Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  “Rough morning,” Janie said, an exaggerated look of displeasure on her face. She glanced at her phone. “Have a call with the governor’s office in five minutes.”

  “He’s never on time,” the officer said. “Not with a meeting or getting a budget approved. But if you ask me, a crying baby in the middle of the night is at the tippy top of the ‘rough morning’ scale. I didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

  “Tell me about it,” Janie said, going through the detector. “I haven’t forgotten those days. You’ll get through them.”

  The African American man grinned, showing white teeth, and passed Janie’s briefcase over the counter instead of through the scanner. The superintendent was always so nice, asking about the kids, sharing photos of her family from her phone.

  Later the officer would say that the briefcase weighed more than usual and he probably should have opened it, but she was, after all, the boss.

  “She runs the prison,” he said. “What was she going to smuggle in? A set of keys? A file?”

  A half hour later that same morning, Brenda Nevins was in Janie’s office, purportedly to take on a special work assignment to help other inmates with life skills. Other prisoners saw an irony in that, but didn’t say a word. Speaking up against Brenda meant getting cut in the shower with a shank made of a mascara wand and the sharpened edge of a Pringles’ can top. Or poisoned at lunch with meds ripped off from the infirmary. Or, worst of all, cut off from visitation with family.

  “I run this place,” Brenda had said, when a new girl—a meth head from Black Diamond with more body tattoos then brains—challenged her. “You keep that in mind if you piss me off.”

  In her office the day she disappeared, Janie opened the laptop for the benefit of the woman who had told her to bring it.

  “Nice. Does it have video capabilities?” Brenda asked as the pair moved from Janie’s office to the records room—the only location in the institution that did not have the prying eyes of security cameras.

  They stood face-to-face, a worktable separating them. Brenda had done her hair in the way she knew Janie liked—down, with slight curls that brushed past her shoulders.

  The two of them were there to plot the escape. Janie’s and hers.

  “It’s an Apple,” Janie said. “Top of the line. My husband helped me set everything up.”

  Brenda watched a flicker of emotion coming over Janie’s face at the mention of her husband, Edwin. She moved her own mouth into a slight frown; a mirror of what Janie was doing, sans the slight lowering of the chin. Quivering was too much. Not needed.

  “Don’t be sad, Janie,” Brenda said in a voice dripping with honey sweetness. “I know this is hard. But your life belongs to you and you have to live it as you were meant to do. No more dreaming. No more wondering, baby girl. We are on the verge of our moment. We have to take it together. We have no choice in the matter. You know what we are? You know what brought us together?”

  Janie bit down on her lower lip.

  “We’re soul mates,” she said. Brenda relaxed her frown. “Don’t ever doubt that. Don’t ever. I know that God or some higher power—whatever She is—has brought us together. That’s right. The world will be all over us. You know that. They’ll be watching and hunting and trying to stop us from doing what we must do.”

  “I guess so,” Janie said, fear evident in her voice.

  Brenda reached across the table and grabbed Janie by her shoulders.

  “Get a grip,” she said. “This moment will not only set us free but will define the future for so many people. The world will be watching and we’ll need to tell them the reasons behind everything we’re doing.”

  “To help them, right?”

  It was more than a question, almost an affirmation.

  Brenda gave her head a slight nod. “Yes,” she said. “It isn’t about just us. Just you and me. I wish both of us could have come from other circumstances. Come from backgrounds free of the torment that sent us here. . . me to be a zoo animal, you to be a zookeeper. But life isn’t fair. I get that. Life is what we make it. We’re the example of living with authenticity.”

  Brenda stopped talking to assess. She watched Janie as a cat watches the family goldfish as it twirls in the waters of its bowl.

  Like the betta fish.

  “And we’ll help people, right?” Janie repeated.

  Exasperation was in order. Maybe a little bit of the takeaway was called for just then.

  “Are you even listening?” Brenda asked as she let out a sigh. It was the kind of nonverbal punctuation at which she was particularly skilled. She was good with words. Good with presenting her concepts, no matter how outlandish. Repulsive even. She could sell peed-on snow to an Eskimo.

