Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  She read the note:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Nevins,

  So sorry for your loss. So sorry that you never got any photos of the wedding. The bride was insistent about having every image with you two in the frame destroyed. I did what she asked. After I read about the fire that killed your son and granddaughter, something clicked and I went back to my files. I had this one. I feel bad that I didn’t give it to you sooner. She was pretty clear with her demands.

  My apologies,

  Antonio Gill

  “Brenda was always clear in her demands,” Kendall said, now meeting his gaze.

  “Crystal,” Brad said.

  They talked some more about Brenda and Joe’s marriage and how the arrival of baby Kara had changed things. Shortly after Kara was born, Brad said that he and his wife had been completely cut out of their son’s life.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” Kendall said, knowing the futility of the words. “That must have been very hard on you and your wife.”

  “Everything with Brenda was hard. She let us see Kara once a month and only for an hour at a time. She treated us like we were sex offenders or something and could only have supervised visitation.”

  Joe was the missing figure in all the discussions about Brenda.

  “What did Joe say?” Kendall asked. “How did he handle it?”

  Brad pushed his chair back. “He said nothing. He was so controlled by Brenda the Bitch that he didn’t say a word against her. Never. Not even once. That’s something we’ll—I’ll—never understand.”

  “She has a way of using and manipulating people. Your son. The prison warden.”

  “Chelsea,” he said.

  “Yeah, probably her, too.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The image started dark, then a blush of light washed over Brenda Nevins’s beautiful face. Her eyes had always been like magnets, drawing an observer in so close that sometimes they didn’t even realize how their necks had been stretched forward for a better view. Whatever it was, Brenda had it.

  A Savage Garden song, “I Knew I Loved You,” played in the background.

  Brenda wore a white blouse that she’d unbuttoned nearly to her navel; the shimmery fabric of a lacy, purple brassiere peeked out. There had never been subtlety when it came to Brenda Nevins. Not ever. Subtlety was for the pathetic, the unsure, and those who sought to blend into the background.

  Before she spoke, she pulled out a photograph and held it out to the lens.

  “This is my baby girl,” she said, tilting the snapshot of Kara, to ensure that the viewers would be able to see her. “She was so pretty. Everyone said she looked just like me. From that first moment I saw her I wasn’t quite so sure. She was all pink and wrinkly and she reminded me of a little naked monkey. Scrunched up like.”

  She set down the photo and stared at the camera.

  “I know people are opening up old wounds,” she said, her tone condescending. “Trying to make me out to be some kind of a baby killer. I’m here to tell you right now that you’ve got it all wrong. That poking around in the tragedy of my past isn’t going to do anything but make you look like an idiot.”

  She reached up and lifted her hair away from her face, then let it fall over her shoulders in a seductive move.

  “I’m so tired of being judged for things that I didn’t do. I’ll own up to Joe and I’ll own up to Janie. They had it coming. Joe cheated on me. He was a player, and I don’t ever get played. And Janie? She was weak. I don’t do weak. You can’t do weak and get anywhere in life. Doesn’t everyone know that? At the prison, I was known as the tough one. I was the one that the other prisoners feared because they thought that I had ice in my veins. But that’s not who I was. Not who I am. I’m a survivor. I will always fight to the death because the second that I give up, the second I stop, is the time that someone will try to silence me. But here’s what you need to know. You can’t stop me. No one can. I’m invincible and I’m going to make sure that I get credit for what I do, not for what you think I’ve done.”

  She held out the photograph one more time, turning it in the flat light of wherever she was recording the video.

  “I did not,” she said. “I repeat. I did not kill my baby. Why would I? Insurance money? Get real. There wasn’t enough money on Kara’s life to make any difference in mine. If I’d had killed her I would have put a million dollars of insurance on her. I’m not stupid. I don’t take risks, and I don’t underinsure. That’s stupid. So go ahead, muck around. Dig deep. Find out what you can about my past. It won’t do you any good, Kendall Stark. I’m only getting started.”

