Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  “I wanted to talk some more,” she said.

  “Let me take you home. You can get your car in the morning.”

  “I can drive, Detective,” Brenda’s friend said, nearly slumping to the floor. “How do you think I got here?”

  Kendall helped her up. “You got here because you were lucky. I’ll drive you home so you and others on the road are safe.”

  “Can we have a drink first?” Chelsea asked.

  “You’ve had enough, Chelsea.”

  “You can never have enough.”

  “You can,” Kendall said. “And you have.”

  Kendall walked Chelsea to her car to get her purse. A minute later, they were in Kendall’s SUV heading toward Chelsea’s townhome on Morning Glory Ave.

  “One thing I don’t get,” Kendall said, though she was unsure how much Chelsea could actually process—her head was bobbing up and down. Her neck was a Slinky. Her eyes were blue marbles.

  “Get who?” Chelsea said, cracking the window and letting the evening air flow over her.

  “What,” Kendall said. “It’s a what. What I don’t understand is Brenda’s need for the spotlight. It’s psychotic.”

  “Cheerleaders. Psychotic.”

  “Huh?” Kendall said, looking at Chelsea and hoping she didn’t vomit in her car.

  “When we were in high school, Brenda was borderline cool. She was pretty enough, but her personality wasn’t really outgoing. She was this close to becoming something amazing, but she didn’t quite get there. She ran for cheerleader and didn’t make it. That crushed her. I didn’t know her well then, but something happened to her after that.”

  “Something like what?” Kendall asked, as the lights of the car behind them filled the space of the SUV.

  Chelsea didn’t answer. Her marble eyes rolled some more. Her Slinky neck stretched for the open window.

  “Are you sick?” Kendall asked.

  “I’m okay,” Chelsea slurred, turning to face the driver. “Feel like your car needs a tune-up or something. Rides really rough.”

  The car was fine. It was the passenger that was a mess.

  “When she didn’t get on the squad that time, she turned into a mega bitch. She would ice out people that couldn’t help her get to wherever she wanted to go. She was so fixated on what those other girls had and what she didn’t have. I wasn’t surprised when I read somewhere that she’d gotten a boob job. She thought that was part of her problem.”

  Kendall parked and retrieved Chelsea from the passenger seat. She led her to the door. Chelsea tried to insert her key, but wasn’t having an easy time of it.

  “Let me,” Kendall said, turning the key in the lock.

  “When we were working at the insurance company, she told me one time that she was going to be famous one day. Her exact line was ‘One way or another, I’ll show those bitches that I’m better than the bunch of them.’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Chelsea’s town house on the outskirts of town was decorated with vintage and modern style that left no room for clutter. Most of the furnishings were black with a few pops of tangerine here and there. It looked elegant. Halloween chic, Kendall thought as she surveyed the living room, bracing Chelsea from slumping to the aggregate floor of the entryway. After shutting the door, she led Chelsea to a black leather chair and made her way to the kitchen to get her something to drink.

  The refrigerator was stocked with fruits, vegetables, and diet soda. No juice. Kendall retrieved a glass and filled it while she looked through the kitchen window to a grove of weeping redwoods that the landscaper must have thought were beautiful. To Kendall the hunched-over trees looked sad.

  Weeping indeed, she thought.

  “Drink this,” she said, handing Chelsea a glass of tap water. “Lots of water will help.”

  Chelsea murmured a thank-you, and her eyes fluttered a little as she drank. “You’ve done this too.”

  “Not since college,” Kendall said, “but yes. I’ve had my moments too. Just about everyone has. You must never get behind the wheel like this again. Promise me? It isn’t about you. It’s about harming someone else.”

  “Understood,” Chelsea said, the word slurred. “Thanks for bringing me home.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m glad you’re safe now.”

  Chelsea stared up at Kendall. “Am I?”

  “What?” Kendall asked.

  “Safe?”

  “I think so, Chelsea. Why wouldn’t you be?”

