The woman regarded as the reigning computer wizard looked genuinely happy to see Nikki—except that it wasn’t Nikki she was looking at.
Krys sighed. She was used to being mistaken for her twin once in a while, but this was becoming a regular thing. She had the feeling that it wasn’t about to change anytime soon.
“You know, I am seriously entertaining the idea of getting a badge or a name tag that says ‘I’m not Nik’ on it,” Krys told both Morgan and the young woman he had brought her to meet.
Confusion furrowed Valri’s brow. “I don’t understand.” She looked at her cousin for some sort of an explanation.
“It seems that the woman Finn married has a twin sister,” he said, gesturing toward Krys. “Valri, meet Krystyna Kowalski.”
Valri stared at the other woman, surprised and stunned. “You’re kidding.” Her eyes widened as she scrutinized the newcomer. “You look exactly like Nik.”
“Maybe not that exactly,” Krys told the other woman. “I’m older, Nik’s taller,” she volunteered, then looked at Morgan, adding, “I already told you that.”
Morgan merely shrugged at the information. “If you say so,” he replied vaguely. “Val, we’re in need of your very special talents.”
“Why? To figure out how to tell them apart?” Valri quipped.
“Not a bad idea, but maybe later. Right now we really need to be able to track down a serial killer who escaped from prison before he could be brought to trial.”
“What is your particular interest in this guy, other than his pulling a disappearing act before his trial?” Valri asked.
“We suspect that he may or may not be out gunning for Krys,” Morgan answered.
Before he had a chance to give Valri any details, Krys broke in. “I’m afraid that if it is him, he might wind up killing Nik, thinking that she’s me. I have to find him before Nik actually does get back from her honeymoon. Morgan says that you’re the best there is,” she added to get on Valri’s good side. “Can you help us?”
During the course of her years in the computer lab, Valri had learned never to agree to anything immediately. This time, however, was the exception. This involved family.
“Say no more,” she told the woman with Nik’s face. “I’m in.”
Chapter 8
“I really appreciate any help you can give me,” Krys told Morgan’s cousin. “Even if Bluebeard doesn’t turn out to be the one who’s trying to kill me, all the evidence points to him having killed at least six women if not more and at the very least, he deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life, not out there, free to prey on yet another woman.”
“Believe me, it’ll be my pleasure to locate the monster,” Valri told her with more enthusiasm than Morgan had seen her display in a long while.
Krys pulled out her laptop from her backpack and held it up. “Tell me what you need from me. I brought the six-part online article I wrote on him, plus all the research material on him that I could get my hands on. I also have a list of all his aliases, or at least the ones I know of.” She held up the piece of paper containing the various names that Bluebeard had used during his nefarious career. “There might very well be more.”
Morgan leaned in toward his cousin. “Wait until you find out who this guy fancied himself to be.”
The latter saw the amused grin on Morgan’s face. “Go ahead,” she told him. She glanced at the piles of work on her desk that she had been wading through. “I could definitely stand a laugh today.”
“There seems to be a pattern,” Morgan told his cousin. “The names this guy used all seem to be characters that Clark Gable played in various movies.”
Valri eyed him a bit skeptically. “You’re talking about the actor who was in those old movies, Gone with the Wind, It Happened One Night? That guy?” she asked Morgan.
Morgan nodded. “I guess that must have fed his ego.” In his day, his mother had once told him, Clark Gable was adored by millions of women. Maybe that was what the serial killer was trying for.
Valri looked at the list, then at her cousin. “You’re sure about this?”
He pulled over the list that Krys had written down and glanced at it to reassure himself, and then Morgan nodded. “I’m positive.” He turned the list back to Valri. “I could even tell you the names of the movies those characters were in.”
Valri passed on his offer. “No, that’s okay. I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “However, if you can think of other possible names, I could go through databases, see if anyone has turned up or been arrested using any of those aliases lately.”
Krys felt guilty about putting this on the other woman’s shoulders. “I know this is asking a lot,” she apologized. “But there is a time crunch, and according to Morgan, you have a great many more resources available to you than I do. Or actually,” Krys amended, “than anyone I know of does.”
Valri waved away Krys’s words. “I’ll do what I can.” She nodded at Krys’s laptop. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Leaning the laptop against a corner of Valri’s desk, Krys opened it, pulled up the saved data she had and scrolled down to the folders that she needed. She turned her laptop around so that it faced Valri.
“This is all the material that I managed to collect on Bluebeard,” she told the lab tech.
Valri skimmed over the first few paragraphs, then looked up from the laptop. “The first thing we need to do is find out what this guy’s real name is,” she told the two people by her desk. She indicated the laptop. “Can I hang on to this?”
It was Morgan who answered her before Krys had a chance to. “Krys needs that for her work, Val. Can you hook her up with a printer or better yet,