  Brenda moved the photo from view, keeping her gaze steady on the camera. The wheels were turning. It was not a flat stare. In a beat, she shook her head slowly. Tears welled up in her eyes. She waited a second. Another. Finally, a tear rolled down from her eye to the corner of her mouth. She produced a tissue and dabbed away at the damp trail that shimmered on her cheek.

  “You’ve all forced me into what I’m about to do,” she said. “So deal with it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Birdy watched the YouTube video play out on her phone. While she’d seen Brenda’s handiwork up close and personal with the killer’s recent Kitsap victims, she’d also seen, in Kendall’s case reports, what Brenda had done to her husband and child. Like her detective colleague and friend, Birdy Waterman had been sucked into the Brenda vortex.

  With each nugget of information, she found herself growing closer and closer to the source, wanting to know more. Brenda was a bloody traffic accident, the kind of catastrophe that you could not pass by without a long, hard stare. Birdy had downloaded the trial testimony that one of Brenda’s fans had put up online—annotated with what the authorities had supposedly gotten wrong at trial. There was no way that little Kara’s death had been accidental.

  Both Joe and Kara had been found lying on the floor of the burned-out back bedroom of the murder house. While Joe’s pre-fire trauma was obvious, the baby’s had been more subtle. There had been no broken bones. No indicators of any perimortem trauma whatsoever. The original autopsy report, in fact, indicated one major clue as to what had happened to the baby.

  No smoke in lungs.

  Kara had been dead before the fire. No stab wounds. No crushed vertebrae. Most likely, the little girl had been suffocated. Possibly even softly so. The state crime lab indicated melted poly fibers had been recovered from the charred body tissue, leading experts there to posit that a blanket or pillow might have been used to suffocate her.

  At trial there were two other elements that indicated her latest YouTube rant was another attempt to drop a curtain over what really happened. The first came from the testimony of the day care owner, a forty-four-year-old woman named Teresa “Terry” Gonzales. Teresa indicated that the night before the fire, Brenda had called to say that Kara wasn’t feeling well, and she wouldn’t be there the next day. While Brenda didn’t testify at trial, her lawyer made it clear that they took complete umbrage at that story. The defense’s line of questioning of Teresa was a kitchen-sink tactic that touched on everything from potential drug use, organizational incompetence, and direct accusations of sexual abuse.

  LAWYER:: Isn’t it true that the defendant caught you fondling a little boy in the naptime room of your business, Terry’s Daycare?

  GONZALES: I never did that.

  LAWYER: But she saw you bent over a child and you were touching his penis.

  GONZALES: I was changing his diaper. The baby had diaper rash. I was doing what the parents had requested me to do. I never, ever did anything improper. I never would. I don’t know anyone who would.

  LAWYER: We’re not taking about anyone else. We’re talking about you and what you did. The defendant saw you do this . . . this “nothing improper” thing you were doing to the boy.

  GONZALES: She was there, yes. But there was nothing going on.

  LAWYER: Are you a medical doctor?

  GONZALES: No. I never said I was.
/>
  LAWYER: Yet you say you were administering medicines.

  GONZALES: I was putting diaper rash cream on the boy.

  LAWYER: You enjoy doing that, don’t you?

  GONZALES: There’s nothing wrong with taking care of a baby.

  LAWYER: Nothing further.

  The prosecution refocused the day care owner’s testimony to what she was doing and why. That she’d operated a day care center for five years without one complaint about anything whatsoever. That she was perfectly within the purview of her responsibilities to apply diaper-rash medicine.

  Birdy saw Terry Gonzales’s testimony as defining what kind of person Brenda Nevins was. If she had to destroy someone to save herself, she had no problems doing so. In fact, that might have been part of her game.

