Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  “Okay, fine,” she finally said. “Fifteen. But a real fifteen. Not a fifteen that is only ten minutes. You understand me?”

  “I have a stopwatch on my phone.”

  “Phones don’t work around here,” she said.

  “This isn’t dependent on Wi-Fi or cell service,” he said. “A real fifteen. Be careful, Aunt Birdy.”

  Birdy didn’t turn around. “I always am,” she said, walking in the direction of the farmhouse.

  * * *

  As Kendall rounded the Wilder barn, she heard a humming sound. What is that? She moved closer. It came at her, faintly at first, then stronger. She smelled automotive exhaust coming from inside. Sliding open the door released a torrent of fumes. It was a cold, gray curtain, undulating and moving all around her. Her heart was pounding. Something terrible was happening. She lunged forward, and through the haze, Kendall could see the faint outline of a tractor.

  She knew what was going on.

  Someone is killing himself or herself. If it’s you, Brenda Nevins, it’s not going to end that way.

  She scanned the space, found a rag, and held it over her nose and mouth. Her eyes burned, but she held her breath. Her fingers felt numb. She managed to turn off the ignition of the old John Deere and then ran for another barn door, flinging it open as fast as she could.

  Outside, she found Birdy Waterman.

  Kendall’s eyes were wet, red. “Thank God you’re here, Birdy. My guess is someone is doing some more of her favorite activity.”

  “Carbon monoxide poisoning, Kendall. Open all the doors. We’ve got to search the barn. And we’ve got to do it fast. No telling if the girls are alive.”

  “Or if Brenda Nevins is,” Kendall said.

  “She’s no suicide, if you ask me, Kendall. Too in love with herself.”

  Birdy was right.

  Both women raced around the weathered old barn, opening windows and doorways. When a large window on the south side wouldn’t open, Birdy crashed through it with the butt of her gun.

  Finally some use for that thing.

  The haze lifted and they could see. Later, both would say it was the worst thing they’d ever laid eyes on.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes had elapsed since his aunt faded from view. A real fifteen. Elan looked at his phone’s timer, took a breath, and started in the direction of the Wilder place. Amber. She might still be alive. She has to be alive.

  Elan didn’t have a gun, but he did have the pocketknife that he’d carried since grade school. It wasn’t a large knife, barely useful for anything other than gutting a fish or the occasional squirrel. He hadn’t used it since he moved to Port Orchard. Right then, however, it felt good in his grip.

  Like an old friend from his past.

  * * *

  “Over here!” Kendall cried out to Birdy.

  Kelly Sullivan and Violet Wilder were unconscious but alive, huddled next to each other on the floor of the stall with the name MONTANA above the door. Their cheeks were ruddy, their eyes rimmed in red. Kelly’s head rested against the older woman’s as though she was seeking comfort. Was it a genuine moment captured as they prepared to die? Or had it been a tableau arranged by their killer? Kendall noticed that Kelly had been bound at the ankles and wrists. The older woman hadn’t been.

  Birdy dropped to her knees.

  “The pulse on the older victim—Mrs. Wilder?—is weak,” she said. “She’s been beaten too. Let’s get her out first.”

  Kendall hooked Violet under the arms while Birdy hoisted her feet. As quickly as they could manage, they carried her just outside the barn and returned for Kelly. They knew it was Kelly because she was wearing her cheer top with her name embroidered on it. There was no time to untie her. The teenager needed air.

  Birdy felt for a pulse. “This one’s stronger,” she said.

  “Lighter too,” Kendall said. She scanned the barn for the others as they carried the teenager out and placed her next to the old woman.

  “Hey!” a voice called out.

  Kendall and Birdy spun around.

  It was Elan.

  “Are they dead?” he asked, as he circled the bodies.

  “No. Not yet, Elan,” Birdy said, knowing that he’d probably waited as long as he’d been told to. She was glad he was there. They could use the help. “Carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Where’s Amber?” he asked, his voice full of urgency. “Did you find her?”

  Kendall’s breath had quickened. “No, we haven’t.”

  “Elan!” Birdy cried out as the teenager ran into the barn.

