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 cropped 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 hard 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.”
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.