  “Really?” she asked, drawing away slightly as though she were disgusted by what Janie said. “Really? This isn’t about us. This is about the world. That’s why we need to get our act together and get out of here. I didn’t do any of those things they pinned on me. None of them whatsoever.”

  Janie didn’t say another word. Brenda was a lot of things, but Janie was all but certain a liar was not among them.

  “Are you with me, baby? Are you about to let go of the past and be what God wants us to be? She’s calling for us. She wants us to be together, and yes, my love, She wants for us to help others.”

  Brenda was all about empowerment.

  “She loves us, doesn’t She?” Janie asked. Before Brenda, Janie never used the feminine personal pronoun for God. It felt funny when she did it, but also empowering.

  “More like adores,” Brenda said.

  Janie felt her body relax a little.

  It felt so good to be loved for who she was.

  “I’ll be ready tonight after work,” Janie said. “I’ll send for you.”

  After everything happened

  Kendall Stark didn’t know it, but she wouldn’t be in need of a second tuxedo mocha that morning as she arrived in her offices at the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department in Port Orchard. The email link that was about to be forwarded to her would provide enough of a jolt.

  The new public and media relations specialist, Daphne Brown, cornered the detective and spoke with a kind of breathless excitement that tempered just about everything that came out of her mouth.

  East Port Orchard Elementary wants you to talk about stranger danger safety! Tonight!

  We are out of creamer in the break room! Where do we keep it? I need some!

  We have a serial killer on the loose!

  Do you like my hair this way?

  Kendall said good morning and waited for whatever urgent missive only-one-speed Daphne had.

  “We’ve already heard from all the morning shows,” Daphne said. “I’m so excited. They want you on.”

  Kendall shook her head. “I’m not doing it,” Kendall said.

  Daphne pulled at one of her curls and it bounced back into position. “You don’t even know what it’s about,” she said. “How can you even say that?”

  “It’s not a what, Daphne. It’s a who and I know that who is Brenda Nevins.”

  The younger woman’s eyes widened a bit, but before she could speak, Kendall preempted her from doing so.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Kendall said. “I’m not required to go on camera. You are. You can do it.”

  Daphne dialed down her pushy enthusiasm. She’d been to a conference in Seattle the week before and had learned new techniques to influence what she considered a “resistant personality type.”

  Daphne fiddled with her department-issued smartphone.

  “You better watch the link I’m about to send you.”

  “What link?” Kendall asked.

  Daphne glanced up, a satisfied look on her face.

  “Watch it,” she said. “Then call me so I can work my PR magic.”

  Kendall didn’t acknowledge Daphne’s boast. She had no plan whatsoever of encouraging Ms. Brown to do anything, let alone work any kind of self-professed publ
ic relations hocus-pocus. She was so sick of Brenda Nevins that she couldn’t imagine enduring one more minute of thinking about her. Brenda was on the front page. Brenda was the top-of-the-hour news. Brenda had even been featured on the cover of USA Today. She was a murderous prison escapee and that made her a problem for the special agents of the FBI, not the investigators from the local Kitsap County’s Sheriff Department.

  Brenda had moved off the front pages. Janie Thomas’s husband, Edwin, had buried his wife in a family plot in the memorial park just off the highway in Gig Harbor. TV producer Juliana Robbins’s parents had claimed their beloved daughter’s remains and placed them in an urn on their mantel—vowing they’d never let her go again. Bar owner Chaz Masters, who had become a footnote to the story in the way the white and middle aged often do, was honored with a wake at the Grey Gull—an event that only brought out a handful of barflies, a blogger, and a local newspaper reporter who normally filled in for the sports editor.

  None of those who loved the dead had really moved on, of course. Most never would. The fact that Brenda Nevins had smeared her kind of evil all over Kitsap County had not brought anything but misery to Kendall Stark, Birdy Waterman, or any of the others who’d wanted justice to prevail.

