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, though 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
