Just Evil

by Vickie McKeehan

  It was May for chrissakes in Southern California. He’d been told L.A. was warm in May. They’d obviously lied.

  But they hadn’t lied about the damned traffic. After sitting for several hours in bumper-to-bumper exhaust, he finally pulled to a stop across the street from a house in Beverly Hills.

  He stared at the fifteen-room mansion. Alana’s house. He sucked in a breath to let his nerves recover. The trip down the 101 had been brutal. He needed to settle down, focus.

  What was wrong with him anyway? Where was the calm, cool detached man who did this for a living? He took a few more minutes to right himself, his mind, his thoughts. When he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror, he laughed at himself.

  Here he was sitting in the dark in a parked car in the pouring rain, about to begin his mission, if you could call it that, feeling colder than he could ever remember feeling in Prague during the winter.

  Bollocks to Southern California, anyway. He’d get his business done and get out.

  So what if the lousy rain reminded him of another time, another place? God, he felt burned-out. But then that was normal at this stage of the game wasn’t it? Didn’t most people tire of doing the same old thing year after bloody year? At his age, he should be sitting on a sunny beach in Aruba using the nearest available hot body to warm his bed.

  Sunny Southern California, my ass, he thought as he reached over and turned the heater up to high.

  When the warm air from the heater made the windows fog over even more, he cursed under his breath and wondered if the nasty weather would keep Alana from going out tonight. Would she leave the house in this weather or decide to stay in? It didn’t matter much to him.

  Either way, it was her last night to live.

  A couple of minutes later, as if on cue, he watched as the garage door slowly worked its way up and Alana backed out her Lexus. Once out of the garage, she kept the engine idling in the driveway while the garage door shimmied closed. After she’d pulled away, he waited until she was a reasonable distance before shifting the Chevy into Drive. He followed her through the maze-like streets of Bel Air.

  As soon as he was sure she’d stay put carousing at her favorite bar for a few hours, he’d head back to the house and wait for her return. Because he knew she’d almost certainly take a side trip and spend part of the evening with her partner in crime, dear old Jessica, it would give him time to set up in the house.

  After all, he had Alana’s routine down almost as well as he know her nasty little secrets. Good thing she was a predictable sort, a creature of habit. But hell, who was he kidding? The vault full of lies and deceit he’d cracked open would be difficult for anyone to accept as the truth. That’s why tonight it would be Alana up first. There was an order to this process, and he intended to follow the plan, a plan he’d been working on for two fucking years. It would take both his patience and his professional timing to pull it off. So what if he toyed with them a bit before each kill? He had to make a statement, didn’t he? Because by god, before they died they’d know why and what it meant to him.

  This time when he got to Alana’s, he parked the car several streets over. He picked up the black bag that held his tools of the trade, slapped on a pair of thin leather gloves and made his way back through the darkened neighborhood in the pouring rain. When he got to the back door, he pushed a key into the lock and stepped inside, stopping to punch in the code at the control panel. He shut the door and went into the laundry room just off the kitchen to grab a towel to wipe up the watery footsteps he had dripped onto the sandstone floor.

  He mechanically checked his watch. He’d plan on a minimum of two hours before she returned. He set the timer on his Tag Heuer. After mopping up the floor and disposing of the towel, he snapped off the leather gloves he’d worn and stuffed them in his bag only to dig further down and pull out a dry pair, which he promptly stretched onto each hand. Fastidious to a fault, he had been taught by the best, which made many of his habits outdated and probably unnecessary. But technology had changed a great deal over the years and in his line of work, one could never be too careful.

  Suddenly hungry, he strolled into the kitchen to fix himself something to eat. As he dug into the refrigerator, he pulled out the makings for a hearty ham and cheese sandwich. He found the bread, a nice focaccia, and drooled. He did so appreciate good food. The thought of a gourmet meal made Kit Griffin’s delectable desserts pop into his head.

  Would it be her turn before long? A pity, he thought. No matter what he’d seen today, if she was anything like her mother, she too was living on borrowed time.

