Now That She's Gone
Page 33
Kendall knew it was a pretend laugh. All of Brenda’s emotions were as bogus as her breasts. She was incapable of recognizing the pain of others because to her, others were only objects. Things to be used. Things to get her whatever it was that she wanted.
To serve her needs.
Brenda turned to the camera and whispered. The whisper was fake too. Loud enough for Janie to hear every word.
“Everyone who is watching this already knows that Janie didn’t get her Indian dinner out. You already know that she’s dead.”
She paused, looking down at the cigarette she’d ground into Janie’s forehead. It was still smoldering, so Brenda took another puff, breathing in the burning tobacco and the incinerated flesh of the woman who’d helped her escape from prison. She made a face and quickly extinguished it.
“Did you find my mark on Janie, Dr. Waterman? Sorry about your little boy, Detective Stark. Kids love cookies. I was a cookie monster when I was a little girl.”
Kendall looked at Birdy, gauging her reaction to being named. The reference to Cody and the incident at school was spine chilling. It made her skin crawl. If anything on the video was a shock to her, it was the fact that the two of them had been named.
Birdy stared at Kendall.
“She was too badly burned for me to observe the cigarette burn,” she said.
They both watched until the clip found its way to its end.
“I hope this goes viral,” Brenda said and the screen went black.
Another advertisement for a cruise popped up.
“She got her wish, Birdy,” Kendall said, ignoring the ad and wondering why the advertising tool on YouTube thought she was in her sixties. “More than five hundred thousand views and climbing.” She refreshed her laptop screen. “Five thousand more since we started watching.”
Birdy looked at her friend. Her expression was grim. “This is going to encourage her, Kendall. She’s a narcissist who lives for this kind of attention. She craves it like we crave our morning coffee.”
Kendall reached for her lukewarm tuxedo mocha. “Right. She’s going to do something big.”
“Unless we stop her,” Birdy said. “She has to be stopped.”
Photo by Howard Petrella
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
New York Times bestselling author GREGG OLSEN has written more than twenty books. As a journalist and true-crime author, Olsen has received numerous awards and much critical acclaim for his writing. He’s been a guest on Good Morning, America, Dateline, CBS Early Show, Entertainment Tonight, 48 Hours, and news programs on CNN and Fox, as well as other national and international TV programs. The Seattle native and his wife live in rural Washington State, where he’s now at work on his next thriller. Readers are invited to visit his website, www.greggolsen.com.
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Copyright © 2015 Gregg Olsen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-2996-9
First electronic edition: December 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-2995-2
ISBN-10: 0-7860-2995-1