  It wasn’t that Brenda Nevins, whom federal investigators were all but certain had fled to Canada, wasn’t an icepick-in-the-eye kind of torture to Kendall. It was simply that Kendall couldn’t do a thing about her.

  “She was our Hurricane Katrina,” her husband Steven had said a few weeks after the murder spree began. “She came and destroyed as much as she could and in the morning it was over. Only the wreckage was left behind.”

  He was right. That’s exactly what she was and what she did.

  After extricating herself from Daphne, Kendall made her way to her office and, against her better judgment, powered up her laptop and went right to her message inbox.

  There it was, an email from Daphne Brown. No message. Just a link to a YouTube clip. Kendall clicked on the link and waited until the advertisement for a trip to Greece on a luxury liner reached the ten-second mark so she could X it out.

  The video was entitled: How My Story Began, Part One.

  Kendall could feel her heart rate accelerate a little as the clip worked its way from start to finish. Feeling a little sweat collect at the nape of her neck, she pushed her chair away from her desk and dialed Birdy Waterman’s number.

  “Hi Kendall,” Birdy said. “What’s up?”

  “Are you in your office?”

  “Yes,” Birdy said. “Gloves about to go on.”

  “Can you come over here?”

  Birdy hesitated a beat. “I’m about to start an autopsy on a crash victim from yesterday.”

  Kendall pushed. “But you haven’t started, have you?”

  “No, but . . . what’s this about, Kendall?”

  Kendall looked at the YouTube video cued up on her screen.

  “Put the corpse back in the chiller and get over here,” she said. “Brenda Nevins has posted a video blog. You need to see it.”

  “Video blog. What is she, fourteen?” Birdy said.

  “This is no joke,” Kendall said. “Come over as soon as you can.”

  The image was in high definition—clear and leaving no room for doubt. Brenda Nevins had not ever been a person who could lay low. She took the microphone, looking at the camera.

  “The light is on so I guess you can see me. Or you can see me when I post this. I’m not stupid enough to do this live. It pissed me off to lose the chance to be on TV to tell the world my true story. The morons in the legal system really screwed me over. I don’t like to be screwed with. I’m the one who does the screwing. Right, Janie?”

  She turned and tilted the camera to Janie Thomas, who was bound and gagged on a chair. Silver duct tape cocooned her forearms to the armrest. Her feet were out of view. The gag appeared to be black fabric, some clothing item.

  “Looks like underwear,” Birdy said. “Wonder whose?”

  Kendall didn’t reply. Her office was silent. Still. Her eyes were glued to her computer’s screen. In particular, Janie’s terrified eyes riveted the detective. Though farther back in the shot, there was no mistaking the pleading coming from them, an urgent message that was stronger than words.

  Help me.

  Brenda let the camera linger first on Janie, then on herself before she started talking again. She wore full makeup and a teardrop necklace that Edwin had reported Janie was wearing to work the day she went missing from the prison. The teardrop, an amethyst, nestled between Brenda’s breasts.

  Brenda was nothing if not consistent. She was always one to make sure people’s eyes landed right there, Kendall thought.

  Brenda started talking again. “Janie, you know your baby doesn’t like it when you don’t answer her. Makes me annoyed. When I get annoyed I need to do something to liven things up. You know, to break the tension.”

  For the first time, Birdy noticed a curl of smoke in the frame. She tapped her finger on the screen.

  “She’s going to burn her,” Birdy said.

  “It’s one of her favorite things to do,” Kendall said, sliding back into her chair. “She did it to her child.”

  “Who does that?” Birdy asked, a rhetorical question if ever there had been one.

  The answer, of course, both women knew, was a sociopath like Brenda. Maybe no one had seen someone so profoundly evil in the annals of crime. Kendall had. She’d been in the cage with the predator when she interviewed her on the Darcy Moreau case. She’d seen the charm and pretense of being human, the sickening game of those who have no other purpose in life but to win others over and destroy them.

