Hunt Evil Read online

  I straightened and ran my hands over my face as I thought about where she could be. Was she still in the country? If I had to guess, I would say that she had managed to get to a country that didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. That way, it would be harder for the US to get her back in prison if they ever located her. Was she with Jordan? Or had she killed him after he had served his purpose? Again, if I had to guess, the latter seemed most plausible. It would be easier for Mom to hide if she was on her own. While I didn’t know much about Jordan, just that he was an attractive personal trainer-turned-driver and was about 41 years old, I doubted he was as bright and devious as my mom. If he were, you’d think he’d be more ambitious. Being someone’s driver, even someone’s trainer, didn’t require much intelligence and drive.

  Ever since the day she got out, I had been watching my back. Even if I believed that she was somewhere abroad, I knew better than to assume that had to be so. Unfortunately, it was just as likely that she had chosen to stay local so that payback would be easier. My mother, who’d been furious with me for accidentally shooting my father to death at age six, would be even more pissed off now that I had succeeded in revealing her true nature to the world. I could only imagine that her mission in life as a fugitive was to make sure I got what I deserved for what I had done to her. Which was why, at first, I’d barely left Ariel’s penthouse that I had moved into shortly after Mom was arrested. There were enough people around to indulge my every whim. I felt safe at the top of the Fifth Avenue building Mom had called home for more than four years. Ariel, who was even more scared of Mom than I was, had hired a security team that guarded us 24/7. Even though Mom might be very familiar with the huge apartment, she wouldn’t be able to make much use of that knowledge. Someone would always be around to block her every move.

  Spending so much time at home wasn’t all bad. For one, I really got a chance to get to know my kid sister Neera, the product of the marriage between my mother and Ariel. I had only spent time with the feisty little girl sporadically before I moved in, and my main impression of her had been that she was sweet but willful, mostly in a good way.

  That impression had changed over the last few months, and not for the better. The girl was very spoiled, just like Mom had already mentioned. Given that Mom was a manipulative liar, I had of course taken her words with a huge grain of salt; surely, it was a matter of Mom exaggerating, not having the patience to deal with a lively, healthy child like Neera. From what she had told me, I had been a quiet, nice kid who always did what he was told. So I didn’t pay much attention to what the four-year-old did. It was only when I recently caught her stabbing her teddy bear with a small penknife that she had found somewhere that I thought twice about it. She seemed to have taken so much pleasure in driving the knife into the stuffed animal that I had just stared at her, riveted by her action.

  When I asked her why she had stabbed the teddy bear, she told me that she wanted to feel what it would be like to stab someone.

  “Someone?” I had repeated with a cocked brow.

  She nodded emphatically in response, her light brown locks bouncing. “Yes. One day maybe I will stab a person. I want to know what that would feel like.”

  The relaxed smile on her face sent a chill up my spine, through my veins. “Why would you ever stab a person, Neera?”

  She had shrugged her small shoulders. “If they’re mean to me, I need to make them stop. I don’t want anyone to hurt me. If I stab them, they can’t hurt me.”

  I tried to not read too much into her words; after all, what she had just stated was true. If someone was mean and tried to hurt her, she should be defending herself. The fact that she understood that and was prepared to make them stop was a good thing, wasn’t it?

  “Yes,” I told her. “You should never allow a person to hurt you. But stabbing someone with a knife is…”—I was searching for the right word—“might be too much. Too violent.”

  She tilted her head to the side. “That’s not what Dad told me.”

  “Dad told you to grab a knife and stab the person who tried to hurt you?”

  “Yes, he said that I should do whatever I can to make sure I’m safe.”

  “So he didn’t mention the knife and stabbing someone then?”

  “No, I asked him if I could use a knife and stick it into the person and he said, that would be okay if the person was very mean to me.”

  I nodded pensively, thinking that I would ask Ariel for his version of their exchange. I never got around to asking him.

