. Elise, on the other hand, just wanted to make our boy happy.”

  “Moms do that,” Kendall said.

  Brad looked over at a family portrait on a side table. “Of course they do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, and I want you to make a note of this in your notebook. Dads don’t hit on their son’s girlfriends. They don’t. I don’t.”

  Kendall fished for a notebook, though she didn’t really need one.

  “She did it to you, is that what you’re saying?” she asked.

  He took off his glasses and looked at Kendall. “Yeah,” he said. “And I know what you’re thinking. You don’t think a girl that young could be that manipulative and, honestly, that scary kind of devious? Well I know of one who can. And she’s the reason you’re sitting right here, right now.”

  They talked some more about those early days with Brenda hanging around, trying to keep her extra-sharp claws embedded deeply in Joe’s back. It was a rocky relationship. By the time Joe had graduated from high school and was college bound, he’d sworn off Brenda for the last time.

  “Elise coached me on this. Told me not to drag the girl through the mud because by then I hated the sight of her. Told me that ‘love is strange’ and we’d best be careful in case she came back into his life.”

  “Right,” Kendall said, “which she did.”

  “Yeah. Boy, did she ever. Joey was finishing up his degree at the University of Washington when he came home and said not only had they gotten back together, they were going to get married.”

  “That was a shock, wasn’t it?” Kendall asked.

  “Damn straight. Completely. We didn’t even know they were seeing each other. I guess it’s because he knew that I couldn’t stand her. From the very beginning, from that very first day, I understood she was going to be a major problem. I just didn’t know how big.”

  “He was in love with her,” Kendall said.

  He exhaled. “Even better. She said she was pregnant.”

  “But she wasn’t,” Kendall said. “Was she?”