  As he assembled his supper, he considered the night ahead of him and what he needed to do. For the next couple of hours he’d hide out in the tiny back bedroom he’d found off the alcove, almost an afterthought of a bedroom. Because it was the room farthest from Alana’s, it would suit his purpose perfectly.

  When he thought about the possibility of Alana bringing Jessica back with her for the night, he knew he could easily kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. The thrill of killing them both at the same time had his body pinging. But then he quickly tamped down the urge. While the local police weren’t exactly known for their sharpness, killing both women now would not serve his purpose. No matter how tempted he was to take care of them both at the same time, it simply wouldn’t work to his advantage.

  He reminded himself of the plan.

  No, he’d wait until Alana was alone, even if it meant waiting all night, even if it meant waiting till morning. He could be patient when necessary.

  Getting comfortable in the little guest bedroom, he threw his bag on the bed and dug out the movie he’d brought for the occasion. Turning on the television before pushing the button on the DVD player, he popped in the movie, Psychos At Dusk, made in 1968. The film certainly couldn’t be considered one of Alana’s best performances, but then, what was? She’d never bothered to hone her craft.

  Settling back on the bed, he took a bite of his sandwich and enjoyed the movie, which he knew had a mood-lifting macabre death scene. He smiled to himself wondering how Alana would play her own death scene. For real.

  It was after one in the morning when he heard Alana return home and get ready for bed. It was time to go to work. Technically, it was now Sunday morning, Mother’s Day, no less. He could only hope the police would see the significance of it all.

  Even though he’d been at this for years, he still couldn’t fight that bit of adrenalin rush that came just before a kill. And he reminded himself this was a bit different; unlike his other jobs, he wasn’t getting paid for this one.

  He drew out the butcher knife he’d taken from the kitchen. It wasn’t his usual weapon of choice, but then Alana deserved something a bit out of the ordinary. As he ran his gloved hand up and down the blade of the knife, it dawned on him how easy access had been up to this point. That, he knew, would change. After tonight it would be a little more difficult to get to the others. He shrugged, realizing he’d just have to make the best of it. But then he smiled at his dark reflection in the dresser mirror; he’d planned for that as well.

  As he walked quietly down the Berber-carpeted hallway toward Alana’s bedroom door, he thought about how it would play out. He was as good if not better than Alana and Jessica at setting a scene. And with this scene, he intended to have Alana Stevens play her part to perfection. Her best and final death scene would have as much drama and flair as he could eke out of her. Suddenly, he wished he’d thought to bring a camcorder.

  He clutched the knife in his hand and opened Alana’s bedroom door, calmly stepping into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 3

  Thunder grumbled with a roar and shook the small bungalow like a mini earthquake. Intermittent flashes of lightning and the howling wind had Kit restless and edgy. As if the storm refused to give ground, it battered the house until she pulled the covers over her head, curling into a fetal position. She couldn’t sleep. Something didn’t feel right.

  She didn
’t think it was the weather, either. She’d had the strangest sense of―something all day. It had started at the shop that morning, and then, out of the blue, he’d walked into the Book & Bean.

  “Jake’s to blame for this,” she said out loud to Pepper, her rescued black-and-white border collie curled up beside her on the bed. At the intrusion to his sleep, the dog lifted his head long enough to stare at her, stare at the crazy woman who had arrived home hours earlier, acting weird.

  “Don’t look at me like that, okay?” she told the dog. But since Jake had dropped her off at the store around six o’clock to pick up her car, a gnawing, inexplicable fear chewed at her insides. Something bad was about to happen. She couldn’t shake the ominous feeling and now she couldn’t seem to settle down.

  Maybe it was the panic attack at the house, she thought. And seeing Jake again must have triggered it. But she couldn’t ignore the sense of danger she’d felt when she’d gotten into her Jeep. Not danger exactly, she corrected, maybe it was more like defeat that stemmed from watching him drive off down Main Street and head back to L.A. and out of her life…yet again. Why did he keep doing that to her? And why did she keep letting him? And who was he planning on sharing Crandall House with anyway?