  “Amber! It’s me!” he said, running from one corner of the barn to the other. He looked inside the makeshift video-production studio, but what he saw there didn’t register. The image of a cut and bloody dead man filled the screen. What is going on? Where is Amber?

  As he worked his way around the mean green machine, he saw her.

  Amber was slumped against the wall of the last stall. Her ankles were bound, but her arms were free. Her beautiful red hair was matted with straw and manure. Her stillness suggested it was too late. Elan threw himself to the floor and cried out for his aunt to come. He brushed the hair from Amber’s face and leaned in.

  “You can’t die, Amber,” Elan said holding her shoulders. “Wake up. Wake up!” He shook her, gently at first, then harder. He was sure he was too late. He shouldn’t have waited fifteen minutes at all.

  “She’s not waking up,” he said, his eyes full of terror. “Aunt Birdy, she’s not waking up!”

  “We have to get her out of here, Elan,” Birdy said, touching his shoulder. Then once more, with some force. “Stop,” she said. “Don’t shake her. She needs better air. Carbon monoxide lingers.”

  Kendall helped Elan carry Amber out of the barn, while Birdy hurried back to the other two victims. As gently as they could manage, they placed Amber next to Kelly.

  Birdy felt for a pulse. She looked up. Her eyes carried some hope.

  “Elan, she’s alive,” she said. “We need to look for the others. There’s still a chance.”

  “I don’t want to leave her,” he said.

  “She’s breathing, Elan,” Birdy said. “She’s the strongest of the three. We have to find the others.”

  “The others are dead,” he said. “We saw the video.”

  “No,” Kendall said. “We don’t know if Tansy Mulligan is dead. One last sweep.”

  Kendall, Birdy, and Elan hurried back into the barn.

  * * *

  Kelly Sullivan’s red, weeping eyes opened. She looked around, trying to make sense of everything going on around her. She was foggy, unclear. She was outside. Clouds shifted overhead. Cotton plumes, darkening with the waning light of day, passed above her. She was shivering, but even that didn’t register.

  Where am I? What happened? Am I dead? Alive?

  Kelly looked to her right and saw Violet’s white and gray hair. The teenager’s neck was sore. She tried to turn to see if the old lady was okay, but she couldn’t move. It was as though she was paralyzed. Her breathing was shallow, weak. As she lay there, the memory of what happened came back, and the adrenaline in her body surged. Her arms and legs were still tied. She rotated slightly to the left, and all the air from her lungs exited at once.

  She faced the kind of evil she’d never experienced until that fateful trip to Port Angeles.

  Amber eyed Kelly.

  Kelly flexed her fingertips, hoping she still had that damn horseshoe, but her hands were empty.

  Amber had been the one to bind her legs while Brenda Nevins held a knife to a dying grandmother’s throat. She’d tied her own legs and wrapped a rope around her arms in a clumsy attempt to make sure she’d look like a captor had bound her.

  When she had been one of the captors the whole time.

  She’d given the other girls the invitation to the cheer event in Port Angeles. She’d provided the Mountain Dew to Patty. She’d been holed up in a veritable luxury suite in the barn whil
e Chloe and Blake were murdered for the pleasure of a freak (who was also her father!) and his girlfriend.

  “I know what you did,” Kelly said, her voice, dry and weak.

  Amber glanced at her. Her eyes were devoid of any emotion.

  “I hate girls like you,” she whispered. “You think you’re better than everyone.”

  “I’ll tell,” Kelly said, trying to inch away. “I’ll tell everyone, you bitch.”

  Amber moved her hand over Kelly’s mouth and nose, and held it there, while her teammate squirmed. Kelly’s eyes nearly popped from her head. She wriggled to fight off her former friend. She was trapped. Caught. Amber, who had orchestrated so much of what happened, was doing what she needed to do to cover her tracks.

  A minute later, Kelly’s foot twitched one last time.

  * * *

  Amber gazed up at Elan. A tear rolled from her eyes. She motioned for some water. He cradled her head and she drank, spilling some over her sweater.

  “Sorry, babe,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.”

  It was the first time he’d had the courage to call her babe. He leaned over and pressed his lips against her cheek.