  Chelsea fiddled with the rim of her now-empty water glass. “Brenda thrives on revenge,” she said, “in case you haven’t noticed.”

  It was the kind of understatement that didn’t need a comment of any kind. Brenda thrived on all kinds of evil—rage, jealousy, and envy. The list was long and complicated.

  Thriving on revenge was so right. Chelsea knew it in her bones. Kendall could see it. It was as if Brenda knew how to unravel the good in anyone and spin a noose with it.

  “You’re safe,” she repeated.

  “Says you,” Chelsea said, her tone accusing. “You don’t know her. You might think you do, but you don’t. You couldn’t. Her kind of abnormality when it comes to how she uses and abuses people . . . is almost like she’s one of those alien body snatchers or something. You know?”

  “I think so,” Kendall said, retreating back to the kitchen to get more water. Chelsea was going to have the mother of all hangovers in the morning. When she returned, water in hand, Brenda’s pal from the insurance company was slumped a little lower in the chair.

  “She won’t harm you, Chelsea. She doesn’t know that I’ve talked to you. She won’t ever know.”

  “Like I told you, you don’t know Brenda,” she said, beginning to drift off.

  “You’re right,” Kendall answered. “I don’t know her. That’s why I’m here. If you were so afraid of her, Chelsea, why did you visit her in prison?”

  “I went once. I only went because I had to.”

  “Had to? But why?”

  “Because she told me to. You don’t say no to her. You just don’t.”

  “What does she have on you?”

  Chelsea looked away.

  “Is it Addie?”

  Chelsea stayed mute and then, after a very long time, indicated her high school yearbook, over on the shelf by the TV. Kendall went to get it.

  “We were pretty happy back then,” she said, flipping through the pages. “At least I was.”

  Kendall watched as Chelsea Morgan opened a page showing the cheerleading squad. There were eight girls, four in the back, four in front. The image was in black and white. Someone had taken a thick red pen and colored an X through four of them. Underneath the photograph someone with loopy, girlish handwriting had written:

  Four little bitches in a row.

  “Brenda?” Kendall asked.

  Chelsea looked at Kendall. “Yeah. She hated those girls more than anything.”

  “She hated a lot of people,” Kendall said. “There are eight girls pictured here, why those four?”

  “Terry because her dad always bought her a new car. Stephanie because her mom was beautiful and nice to everyone. I can’t remember why she hated the other two.” She peered back into the yearbook. “Anna,” she said, tapping her fingertip on a girl who’s face had been crossed out, “not sure, but it could be that she was straight A’s. We all kind of hated that she was both pretty and smart. I don’t recall anything about Charlotte. She died in a boating accident the year we graduated.”

  Kendall thought to ask Chelsea if Brenda had gone boating with Charlotte, but she was starting to fall asleep.

  “Kendall,” Chelsea said, using her first name for the first time, “there is something else that I haven’t told you.”

  “And what’s that?” Kendall asked, hoping it was about Charlotte and the boating accident.

  It wasn’t.

  “It’s really hard to talk about. It’s something I never talk about. It’s something that is so terrible, n
ot for what I did. I’m fine with that part of it. It’s terrible for who I did it with. I regret it. I really, really do.”

  “Tell me,” Kendall said.

  Chelsea looked away.

  “Brenda and I were more than friends—we were lovers,” she said, her eyes still focused on something across the room. Or maybe focused on nothing at all. “That overstates it a little,” she said. “Brenda didn’t know how to love anyone.”

  The disclosure startled Kendall a little.

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “I’m not gay,” Chelsea said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. I took a walk on the wild side with Brenda in the back room at the insurance company. At the Mountain View Motel too. I think we did it in the very room you’re staying in.” She raised her gaze to meet Kendall’s blue eyes, now full of concern.

  “Isn’t that weird?” Chelsea asked, looking for confirmation where she was hoping to find it.

  “Weird,” Kendall repeated. “I thought she was in love with Joe? I thought she had the mechanic on the side?”

