Krys crossed over to it, standing on one side of the sliding door. “It has a lock on it.”
He spared a disapproving glance in the door’s direction. “A lock that a nine-year-old could pick, not to mention that it’s a glass door, which means that it could easily be broken.”
She didn’t appreciate what he was doing. “Are you trying to scare me?”
Morgan frowned at the conclusion she had jumped to. “What I’m trying to do is make you aware of your surroundings.”
“Oh, make no mistake about it. I am definitely aware of them,” she assured him. She didn’t need him pointing out the obvious. She needed him to find out who had taken a shot at her and then tried to hit her with their van.
He made a decision. “I can have a police car patrolling the area every half hour,” Morgan told her, taking out his cell phone so that he could put a request in to the station.
“Every half hour,” she repeated, nodding. “That’ll give my killer a twenty-nine-minute window he could use to shoot me.”
About to say something, Morgan paused and studied her face. “Are you afraid?”
“No.” She laughed, brushing off his question. She had sounded too serious just then, she thought, upbraiding herself. The last thing she wanted was to sound like a frightened, old-fashioned damsel in distress. “Just pulling your leg.”
Krys crossed back into the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I can fix us something to eat.”
Morgan frowned impatiently. “Krys, this isn’t a social call.”
“I’m aware of that. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have something to eat. I’ve got some chicken soup I could warm up, or I could just get something delivered if you’d rather have that.” Temporarily closing the refrigerator door, she turned around to look at Morgan. “What are you in the mood for?”
“Answers,” he told her.
They were obviously not on the same wavelength right now, she thought. “What kind of answers?”
Either she was really in denial, or she had completely forgotten that he told her he wanted her to give him a list of names of the people she thought might be possible suspects in her own personal version of a murder mystery.
Giving her the benefit of the doubt, Morgan refreshed her memory. “That list of names I asked you for,” he reminded her.
Krys nodded, resigned that he wouldn’t eat anything until she supplied him with at least some of the people she talked to or got information about. Somewhere in that list might be a person worried enough about their future that they’d eventually decided they had it in for her.
“All right, let’s get that out of the way,” she agreed. She gestured around the general area. “Where do you want to sit?”
He’d always found that sitting at a desk or table made it easier for him to jot things down than sitting on a sofa. Morgan indicated her kitchen table. “How about over there?”
“Just let me get something first,” she told him. She began to go toward the back of the house. He followed her, but she looked at him over her shoulder. “That’s okay. I don’t need an escort,” she said. “I know my way around here.”
Her flippant quip made him frown. “This isn’t a joke, you know.”
“I know,” she replied tersely. “Would you be happier if I assumed a fetal position and sucked my thumb?”
“No.” It was hard not to snap. “The sooner you give me what I’m asking for, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair,” he said, addressing the spot where she’d been.
“You know,” she called out to him, “you might think about working on your technique a little.”
“And you might think about taking this a little more seriously than you are, Kowalski,” he told her just as she re-entered the kitchen, carrying her laptop with her.
She supposed the man needed to have this spelled out for him. “Trust me, if I take this any more seriously—if I stop moving around like this—” she spread out her hand “—I might break down altogether. I just buried a man I regarded as another father, my only relative might be in danger because of me, and some crazy person is out there, gunning for me for some reason unknown to me. So yes, I know this is serious, but I am doing everything I can not to let the weight of this whole thing crush me because then I won’t be any help at all. If you don’t approve of my way of handling this, I’m sorry, but I’m doing the very best I can under the circumstances.”
Morgan felt for her. Maybe he had been too hard on her, he thought. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to set you off like that.”
Krys inclined her head, letting him slide. “Fair enough. And for my part, I’m sorry that I just went off,” she apologized. She put her laptop on the table and turned it on. “I thought it might help if you took a glimpse at one of my articles, the series I did on Bluebeard.”
“The pirate?” Morgan asked, thoroughly confused at this point.
“No,” she explained patiently, “that was Blackbeard. Bluebeard was the nickname the news media gave the guy who was marrying those women for their money and then doing away with them, or, according to him, they ‘died on him,’ leaving him bereft, grieving—and, of course, exceedingly rich.”
Morgan looked at the laptop screen she had pulled up and placed before him. He preferred getting his information firsthand rather than just reading about it, but since she seemed to feel that her writing was what had gotten her to this particular place, he decided to indulge Krys and review the series, at least in part. Anything to get her to give him
