Evil Never Dies

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The first thing Kobi Millard noticed when she returned home after a long day filled with meetings and phone calls was that the door was unlocked. With her fingers clasped around the doorknob, she slowly pushed open the door. “Valerie?” she called as she stepped inside. “Val, are you here?”

Usually the television was on and she would find her ten-year-old daughter eating a pudding or some other snack she wasn’t supposed to eat before di

Kobi’s heart dropped to her stomach. Valerie walked home from school every day. Though sometimes, if it rained, she would catch a ride with their neighbor, Gretchen Myers, downstairs.

Kobi whipped around and sprinted out of the apartment, almost tripped over her feet as she ran down the stairs and to the apartment beneath hers. She knocked on the door, didn’t stop until someone opened it.

“Kobi, what’s wrong?”

She stepped inside, looked around the kitchen, ignored all the surprised faces looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Is Val here?”

Gretchen followed her inside. “No. I haven’t seen her today.” She looked at her kids on the couch. “Have any of you seen Val today?”

Head shakes and grunts. None of them had.

“Her backpack is on the bed,” she told Gretchen as she headed for the door. “She ate her lunch.” Kobi willed herself not to fall apart. “Oh, God, where is she?”

“Take a breath,” Gretchen told her. “Remember that time when she went to the park on the corner without asking, and you just about ripped her to shreds after you—”

Kobi didn’t let her finish. She took off ru

“Mom! I’m over here.”

Kobi wiped her eyes as she headed for the swing set. And then she saw him. Wayne Be

She walked over to her daughter. “Get off the swing now. We’re going home.”

“What’s wrong? Have you been crying?”

“Why would you leave the house with a perfect stranger?”

“He said he knew you and that he was a friend of the family. He said he offered you a job with lots of money and that you were still thinking about it.”

Wayne Be

Valerie blushed.

“Do you want to do that again sometime, Valerie?” Be

“Can I, Mom?”

“No. You can’t.”

“Stay on the swing for a moment, dear,” Be

Valerie looked at her mom.

“It’s OK,” Kobi assured her. “I’ll be right by the bench.”

“Next time you talk to someone,” Be

“I didn’t talk to anyone.”

“Not even in the parking lot at Grocery Mart?”

“Lizzy Gardner came after me, followed me from work. I told her to leave me alone and never come near me again.”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted me to testify against you in court. She also wanted to know what you did to me.”

“Did you tell her?”

Her mouth tightened, and she did everything she could to hold back the tears as she replayed bits and pieces of that night in her head. God, why had she risked telling Lizzy Gardner about Be

Because he was a psycho, and he needed to be stopped.

“How could I tell her anything,” she told him, lifting her chin and looking him straight in the eyes, “when I don’t recall ever going anywhere with you at all?”

He stood tall. “I hope, for your sake, she believed you. Your daughter is a pretty, pretty girl. If I were you, I would keep a closer eye on her.”

Shivers crawled up the back of her neck.

Kobi watched him leave, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop him from coming back. She walked back to her daughter and took Val’s small hand in hers.

“I’m sorry,” Val cried. “I never should have gone with him.”

“You and me both.”

Hayley sat on the couch, going through the videos from Be

But if she were pregnant, why would she keep it a secret?

Or maybe she didn’t realize it herself.

Hayley did some quick math in her head. If Lizzy had conceived within a week or two before Jared was killed, she could or would be almost four months along.

But how could she not know?

Hayley minimized the video application so she could do a quick Internet search instead.

It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. The stats were insane: one in every 450 pregnant women didn’t know they were pregnant until week twenty. Approximately one in every seven thousand pregnancies was unknown to the mother until the moment she delivered her baby. And there seemed to be a lot of reasons for this: the position of the placenta, no morning sickness, denial, irregular periods, weight gain or weight loss, and stress.

But Lizzy Gardner wasn’t like most women. She would know. Hayley decided to drop the notion altogether. She looked at Tommy and said, “Could you stop that?”

“What’s the problem?”

“That noise you’ve been making with the kid for the past ten minutes is a

“You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

She held back a smile. It was the first time he’d called her out. Ever. And for some reason, she liked it. The two of them had spent most of the day driving around looking for the Ghost. They were both tired. She clicked the video back on. After another five minutes, a room popped up. There was a couch and an end table with a lamp. Hayley sat upright as a woman appeared on the screen.

She fast-forwarded through the video, unable to believe what she was seeing. Once she got to the end, she hit Rewind until she was at the begi

Tommy leaned over so he could watch.

Salma had stepped out of the kitchen to check on the baby, and now she hovered over them, too.

“We’ve got a hit,” Hayley said, “and it’s not pretty.” She moved the cursor to the arrow and started the video over.

There was no sound.

A young woman of about eighteen years of age, wearing a fuchsia dress and black heels, walked into the living area. She appeared to be alone. The camera had a full-bodied picture of her as she took a seat on the couch. She sat on its edge, her fingers entwined in her lap. She looked around the room. Her legs were drawn tightly together.

“She looks so nervous,” Salma said.

The girl looked to the right, to a place inside the house that they couldn’t see because of the angle of the camera. She smiled then, a nervous, tentative smile.