Hunt Evil Read online

  Hunt Evil

  Book Three in the Evil trilogy

  julia derek

  Copyright © 2018 by julia derek

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by The Cover Collection

  Created with Vellum

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  To Bear, you will always be in my heart

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  37. Sean – About A Month Earlier

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Also by julia derek

  1

  It happened three weeks after Neera’s fourth birthday. The cute girl looked pleased with herself when she loudly announced, hands on her small hips: “Daddy can never be mean to me again.”

  She was standing in the wide arched doorway between the two sitting rooms in the penthouse on Fifth Avenue, watching me where I sat on one of the sofas, about to call Trish, the girl I had begun to date.

  I put the cell phone down and asked, “What do you mean, Neera?”

  She smiled in that infectious way of hers, broadly and with all of her little teeth showing: “I killed him!”

  I stared at her, sure I must have misunderstood. She could not have said I killed him, looking like she had just gotten a new doll to play with. Or was this her idea of a joke? No, she was too young to be so morbid.

  Before I could ask her to repeat herself, she bounced toward me, shrieking, “I killed him, I killed him, I killed him!” She kept skipping forward, those three words coming out of her like she was singing a happy song, over and over. Finally, she reached me and slapped her tiny hands on my knees.

  “I killed Daddy, Shay!”

  I was sitting ramrod straight on the sofa, unable to take my eyes off of the adorable girl with the pigtails and the frilly yellow dress standing before me. As though my arms were an entity of their own, they left my sides and my hands gripped Neera’s small wrists, forcing her to stop banging my knees.

  I squeezed them so hard the girl let out a yelp, the smile on her plump face dying and her hazel eyes suddenly big and round. “Ouch, it hurts, Shay…” she whimpered.

  I ignored her. “Where is Daddy, Neera?”

  “In my room. On the floor. I killed him.”

  I shot to my feet, letting go of the girl’s wrists at the same time. Pushing her aside gently, I marched out of the sitting room and into the big hallway in the direction of Neera’s large bedroom at the end. Given that the penthouse took up the entire top floor of the building, it wasn’t a short walk. Neera stumbled after me somewhere in the distance, yelling, “Shay! Shay!”

  As I spotted the door to her room, which was ajar, I repeated to myself that she was playing, she’s only a little girl. It will be fine.

  She’s playing, she’s only a little girl. It will be fine. She’s playing, she’s only a little girl. It will be fine. She’s playing, she’s only a little girl. It will be fine.

  In the seconds it took me to reach her room, I had managed to convince myself that this was in fact true and that Ariel himself was in on it. I wouldn’t accept anything else.

  I pushed the door open all the way, fully expecting to find the brown-skinned little man lying on the floor, playing dead at the same time as he was unable to stop chuckling like a madman. At this point, I had come to learn that the 75-year-old Israeli had a very dark sense of humor. This was all a big, unfunny joke. A taste of the Friedman family’s special brand of humor.

  The aging man did lie splayed out sideways on the cream-colored, thick rug that covered a considerable chunk of the shiny hardwood floor, face away from the door, but he wasn’t shaking with laughter. He was perfectly still.

  “Ariel,” I said, having paused in the doorway. “Ariel. What are you guys up to?”

  He didn’t move at all, but instead of getting nervous, fearing the worst, anger began to simmer in my veins as I doubled down on it all being just a prank. No more of this.

  “Ariel!” I demanded, striding over to him, willing him to turn to me with my voice, willing him to stop playing. It wasn’t funny. He of everyone in the world should understand just how fucking unfunny this prank was to me. He needed to stop indulging his young daughter or she would become a little monster, exactly like my mother had predicted. I didn’t agree with my psychopathic mother on a lot of things, but this was one that I definitely did.

  “Ariel!” I stopped beside him, giving him one more chance to roll over and act like an adult finally. When he didn’t, I sank down on my haunches and grabbed his arm and rolled him over so that he was on his back.

  It took me one look at his ashen face and flat eyes to know that he wasn’t acting at all. This wasn’t his idea of a practical joke, a tasteless, much too dark one.

  Ariel Friedman was dead.

  Even though I understood that on a rational level, I refused to accept it was the truth. I shook Ariel, ordering him to talk to me, say something.

  “Come on, stop it,” I implored. “It’s not funny, Ariel. You know it’s not. Hey. Talk to me. Please.”

  But he just lay there, like a clothed slab of meat, those shark-like black eyes frozen in their sockets, his immobile features wax-like.

  “Shay?” Neera’s voice behind me. “Shay?”

