“Anything that might interest or affect the general public. My last piece was a six-part series about a man who seduced and married lonely, rich widows. All those women eventually met with untimely ends.”
“He killed them?” Morgan asked, vaguely aware of reading something along those lines.
She nodded. “I gathered enough information to get him arrested.” She didn’t bother keeping the pride out of her voice. She had worked hard gathering that information which was used to indict Bluebeard. “He was about to be brought to trial when he managed to escape and go into hiding.”
Well, if she wasn’t making things up, this sounded like the most likely candidate who was trying to kill her. If that turned out to be the case, it shouldn’t take him much time to bring this whole thing to a close, Morgan thought.
“And you believe that this is the person who’s trying to kill you now?” he asked, expecting her to say yes.
If only it was that simple, Krys thought. “Well, he’d certainly be worth tracking down, but I’m not sure if he was the one who took a shot at me.”
He would have said that this sounded pretty cut-and-dried to him. “Why? Are there more people you’ve gotten angry? What are you not telling me?” Morgan asked, scrutinizing her more closely.
“I’m currently working on another story.”
The pregnant note in her voice had Morgan thinking that maybe he had been right. She had gotten more people angry at her. “And what’s the story about?”
“Weatherly Pharmaceuticals has a brand-new drug that’s coming out on the market next month that’s been greatly anticipated,” she began.
Morgan nodded. “I’ve heard about it,” he told her. Everyone with a pulse had. The story had been on the news, growing in scope, for the last year. “What about it?”
“Once it’s on the market,” Krys went on, “it could stand to make everyone involved in its development a boatload of money.”
So far, the woman wasn’t telling him anything that was new, but the look on her face told him that she was about to.
“But...?” he asked.
“But I’ve done lots of research on my own and I’m not convinced that it’s the miracle drug the company says it is. There are a few discrepancies that my sources say the company has gone out of its way to bury.”
“And you’ve documented this?” he asked.
She read people for a living, but she couldn’t get a handle on whether or not Morgan believed her. She had a feeling she would need to prove herself to him. So be it. Nothing she hadn’t done before.
“I’ve been trying to locate a few of the people involved in the tests who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. If I find them—and if I’m right—that throws a very large monkey wrench into the results,” she concluded.
Morgan’s expression remained unchanged. What he said next shed no light on the situation for her. He could have easily just been mocking her.
“So you think one of the company’s executives is doing their dirty work and trying to eliminate you from the scene?” Morgan asked.
“I honestly don’t know who’s behind this or who shot at me,” she admitted. “That’s why I came to you. I thought with your expertise you might be able to narrow things down for me, find the person who’s trying to kill me before Nik comes back from her honeymoon.”
“And you’re sure someone is out there, trying to kill you?” Morgan questioned again. “It couldn’t just be your imagination, getting carried away?” His eyes pinned her in place as he continued to wait for her to convince him. “You know, given the stressful nature of your work, maybe you’re imagining things that—”
Krys cut in. “You don’t believe me.” It wasn’t a question.
He didn’t say yes or no. Instead, he said, “Well, I do know that once an idea has found a home in a person’s head, it’s hard to get it out or think of alternative assumptions.”
Well, that did away with any possibility that she had misunderstood him. “You don’t believe that someone’s out to kill me,” she concluded, leaving no room for doubt.
“It’s not a matter of what I believe,” Morgan told her, doing his best to be diplomatic about the matter.
Now Krys was glad she had decided to drive over here instead of taking a service or having one of her friends drive her over to the police precinct.
There seemed to be only one way to convince the detective that she wasn’t being paranoid. She’d brought the evidence with her.
“Would you mind coming outside with me?” she requested politely, keeping her emotion out of her voice.
Morgan thought of the reports that he still had left to fill out on his computer. Granted, he would have happily grasped at any excuse to get away from them, but at bottom, that meant only postponing the inevitable. They would be waiting for him to finish up once he got back.
Morgan had a feeling that, despite the look on Krys’s face, this wouldn’t turn out to be anything and he was just wasting his time by humoring the woman.
“I’m a little busy right now,” he began, hoping to get out of pursuing this charade any further. But Morgan didn’t get a chance to finish.
“This won’t take long,” she promised. “I just need you to come outside with me.”
Morgan had a feeling that Nikki’s sister could be very persistent. He supposed that if there was anything to her paranoia, he needed to check it out. If there wasn’t, then the fastest way to settle this for both of them was to disprove her assumption.
“All right, if this isn’t going to take long,” he qualified, “show me what you want to show me.”
Just for a moment, her eyes met his and he felt something akin to a warm shiver slithering up along his spine. Since this woman was a dead ringer for his cousin’s gorgeous
