Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  At first authorities suspected a robbery gone wrong—but the till was full and Jimmy’s wallet hadn’t been taken from his jeans pocket. It had long been suspected that the crime scene had been tampered with and that the man behind the murder was the chief of police. The evidence left at the scene was circumstantial at best—a shoe print matched the size of the chief’s. Later his wife told investigators that he’d come home with bloody clothes.

  It was the way things were handled at the time. The facts about the chief that had emerged over time were troubling. He’d been the only one to secure the evidence, elements of which swiftly went missing. And later, adding credence to the rumors of his potential involvement, he was convicted some years later of sexual assault and sent to prison.

  Birdy wondered about two things as she gave up on the dying and possibly dangerous oven. She wondered why it was that her personal frame of reference for every little thing seemed to tie into murder? It was a bowling alley, a place of smelly shoes, rock and roll, and over-foamed beers. That’s what most people thought. Not her. A park on a sunny day? That’s where a girl had been raped. A shopping center she passed by occasionally in Tacoma? That’s where a little boy went missing before a K-9 team found his body in a culvert two miles from the scene.

  She couldn’t answer exactly why it was that she often thought in those terms. Occupational hazard maybe? Sometimes she tossed it all off as something vague, that the tendency to imprint on things in a dark way was just how she was wired. Somehow she always could see the undertones of the grim under the sparkling veneer of pretty.

  And the other question that weighed on her mind just then? Exactly what time did the appliance store open the next morning?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Hello Deli was one of those restaurants that prided itself on its use of fresh ingredients. Enormous posters of fruits and vegetables misted with water adorned the walls. Brad Nevins and Kendall Stark sat under an image of an eggplant that had to be at least five feet in length.

  “I hear the eggplant is good,” Brad said with a smile.

  “Really? They have eggplant here?” Kendall smiled back.

  A young man named Terry brought them water and ran through the daily specials with the enthusiasm of an undertaker.

  “I’ll let you chew on that for a minute,” he said.

  Kendall settled on a soup and salad combination, and Brad decided a meatball sub would hit the spot.

  “Chelsea Hyatt owns this place?” Kendall asked.

  “Yeah. Though it’s not Hyatt anymore. She’s had a few husbands. No. 3, I think. Last name is Morgan.”

  “She and Brenda knew each other quite well,” Kendall said.

  “Yep. Thick as thieves, those two. Probably accurate in every way.”

  “Grew up together?” Kendall asked.

  “Nope. Supposedly met after Joey and Brenda got married. Brenda was working at the front desk at the Allstate office on 3rd and Chelsea was some kind of an aspiring agent—though she had a clerical job too.”

  Terry came back, and they ordered.

  “Anything to drink?” he asked.

  “Water’s fine,” Kendall said.

  “I’ll take a beer. Mac and Jack’s if you have it on tap.”

  “We do. Twenty-two ounce or sixteen?”

  “Sixteener.”

  As they waited for their food, Kendall caught a glimpse of Chelsea. She was a ketchup-colored redhead with cat-eye glasses and distressed jeans. It was either the look of a hipster or the look of a woman who raided her aunt’s closet.

  “Chelsea never testified at trial, did she?” Kendall asked.

  Brad shook his head. “Nope. She disappeared right after the murders. Went to St. Croix or some paradise like that. Laid low. Came back here long after the dust settled.”

  “They really wanted to find her,” Kendall said.

  “Yeah, they did,” Brad said. “But they didn’t. And I guess they didn’t need her after all. Got a conviction. That’s all that mattered.”

  The food came. The soup looked good. It was a broccoli cheese concoction with freshly made sourdough croutons for crunch. The salad, however, was a sad affair. All limp iceberg lettuce and carrot shavings. The meatball sub was the superior choice, but not the kind of thing Kendall would eat while conducting an interview about a criminal case. Sauce on the front of her blouse would evoke blood spatter.

  And that wouldn’t be good at all.

  “She didn’t do any media, did she?”