  I could hear her walk toward me, and I instantly swiveled around, my arms raised in protective mode. She wasn’t going to get me, too. No way.

  She stopped walking and let out a little gasp. “Why you look so mad, Shay? You mad at me?”

  Realizing how tense my face and the rest of my body were, I made myself relax. What the hell are you doing, man? She’s just four years old. She’s not about to stab you from behind!

  “Are you mad cuz I killed Daddy?” She walked over to me and stopped beside me. I turned back toward Ariel, who lay as disturbingly still as before.

  I shook him gently and whispered, “Ariel, please talk to me…”

  He didn’t, of course. A couple of beats later, my fingers went to his neck. Wasn’t that how the cops on TV figured out if someone was dead or alive? I should be able to find a pulse if he was alive. Somewhere on the side of the neck. I fumbled around, searching for a throbbing artery and found nothing. Was that because I didn’t know what to look for? Please let that be so. Please. Oh, please.

  I kept circling my fingers around the s
ide of his neck, unable to locate anything that pulsed steadily against my fingertips. Then someone pushed me aside.

  2

  I didn’t have to call for an ambulance; Ariel’s butler James had done it for me when he saw me shaking the old man’s body. After that, he had brought the first aid equipment that was kept in the penthouse, among it an AED to jumpstart the heart. He and I spent the rest of the time attempting to revive Ariel, alternating giving the man CPR.

  When the paramedics entered the room, it was James’s turn again and I was seated on Neera’s fluffy, pink princess canopy bed, the little girl beside me. No more than ten minutes could have passed before they arrived, but it was still too late. Ariel Friedman, my stepfather, was declared a dead man shortly thereafter. His heart wouldn’t start beating again.

  I was grateful that James was such an effective manager of the household, getting everyone who needed to be there to come without me having to lift a finger. Because Ariel had died so unexpectedly from what appeared to be a heart attack, the police were on the premises as well. He may be an old man, but he hadn’t been at the brink of death. Except for his weak heart, he had been in good health for his age.

  The blond woman detective with the taut ponytail and the big mole on the cheek was seated on a chair that she had brought to the bed, facing me and Neera. She held a pen and a small notebook in her hands.

  “Please tell me how you found Mr. Friedman in this state,” she said to me, her voice official-sounding and her even features stern.

  “I—I was in the sitting room at the other end of the penthouse about to make a phone call,” I began, tossing a glance at Neera, who sat beside me like everything was just the way it had always been. We had all concluded that she must not be aware of what had happened, or at least she was choosing not to deal with it yet. “My kid sister suddenly appeared, telling me that her father had died.”

  I didn’t see why I needed to tell them the exact words she had used when she’d come to get me. She was only four; she couldn’t possibly have any idea why Ariel had suffered a heart attack. She couldn’t possibly have killed her father like she had claimed so excitedly. Someone that young didn’t know what it meant to kill someone. She had obviously just been playing, thinking Ariel was playing, too. In fact, she and I had played a similar game not long ago I remembered then, a game in which we played dead when caught. Neera loved roughhousing.

  “I killed Daddy,” Neera proclaimed then, rendering my attempts to hide any participation on her part useless.

  The detective, whose name was Melinda Gilbert, turned her attention to the little girl, who was nearly bouncing beside me on the bed. She narrowed her gray eyes behind her black-framed glasses as she studied Neera for one silent beat.

  “You killed your daddy?” Detective Gilbert asked her.

  “Yup. I killed him.” Neera grinned big at the woman, looking proud of her accomplishment.

  “Neera has a very lively fantasy,” I said quickly, feeling protective of the girl. “She is very intelligent and has figured out how to watch TV on her iPad. She’s watched shows and visited sites that are way too mature for young children like her.”

  Neera scowled at me. “I’m a big girl! I can watch what I want.”

  The detective and I exchanged a glance, silently agreeing to ignore Neera’s statement.

  “Why do you say that you killed your daddy, Neera?” the detective asked her.

  “Because I did. I wanted to see if I could kill him and I could.”

  I couldn’t help but stare at the precocious child. She didn’t know what she was talking about. The detective must understand that. The kid was barely out of the toddler stage.

  “Neera, can you please explain to me what you mean?” Detective Gilbert said to her, patting her white tights-clad little knee.

  I opened my mouth, about to ask if that was really necessary when I caught the blond cop’s eye, ordering me to be quiet.

