Just Evil (5 page)

She bound her hair back with a bright red scrunchie and left
the bedroom to head downstairs, the dog at her heels.

On the way to the kitchen, she contemplated whether or not
the rain was really the root of her mood. She hadn’t slept well after waiting
until almost six o’clock the night before to call Alana to wish her an
obligatory happy Mother’s Day. When she hadn’t answered the phone, Kit had left
a brief to the point message on her mother’s answering machine.

Kit was so overjoyed that she hadn’t actually had to speak
to her, she could have danced. And didn’t that just sum up nicely her entire
relationship with Alana?

Afterwards, she’d had no problem picking up the phone and
talking for almost an hour to Gloria about everything from recipes to life in
general.

It wasn’t her fault she had more in common with her aunt
than she’d ever had with Alana, the woman who’d given her life. As Kit saw it,
Alana was the one with the problem and always had been.

Kit’s first taste of normal and belonging hadn’t come along
until Gloria and Morty had moved from Maine to L.A., opening up a whole new
world every time they had praised her or showed her affection. Both had given
her a taste of self-worth for the first time in her life. And whenever she was
around them, she had noticed how they took pleasure in the small things of
everyday living. Like cooking.

Like so many rooms in that Beverly Hills mausoleum that
passed for a house, Alana’s kitchen had been off limits. No exceptions. No
daughter of hers would spend time in the kitchen doing something as lowly as
cooking. To Alana, the only people who cooked were, well, cooks. Kit winced,
remembering the ugly screaming-match between the two sisters the day Alana had
walked into Gloria’s kitchen and found Kit making a hearty Bolognese from
scratch. Kit had been fourteen.

But time spent with Gloria meant she got to do normal stuff.

With her aunt’s encouragement, the reserved, shy girl had
made the most of it. With the freedom to cook and bake at Gloria’s, Kit found
she not only liked it but that she was good at it. Gloria had pushed her to
experiment with recipes and try her hand at spicing up some of the age-old
favorites and creating her own dishes, such as the chocolate pecan tart, a
velvety saucy chocolate version of her own making, a dish so rich her customers
hounded her to make it. And every time she did, it sold out before noon.

“Well, come and get them, folks. I baked enough for the
whole town,” she said to herself as she walked into the kitchen, mechanically
turning the oven to preheat. She poured herself a cup of coffee from the fresh
steaming pot already brewed thanks to the automatic timer she’d set the night
before. After feeding Pepper, she started digging in the pantry, assembling the
ingredients she needed to make fresh orange-cranberry muffins to offset all the
chocolate goodies she’d made.

When she’d poured the last of the batter into the muffin
pans, she realized she had an excess of leftover fresh orange juice and rind
and wondered if she had enough time to roll out dough for orange cinnamon
rolls. One glance at the clock told her she needed to get moving. Maybe
tomorrow, she thought, and started clean-up detail.

By the time she reached the store, carrying the first tray
of baked goods, the sun was just creeping up, turning the horizon into
brilliant shades of orange.

For the first time in almost a week, after days of
torrential rain, the sun was making an appearance. After starting several
different flavors of coffee including regular brew, she went to the front door
and flipped the sign around to Open.

Thrilled with the prospect of a sunny day, she stood at the
window with a smile on her face and watched as the little fishing village she
called home slowly came to life.

At about the same time Kit opened her store, a maid used her
key to unlock the back door at 15222 Bel Green Drive and made her way into the
kitchen to start breakfast. When she’d finished preparing the meal, she started
a load of laundry, and then waited patiently until seven-thirty or so before
going upstairs to check on why her employer hadn’t come down for breakfast.

When she got to the master bedroom, she noticed the door
stood slightly ajar, which was a rarity. Not wanting to spy on her employer,
but curious as to why she’d left the door cracked, she peeked inside…and froze.

Blood was—everywhere. A scream hung in the back of her
throat as she backed out of the room and ran down the hallway until she tripped
on her own two feet. Picking herself up, she fled down the stairs two at a time
and ran screaming out the front door to the nearest neighbor.