  He picked at his food. “Chelsea said she had nothing to tell, but I think she was scared about what she knew.”

  Kendall set down her fork. Good-bye Deli would be a better name for the restaurant.

  “How come you think that?” she said.

  “She sent us a sympathy card right after Joe and Kara’s funeral. She added a note to the standard ‘thinking of you at this difficult time’ imprint. It said something along the lines of ‘I’m personally sorry for your loss.’”

  “Personally?”

  “Yeah,” Brad said, while chomping on his sub. “Weird, huh?”

  “Very.”

  “Elise ran into her after she came back to town. It was here. She opened up this place. Elise said that Chelsea told her that she didn’t mean anything by using the word ‘personally’ and that she’d used it just to emphasize that she was sorry for the pain we were going through.”

  Interesting.

  “Did you know her?” Kendall asked.

  “She was in Joey’s class. We’d run into her over the years at school events, but no, for someone who was ‘personally’ sorry, she sure didn’t have much of a connection to us.”

  Kendall finished her soup, which was ten times better than the salad, and got up.

  “I’m going to see if she’ll talk to me,” she said.

  “Good luck,” he said. “She’s pretty buttoned up. Hasn’t said a word about Brenda that I know about. Never been in the papers. Or TV. Radio silence, that one.”

  * * *

  Chelsea Morgan indeed was a hipster. She had not raided her aunt’s closet. As she leaned over the computer behind the counter, a feather tattoo on her shoulder caught the light.

  Definitely a hipster’s move.

  “Chelsea?” Kendall asked.

  Chelsea turned around. “Is everything all right with your meal?”

  “Oh yes,” Kendall said, knowing that there was no point in saying that the salad was terrible. “I wanted to talk to you about something else.”

  Chelsea looked at the detective warily and logged off the computer. “What can I help you with?” she asked.

  Kendall told her who she was and that she was in town to find out more about Brenda Nevins.

  Chelsea looked away. “I knew her a long time ago.”

  “I know,” Kendall said. “But you might know something about her that will help us find her.”

  “No,” Chelsea said. “I really wouldn’t be able to help.”

  Kendall persisted. “Why is that?”

  “Because I don’t want to get involved,” Chelsea said, her eyelids fluttering. “I don’t want her after me. She’s on the run now, and I don’t want to give her any reason to make a pit stop in my corner of the world.”

  “Have you heard from her?” Kendall asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Chelsea said. “I wouldn’t expect to hear from her. She and I are not friends.”

  “I know you saw her in prison, Chelsea.”

  Chelsea’s face fell. She looked away at Terry, who was taking an order from a couple across the restaurant. Her eyes scraped the rest of Hello Deli and landed on Brad Nevins. She broke her gaze and looked back at Kendall.

  “Look,” she said, “I can’t have this conversation here.”

  “Where can you talk? When?”

  “I can meet you at River Front Park. There are some benches by the wading pool. I’ll see you there in an hour.”

  “All right,” Kendall said. “I’ll be there.�
��

  Kendall returned to the table where Brad Nevins was waiting.

  “She’s going to meet me,” she said. “I’ll stop by your place after. Now, how do I get to River Front Park?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The wading pool at River Front Park was bone dry. A sign posted nearby touted that the empty pool was a “sign of progress” and that soon it would be “better than ever.” Kendall Stark sat on a bench and watched a man and his black Lab play Frisbee on the browned-out lawn that rolled from the parking lot to the river’s edge. She fished her phone out of her purse and texted Steven that she wouldn’t be home until late that night.

  Don’t wait up. I promised Cody some Cheetos

  today. Can you give him some? Love you!

  She added a heart emoji because she couldn’t stop herself from doing so. She’d become obsessed with emojis. It was a habit she knew she had to break.

  Chelsea Morgan parked next to Kendall’s white SUV. She climbed out of her Jeep and walked across the lot to the bench where Kendall waited.

  “I don’t want to be involved,” Chelsea said.

  Kendall looked up. “Then why are you here?”

