Morgan had been watching Krys grow progressively more agitated. “I think it’s safe to say that this woman isn’t coming,” he finally told her. “Why don’t we just move on to your next appointment? Maybe something came up and for some reason this Williams woman wasn’t able to make it to the restaurant.”
Krys sighed. “I suppose you’re right.” Having the woman be a no-show just didn’t sit well with her. Claire hadn’t seemed like the type to do that without so much as an explanation. “But I just can’t get over Claire standing me up like this. She just seemed so genuinely sincere.”
Morgan had seen this sort of behavior countless times before. “It happens,” he told her. “Maybe she had time to think this over and decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk and was too embarrassed to admit it. Or she might even have been threatened—or bribed,” Morgan told her, citing a couple of reasons why the woman was a no-show. “Believe me, there are a lot of ways to get someone to change their story.”
“I know,” she replied. She wasn’t born yesterday, Krys thought defensively. “But I would have bet anything that Claire wasn’t like that. When she first came to me, it wasn’t easy piecing everything together. I had to practically drag the information out of her word for word,” she told Morgan. “She didn’t relish being a whistleblower or telling me that the tests conducted on her hadn’t yielded the desired results.”
“But didn’t she first tell you that they did? That her cancer had appeared to have gone into remission?” he asked her.
“That was what she was first told, but then she found out her data had been manipulated so that the resulting figures made it seem as if her condition had gone into remission,” she told Morgan. “Claire was adamant about that, not to mention upset. Someone like that doesn’t just do an about-face at the last minute, claiming she had been mistaken after all. That’s why her disappearing act now looks so suspicious.”
The journalist seemed so passionate about the stand she was taking, Morgan was inclined to believe her. Something could have happened to Claire. Maybe whoever had tried to eliminate Krys had gotten to Claire as well.
“Why don’t you give me all the information you have on this woman,” he told Krys. “I can send someone to check her out, find out where she’s currently staying.”
“You don’t think that something’s happened to her, do you?” Krys asked. She really didn’t want to face that possibility.
He could see that beneath her bravado, Krys was sincerely worried. She did not harbor a Pollyanna view regarding the nature of some of the people she was dealing with. Morgan couldn’t help wondering just how far one or more of the key people at the company would be willing to go to squelch any damning testimonials about this so-called miracle drug Weatherly Pharmaceutical was backing.
Rather than answer her question outright, he said, “I’ve found that expecting the worst and hoping for the best have always worked for me. Where are you supposed to meet the next person you’re going to be interviewing?”
Krys didn’t have to look at the appointment log she had on her phone. She knew all the entries on it by heart and answered Morgan’s question. “I assumed that Claire’s interview was going to last until eleven, so we have some time to get to Gerry’s.”
“Gerry’s?” he repeated.
Thinking he was unfamiliar with the restaurant, she wrote down the address for him. “Gerry’s,” she declared, turning the piece of paper around so that he could look at it.
He took in the location. “That’s clear on the other side of the city,” he said. Why was she chasing around from one end of Aurora to the other? “Were you trying to qualify for frequent flier miles with these interviews?” he quipped.
“I was dealing with paranoid people,” she told him. “I didn’t want to risk one person seeing the other or overhearing their testimony,” she told him. “That could cause all four subjects to just clam up.”
Morgan nodded. He could see that. “That makes sense,” he agreed.
“Glad you approve,” she said tersely.
He realized she was disappointed, but he didn’t care for her tone. “Hey, in case you missed this point, I’m on your side, remember?”
She flushed. He was right and she wasn’t being fair. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I guess my disappointment got the better of me,” she explained, although that really wasn’t an excuse. “Not to mention that I am worried about Claire.”
Morgan let the incident slide. “My mother used to have a saying: don’t borrow trouble. It’ll find you soon enough if it wants to. There’s no point in worrying about it until then.”
Krys managed what passed for half a smile as she acknowledged the late woman’s comment. “Your mother sounded like a nice, levelheaded woman.”
He heard the wistful note in Krys’s voice. “She was,” he agreed. He’d been thinking about his mother these last couple of days. He normally didn’t unless he was at a family gathering, and even then it was only once in a while. And Krys was the kind of person his mother would have liked. “That’s why her advice to you would be not to take unnecessary risks pursuing your stories.”
Krys laughed at the directive. “Everything about being an investigative reporter involves taking so-called ‘unnecessary’ risks.” She didn’t want to argue about it. Instead, she turned his ‘advise’ back on the detective. “And what about you?”
He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “What about me?”
“You’re a police detective. Isn’t that all about having to take risks?”
He assumed that Krys was still talking about his mother’s advice. “She was the wife of a policeman. She knew all about that. She just wanted to make sure all of us
