Just Evil (27 page)

Jake had a stunned look on his face. “Kit, do you realize
you’ve just described a crime scene that’s eerily similar to the murders the
Manson family committed back in 1969?”

“Wow. It is, isn’t it? Wow. That might explain why the dream
looks like it takes place in another era, why the furnishings look so old, like
they belong in the ’60s. It explains why the Mercedes looks brand new but is a
dated model now.”

“The killers drive a Mercedes. I think that rules out
Manson.”

“You know I could do some research online, find out more
details about the Manson murders.”

Just then the doorbell rang, causing Pepper to let out a low
guttural growl. Kit frowned at her usually docile dog, looking at Jake and then
back at the dog before Pepper trotted off to the front door, alternating
between barking and growling. The last time Pepper acted like that...

“He’s been doing that a lot lately.”

“What? Growling?”

“Yeah.”

Jake trailed after the dog, was the first one to reach the
front door and look through the peephole. He groaned.

Curious, Kit stood behind him, and when he moved she took
her turn looking—and stared at Dan Holloway and Max St. John. At the sight of
both of them standing on her porch looking perturbed, Kit went white. “Is it
significant they’re here at the house?”

Even though Jake thought differently, he tried his best to
sound convincing when he said, “Don’t read anything into it. Just remember, if
at any time you don’t want to answer a question, just tell them you want a
lawyer. Be insistent. That will end the interview and they’ll have to leave
or...”

Kit knew what that meant and told him emphatically, “If they
arrest me, call your friend Reese. I’m not relying on a Boyd or a Geller or a
Gatz for my freedom.” Noticing Jake had a strange look on his face; Kit
suddenly understood his anxiety and her heart went out to him.  “Oh, Jake, you
can’t be happy to see St. John here. This is too much, I’m sorry Gloria dragged
you into this mess.”

“It isn’t that. But I don’t think my being here will help
you any. It didn’t the other day at the bookstore. It just made St. John more
determined.” He rubbed the back of his neck and reached to open the door.
“Let’s just get this over with.”

Boston and Griffin. Together. The idea rankled St. John as
he followed Holloway into the living room and settled next to his partner on
the sofa. When St. John looked up, he met the cold hard glare of the angry man
sitting across from him on the opposite couch.

The two men had stared each other down at Alana’s funeral,
and now, Jake sat with his jaw clenched, looking like he might explode from the
tension. St John did his best to ignore him, concentrated instead on the woman
in question; who stood with her arms wrapped around herself in a protective
lock, and noted how nervous she was.

Holloway, the good cop, started the interview with a gentle
voice, wanting to know, “Ms. Griffin, we need you to tell us more about the
relationship with your mother. Tell us about the abuse. When did it start? When
did it stop? The neighbors tell us you rarely saw your mother these days, that
they rarely saw you at the house after you moved out as a teen.”

What was he saying? She’d never once gone back to that house
after she’d moved out. Thinking back to her past, a cool, detached mask slid over
her face. She started to feel pressure build up in her chest just as it had so
many other times when she’d talked about her childhood with Dr. Strasburg. She
tried to make herself relax. “That’s true,” she said barely above a whisper.

She looked into Dan Holloway’s dove gray eyes for any
friendly sign. He was about thirty-five, with short, sandy brown hair that
looked a bit windblown. Despite the soft voice, those eyes didn’t relay an
ounce of sympathy but rather cold hard steel rods searching for the truth.

She reminded herself that he was simply doing his job. This
time she needed to do better, answer his questions. She wouldn’t freeze up.
She’d focus. If she didn’t answer correctly—there was so much on the line now.
Jake was in her life. She had so much to look forward to. She noticed
Holloway’s mouth moving. 

“You want to elaborate?”

“There were the usual bruises and broken bones.” Now she was
wringing her hands.

She heard Holloway suck in a breath, heard an impatient
voice coming from St. John, the bad cop. “You inherit your mother’s sizeable
fortune, an estate that amounts to millions, and you act as if you don’t really
care that she’s dead. You didn’t cry at the funeral. You didn’t seem all that
upset when we told you she’d been murdered, brutally.” He let the words stick,
before adding, “When was the last time you saw her?”

