Not waiting for an answer, she quickly marched down the hall to the ladies’ room.
Once inside, Krys carefully looked around. The stalls were all empty. She had her privacy, she thought, hoping that all this effort turned out to be worth it.
“Hello, are you still there?” she asked the party on the other end again, afraid the person had hung up.
“Yes, I’m still here,” the woman told her a little impatiently.
Krys thought she detected a slight accent, but she couldn’t place it. Moving ahead, she asked, “So, what can I do for you?”
Many of her conversations with her sources started this way, she thought. With any luck, this would be another one of those.
“I hear you’re looking for me.”
A little electric shock traveled through her, but she wasn’t going to get carried away. Not yet.
“That all depends,” Krys replied in a calm voice. “Who are you?”
“I thought you would have figured that out already. I’m the woman who was in the car with the man you called ‘Bluebeard.’”
Every fiber of Krys’s body came to attention as she replayed the words she had just heard. Still, she was well aware that this could all just turn out to be a hoax. There were a lot of strange people out there and it never ceased to amaze her just what some people were capable of, the kind of lies certain people could tell in hopes of being able to secure their fleeting moment in the sun.
“The woman who was taken to the hospital after the accident,” Krys guessed.
“Yes, that was me,” the woman acknowledged.
“They said it was a miracle that you survived the accident,” Krys said, still wondering if this was a hoax, or if the woman who had been in the car was actually calling her.
“I guess I’ve always been lucky like that in my own way,” the woman on the other end of the call told her.
“Why are you calling me?” Krys asked. She knew she could very well be chasing the woman away, but in order to make sure the woman was who she said she was, she needed to have this question answered.
“Because my story needs to be heard,” the woman said simply.
“All right.” For the time being, she was willing to go along with this. She could get more proof later. “Tell me this. If you were hurt, why did you flee from the hospital?”
“Because I was afraid,” the woman admitted.
“Afraid?” She didn’t understand. “Of who? The police? The doctors?” If this woman was telling the truth and she was who she claimed she was, it didn’t make any sense to Krys why she would suddenly vanish the way she had. Why didn’t she remain to be treated properly?
“I was afraid of Alan,” the woman answered, her voice sounding almost breathless.
“Of Alan?” Krys repeated. The name rang a bell. It had been one of aliases that Bluebeard had used. “You mean Bluebeard?”
She heard the woman make a dismissive noise. “That really is such an awful name,” she said with feeling. “Yes, I was afraid of him. Of Alan,” she repeated.
“But why were you afraid of him? He was killed in the accident,” Krys told her. “You must have known that. The police had to have told you he was dead.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the call, and then the woman said, “Yes, they told me. But I didn’t believe them. I thought he made them lie to me. He was capable of something like that, of getting people to do what he wanted them to do. You have no idea how charming Alan could be when he wanted to.”
“So you took off,” Krys concluded, prodding the woman to go on talking.
“I had to,” the woman told her.
Krys felt her head filling up with questions she wanted to ask. She needed to meet with this woman face-to-face, to look into the woman’s eyes as Bluebeard’s last victim told her story.
“Look, is there anywhere that we could meet?” Krys asked. “I’ve got a lot of questions I want to ask you.”
She heard the woman hesitating, and then she said, “I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“You called me, so some part of you has to feel that you can trust me,” Krys pointed out, trying not to push, but to make the woman feel secure enough to tell her things.
She heard the woman sigh. Gotcha, Krys thought.
“All right,” the woman on the other end agreed reluctantly. “I’ll meet you right inside William Mason Park,” the woman said, then added, “Come alone. If I see you bringing someone—if I even think that you’ve got someone with you—this is over and I’m out of there. Do you understand?”
Krys thought of Morgan. He was going to want to be there with her. There was no way he would let her do this on her own, but she had to if she wanted this interview.
This was going to take some work on her part. Therein lay the challenge, she thought, anticipation growing within her.
She wanted this interview so badly, she could taste it.
“I understand,” Krys answered.
Chapter 23
Hurrying out of the ladies’ room, Krys narrowly avoided colliding with Morgan.
He caught hold of her shoulders to steady her as he scrutinized her face. “Are you all right?” he asked. “You were in there a long time. I was just about to get one of the female officers to go in there and look for you.”
Maybe another time she might have even been touched by his display of concern, but right now it was interfering with her escape plan. “What did you think happened to me?” she asked. “That I slid down the drain?”
“No, I thought that maybe you weren’t feeling well,” he answered.
She was embarrassed by her flippant retort, and upset that she had to lie to Morgan. But she knew that there was no way he was going to let her go off to meet with this Miranda person by
