Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  Kendall kept her face expressionless as possible, which, considering the ludicrous nature of Brenda’s candy metaphor, was pretty hard to do. “That’s not very helpful, Mr. Connors. Did she talk about where she might go if she ever got out of prison?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We all play the game that, you know, if we were Morgan Freeman getting out of prison where would we go. Most say Mexico because that’s what he did in the movie. I myself would go back to my old neighborhood and face those liars who said they found those bodies in my backyard. But that’s me. I’m stronger than most. Brenda was strong like me.”

  “How so?” Kendall asked, pushing a little, but not too much. “What did she say to you?”

  He rattled his chains against the scraped surface of the tabletop. “Sure wish I could have a Dr Pepper,” he said.

  “Sorry. I can’t give you one,” Kendall said, though if she could have given him a drink she would have liked to spit in it first. “Prison policy. Now, what did she say?”

  “She told me she was surrounded by losers,” he said. “She said she was misunderstood. The same way I am misunderstood. That she was innocent but she’d been branded something she wasn’t and that she’d never stop until she made sure the world got the right message about her. In one letter, she said something along the lines of how she was going to do something so big, so awful, that it would make people sit up and notice.”

  Kendall pushed again. “Notice what?”

  “Her,” he answered. “That they really screwed up on her prosecution. She was tired of being blamed for something she didn’t do.”

  “But she killed her husband and baby girl. There’s no doubt about that. She did that.”

  “Lots of people are convicted of things they didn’t do. Don’t you ever watch The Innocence Project on TV?” he asked, his eyes unblinking. “Brenda said that she was convicted because everyone was jealous of her. Her friends. Her in-laws. Even the newspaper people who covered her case. You know what, Detective? People can be real mean when they want to.”

  When someone deserves it as much as you and Brenda, she thought.

  “Yes, I guess I see what you’re saying,” she lied. “Did she say what she was planning? Did you get an idea, a hint of what she might do if she ever got out?”

  Again the chains scraped the tabletop. “If you’re looking for me to connect the dots for you, Detective, we’re fresh out of that today. Sorry. She hinted, I guess.”

  “And?”

  Jerry looked right into Kendall’s eyes. It was like she was looking into the bottom of a swimming pool with no one inside. Just the blank emptiness of his fixed stare. She wondered what those fourteen young women had seen in those eyes before he killed them. Had he been able to project kindness at first? Had he used that stare to bring them closer so that he could run that razor across their throats? Eyes like the ones belonging to Jerry Connors were vacant enough to be anything the beholder wanted to see.

  “She wasn’t explicit,” he continued. “You can’t be. Everything that comes in and out of here is read by some dolt who has nothing better to do than eavesdrop on our pathetic lives. Like we’re some show.”

  But not The Innocence Project, Jerry Connors, she thought.

  “What was she going to do?” Kendall asked. “Where was she going to go?”

  Jerry swallowed and made an audible gulping sound. A disgusting noise. He smacked his lips. He was either thirsting for that Dr Pepper or trying to push Kendall’s buttons.

  She ignored the darting of his tongue and waited for him to say something. Silence filled the room. Off in the distance, down the corridor through which she’d passed to meet him, she could hear the slamming of a heavy metal door and footsteps fading into the oblivion of the prison.

  “We talked about fishing and hunting,” he said.

  Kendall leaned in a little. “Go on. Fishing and hunting?”

  “Right. Not really that, of course. Not the animal kind. The human kind. You can’t share tricks and tips for, you know, dealing with people.”

  “Dealing” was about the coldest word for murder that Kendall could imagine, but she didn’t let her feelings show. She looked at Jerry with the same flat stare that he employed. Or at least she tried to.

  “What did she want to know? What did you tell her?”

  He laughed. “It seems so stupid now. I know you’re judging me. Judging her. But you don’t understand that the world is full of people like Brenda and me. You call them CEOs or politicians or doctors or TV stars. Anyone who wants to get something from others in a big way is a hunter or fisher. The world is made up of people like us and . . .”

  “. . . and?”

  “People like you.”

  The remark irritated Kendall. “And what, tell me, are people like me?” she asked.

  He laughed again. “I could really use that drink.”

  “You aren’t getting one,” she answered. “Not until we’re done.” She made a mental note to tell Steven and Birdy later that she was pretty sure that being a mother was good practice for interviewing Jerry Connors. “Clean up your plate, Jerry, before you go outside and kill someone!”

  “Fine,” he said, sulking a little. “I’ll tell you what I know because I’m not above being helpful. I want you to make a note of that, Detective. If someone asks if I cooperated with you, you’ll tell them that I did. I’ve been completely misjudged.”

  “You did kill fourteen women,” she said, unable stop herself.

  “So say the prosecutors.”

  “You admitted it.”

  He smiled. “I admitted those,” he said, letting the word those hang in the air.

  What the? Was he going to confess to more? Or was this another game?

  “There were others?” Kendall asked.

  He grinned. “I’m saving the rest of the story for my autobiography. Let’s talk about Ms. Brenda Nevins.”