  Another time, only a week ago, I spotted her watching a torture scene on her iPad. To this day I wondered how she managed to find that horrific site and how come the child safety software on her computer had let it slide through. What Neera had been watching was gruesome for an adult. For a small child like her, it had to be an unbelievably frightening experience. But Neera hadn’t seemed frightened in the least. Instead, she had devoured the whipping of the woman on the screen with a scary appetite, oblivious to what went on around her. When I tried to pull the iPad away from her, she had gotten mad and refused to let go of it, claiming she wanted to finish watching.

  I had stood my ground and forced her to give me the tablet. Then I had asked her why she was watching something like that.

  “Because I like to hear her scream with pain,” she had answered with an earnest expression. “I like to watch her skin bleed.”

  Trying not to show just how much her answers bothered me, I asked her: “How did you find the video?”

  “I don’t know,” she had replied. “I just found them one day.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes, I found all of them at the same time. I’ve been watching at night before I go to sleep.”

  I checked the tablet’s browser history then and discovered that Neera had spent several days watching disturbing torture videos from the same site. Before I could consider whether it was wise or not, I deleted the history and blocked the site so that Neera couldn’t access it again.

  Like with the stuffed animal, the event had slipped my mind before I could mention it to Ariel or anyone else. Now I wondered if that meant I was at fault for what had happened today. Shouldn’t I have picked up on the red flags? Shouldn’t I at least have mentioned to someone what Neera had been up to? I thought so. If I had, Ariel might have been alive today.

  I suddenly felt like crying.

  4

  James entered the sitting room then, announcing that Rachel had arrived. The petite, raven-haired woman walked straight up to me and we embraced for several seconds despite that we were practically strangers. I could sense that she needed the physical comfort and it felt wrong not to give it to her. Out of Ariel’s three adult children from his first marriage, Rachel was the one who had been closest to him and would likely take the news of his passing the hardest.

  When we let go, I gazed down into her face that looked so much like Ariel’s and registered how much pain she was in. Her black eyes under those dramatically drawn eyebrows were swollen and red, revealing hours of tears, as did her blotchy nose and cheeks. Her small, suit-dressed body was trembling. She wiped at her crooked nose with the back of her hand and stifled a sob.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to stop crying,” she murmured, looking away.

  “It’s okay,” I said for lack of anything better. It was awkward consoling a forty-something woman who had just lost her father so suddenly, a woman I had only met twice for dinner. Rachel and Ariel had been close, but she was traveling a lot for work, especially lately, so they didn’t often get a chance to get together. I couldn’t imagine how she felt even if I wanted to. Any relationship I had shared with my family members had either been superficial or forced and fake, like the one I had with my mother.

  “I came as soon as I could,” she said. “Got on the first flight I could get.”

  She had been in D.C. for the day for work when I had called her with the bad news. James had offered to call, but I felt I sh
ould do it, given that I was family now. I had yet to inform Rachel what had prompted Ariel’s deadly heart attack; all she knew was that he had overexerted himself and that while help had arrived quickly, it had still been too late.

  I was debating when to tell her about Neera’s involvement, whether to tell her at all. The detective seemed to think it was impossible for a four-year-old to consciously plan to kill her father. I was inclined to agree, but Neera wasn’t your typical four-year-old. She was extremely articulate and smart for her age. When I spoke to her, I sometimes forgot how young she was, she spoke so well. I didn’t share my thoughts on Neera’s precociousness with Detective Gilbert. It had felt unnecessary.

  “She’s too small to understand the ramifications of what she has done,” Detective Gilbert had told me. “She hardly wanted her father to actually die and be gone from her life forever.”

  Before she left, she assured me that Neera would likely ask for her dad tomorrow, having forgotten all about the heart attack.

  “Um, would you like a drink?” I asked Rachel. She looked like she could use something strong to dull the rawness of her emotions. I was barely 19, but Ariel had let me drink alcohol with him when I moved in. He thought it was ridiculous that a young man like me wasn’t allowed to consume liquor and refused to follow US law while we were in his house. After he learned what kind of a woman he had married, he needed a drink every day, he’d told me, and he would like me to join him if I wanted to.