  “Because I can feel the heat being turned up,” Chelsea said, sliding into the bench next to Kendall. “I know that she’s out there somewhere, and I know that if she’s not caught more people will die. And I can’t have that . . .” she said, her voice fading into the breeze.

  “On you?”

  “Something along those lines,” she said, her jaw tightening and her fingers nervously playing with her car keys. “I don’t think that I had anything to do with what happened.”

  Kendall watched the Labrador pull the Frisbee from the air, and then turned to face Chelsea. She studied her face. It was lined. Tired. Marked with anguish. She was afraid, that was so evident. She’d felt ambushed in her restaurant, and there was nothing Kendall could do about that. She was on a mission, and Chelsea might have something she needed.

  “When those words come out of your mouth it sounds as though you are trying to convince yourself of something,” Kendall said.

  “Maybe I am,” Chelsea said.

  Over the next hour, Chelsea talked about her former best friend Brenda Holloway Nevins. She started at the beginning—though it wasn’t as early as Kendall had thought. While they went to the same high school, they weren’t friends.

  “She couldn’t be bothered with someone like me,” Chelsea said.

  “I wasn’t an A-lister.” She laughed a little. “I mean, I have come a long way, but back then, not so much. Brenda was a climber. She was looking for people she could use to get what she wanted.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t like her at all,” Kendall said.

  Chelsea looked away, her face reddening. “I didn’t. Not at all. But here’s the truth. I was kind of starstruck by her. She was so perfect. So beautiful. There was a coldness to her, but it didn’t detract from how pretty she was. Sometimes photos look cold, but people still look and admire. You know?”

  “Yes, I do,” Kendall said. “And sometimes aloofness draws people closer.”

  Chelsea folded her arms around her chest.

  “Right. Right,” she said. “The fact that she was unapproachable only made kids want to get closer to her, like they’d cuddled up with a tiger or something and could brag about it. She’d flick away anyone like a bug on her arm. If you didn’t interest her in a way she could exploit, she didn’t have the time of day for you. Not a second.”

  “How did Joe fit in to all of this?” Kendall asked.

  Chelsea took out a cigarette. Her fingers trembled as she held the lighter to it.

  “He was everything she wanted,” she said, exhaling. “At the time. He was good-looking. Had an awesome body—especially when she got him to juice up a little—and was smart. Ambitious. She thought that he could lead her out of town and into some fantasy she’d concocted for herself. He was a nice guy, no doubt. But really, he was never going to be her ticket out of here.”

  “You said you weren’t friends in high school,” Kendall said. “How’d you reconnect?”

  Silence hung in the air. “That’s the bad part,” Chelsea said. “That’s the part where I feel kind of responsible for what happened.”

  Chelsea looked over at the river. She glanced around the parking lot. It was as though she wanted to make sure no one was there to hear what she had to say.

  That no one being Brenda, of course.

  “Why, Chelsea?” Kendall asked. “What was it?”

  Chelsea inhaled deeply and tapped her cigarette on the edge of the bench. Ash floated to the pavement.

  “The insurance company,” she spat out. “That’s where I worked. Where we worked. It gave her ideas. I gave her ideas.”

  * * *

  Brenda was alone in the employee break room when Chelsea brought in a brown-bag lunch and sat down at the table across from her. Brenda was reading a copy of Vogue and picking at the congealed contents of the bottom of her Cup O’ Noodles.

  “Sad-sack lunches,” Brenda said.

  “We make a great pair,” Chelsea said.

  “We really should go out for lunch sometime,” Brenda said, getting up and tossing the Styrofoam cup into a trash receptacle with gummed-up hinges.

  “I’m on a budget,” Chelsea said.

  Brenda made a face. “Me too, unfortunately.”

  “You’ve got a husband, don’t you?” Chelsea asked, though of course she knew the answer.

  “I do,” Brenda said. “Joe’s working things out with his business. Still. It’ll be a long time before we get anywhere, finances-wise. I just don’t know how long it’ll take.”