  Jerry Connors was a tease. A killer. A complete waste of oxygen. He was also adept at controlling the situation, as he had when he’d abducted and killed his victims. Kendall wondered how he’d fared in prison. She imagined he was one of the few cons who’d be able to straddle both sides of the power base. Prisoners probably admired him for his ruthlessness. The corrections officers undoubtedly appreciated his compliance with the rules.

  Both sides had only seen what he’d allowed them to see.

  * * *

  Over the next half hour, Jerry Connors told Kendall how Brenda had started writing to him after she was incarcerated at the Washington Corrections Center for Women, in Gig Harbor, Washington. According to Jerry, Brenda was looking for friendship and understanding.

  “It changed over time,” he said. “They always do.”

  “Romantic?” Kendall asked.

  “Hotter than romance,” he answered.

  If Birdy were in the room just then, she’d have looked over at her and raised a brow.

  “What else?” Kendall asked.

  Jerry made that smacking noise again, but Kendall managed to ignore it.

  “She talked about how we’d both been beat up by the media,” he said. “And she’s right. TV people are so damn shallow. They don’t care about facts, only tone and volume.”

  That would be about the only thing Jerry Connors could say that she’d ever agree with. Kendall hated the media too.

  “What did she want with you, Mr. Connors?” she asked.

  The prisoner puffed himself up a little. He was loving this. Too much. For Kendall’s liking, for sure.

  “Besides having my baby probably,” he said, “Brenda wanted a sounding board. There’s no book you can read, no class you can take to deal with the kind of pressures ambitions like ours bring. Brenda sought advice from me. Like you might seek advice from the director of the FBI, you know, if you wanted to go to the top and get the best mind to help you sort things out.”

  Again, another opportunity for rolling her eyes.

  And again, Kendall kept her face as expres
sionless as possible.

  “What was it that she wanted help with?” she asked.

  Jerry Connors shifted and his manacles rattled. “Look, our words were coded,” he said. “But underlying all of her words was a desire to be famous. To show those who’d wronged her that they were nothing and she was worthy of major adulation. Worldwide even. There was no limit to her ambition. I liked that about her. The girl reminded me of myself.”

  “How was she going to get there?” Kendall asked.

  Jerry Connors, killer of at least fourteen women, looked toward the door and the guard outside. Like Brenda, he liked an audience. The larger the better. It was surprising to Kendall that he didn’t like television, as he was a natural showman in that hideous train-wreck way.

  “She was going to do something big,” he said. “Something outrageous. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I do think that the girl had it in her to do whatever it took. Some people have characterized me as being cold or indifferent. It might be fair to some extent, I don’t know. But I do know that Brenda Nevins had me beat by a mile. She told me that she’d get out of prison and she did. She told me that she had someone on the inside that she was working hard. I thought it was a man—you know the old corrections officer and the horny gal behind bars deal—but I guess it wasn’t. It turns out it was that woman who ran the joint.”

  “Superintendent Thomas,” Kendall said.

  “Yeah, her. I guess. I really thought it was a guy. She never said it was a woman.”

  * * *

  On the way out, Kendall thought about what Jerry Connors had told her. She dialed Birdy, but the call went to voice mail.

  “Okay, Birdy, that was not great. Not all that helpful. Promise me that whenever I suggest that I should go Silence of the Lambs and talk to a serial killer to try to find out something for a case, you’ll tell me that I’m wasting my time. At least I probably wasted my time. He wanted me to know that Brenda was driven by a need for fame and revenge. Like we didn’t know that? Right? I guess we also know that she felt she’d been wronged by people in her life. I’m guessing that someone must have not told her she looked hot back in high school or something, and she’s still pissed off about it. Still. Let’s see . . . I’m doing a data dump on you right now. Could use a drink. Anyway, I’m taking the seven o’clock boat. If you’re around give me a buzz.”

  * * *

  The opportunity to strut their stuff at Port Angeles High School had been presented as top tier, which made the girls from South Kitsap laugh out loud when they got notification in the mail.

  The Best of the West in cheer will be performing

  at the Port Angeles High School auditorium,

  Port Angeles, Washington.

  BY INVITATION ONLY.

  “How about ‘beg only’?” Blake Scott said, as she flipped her dark brown hair over her shoulder and gave her classic eye roll to the others. She’d been the first to receive the invite. She’d gathered the others together in front of her locker at South Kitsap High School.

  “Blow only is more like it,” chimed in teammate Kelly Sullivan.

  Blake had been one-upped in the sarcasm department, something she only allowed on a limited basis. Being number one at everything was very important her.

  “For sure,” Blake said, stealing the attention away from Kelly, “someone had to blow someone to force us into attending an event in a Podunk town worse than Port Orchard.”

  “Right,” said Kelly, a reed-thin girl with a suspected eating disorder, who carried a mini bottle of Listerine in her purse. “Totally stupid.”

  Of the squad, Blake considered only two others “top tier”—Amber Turner and Chloe MacDonald. They’d represent the school with their very best routine.