  I’d definitely wanted to. In the few months that I had been living in this penthouse, I had gotten a crash course in alcohol, both wine and hard liquor. Ariel hadn’t been much of a beer drinker. I felt that I might as well take advantage of my knowledge here with Rachel. It wasn’t like she wasn’t aware that Ariel had allowed me to drink alcohol, and she saw no problem with it.

  She gave a faint smile. “Yes, that would be lovely. Can I have some bourbon, neat? A double would be good.”

  I glanced at James, who was hovering in the background, and told him to get me the same. I had already had a couple of shots of vodka to take the edge off the sadness, but I felt like I could use some more. In fact, I wouldn’t mind getting drunk. That way I wouldn’t notice the sharp pain that had developed in my gut, and that seemed to grow stronger with every hour that passed. The guilt was consuming me. To make it go away, I turned to Rachel, who had taken a seat on one of the two green-striped silk sofas in front of the fireplace.

  I went over and had a seat on the sofa facing hers. She was glancing at some of the large framed pictures on the wall. The one that appeared to have really caught her attention was of a tree that looked like it was alive high up on a cliff. Alive and boastful with its muscular branches reaching for the sky. It was an amazing photo that still creeped me out whenever I saw it.

  “That’s yours, isn’t it?” she asked me, eyes still stuck on the picture.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I took it many years ago. When I was twelve.” I was about to add that it had been on the same day that I had stumbled upon a girl who had fallen to her death while bird-watching from a similar tree on another cliff in the woods. I changed my mind at the last second, not seeing the point in adding such a morbid detail.

  “You’re so incredibly talented,” Rachel murmured, still taking in the picture. “No wonder Dad wanted to take you under his wing.”

  Ariel had come from Tel Aviv to America as a 19-year-old with the goal of becoming a wealthy real estate developer. He had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams despite having no contacts or education to speak of. When he got much older, middle-aged, he discovered that he had a passion for the visual arts, painting in particular but also photography. I had spent my childhood taking pictures and painting, and it turned out that I did have great talent in both disciplines. It was this mutual love for the arts that had brought me and Ariel together at first. When he discovered I had talent, Ariel wanted me to keep painting and taking photos.

  James appeared with a small silver tray that contained two tumblers with a couple of fingers of bourbon in each. He first handed Rachel one, then he gave me the other.

  I had a big sip of my drink, grateful to have gotten it so quickly. The liquor burned as it slipped down my throat, overwhelming the ever-present ache in my stomach.

  “I wish I had gotten a chance to talk to Dad one more time,” Rachel said, gazing into the crackling fire below the impressive fireplace mantel. “I wish we hadn’t argued, but that I had been more agreeable with him. Now, the last thing I told him was that he was a stubborn idiot.” She had a sip of her bourbon, her shoulders slumping.

  “I’m sure he didn’t take offense,” I said encouragingly. “He knew how much you loved him.”

  She turned to me and gave a small smile without teeth. “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes, I do. You were his favorite.” That was a lie—Neera had been his favorite by far—but hearing those words would make Rachel feel a little better.

  She chuckled quietly. “Only until Neera was born. After that, I had to make do with being second favorite. But who can blame him for preferring her over me? The girl is amazing. So smart and cute, spirited like Dad was. It’s hard to believe she’s as young as she is when she talks.”

  “Yes, it sure is.” I had another gulp of my bourbon to drown out the guilt that surged through me at the thought of Neera and her cleverness. The ease with which she picked up knowledge, like a new sponge sucking up water from the floor.

  “How’s Neera taking it?” Rachel asked, looking suddenly concerned. “Does she even know yet? Did you tell her?”

  I debated whether to even mention that Neera had been around when Ariel died, never mind that she had been the one who had induced the heart attack in the first place. When it struck me that Rachel would find out that Neera had at least been present, I decided that I might as well tell her part of the truth now.

