But now Ian was no longer alive to distract her. He had passed away clutching her hand. She had no regrets about being there even though she had wound up missing her only sister’s wedding. She refused to leave Ian’s bedside, refused to take a chance that the man with no family would wind up dying alone while she was busy celebrating Nikola’s big day.
Nik had understood why she couldn’t come to her wedding. They were twins, and twins intuited things about one another that no one else could begin to comprehend.
But now Ian was gone and Nik was on her honeymoon with Finn Cavanaugh. Not wanting to think about how much Ian’s passing affected her, not to mention how she felt about missing Nik’s wedding, Krys threw herself back into her work with a vengeance.
In the last nine months, after doggedly following a trail that led from the middle of the country to the West Coast, she had written an intensely conclusive exposé about Alan Parker, a charming, dark-haired, rakishly handsome man who, for the purposes of her article—and the nature of his crimes—she had dubbed “Bluebeard.” The man with soulfully seductive blue eyes and a smile that Cary Grant would have envied made it his business to romance wealthy, lonely women and marry them.
According to the research she had done, there had been at least six of these women over the course of the last few years, although she had a hunch that there were more who hadn’t come to light yet. Parker separated them from their money and eventually, he separated them from the world of the living as well.
Krys had doggedly put together all the evidence until there was enough for the police to issue a warrant and arrest the man. Everything fell into place and the man the police thought of as “Bluebeard” faced certain conviction as well as prison.
But somehow, thanks to his connections, Parker managed to escape before he could be put on trial for the murders he committed.
Right now, he was out there, free to continue his spree unimpeded.
She remembered the way Parker had looked at her when he was being arrested and taken away. For one split second, the silver-tongued smooth-talker shot her a look of sheer hatred. In that moment, her blood had run absolutely cold.
By then, she was hot on the trail of her newest investigation. Weatherly Pharmaceuticals had sunk a great deal of their money into the research, development and test trials for a new wonder drug whose properties were believed to keep cancer from metastasizing and spreading to other organs. The researchers hoped to contain the disease if not drive it totally into remission.
Fifteen years in development, the drug was highly anticipated and promised to make Weatherly’s investors richer beyond their wildest dreams. The drug was, in essence, too good to be true.
For Krys, that sent up bright red flags.
Unlike her twin sister, to Krys, if something was too good to be true, she believed that it usually wasn’t—and it was her job to prove that. She was currently interviewing everyone associated with this new wonder drug, both the developers and the people who had been the drug’s test subjects. She was determined to get to the truth of the matter. If her hunch turned out to be true, there would be an awful lot of unhappy people at Weatherly Pharmaceuticals. People who she felt would go a long way to make sure they weren’t unhappy.
For her part, Krys would have never become involved in investigating something of such major proportions if she didn’t feel she was able to prove that the emperor had no clothes.
Possibly that was why she was letting her imagination run away with her, why she felt there were threats to her safety lurking around almost every corner.
Maybe she just needed to take a break, wind down, be a person again instead of strictly a driven investigative reporter with tunnel vision who was focused on only one thing.
Making her way to her car in the almost completely deserted parking lot, Krys shifted the pages and copious notes that she had accumulated and brought with her to this latest meeting. As she opened the driver’s side door, several of the pages slipped out of the pile and unceremoniously fluttered down to her feet.
“Damn,” Krys muttered, ducking her head and bending down to retrieve the errant pages.
A jolting noise just above her head, sounding like a car backfiring, screamed through the night air and effectively pierced the silence. Krys had spent enough time at gun ranges to know what that sound actually was.
And even if she hadn’t recognized it, the shattered glass raining down from just above her head onto the pavement would have cleared up the mystery for her.
Her mouth went dry.
Someone had just taken a shot at her.
Chapter 1
Detective Jay Fredericks was the embodiment of a man on the cusp of middle age. Balding since the age of twenty-three and paunchy, Fredericks had the unfortunate habit of shuffling his feet when he walked, and he had long given up his battle with maintaining some sort of relatively decent posture. Consequently, walking or sitting, he gave the impression of being the personification of a perpetual parenthesis. Because of this, Detective Morgan Cavanaugh had given up trying to read his partner’s body language as a way of gauging whether or not the news that the man was about to deliver was good, bad or of no consequence whatsoever.
“Hey, Cavanaugh,” Fredericks called out as he walked into the Major Crimes squad room and crossed over to Morgan’s desk.
Looking up from his computer monitor, Morgan waited for his partner to say something further.
There was a pregnant pause on Fredericks’s part, either for effect or because he couldn’t find the right words to explain what was on his mind. Since Morgan was currently catching up on his paperwork, something he viewed as just a