  “We’ll show those morons in Port Angeles who’s boss,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Mom,” Sherman Wilder said, “there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Violet’s son stepped aside, and behind him was the most beautiful woman his mother had ever seen. She had crystalline blue eyes, and dark hair that shimmered like the blackest water on a moonlit night. She wore a simple print dress that accentuated her body without screaming to the world that she had a stunning figure. She looked like one of those women in a fashion magazine. Her skin was flawless, her lips full, and her features were perfect. Not bland. Interesting enough to keep another’s eyes searching for the most perfect place to land a gaze.

  That place had to be those eyes.

  “Mom, this is Vanessa,” he said.

  “Ms. Wilder,” Vanessa said, “I’m thrilled to meet you. Sherman has told me so much about you. I feel like we’re going to be very good friends.”

  Violet felt the young woman was trying awfully hard to win her over. She’d been there. Most girls had. Trying to get in the good graces of the mother of a boyfriend is every girlfriend’s goal. She hadn’t been told much about Vanessa, except that she’d suffered some terrible tragedies in her life.

  “You must be tired from the long drive, Vanessa,” Violet said, trying to keep her tone friendly. Her son had made dubious choices in the past. Girlfriend choices. Wife choices. He was an introvert. He’d always attracted the kind of women who fed on being in charge. It was too soon to know if Vanessa was that kind of a girl. And really, at her age, Violet thought to herself, what did any of that matter?

  “Blackberry wine?” Violet asked.

  Vanessa hesitated. “If it’s not too much trouble, yes. But only on one condition.”

  Sherman looked at his mother, then back at his girlfriend.

  “What’s that?” Violet asked.

  “Only if you made it,” she said.

  Sherman laughed, cutting the tension. “Of course,” he said, “she did. She makes everything.”

  Vanessa laughed. “I’ll pour.”

  Violet scooted her walker to the pantry, telling Sherman to set out some glasses.

  “The ones for company.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Violet couldn’t sleep. She could hear her son and his girlfriend making love as the headboard beat against the wall in that rhythm that she hadn’t experienced for years. She was glad that Sherman had a lover. It broke her heart that he’d been alone for so long. He was such a good, good boy.

  After a while, the headboard stopped banging, and Violet drifted off thinking of her husband, the farm, the things that no longer were part of her life. She hoped that she’d die in her sleep. Not that night. But before she had to go to an assisted-living home in Port Angeles. She’d visited her friend Jerri Anne there and couldn’t banish the scent of the place from her consciousness. The mix of dead skin, soiled bedding, and bleach haunted her. She’d never gone back. Jerri Anne died a month after the visit. Violet considered her death a gift to her family and friends.

  Violet’s eyes fluttered open. She looked at the clock on her bedside table. It was a little past 3 A.M. Nature was calling. It called at least once a night. She reached for her walker, slipped on her robe.

  Vanessa stood in the hallway. She was naked. Her eyes met Violet’s.

  “Do you need something, Vanessa?”

  A nightgown maybe?

  Vanessa stretched her arms. “No, I’m fine. Just couldn’t sleep. I don’t know if you heard, but your son really has a way with a girl.”

  Violet ignored the remark.

  “You need to put some clothes on,” she said.

  Vanessa looked down at her nakedness. It was a long gaze, the kind that one might give to admire something precious. Coveted.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I hadn’t realized.” Her eyes stayed riveted to Violet’s.

  “Remember when you were young and beautiful?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I’m going to the bathroom and then I’m going to bed. I think you should go to bed too.”

  “The blackberry wine was delicious,” Vanessa said. “Goodnight, Ms. Wilder.”


  * * *

  The next morning, the kitchen smelled of coffee and frying bacon. The familiar aroma brought back a flood of memories. Sherman was at the stove, adjusting the strips of bacon as they sizzled.

  “Coffee, Mom?”

  “Please,” she said. “Smells wonderful in here.”

  “Like old times.”

  Not exactly.

  “Where’s Vanessa?”

  Sherman gave his mother a cup of coffee. “Asleep.”

  “Honey,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Mom, if it’s about earlier, forget it. Vanessa told me.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She sleepwalks, Mom. She told me that she ran into you this morning. She’s very embarrassed about it.”

  “The poor thing,” Violet said, taking her seat by the window.

  “It’s okay. She doesn’t do it that often. She doesn’t remember what she says or does when it happens. Just that it happened.”

  “I see,” Violet said, though she really didn’t. She didn’t know anything about sleepwalking. “She seemed awake.”

  Sherman moved the bacon to some paper towels to blot the fat.

  “She’s a bit of a free spirit,” he said. “I like that about her. Don’t you?”

  Before she could answer, Vanessa appeared. She was dressed, her hair and makeup perfect.

  “Morning, Ms. Wilder,” she said.

  “Call her Mom,” Sherman said.

  Violet blinked. She wasn’t sure she heard him quite right. Her hearing hadn’t been the best lately.

  “Mom?” she said, almost hopeful that she’d been mistaken.

  Sherman beamed. “Yeah, we’re getting married.”

  Vanessa put her arms around Violet’s shoulders and hugged her. It was a hard hug. A very hard hug.

  Vanessa leaned close to her ear.

  “I saw the way you looked at me,” she whispered.

  Violet pushed back, eyes wide. Her hearing was bad, but not that bad.

  “What did you say?” she asked.