  “I’ll never get anywhere,” Chelsea said.

  “I know,” Brenda said, looking Chelsea over like she was meat in the “Manager’s Choice” section of the cooler in the grocery store.

  The remark and the look were callous. Ice cold. But Chelsea barely winced. It was if Brenda had given her a double dose of reality. By slamming her, Brenda was offering a great kindness. At least, that’s how it felt whenever Brenda put her down. It was true, she was never getting out of there. Not ever.

  “The only way I’ll ever get a ticket out of town is if I’m the beneficiary on some millionaire’s life insurance,” Chelsea said, letting her words dangle in the popcorn-scented air of the employee break room.

  “Good luck with that, Chelsea,” Brenda said.

  Chelsea went over to the coffee pot and poured some of the overboiled brew into a cup.

  “Thanks for reminding me,” she said.

  Brenda scraped her nails on a bug bite that was giving her grief. Blood oozed and she watched it bead up, then roll to the tabletop.

  “You don’t need to be a millionaire to have a lot of money on your head,” Brenda said. “Do you?”

  Chelsea sat back down. She handed Brenda a white paper coffee filter.

  “Blot the blood with this,” she said. “And no you don’t. You just have to be the beneficiary of someone who’s purchased a large policy.”

  “Like your husband?” Brenda asked.

  The wheels were turning.

  Brenda soaked up the blood droplet. “Look,” she said, unfolding the filter to reveal a kind of inkblot.

  “I made a bloody heart,” Brenda said.

  Chelsea leaned over. It was gross, for sure. But it was a bright red heart made of blood.

  “Cool,” she said.

  * * *

  Chelsea grew quiet, and Kendall turned toward her on the park bench. Brenda’s former coworker and friend refused to look into the detective’s eyes. She sat facing the river.

  “Something happened after that encounter, didn’t it?” Kendall asked.

  Chelsea stayed mute.

  Kendall pushed a little more. “Don’t you want to stop her?”

  Still quiet.

  “Think of Kara and Joe,” the detective said. ‘Think of the three latest victims. She’s killed five people,
Chelsea. Do you want that number to keep growing?”

  “She killed six, Detective.”

  Kendall repeated the number. “Six?”

  “Yeah,” Chelsea said. “We had a temp working for us at Allstate. Her name was Addie Lane. She was twenty-three. She’d come from Manpower to work on a new filing project that none of us wanted to do.”

  “What happened to her?” Kendall asked.

  Chelsea swallowed hard. “Brenda happened to her.”

  Chelsea needed to be more direct.

  “I don’t follow you, Chelsea,” Kendall said.

  “I don’t want to get into trouble. I’ve been running from this for all of my adult life, and I thought I could just sweep it under the rug. Forget about it. Never even think about it. But I can’t do that. I haven’t been able to do that. I see Addie’s face in my mind’s eye every now and then.”

  Kendall caught her gaze just then. Terror and regret poured from Chelsea’s eyes. She reached over and put her arm around the sobbing woman’s shoulders, touching her dream-catcher tattoo.

  This next question was a tough one to ask anyone. Chelsea was vulnerable. She was scared. What she was telling Kendall would never have been disclosed if Brad hadn’t taken her to her deli that day.

  “Did you help her?” Kendall asked.

  Chelsea bristled, which brought Kendall immediate relief. She liked her and felt sorry for her. Secrets can be an enormous burden. She knew that first hand.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t know what happened to her until after Addie missed work. I swear I didn’t know a damn thing about what Brenda was up to. I would have stopped her if I had.”

  Kendall believed her. “I’m sure you would have, Chelsea. Tell me what happened. Talk to me. I will help you any way that I can.”

  Chelsea swiveled over to face Kendall. Her eyes were wet, but she wasn’t crying.

  “After Addie died,” she said, “a bunch of us went to her service. It wasn’t like we knew her that well, but Brenda insisted it was the right thing to do. She said that we were her ‘office family’ and we needed to show support. I had no idea what was going to happen there. Really I didn’t.”