  Teresa Gonzales endured the humiliation of an investigation after the Nevins trial. Local and state authorities determined there had been no wrongdoing on her part, but her business didn’t survive. Just the whisper of possible sexual abuse was all it took for parents to drop her. When her Realtor showed her house to a potential buyer six months after the trial, the couple backed out because they’d read online that a bunch of kids had been molested there.

  “Bad energy,” the young woman said, “has a tendency to linger in places like this. We can’t live here.”

  The agent insisted that no wrongdoing of any kind transpired there, but few listened. After a series of price drops, the house was sold for less than what Terry owed on it.

  She took the offer and wrote out a check for the difference. Her sister in Austin said she could live with her for a while and start over. She packed up everything, including the Terry’s Daycare sign that she thought maybe she could use again. She had no children of her own and wondered if she’d ever find the joy she had before Brenda came through her life like a wrecking ball.

  The other linchpin that was at odds with Brenda’s contention that she hadn’t murdered her daughter was the fact that in addition to the life-insurance policy she held on her husband, Brenda also had purchased a large life-insurance policy on Kara. The prosecution played out the details surrounding the policies by establishing Brenda’s understanding of insurance through her job and the fact that she’d applied a little subterfuge by purchasing Kara’s policy from a Mutual of Omaha agent across town—instead of from her own office, where she’d have received the same discount that she’d earned from buying Joe’s.

  The agent on Kara’s policy was a man named Kent McGrew. Kent was fifty-three, balding, and with a potbelly that hung over his beltline like a volleyball. If he’d been a woman, no doubt he’d be asked when his baby was due by an insensitive grocery checker. Brenda’s lawyer worked him over too.

  LAWYER: Isn’t it true that you were attracted to the defendant?

  MCGREW: I don’t know. I guess I was. She’s an attractive girl.

  LAWYER: You guess? You had intimate relations with her.

  MCGREW: (inaudible) I did.

  LAWYER: Isn’t it true, Mr. McGrew, that you were obsessed with her?

  MCGREW: Not obsessed. No. I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with her.

  LAWYER: Oh. I see. You have sex with all your clients.

  MCGREW: No. No. I do not.

  LAWYER: Where did you have your sexual encounter with the defendant?

  MCGREW: In my office. We had relations one time in my office. She said she was lonely, and I just wanted to comfort her. It just went further than it should have gone.

  LAWYER: You were being a shoulder to cry on, were you?

  MCGREW: I would say so. Just trying to help.

  LAWYER: By having sex with her?

  MCGREW: No.

  LAWYER: Isn’t it also true that you sold her the policy on her child’s life?

  MCGREW: I did.

  LAWYER: You suggested it?

  MCGREW: No. Not really. She told me that Kara had a rare genetic disorder and that she probably wouldn’t make it to adulthood and she was pregnant with a second child and she was afraid of not having enough money to care for the new baby.

  LAWYER: Sir, did you not suggest that she take out a policy on Kara’s life?

  MCGREW: I felt sorry for her. She was vulnerable. She was worried. She didn’t think Kara would survive much longer, and she didn’t want to lose another baby.

  LAWYER: Who signed the paperwork?

  MCGREW: I did. She called me crying that Kara was probably going over to Children’s Hospital in Seattle. She was worried that if Kara died, her other baby would face a similar fate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The day had been long, and the temptation for drinking too much wine was very real. While Cody played in the yard, Steven and Kendall sat on the front porch in a pair of old, silvered, cedar Adirondack chairs that had once belonged to Kendall’s parents. They drank the last of a box wine that they’d decided was a “never again” purchase.

  “Your stalker,” Steven said, taking a sip, “was on the news today.”

  Kendall kept her eyes on Cody. “Don’t call her that, Steven.”

  Her tone was harder than she would have liked, but she was tired of Brenda Nevins haunting her every move; being the subject of every single conversation. Even the dry cleaner asked Kendall if she “had met” Brenda. As if Brenda had crossed over from murderer to celebrity and no one seemed to have noticed that she’d killed people to get her fifteen minutes of fame.