By eleven o’clock that morning, veteran homicide detective
Max St. John and his younger counterpart Dan Holloway had identified their
victim as Alana Stevens, a former actress and owner of a real estate company.
Her nude body had been left on the floor of her bedroom, cut up like a piece of
meat with at least twenty stab wounds―and the coroner was still in the
process of counting. They’d also found the murder weapon, a nine-inch butcher
knife from the kitchen, dropped in the bathroom sink with no apparent effort to
conceal it.

As St. John and Holloway stood in the hallway directly
outside the bedroom, waiting for the crime scene unit to finish up, Max said
flatly, “Whoever did this was pissed.”

“Overkill, pure hate, pure rage. No forced entry, Max. I’d
say she knew her killer.”

“Yeah, which means we start with family, friends, boyfriends,
and acquaintances right up front. I didn’t eyeball a single print on the knife,
but you never know. You canvassed the neighbors, right? Did they hear or see
anything?”

Dan shook his head and stifled a low chuckle. “You don’t
want to know.”

“Now you’ve piqued my interest.”

“Okay, but you asked for it. The neighbors are so damned
scared they think Manson might’ve made parole or one of his followers did and
came back after all these years, killed her like this to make a statement;
another actress, butchered, murdered.”

“Manson? You’re kidding.” St. John drifted back inside the
bedroom, and Holloway was forced to follow.

“Nope. A couple of the neighbors still remember the Manson
family slayings up in the hills not far from here.” Eyeing the uncertainty on
his partner’s face, he went on to clarify. “A lot of the same neighbors still
live here. They remember the Manson murders in ’69. For years afterward they
were scared, thought Charlie pulled some kind of bad mojo strings from his cell
in San Quentin. Now they think he somehow made parole, started his killing
spree all over again not far from the original murders.”

Dan watched Max roll his eyes. “Hey, you asked. I’m just
repeating what they said. Old people believe wild conspiracies. The way they
see it—a former actress, a mother, killed on Mother’s Day, their imaginations
kick into overdrive.” He flipped through his notes. “I did find out the victim
has a kid. A daughter, an estranged daughter, so say the neighbors. And there’s
an odd message on the answering machine from her that came in Sunday night
around six. Sounds kind of…weird. You might want to take a listen. Could be she
staged the call to throw us off. According to the neighbors mother and daughter
had issues. Since the murder occurred on Mother’s Day, the daughter might be
our starting point, and we spread out from there.”

Looking at the bloody, lifeless body still on the carpet,
Max agreed, “When you think about it, it makes sense: wealthy woman with a fat
bank account, greedy relative like the daughter wants her dead for the
insurance and the money, chops her up like meat on Mother’s Day. Doesn’t take a
genius to imagine greed as a motive, but why kill her like that?”  

“Obvious rage,” Dan said, glancing again at his notes. “A
murder with so many stab wounds, you figure it was either a crime of passion or
pure hate. We’ll know more details after the autopsy, of course.”

And even as he said it, Holloway winced as he watched one of
the crime scene technicians scrape at blood splatter from the wall then slip
the evidence into a plastic baggie. After only three years in Homicide it still
made Dan cringe a little. He remembered why he’d wanted to remain outside in
the hallway. So when the M.E. spoke it caught him off guard. “Got something
here, found something foreign in the mouth.”

Holloway watched as the portly medical examiner pulled a
shiny, metallic object from the mouth of the victim and dropped it into another
evidence bag.

“Define foreign,” St. John demanded.

The M.E. held up the bag. “Looks like it’s about the size of
a toy soldier, only it looks like,” he squinted, before adding, “a gold
something, maybe a cowboy. It doesn’t belong in the mouth, that’s for sure.”

Holding up the bag himself, St. John remarked, “What the
hell? What’s that doing in the mouth?”

“More like stuffed down her throat. Hey, you guys are the
detectives, you tell me.”

“Can you give me a time of death?”

The M.E. shook his head. “Too early, but I’m guessing more
than twenty four. My best guess is sometime after midnight Saturday night,
maybe early Sunday morning.”

St. John pressed, “When will you have more?”

“Don’t get pushy, Max. Tomorrow morning tops.”