  “I love you,” he said. “I love you more than you will ever know.”

  Amber moved her head in agreement. Tears came to her eyes as she looked past Elan to Kendall.

  “My dad did this,” she said. “My real dad. He told me that he’d kill my mom and my little sister if I didn’t help him. I didn’t know any of this was going to happen. I thought he was going to kill me. Rape me even. I don’t know what kind of a monster he is, but I know he’s dead and I’m glad about that.”

  Elan held his finger to his lips.

  “No talking,” he said. “You can tell the detective everything when you get to the hospital.”

  She shut her eyes, pressing out a tear.

  * * *

  Birdy knelt down and felt for a pulse, her fingertips gently touching Kelly’s slender neck. Nothing.

  Her eyes met Kendall’s.

  “She’s gone,” Birdy said. “Kelly didn’t make it.”

  “No!” Kendall called out. “That’s not right. We got here in time. We did.”

  Birdy undid the knots on the girl’s wrists. She didn’t consider it tampering with evidence, just the right thing to do at the time. If Kelly had survived she’d have had the ropes removed.

  “She breathed in a lot of the poison,” Birdy said. “She’s a small girl.”

  Kendall didn’t want to cry right then. She wondered why this girl had to die. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Kelly. She held her hand, still warm. Her fingernails were broken and a gash marked the length of her arm.

  “Poor thing tried to dig her way out, Kendall. We have to get these two to a hospital. We have to do it now.”

  “Brenda’s not far, Birdy. I feel it. I’m not going.”

  “I can take Amber and Mrs. Wilder, Aunt Birdy,” Elan said.

  “I don’t know,” Birdy answered, looking at Kendall.

  “We don’t have a choice. Let’s get them in the library van. The keys are still in the ignition.”

  They loaded Violet in first, then Amber.

  “Grammie,” Amber said, “it’s me, Amber.”

  Violet’s eyes moved underneath her parchment eyelids.

  “Amber, is that you? Amber, I’m so sorry your father was so wicked.”

  “We’ll be okay, Grammie,” Amber said as Elan started the van.

  “The closest hospital is in Port Angeles, Elan.”

  Elan wore a determined look on his face. “I know, Aunt Birdy.”

  “I didn’t know he had his license,” Kendall said, as Elan backed around the barn and head down the rutted driveway toward Elwah River Road.

  Birdy looked at the detective.

  “Well, I think he does.”

  * * *

  Brenda Nevins’s silhouette filled the kitchen window. She’d been watching—and enjoying—the chaotic scene the whole time. Kendall told Birdy to cover the back door while she managed the front. She’d call out when the time was right.

  “If she comes at you, don’t think twice,” Kendall said. “Shoot her. And by that I mean, shoot to kill. No maiming, please.”

  Birdy understood. She crept around to the back door and listened. Her heart pounded. Only two things were on her mind. She hoped that Elan really did know how to drive, and she hoped that she and Kendall would get out of there alive. Brenda Nevins was a killing machine. She thrived on the act of killing—not the supposed gain of doing so.

  * * *

  “Come in, Detective Stark,” Brenda said.

  Kendall, her gun drawn, inched her way closer along the walls of the entryway to the kitchen. Brenda Nevins, wearing a lime green negligée that had to have been one of Violet Wilder’s from the 1960s, sat on a chair facing the window. She was naked under the filmy garment. Even in her surrender she was a self-absorbed, but beautiful, menace. She’d brushed her hair and applied her makeup with the care of a model. Brenda even posed like one, with her ankles crossed in front of her chair.

  “What’s the matter with you, Brenda?” Kendall asked, though she didn’t expect an answer. She had been following Brenda’s bloody trail all over Washington, and the woman was still an enigma.

  “You’re asking about me?” Brenda asked. “I’d say I’m doing all right, Detective. Did you miss me? How’s Cody?”

  “I could shoot you right now, and no one would be the wiser,” Kendall said.

  Brenda beamed. “Either way, I win. I die as a star and become a legend like Marilyn Monroe. Gone too soon. Remembered for my beauty and all that I’ve done.”