  The questions buzzed through her head like angry bees as she stretched out her long legs and tried to find a more comfortable position. As she lay there she willed herself to sleep and simply wasn’t convinced it was the panic attack making her so…tense and jumpy.

  After a while, she decided she’d gone to bed way too early. But she’d been exhausted. As she blew her bangs off her forehead, she decided she’d consumed way too much caffeine. Or maybe the problem stemmed from that television program she’d watched hours earlier about serial killers that had her jumping at every little sound outside. Or it might have been those six hot steamy chapters of the romance novel she’d read that had her juices flowing. That had to be why she couldn’t get to sleep.

  After all, a healthy, single twenty-four year old woman living in a little town like San Madrid who had just turned down dinner on a Saturday night with the man of her dreams had to be crazy as a loon. “No,” she protested. “Jake Boston is not the man of my dreams. He’s just a man from my…youth.”

  Hot now, she kicked off the covers and wondered what it was about living alone during a thunderstorm that made a relatively normal woman become such an insomniac.

  Normal? Oh God, had she actually thought that? Well, that showed progress, didn’t it? How long had she actually considered herself normal anyway? Since moving to San Madrid, she thought, as she silently answered her own question. Moving here four years ago hadn’t just been a good financial decision for her but a personal one as well. She’d obviously needed to get the hell out of L.A. and make a change in her life long before she’d actually taken the step.

  Normal. Wow. After three long years in therapy, wouldn’t Dr. Strasburg be proud to hear her use that word to describe herself. Maybe she’d call him out of the blue and give him a progress report. “That’s stupid,” she said out loud. “The man has better things to do than walk down memory lane with a former mental patient.”

  Chilled now, she grabbed for the covers and pulled them back around her. Obviously her restlessness and odd feeling was no more than the rainy, sunless week of bad weather getting to her. She didn’t know how people went for weeks, sometimes months, without seeing the sun like they did in the Pacific Northwest. She shook her head at the idea of living anywhere else besides San Madrid and told herself this was just an unusually long lingering storm that couldn’t last forever.

  As she shifted in the bed again, she reached past a slumbering dog, envious of Pepper’s ability to drop off to sleep, and picked up the remote to the television. She clicked it on, then switched remotes and turned on the VCR. The VCR already held a familiar tape, one she hadn’t yet converted to DVD. An old black-and-white image of her father appeared on the small screen.

  Here was her go-to comfort zone. It wasn’t the first time she’d relied on him or, rather, the image of John Griffin to lull her to sleep.

  It had been years since she’d discovered some of her father’s work on videotapes, videotapes that held images of him from his roles in movies or his guest-starring roles in the old ’70s television westerns. When she couldn’t sleep, like tonight, her father’s appearance on screen, even briefly, captured an image that reminded her of what might have been. As a character in his western attire, sometimes playing the villain, sometimes playing the sappy hero, he stared back at her from the television screen and eerily came back to life for a few precious moments in time.

  She knew how pathetic that sounded, but watching him in his various roles even for the brief few minutes he appeared on screen, were all she had of a man she hadn’t seen in years. But in spite of his absence in her life, her father’s presence on screen somehow always comforted her, and eventually she fell asleep.

  He was pretty sure no one would find her body until Monday morning when the maid showed up. But there was always an outside chance that Jessica Boyd might decide to pay her old pal a visit before that. “Well, she can’t be with Alana now,” he sneered into the damned rain as he drove back to his hotel. “At least not yet.”

  He’d cut that damned umbilical cord to ribbons, hadn’t he?

  He smiled at that and wondered if dear old Jessica’s death would be as sweet. He tried to picture how the infamous “family” lawyer would spend Mother’s Day with her self-centered brood.