  Brenda tugged at the chain around her neck, the amethyst rising and falling, swinging back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch.

  “I know I shouldn’t smoke,” she said. “It’s a nasty habit that I picked up in county jail and carried over to prison. Not much else to do in that hellhole.” She stopped and looked at Janie over her shoulder. “No offense.”

  Then back at the camera, those gorgeous, but lifeless eyes. “Smoking really scares me. I do not want to be one of those women whose mouth is a sagging sphincter that wicks out lipstick and is an instant sign that she’s getting old.”

  Brenda reached in the direction of the curling smoke. Her fingertips now held a cigarette. She took a deep drag and then examined the filter before exhaling.

  “Plus I have to constantly reapply lipstick and in prison—not that that’s a problem at the moment—decent cosmetics are hard to come by. I let a hideous creature from Preston fondle my breasts in the shower as payment for a tube of L’Oreal that came in into the institution in someone’s butt. Gag me. The things one has to do to look halfway decent.”

  Brenda let out a laugh.

  Kendall shot a look at Birdy.

  “She thinks she’s a star,” she said.

  “A Kardashian, maybe,” Birdy said, her eyes still on the video.

  Kendall was caught off guard. Birdy was more into Kerouac than Kardasian. “You watch that crap?”

  “No,” Birdy answered. “But Elan’s girlfriend Kelsey does. She’s over a lot.”

  The exchange between the forensic pathologist and the detective was that kind of forced break in the tension that people engage in when watching a horror movie.

  The popcorn is stale.

  Have to go to the bathroom.

  I just remembered I left the water running.

  “Suddenly,” Brenda said, getting up and walking over to a now squirming Janie, “I’m hungry. Do you like Indian food, Janie? I love curry. Don’t get me started on tandoori chicken. Love. Love. Love tandoori. Surprisingly, there was a fantastic Indian place in the Tri Cities that I used to go to with my boyfriend. It had the best tandoori in the Northwest. Better than Seattle. Honestly. So, so good. Well, Janie, do you like Indian food?”

  Tears rolled down the superintendent’s face.

  Brenda ignored them
.

  “When I was a girl,” she continued, “we held dandelion blossoms to our chins and if it reflected gold on your skin it meant that you liked butter. Did you ever do that?”

  Janie didn’t answer. She couldn’t if she had wanted to. The black panties used to keep her quiet were tied so tightly that the corners of her mouth dripped blood.

  Brenda swiveled around to face the camera. Her eyes met the camera’s lens with the precision of a newscaster.

  “Did any of you?”

  She held her stare for a beat and then turned back to Janie.

  “I want to make sure you are seeing this, but it’s hard to manage the camera, the shot, the script, and the talent. I have newfound respect for TV producers and camera crews. What they do is not as easy as it looks.”

  Brenda took one more drag on the cigarette, making sure the camera captured its cherry-red tip.

  “Let’s see if you like Indian food,” she said, her tone completely flat and devoid of irony. As the cigarette’s red-hot tip moved toward Janie’s forehead, the terrified woman turned away, her cries muffled in the lingerie that had so successfully silenced her.

  “Don’t fight me,” Brenda said, in words that were splinter-cold. “You know you can’t win. You’re weak. I’m stronger. You’re smart. I’m smarter.”

  She grabbed Janie by the hair with her free hand and yanked so hard that it looked as though the captive woman’s neck might snap.

  “She’s a monster,” Kendall said.

  Birdy didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

  “Let’s see if you like Indian food!” Brenda said.

  And then while tears streamed and Janie struggled, Brenda pressed the lighted tip of her cigarette into the center of Janie’s forehead.

  “Don’t squirm, stupid bitch! Once I moved when the crappy stylist my mother took me to was cutting my hair. I ended up with bangs that made me look like a trailer park kid!”

  Through the struggle, Janie’s quiet scream was captured.

  “A monster,” Birdy said.

  “Pull yourself together, Janie! You like Indian food! You do!” Brenda said, laughing as if she’d pulled off some practical joke.