Kit drew in a deep breath, let it out. Her eyes glazed over.
“The first of January, her birthday. I dressed up, wore a dress. I always wore
a dress, had to; she wouldn’t allow me to wear jeans. She didn’t like it when I
wore pants of any kind. Let’s see, where did we eat? Oh. We had lunch at Luigi’s;
she had the shrimp scampi. I had the broiled chicken. The meal lasted an hour
and a half.” Ninety long minutes, she remembered now. “I gave her a five-hundred-dollar
Cartier’s gift certificate. Anything less would have been unacceptable.
Cartier’s was one of her favorite places to shop.”

Jake noticed Kit had that distant, faraway look in her eyes.
They’d asked her about the last time she’d seen her mother, and she was talking
about lunch. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, get her away from these two
cops. Couldn’t they see how much it hurt her to talk about the past? Short of
butting in like he’d done at the bookstore, mentioning an attorney, he wasn’t
sure what else he could do. And damn, if she wasn’t doing it again, speaking in
that detached, unemotional tone, as if she were bored with the subject at hand
when the subject at hand was the death of her mother.

Jake watched both detectives. The good cop looked as if he
wanted to shake some feeling into her, and Max St. John was simply so red in
the face that when he spoke Kit jumped at the sound of his voice. “Look, Ms.
Griffin, your mother was a wealthy woman, and yet robbery wasn’t a motive;
nothing was taken from the house. Not a piece of artwork, not a book, no loose
change. Maybe you woke up on Mother’s Day—of all days—and decided if she
intended to cut you out of her will it was time you did something. So you
decided to put twenty-one stab wounds in her as your way of saying, hey mom,
Happy Mother’s Day.”

Kit visibly paled, wincing at his callous phrasing. She
grabbed at that veil of cool indifference and, in a calm tone, defended
herself. “I didn’t kill her. I don’t want her money. I never...expected it.”

Jake wasn’t buying that coolness she was trying so hard to
exhibit. When he saw that her hands were shaking, he dragged her down to sit
next to him on the sofa. The minute she made eye contact with him he noticed
she acted as if she’d just realized he was in the room. Her knees were shaking
so much he put his hand on her thigh to calm her down.

Holloway picked up the pace. “Okay, so there were hard
feelings between the two of you about the abuse. Understandable. If you could
talk to us, give us your side of the story, help us better understand how you
felt.”

Stony silence.

Holloway tried again. “Did the two of you ever get along?”

She shook her head.

Holloway and St. John exchanged furtive glances, but it was
Holloway who continued, “Maybe there’s someone we could talk to, someone who
knows your side of the story.”

“My side of the story?” Kit looked genuinely confused.

Jake had to hand it to Kit; no matter how the detectives
pushed, she managed to stay on the offense. The only question was how long she
could keep it up. If she could just show a tad more emotion…

But just then St. John erupted, losing all patience. He
snapped out, “The coroner determined this morning Jessica Boyd’s death was the
result of homicide. You should know we consider you the link to both murders.
Where were you Monday night, the night Jessica Boyd died, say between ten o’clock
and two in the morning?”

Kit’s answer was quick, and Jake had no time to answer for
her. “Probably sleeping.”

But St. John wasn’t the only one who’d lost patience. Jake
spoke up, stating flatly, “The night Jessica Boyd died, Kit was with me.”

“Ms. Griffin says she was sleeping. Now she was with you?
Which is it?”

Jake stared at St. John in disbelief. “If you think about it
long enough, you’ll figure it out. We were together the entire night Jessica
Boyd ended up dead. As you recall, we were together at the bookstore and from
that time on into the next morning. Kit couldn’t have killed Jessica Boyd. I
have a receipt from the restaurant here in San Madrid where we had dinner. You
can talk to the waiters to verify how long we were there. The rest of the evening,
you’ll just have to take my word for it, we were together all night.”

But St. John wasn’t giving up. “It doesn’t take her off the
hook for her mother’s murder, now does it? Unless, of course, you’re willing to
provide her with a much-needed alibi for Saturday night or early Sunday
morning, let’s say between the hours of seven o’clock Saturday night and noon
Sunday.”