Settling for that, Max and Dan returned to the hallway and
stood at the top of the stairs, where both men paused long enough to formulate
their next move. It was Dan who wanted clarification. “Okay, we check out the
next of kin starting with the daughter. Did she benefit from her death and so
forth? If so, how much does she gain? Find out if the victim had any enemies. If
so, who hated her enough to slice her up like that?” He went through his notes
once more. “There’s a sister in Agoura Hills.”

Just as they started down the staircase, harsh feminine
shouting suddenly drew their attention to the open front doorway. An older
woman with short black spiky hair, meticulously dressed in a raspberry colored
suit, was trying to bully her way past the two patrolmen standing guard. The
woman was yelling obscenities, making threats about someone losing their job if
they didn’t let her pass. She was also explaining to them in no uncertain terms
that they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

Tired of listening to the woman’s shrill voice, St. John
immediately yelled, “Lady, this is a crime scene. Back out of here now or I’ll
arrest you for obstruction.”

“Crime scene?  I’m Jessica Boyd.” She pulled out a business
card, coolly palmed it into St. John’s hand. “Boyd Boyd Geller & Gatz. No
doubt you’ve heard of us. I’m Alana’s attorney and best friend. What the hell
is going on here? Where’s Alana?”

They recognized the law firm and the woman, who was perhaps
the most famous female lawyer on the West coast and the wife of Sumner Boyd. Together
the couple made up half of the founding partners. Jessica Boyd stepped into the
entryway as if she owned the place.

Both men exchanged exasperated looks.

Not wanting to make a mortal enemy of the high-powered law
firm but wanting to keep his dignity intact, St. John simply offered, “Perhaps
you’d be good enough to ID the body for us.” It wasn’t one bit necessary, but
the lawyer didn’t know that.

“The body? What are you talking about?”

“Your friend’s been murdered.”

“Oh my God. How?”

With no intent to share specifics, St. John countered,
“When’s the last time you saw Ms. Stevens alive?”

Shaken by the news but not enough to lose her head, Jessica
jockeyed from lawyer to concerned best friend with the innate skill of a
chameleon. As she calmly searched inside her Louis Vuitton handbag for a tissue
to dab at her dry eyes, without missing a beat, she softened her voice and
replied, “Saturday night we went out for a girl’s night out―in Beverly
Hills, of course. We left around ten, headed to my house for some girl-talk.”

The cops didn’t have to know they’d ended up having a
threesome with a gorgeous hunk they’d picked up at the bar. “She was fine when
she left around midnight.”

“Any idea who might have hated her enough to murder her?”

 Without once considering that maybe a member of their
Saturday night tryst had followed her back to Beverly Hills for a private
rendezvous, Jessica’s mind began to consider more important objectives. When
her brain found one she couldn’t bulldog down, her eyes lit with newfound
concern. Deliberately she suggested, “That ungrateful daughter of hers tops my
list. Then there’s her Loony Tunes sister, Gloria Gandis. They both hated
Alana. And Kit…well, Kit Griffin has a violent streak. I’ve seen it firsthand.”

St. John’s eyebrows went up. “And when was that?”

“When she moved out of the house, she went into a violent
rage and attacked her mother, slapped Alana right across the mouth. I remember
it like it was yesterday. If Alana hadn’t already been kicking her daughter
out, she would have called the police.”

Holloway’s heart raced as he formulated different scenarios.
“And how long ago was that? How old is the daughter now?”

Jessica looked rather annoyed by what she considered an
irrelevant question. What possible difference did it make how old Kit was?
“She’s twenty-five. I know because she’s the same age as my youngest, Collin.”

Both detectives wanted specifics, but it was Holloway who
insisted, “So she moved out recently?”

Exasperated now, Jessica tried to put some force behind her
argument. “She was sixteen. The point is she’s shown violent tendencies.”

Jessica pondered her next comment, before adding, “And Kit
spent years under the care of a psychiatrist.”

Holloway didn’t make much out of a nine-year-old incident,
and hell, half of L.A. was seeing a shrink, but he pressed on, “Were there any
other more recent violent episodes between mother and daughter that you
witnessed personally?”