Just Evil (4 page)

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been taught by the best, which made many of his habits outdated and probably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.

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.

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.