  Chelsea’s eyes were hooded. It was like she’d made some big reveal and needed to rest up. She was ready to fall asleep. Kendall pulled a throw from the back of the sofa on the other side of the room and covered her.

  “She did,” Chelsea said. “With Brenda we were all on the side, like the salad bar at Sizzler. Brenda knew the power of attention and the power that came from an intimate encounter. She knew that if she could get someone skin-to-skin close, she could get them to do whatever she wanted. Remember that. That’s how she operates. Skin to skin.”

  “When did you hear from her last?”

  No answer.

  “Chelsea?”

  She was asleep. The mother in Kendall took over, and she pulled the blanket over Chelsea’s feet so she’d be warm. Satisfied, she looked around the town house. Nothing out of place. Classy. Bland almost. Among the empty, shiny spaces, she noticed one item of interest—a magazine with Brenda’s picture on the cover peeked out from under a book on Cayman Island Style.

  Chelsea was no longer one of Brenda’s lovers, but she’d never forgotten her. No matter how far she’d run away. No matter how guilty she’d felt for whatever it was they’d done at the insurance company. No matter for any of it. Brenda had her talons hooked into Chelsea.

  And she would never let go.

  Neither, it seemed, would Chelsea.

  Kendall wrote a note that she was taking the yearbook and let herself out.

  * * *

  Kendall looked down at her phone as another alert came. Brenda Nevins was nothing if not prolific. She pressed the play button for Brenda’s latest video missive.

  Brenda was fiddling with something next to the keyboard when the camera started recording. She looked up and faced the little lens head-on.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I’m still getting the hang of this. Don’t get me wrong, I adore technology of any kind. So many tools available now to find out where people are, what they are doing and, of course, if they’ve been loyal to me. I’m all about loyalty. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  She took a sip of water from a clear plastic bottle.

  “Talking makes me thirsty,” she said. “I don’t know how those morons on TV can do a newscast without stopping to take a sip of something. Vodka would be good. Even gin. Anyway, back to what I was saying about loyalty. It’s everything to me. I don’t have time for people who can’t grasp that concept. Have you ever been burned by someone so weak? Not literally burned, of course,” she said, allowing an ironic smile on her face. “I could have been. By Janie.”

  She sipped more water.

  “Look,” she said, “I got my freedom from that one, so I can’t completely be disgusted by her. She was a little bit of a worm, though. A sad little worm. Sad little worms have their purpose, but in the long run, they end up as bait on a hook. Bait for something bigger, better than they are.”

  Brenda fiddled with a gold chain around her neck.

  “Janie gave this to me before I killed her. Ooops, I said it. Do you still love me? Do you still want to make love to me? I know you do. You like my honesty. You adore the way I’m direct. That’s my power. At least for some of you. For others, it’s my tits. Whatever floats your boat. I don’t care.”

  More water.

  “Back to Janie . . . from the second I saw her, I knew she was an easy target. She’s like the weak antelope in the herd roaming the African savannah. I was the lioness. I could see by the way she dealt with others that she was weak, scared. That she was unsure. I really like it when people are unsure. It just makes me more confident. Lifts me. I had hopes for Janie. I really, really did. I expected that she’d be able to do what I needed done before I had to kill her. I’m an outgoing person. I gravitate toward action and sparkle. She didn’t have much of that, but I wrongly assumed she’d be trainable and loyal.”

  Another sip.

  “No kidding, talking so much is hard to do! I’d never make it as an auctioneer or some dimwit on TV doing an infomercial. They just keep going and going. Now here’s the thing about Janie. She was repressed. Unhappy. She needed a human connection. Not only could I see that, I could actually feel it. I have that ability. I think I always have.”

  Brenda took a breath, her eyes lingering on the camera’s lens. “Just a second. I have something to show you.” Her face disappeared from view, and she held up a picture of a man and a teenage boy.

  “This is Janie’s family. Or was, I guess past tense applies, right? She was willing to give them up forever to lie in my bed with my arms around her for the rest of our lives. She told me over and over that while she loved them intellectually, she could never feel for them the way she felt for me. She told me my touch was like an electric current running through her body.”

