LITMIR.BIZ

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the window he watched Kendall as she parked on the street in front of the house in the Tri-Cities where he and his late wife Elise had raised their son Joe, who had been their pride and joy. He wasn’t like the other boys on the block. He was a homebody. A helper. He loved going out to the small ranch where the family kept some cattle and a few horses. When he was five and got his first pair of cowboy boots, he didn’t take them off for a week. Slept in them even.

      “You Stark?” he called over to her.

      “That’s me,” Kendall said, pressing the button on her key fob to lock the car and then feeling a little silly for doing so.

      Brenda’s former father-in-law’s neighborhood could not have been more tranquil. Every house was well maintained. Every bush trimmed with a delicate precision. It was hard to believe, Kendall thought, as she walked up to meet Brad, that evil seeps its way so easily into a place like that. But it could. It did.

      The evil was Brenda Holloway Nevins.

      “Nice place,” she said.

      Brad smiled. “Kind of have to keep things nice around here. The neighbors set a high bar, and you’re banned from the block party if you don’t keep things just so.”

      “You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

      “I wish,” he said. “But yes, I guess a little.”

      Brad led Kendall inside. Fresh track marks cut into the pile of the tawny brown carpet, indicating that Brad Nevins likely did a last-minute vacuum run over it before she arrived.

      “Made some coffee if you’d like a cup,” he said. “Don’t have any fancy teas if that’s what you’d prefer.”

      She smiled at the gesture. “Coffee’s fine.”

      “Right back,” he said, returning a beat later with a couple of Seahawks mugs. He set one on the table in front of her.

      “You need to use the bathroom?” he asked. “Long drive and all.”

      “No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

      Brad sipped his coffee and waited as Kendall settled in. “I wish I could say I’m glad you’re here,” he said, “because the truth is I don’t get much company. At least not any company I really want to keep.”

      “The media?” she asked.

      Brad set down his coffee mug. “Them too. But it’s mostly the cars with the looky-loos that drive by, pointing out where Joe lived, where he and Kara were last seen alive. Things had quieted down since, you know, everything happened. It’s been a lot of years.”

      “Seven years isn’t a long time when something like what happened to you and your family occurs,” Kendall said, wondering if he knew that a story like Brenda’s had the potential to last beyond his lifetime in the way that other serial killers’ had.

      Brad didn’t disagree. “I guess you’ve dealt with this a lot in your job,” he said. “Or, no offense, maybe you think you have. But I’ll tell you one thing I know for sure—and I go to a support group, and I’m kind of an expert—someone like Brenda doesn’t come along very often. Someone as conniving, cold, and evil as her is a freak of nature, and God doesn’t make many of them.”

      Brad Nevins got it. He was right. Brenda was in a league of her own.

      “And now she’s back,” Kendall said, easing him toward the conversation she’d come to have.

      “Right. Like the resurgence of the plague.”

      A plague. That was an apt description, she thought.

      “You think they’ll catch her?” he asked, hope rising slightly in his voice.

      She noted how he’d said, “they’ll” instead of “you’ll” when he phrased the question.

      Kendall turned off her phone and set it inside her purse. “She can’t hide forever,” she said.

      Brad allowed a slight smile to crease his jawline. “You don’t know Brenda. She can do whatever she wants. She always has.”

      * * *

      For the next hour and a half, Kendall Stark and Brad Nevins talked about everything that had happened to his son and granddaughter. How the sum of Brenda’s reign of terror had ended up killing his wife, too.

      “I tell people it was the breast cancer that took her,” he told her, “but I know that she could have survived it if she’d had more to live for. Brenda took away everything. I’m not saying my wife didn’t love me, but you are at that point in your life to know that the love she felt for her son and granddaughter was of a different measure. Brought more joy. And, really, a lot more hurt.”

      Kendall understood. Losing her own parents had been devastating. She cried a thousand tears over the loss and the sense of being left alone. Yet, deep down, she knew she’d lost them in the natural order of things. Parents die before their children. At least that’s the way it is supposed to go.

      Kendall had read the files and news accounts of Brad’s son’s and granddaughter’s murders. What he and his wife went through was beyond horrific. She’d devoured every word of the trial. She’d scoured the Internet for all she could find. She felt she had to know the details of those crimes for a better understanding of how Brenda operated.

      To know her better was to find her. At least Kendall hoped so.

      “I’m sure you’ve laid in bed and thought about this over and over,” she said. “Tell me about her.”

      “There probably isn’t enough time in the world to tell you what makes her tick, if that’s what you’re after,” he said.

      “I am,” Kendall answered. “I want to know. What do you remember about her metamorphosis from daughter-in-law to killer?”

      He’d finished his coffee and got up from his chair. He didn’t really need another cup. He needed to think. After disappearing into the kitchen, he returned, a peculiar look on his face.

      “That’s just the thing, Detective Stark,” he said, looking right at her with those sad eyes of his. “I don’t think there was any metamorphosis—your word—I think there was always ugliness behind everything she did.”

      “Talk to me. Tell me what you remember about her. We don’t need to revisit the crimes that killed your son and granddaughter. There has been plenty written about all of that. I’ve read it.”

      “There’s about to be more,” he said.

      The remark puzzled her.

      “I don’t follow.”

      “A book,” he answered. “Someone is working on a book. Movie people have called too. But I don’t want a damn thing to do with them. They couldn’t get it right if they tried. No one would believe it.”

      “Believe what?” she asked.

      “The things she did.”

      “I need an example, Mr. Nevins,” Kendall said. “I want to stop her. I want to understand just who she is and what is underneath her skin, what it is that drives her and, more than anything, how to stop her.”

      “Tall order,” he said. “Skyscraper tall.”

      “Tell me about her.”

      He sat back down in his chair. “Want to know the first time I met her?”

      “That’s a start,” she said.

      CHAPTER NINE

      Brenda Holloway was sixteen when Joe Nevins first brought her home to meet his parents. He’d begged them ahead of time not to call him “Little Joe” as they had since the day they brought him home from the hospital.

      “It’s embarrassing,”

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