  “Okay,” Neera happily agreed. “Daddy and I were dancing in my bedroom. He and I love to dance together, but Daddy’s heart is not strong, so we have to take breaks when he gets tired. I told him he was just being lazy. He said he wasn’t, but I told him he was lying. He told me he would never lie to me. Only bad people lie and he was not a bad person. Only his heart was bad, he said.”

  Neera paused then, as though she just remembered something.

  “What is it, Neera?” I asked.

  “I was still sure he was being lazy,” the little girl continued, “so I told him we needed to dance again or I would not be able to keep up in class. The other girls would dance better than me.”

  “Neera’s taking dance class three times a week,” I explained to the detective, whose eyes had developed a quizzical glaze.

  “Oh,” she said and nodded, then glanced at Neera again. “So you told your daddy to dance with you again?”

  “Yes, I told him enough with the break. We need to dance!” She slammed her small hands against her lap. “And we did. And he was fine, not tired at all. But then he stepped on my foot and it hurt so much. I got mad at him. That’s when I decided I kill him so he couldn’t ever hurt me again.”

  A light frown appeared between the detective’s light eyebrows. “You decided you would kill him so he couldn’t ever hurt you again?”

  Neera nodded with an earnest expression. “Yes. Because you shouldn’t make other people hurt. It’s mean. He needed to learn a lesson or he would be mean again. I didn’t want him to be mean to me again, so I killed him.”

  “And exactly how did you kill him, Neera?” Detective Gilbert asked the little girl.

  “I made him swing me around so much he got one of his heart pains. Then, when he fell down to the floor and asked me to go get James or Shay, I pretended to go.” She glanced conspiratorially between me and the detective. “But I didn’t. I just opened the door and stood outside, watching to see what he would do. I thought he would get up, but he didn’t, so I went to get Shay to help me.” She turned to me. “Can I have a cookie? I’m hungry.”

  3

  She didn’t understand what she was doing. She’s only four years old. Those twelve words kept going around inside my head, like a long, awkward meditation mantra, over and over.

  At the moment, Neera was sleeping and I was seated on the same sofa where I had been when she came to tell me she had killed her father. Three hours had passed since the authorities had left, bringing Ariel’s body with them. When Neera asked what the men were doing with Ariel, she was told that he needed to go to the hospital to be checked out. Detective Gilbert had thought it best that Neera remained at home as long as there were responsible adults around her at all times. That included James and myself, as Karen, Neera’s nanny, had the day off. When Detective Gilbert learned who I was, an ex-con still waiting to get his name cleared, she had insisted on James remaining with me and Neera until Ariel’s oldest daughter, Rachel, would join us. I was expecting Rachel to arrive shortly.

  Only a month had passed since my mom had escaped from Rikers Island and the NYPD were still working on attaching her to the murders she’d gotten me imprisoned for. With her on the lam, it made their task even more difficult. In order to officially clear my name, the New York district attorney’s office needed more than a few pages from an old diary to prove that she had in fact set me up. Ideally, they would need for Mom to confess, they had told Mr. Shapiro, the lawyer Ariel had gotten for me, when he’d last checked in with them. The best they could do for now was to revoke my parole responsibilities, meaning, I didn’t have to check in with my parole officer any longer nor did I have to report when I was leaving town. Basically, I could live a normal life.

  I hadn’t seen or heard from Mom since the day she managed to get out of the Women’s Center where she’d been held in wait to be tried for attempting to murder Ariel Friedman, her second husband. I was still beating myself up for not immediately checking in with Ariel in regard to Jordan, the Friedmans’ driver, whom I had spotted on the prem
ises when I went to visit Mom. Jordan had recently quit his job as the family’s driver and gotten hired as a correctional officer at the Women’s Center to help Mom get out. When I found out he was no longer working for the Friedman family, it was too late.

  As far as I knew, no one had seen Jordan since the day Mom escaped.

  I sighed heavily at the thought of Mom, resting my head in my hands. I should have known she had a backup plan. I should have suspected that she was up to something when she’d claimed to have found God after only a week behind bars and wanting to have a relationship with me. A real, loving relationship, the kind I had always deserved. My mother wasn’t someone who was capable of remorse, certainly not so quickly. But, no, I had swallowed her act hook, line, and sinker. I could be such an amazing moron.

  As I pondered my actions, the reason why I had been so gullible occurred to me yet again. Deep inside, I desperately wanted to believe that Mom was capable of love and redemption. That she was capable of loving me. I didn’t want to accept that she was truly a monster, this inhumane being. She knew this about me, that, on some level, I still loved her. Being a psychologist as well as a psychopath, she knew exactly how to manipulate me, make me let down my guard and focus on the wrong things.