  He snorted as he considered Jessica and Sumner Boyd’s family; their worthless three sons, Connor, Cade, and Collin, all lawyers. He knew firsthand the private image didn’t jive with the public persona they’d skillfully crafted over the years. He shifted easily from the focus on Alana to checking off his list of the others and how they’d made their fortune, every dirty little dime.

  When he was finished here, the family law firm, Boyd Boyd Geller & Gatz, the largest and most successful law firm on the West coast, would have to hope for a miracle in order to survive his onslaught, because he was about to crack open the family vault...then sit back and watch what slithered out into the light.

  If things went the way he planned, all of them were about to pay the ultimate price for their success, one by bloody one.

  CHAPTER 4

  When the alarm sounded at her usual five o’clock, Kit crawled out of bed, nudging Pepper off her legs, and dragged her body into a hot shower. She’d spent her day off, a quiet and uneventful rainy Sunday, doing what she usually did when she was in a mood: she baked.

  She’d made dozens of individual chocolate pecan tarts and a couple dozen batches of brownies, and if that weren’t enough, a chocolate cheesecake.

  As she stepped out of the shower, she realized now, she might have overdone the chocolate thing. But she’d been in a mood for chocolate. It was the weather, she realized, as she threw on a pair of well-worn jeans and an ancient red T-shirt emblazoned with the words Born to Bake on the front.

  She bound her hair back with a bright red scrunchie and left the bedroom to head downstairs, the dog at her heels.

  On the way to the kitchen, she contemplated whether or not the rain was really the root of her mood. She hadn’t slept well after waiting until almost six o’clock the night before to call Alana to wish her an obligatory happy Mother’s Day. When she hadn’t answered the phone, Kit had left a brief to the point message on her mother’s answering machine.

  Kit was so overjoyed that she hadn’t actually had to speak to her, she could have danced. And didn’t that just sum up nicely her entire relationship with Alana?

  Afterwards, she’d had no problem picking up the phone and talking for almost an hour to Gloria about everything from recipes to life in general.

  It wasn’t her fault she had more in common with her aunt than she’d ever had with Alana, the woman who’d given her life. As Kit saw it, Alana was the one with the problem and always had been.

  Kit’s first taste
of normal and belonging hadn’t come along until Gloria and Morty had moved from Maine to L.A., opening up a whole new world every time they had praised her or showed her affection. Both had given her a taste of self-worth for the first time in her life. And whenever she was around them, she had noticed how they took pleasure in the small things of everyday living. Like cooking.

  Like so many rooms in that Beverly Hills mausoleum that passed for a house, Alana’s kitchen had been off limits. No exceptions. No daughter of hers would spend time in the kitchen doing something as lowly as cooking. To Alana, the only people who cooked were, well, cooks. Kit winced, remembering the ugly screaming-match between the two sisters the day Alana had walked into Gloria’s kitchen and found Kit making a hearty Bolognese from scratch. Kit had been fourteen.

  But time spent with Gloria meant she got to do normal stuff.

  With her aunt’s encouragement, the reserved, shy girl had made the most of it. With the freedom to cook and bake at Gloria’s, Kit found she not only liked it but that she was good at it. Gloria had pushed her to experiment with recipes and try her hand at spicing up some of the age-old favorites and creating her own dishes, such as the chocolate pecan tart, a velvety saucy chocolate version of her own making, a dish so rich her customers hounded her to make it. And every time she did, it sold out before noon.

  “Well, come and get them, folks. I baked enough for the whole town,” she said to herself as she walked into the kitchen, mechanically turning the oven to preheat. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the fresh steaming pot already brewed thanks to the automatic timer she’d set the night before. After feeding Pepper, she started digging in the pantry, assembling the ingredients she needed to make fresh orange-cranberry muffins to offset all the chocolate goodies she’d made.

  When she’d poured the last of the batter into the muffin pans, she realized she had an excess of leftover fresh orange juice and rind and wondered if she had enough time to roll out dough for orange cinnamon rolls. One glance at the clock told her she needed to get moving. Maybe tomorrow, she thought, and started clean-up detail.