But Jake was just as stubborn. “You just said you considered
the two murders connected and that Kit was the link to both. Kit has an alibi
for one. As I see it, you’ve just lost your link.”

Holloway changed tactics, putting his hands up for peace.
“Let’s back up for now. What about your mother’s ex-husbands? What do you
remember about them?”

“I don’t remember much about the men she married after my
father. They weren’t around long enough. For all I know, husband number two
might have been Smith or Jones. Look, I just don’t remember; I was three at the
time. She married the other guy when I was five. As a child, I remember
thinking his name sounded a lot like an Italian tuna. You’ll have to get the
rest of the details about her marriages from public records.”

Jake watched Holloway pull two plastic evidence bags from
his jacket pocket. He held them up to Kit. “Have you ever seen these two items
before?”

Taking her hands for the first time out of Jake’s grasp, she
took both bags from Holloway, immediately recognizing the contents. The bags
held identical gold-minted cowboys, the same heavy feel and depiction of a
cowboy sitting atop his horse in front of a rounded sunset in the background
like the one she’d found at work by the cash register. A sick feeling came over
her when she remembered that she’d thought it resembled her father.

“They’re just like the one I found at the store.”

St. John and Holloway exchanged looks. Holloway wanted to
know, “You found one of these at the bookstore?”

Kit got up, walked over to her desk under the stairwell and
retrieved the gold cowboy from her purse. She held the bags up as well as the
loose cowboy. “See, it matches the ones you have in the bags.”

Holloway met Kit at the desk, examining them all. “We have
cowboy number three. You say you found this in the store? When?”

“Last Tuesday. It was sitting on the counter by the cash
register. I thought maybe a child lost it and Baylee picked it up, put it there
for safekeeping. But Baylee didn’t know anything about it.”

“Could these cowboys have belonged to your mother?”

She shook her head with certainty. “Oh no. They didn’t
belong to Alana. Even if they are pure gold, Alana would not have owned
anything so...so western, for lack of a better word. She would not have allowed
these in her house. Where did you get them?”

It was St. John who answered. “One came from the front seat
of Jessica Boyd’s car. The other one—the coroner found stuffed down your
mother’s throat.”

Kit dropped all three cowboys to the floor with a thud. The
loose one scattered under the desk. She glared at the detective. “That’s
disgusting. You did that on purpose.”

Up to this point Jake had been fairly patient, but eyeing
how upset Kit was pushed him to tell both detectives, “That little stunt was
uncalled for. You obviously have no leads. If you had leads, you wouldn’t have
had to resort to something so base. It seems all you’ve got is a daughter who
didn’t get along with her mother. Here’s a news flash, guys, lots of people
didn’t get along with Alana. As I see it, the killer has just handed you a
connection tying the two murders together, and you’re sitting here throwing
accusations at Kit.”

Kit swallowed hard and spoke up with a renewed interest.
“Someone took great pains to have those cowboys custom minted, not to mention
the intricate artwork that went into the detailed sunset in the background.
That kind of detail had to cost a small fortune, considering that the pieces
are made from pure gold. The fact that the pieces must be from a matching set
only increases their value.”

As Holloway bent down to pick up the three gold cowboys from
the floor, he smiled. “Give the lady a prize, Max. That’s exactly what we think
both pieces came from...a matched set. And now we have a third.”

Jake pointed out, “And you don’t see that maybe Kit isn’t
your suspect here but rather a potential target? Why leave one of those
trinkets for her to find unless the killer wanted her to know he was out
there?”

Or, thought Holloway, it’s the killer’s way of telling us
she’s not the killer.

It was St. John who said, “But that’s just it, Mr. Boston.
Ms. Griffin supposedly found this at her store and she’s alive, the only one
that is. The other two are deader than dirt, now aren’t they? How come Ms.
Griffin here is so special that he doesn’t kill her? How do I know for sure
that she didn’t just hand us one of these toy trinkets to throw us off?”

Jake was up off the couch like a shot. “So let me make sure
I understand this. You’re saying that because she isn’t dead, because the
killer hasn’t gotten around to killing her yet, you think this is some kind of
ploy on her part. Maybe there’s some order to his killing. Did you ever think
of that? Maybe he just hasn’t come around to Kit—yet.”