  “Neera was with Ariel when it happened,” I said. “They were playing in her bedroom.”

  Rachel covered her mouth to stifle a small gasp. “Oh! Poor little girl… She must’ve been so terrified when she saw her father having a heart attack. Was she very upset?”

  “Um, sort of.” Then I had a third gulp of the bourbon to make the lie taste better.

  5

  “Where is Daddy?” Neera wanted to know the next day, just like Detective Gilbert had predicted. The little girl had just joined Rachel and me around the dining room table, where we were eating a late breakfast. Rachel and I had drunk more than we probably should have, getting so drunk we both had a headache this morning and had remained in bed for as long as possible.

  Rachel and I exchanged a glance across the big table. I gave her a tiny nod, indicating that I wanted her to take care of this. Last night, we had agreed on what to tell Neera should this situation occur.

  “Hi Neera,” Rachel began, then cleared her throat. “How are you? Do you remember me?”

  “Yes, you’re my auntie Rachel. Do you know where Daddy is?”

  “Daddy has gone away on one of his business trips and won’t be back for a while.”

  The child cocked her head, then shot me an accusatory glance. “Shay told me Daddy went to the hospital because his heart hurt. Did you lie?”

  “No, he did go to the hospital,” I inserted. “But when he was done there he had to go on a trip. He had to go right away. There was no time to say goodbye.”

  “Oh,” Neera said and reached for a piece of wheat toast from a plate near her. “Will you stay here long, Auntie Rachel?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rachel answered evasively. Then she smiled at the girl. “Would you like me to stay, Neera?”

  Neera shrugged her small shoulders. “If you want to.” She bit into the already buttered and jam-covered toast.

  “Okay,” Rachel replied and had a sip of her black tea. “Do you want to go see a movie with me later? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  Again, Neera shrugged. “Maybe.” She seemed focused on eating her toast, so Rachel t
urned to me. I gave her an encouraging smile, attempting to convey with my gaze that it wasn’t personal; lately, I had come to notice that Neera had been evasive with everyone. She had gone from super friendly to cool and disinterested. Sometimes, when I looked at her, I could see our mother in her chubby face, in the way she silently contemplated me, and it freaked me out. Whenever that happened, I reminded myself that she had half of Mom’s genes, so it shouldn’t be at all surprising to me that she looked like Mom. It shouldn’t freak me out in the least.

  “When will the others arrive?” Rachel asked me, referring to her siblings. Her younger brother lived in Los Angeles, where he was pursuing a career as a stand-up comic, and her younger sister lived in Texas with her husband and kids. Rachel didn’t even have a boyfriend.

  “I don’t know about Ari, but Sara said that she would try to be here tomorrow sometime. She wants to coordinate everything with the kids and her husband. She’ll call and let us know today, she said. I haven’t tried Ari since last night before you got here. I’m still waiting to hear from him. Maybe you want to give him a call this time?”

  Rachel didn’t get along very well with her younger siblings, which was why she’d asked me to contact them. I wondered if it was because their father hadn’t hidden the fact that she was his favorite child.

  “Is Ari coming to visit?” Neera piped.

  “Yes, both Uncle Ari and Auntie Sara will come to visit,” I told the girl, who had raspberry jam smeared all around her mouth now. “Your cousins too.”

  “Yay! Ben and Mimi! Can we all play then?”

  “Yes, of course you can, sweetie,” Rachel said and smiled warmly.

  “When are they coming?” Neera asked.

  “Soon,” I told her.

  We spent the rest of breakfast discussing games Neera would play with her cousins and what toys they would use. Because Rachel and I both wanted to distract Neera as much as possible from reality, we let her continue to dominate the conversation until breakfast was over. We both dreaded the moment we had to tell her what had become of her father. Neera was already prone to tantrums, and given how fond she had been of Ariel, she would likely be inconsolable.