  Kendall stepped closer. She could feel her heart race, but she willed herself to keep calm. Carry on. Be careful.

  The woman in front of you is poison.

  “Your legacy. That’s what you’re all about? I thought you enjoyed the limelight, Brenda.”

  Brenda shifted her body, letting her thigh show just a little more skin.

  “I am the limelight. But that’s only for now. I’m not stupid enough to not realize that one day the public will move on. I might have more followers than that kid who quit One Direction, but that’s fleeting. Fame these days is fleeting.”

  Kendall held her gun like a vise. She wanted any excuse to shoot Brenda and end her reign of terror.

  “Death would be a gift for you, Brenda,” she said.

  Brenda’s eyelashes fluttered. “Really? We all die. Then I guess we all get the same gift. In the end.”

  A knife glinted on the table. Kendall prayed that Brenda would go for it and she’d have the justifiable reason to take her out.

  “You can’t know what it’s like to be me, Detective,” Brenda said, looking at Kendall, with a gaze that was more quizzical than seductive.

  The narcissist in full bloom is the one who sees only herself when she looks at a group photograph.

  “I don’t suppose I could,” Kendall said, watching Brenda as a zoo visitor studies a python coiled in its glass-walled prison. “I do know that I wouldn’t want to.”

  Brenda is a glue trap. Quicksand. A snare.

  “So predictable,” Brenda said. “Always judging me. In your safe little world there is only right or wrong. In my world there is no judgment. Only right.”

  “Right to kill people,” Kendall said.

  Brenda offered the faintest smile. “People die anyway. We all do. No one remembers anyone, not really. After the memorial. After the photos have faded. It’s over. The people I killed will be remembered because I gave them a kind of immortality. They live on. In a way, I’m kind of like God.”

  “You are nothing like God,” Kendall said. “Those girls didn’t deserve to die. None of your victims did. Your own baby. How could you have killed her?”

  Brenda gave Kendall a hard stare. For the first time, her eyes pulsed with emotion.

  “I didn’t kill her,” she said. “I’m tired of being blamed for that.
It was Joe’s fault. He screwed everything up.”

  Kendall watched Brenda and the knife. “What did he do?”

  Brenda moved her eyes around the kitchen before returning to Kendall. A breeze wafted the filmy fabric of her negligee. Even in denial, she was aware of how she looked. She was a painting. A photograph. She was a goddess carved in marble.

  “Everything that night was his doing,” Brenda said. “I never killed anyone until after that night. The list of victims ascribed to me is much, much shorter than you—or even I—would like it to be. I’m all about numbers, as you know, but I’m no fraud. Jerry inflated his number of kills. I’m more about finesse than figures.”

  Jerry was a reference to her mentor, serial killer Jerry Conners, who’d pleaded for privileges by copping to dozens of murders—some of which he could not have committed.

  “Addie?” Kendall asked.

  Brenda sighed. “Chelsea did her.”

  Chelsea had been there at the river that day, but it was Brenda who’d grandstanded at the funeral. It was Brenda who had been on the raft. Had Chelsea been on the raft too?

  “Charlotte?” Kendall asked.

  Brenda tapped her talons on the tabletop. “An accident. You can believe me or not. I don’t care. I didn’t do those. I didn’t do any until Janie. I didn’t even know how to kill until my pen pals guided me. Mentored me as the press likes to call it. Believe what you want.”

  Brenda Nevins was a facile liar. Everything she said was a lie or was a lie braided in strings of truth that seemed impossible to unravel.

  “Why the insurance on your baby?” Kendall asked.

  It was a game of chicken. Neither the detective nor the serial killer would flinch.

  “Joe’s idea,” Brenda said. “I admit that I was a participant, but not willingly. He was the one who wasn’t going anywhere in life. I admit I wanted out of that godforsaken town, but I didn’t kill her. Newsflash. I know right from wrong. I know what it’s like to be backed into a corner.”

  She stopped talking and looked at the knife.

  Kendall moved closer.

  “Why those girls?” Kendall asked, not wanting the conversation to end. To end the dialogue would be to stall or even eradicate the chance for some kind of truth.