  Her tone changed from the cheerful blogger to vindictive. She was a metronome of emotions. Back and forth. Dark, then light. Now very, very dark.

  “She told me all of that, then she crossed me. She wanted out. She wanted to go back to those losers. She told me that she’d felt uneasy about what we were doing. Uneasy? Who in the hell says that? Life is uneasy. If it isn’t, then it is completely boring. She said—and get this—that if she had met me in another life that things would be different. Another life? This is the only life we have. She made it so easy for me to kill her. Not uneasy. Not uneasy at all.”

  With that, the recording stopped. Brenda had said what she’d wanted to stay.

  Or at least some of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Kent McGrew’s life in the Tri-Cities was over. He’d not only unwittingly contributed to the events that set a killing in motion, but he’d committed fraud in doing so.

  Kent made a plea deal with the prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against Brenda at trial, thereby avoiding a prison sentence of his own. Before he disappeared off the face of the earth, a visibly shaken Kent McGrew gave one interview to a local reporter for the Tri-City Herald. The paper’s photographer took a shot of him standing in front of his car with the courthouse looming behind him.

  “I know what people think of me now,” he said after the verdict. “They call me the horny insurance guy or some idiot who fell for a killer. I will have to own up to what I did. I honestly knew better at the time. No child should have a big price tag on their heads like Kara Nevins did. I felt wrong about it. I just kind of fell for Brenda’s story and, honestly, fell for her. She told me her husband was abusing her, and that if she didn’t show him that there was some money coming if Kara died, he’d make her get an abortion. I don’t believe in abortion. I think abortion is murder.”

  As Birdy saw it, McGrew’s comments to the newspaper provided the true indicator of Brenda’s supreme cleverness. She’d been extremely skilled at selecting the people she could use. Her husband. Her day care provider. Her insurance man. Her friends at work. She gravitated toward those who exhibited any kind of vulnerabilities or weakness that she could readily exploi
t.

  On the surface, one might have thought that Brenda had targeted Kent because, as an older man with waning physical charms of his own, he’d be unable to resist the wiles of a young, beautiful woman. That would be a poor assumption. Kent McGrew was more than merely a beer-bellied guy caught up in the last gasp of lust. Brenda saw something else. She preyed on something he held very deep inside, something that mattered more to him than her beguiling attention. She was like a hornet at a picnic, swirling, sampling. His stance on abortion was the red meat that brought her running.

  On the rear window of his always-sparkling clean car was the familiar image of a baby in vitro, a Right to Life decal.

  That decal invited the hornet to land.

  * * *

  Kendall Stark stood outside what had once been Brenda and Joe Nevins’s home. It had been burned by the fire she’d set to cover her tracks, and battered by the elements and by kids who’d come there to test the limits of their dares and endurance. The front windows had been long since broken and the front door had the distinct marks of an ax. Or possibly a large knife. Of all the houses on Stoneway Drive, the place was a blackened tooth in what had once been a very pretty smile.

  “Please leave,” a woman’s voice called over to her from behind an unruly laurel hedge.

  “Hello?” Kendall called back.

  “Get on, now,” the voice called out, this time with a harsher, more demanding tone. “Nothing to see here.”

  “I’m an investigator working on the Nevins case,” Kendall said, inching toward the sound of the voice.

  “Everyone’s an investigator,” the woman said.

  “My name is Kendall Stark. I’m with the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Then you have lots of problems,” the woman said, rustling a branch at the edge of the emerald, leafy wall.

  “I can’t see you,” Kendall said. “Can you come out?”

  Jess Conway pushed her way through a gap in the green. She was a tall, thin woman with slightly hunched shoulders and unruly strands of gray hair that she’d unsuccessfully tried to tame with a headband. She wore jeans, white tennis shoes, and a pale pink pullover. A gold cross on a chain dangled from her slender, weathered neck. She told Kendall that she hadn’t meant to be rude.