  “Sorry,” he said, meaning it. “Anyway, they had another story on her video blog and how she might be one of the first serial killers to use digital media to get her message out. I thought it was sort of fascinating. You know, the world we live in now.”

  “Right,” Kendall said. “That’s fine. Zodiac sent letters. Very old school.”

  “He didn’t get caught, either,” Steven said.

  “She’ll get caught,” Kendall said, standing and calling out to their son. “Not so close to the road, babe!”

  Cody waved at his parents and reworked the repetitious route he’d created—an enormous figure eight—to avoid some of its proximity to the road. Beyond Cody, in the harbor, two kayakers maneuvered to set out from the shore.

  “Son of Sam,” Kendall said.

  “Huh?”

  Kendall lowered her gaze from her son to her husband.

  “He sent letters to The New York Times, and he got caught.”

  Steven’s eyes twinkled in the day’s waning light. “Yeah,” he said, “and his dog talked to him.”

  They both laughed.

  “Not the best example, I guess,” Kendall said, tugging at her sweater as a cool breeze blew over from the water.

  “Have you or your new FBI buddy figured out what makes Brenda tick?” Steven asked.

  Kendall stiffened a little at the mention of SA Casey. She’d both liked and couldn’t stand the man. She didn’t like the idea of Steven mentioning him, even obliquely. Her bristled response felt odd, but she set it aside.

  “Power,” she said. “That woman soaks it up like a sponge.”

  “More like a wad of toilet paper, if you ask me.”

  “Better,” Kendall said. “Yes, I like that description better.”

  “From what you said, because; face it, you’re the authority on the woman, sex drives her too. What is she, a lesbian? Bisexual? None of the above? Maybe she’s polyamorous. You know, like that TV show that had the two guys and a gal in love with each other.”

  Kendall put her glass on the arm of her chair. “I don’t think so. While she is very sexual, I don’t think she cares about sex and what it might mean to two people.”

  “Or three or four, if you’re on that show,” he said. “Or in some weird cult.”

  Steven always knew how to cut through all of the BS associated with profiling a person like Brenda or any other criminal for that matter. He told her one time that he thought serial killers weren’t devious because being devious implied smarts. Most of them were just lucky that they didn’t get caught. Kendall conceded that the
re was truth to his assessment.

  Yet Brenda Nevins was different. Different as in a whole other kind of life-form, almost. Not even human. She didn’t operate or think the way so-called regular people do.

  “For Brenda Nevins,” Kendall said, “sex is about power and about what she can get from the experience. Not the experience itself. It isn’t a give-and-take trade. In her mind, it’s a step toward a goal. That’s all. I mean, she’d have sex with a sack of oranges if she thought it would get her somewhere.”

  Her husband was quick to respond. “A big ol’ bag of bananas would probably be better.”

  And they both laughed.

  “Another glass, babe?” Steven asked, feeling the tension slip away. They needed more times like this. They needed a way to balance the darkness of what she did every day with their family life.

  Kendall looked at her empty wineglass.

  “Ah, no thanks,” she said. “I don’t think I can do another.”

  “I actually have some wine in a bottle chilling in the fridge.”

  “A bottle?” she asked. “Real wine?”

  Steven got up and disappeared into the house.

  Kendall stayed planted in the silvered cedar Adirondack chair that her father had built when she was a girl. She watched the water as it shimmered in the late-day sun. Cody’s golden hair had turned russet in the ebbing light. Her husband was in the house getting her some wine. Real wine. And while she was enjoying this peaceful interlude with her husband, she could not think of anything else but Brenda Nevins.

  Where are you hiding? And how am I going to stop you?

  “You look lost in your thoughts,” Steven said, appearing with a bottle of sauvignon blanc. He presented it to her like she was some wine connoisseur, which she wasn’t at all. “What’s rolling around in that investigator’s mind of yours right now?” he asked as he poured.

  Kendall took the wineglass and swirled it. It even looked better than the box wine.