She dismissed his question, hitting him with one of her own. “Never mind that. How did you know where to find me?”
In view of what had just happened, he saw no reason to hide the truth. If he hadn’t done what he did, she would have been dead by now.
“I had a tracker put on you and it’s a damn lucky thing that I did or this nutcase,” he gestured down at Miranda, who was still unconscious, “would have killed you.”
Krys was speechless, but only for a moment. “You had a tracker put on me?” she asked, stunned. “When? How? Why?” She emphasized the last question.
“I did it while you were asleep that first night,” he told her. “With the stalker out there after you, I slipped the tracking device into your cell phone just under the battery. I did it just in case you were kidnapped.”
“No, you didn’t. You did it in case I eluded you, which I did,” she pointed out.
He wasn’t about to argue the point with her. Instead, he shrugged and said, “Pota-to, po-tah-to. In either case, it turned out to be damn useful. I wouldn’t have known where to start looking for you without it.” Realizing that she was missing had encompassed the most terrifying ten minutes of his life.
Krys looked down at the prone figure on the ground. Unconscious, the woman didn’t appear so frightening as she had been.
“She was the one, you know,” Krys said to Morgan, her voice losing some of its animation. It had all suddenly really hit her hard. She was lucky to be alive. “The one who was trying to kill me.”
“Her?” It all sounded almost too fantastic to be true. As far as he knew, the unknown woman had never even been considered a suspect. “Do you have any idea why she was trying to kill you?”
A hollow laugh escaped Krys’s lips. “She wanted to get back at me. In her demented mind, I was the reason Bluebeard lost his life. From what I pieced together, as strange as it sounds, she seemed to be in love with the man.”
It was finally beginning to make some kind of sense, Morgan thought. “Then she was the woman in the car with him.”
Krys nodded her head. “She was.”
Morgan looked down at the woman he had been forced to knock out to protect himself and Krys. “I take it he didn’t have to kidnap her.”
“I don’t know the backstory to this little sick romance yet,” Krys admitted. Handcuffed or not, she was keeping her distance from the woman, just in case. “All I know is that according to her, Miranda here was the one who wound up springing Bluebeard out of his prison cell. She did because she was planning to live ‘happily ever after’ with that maniac.”
Morgan shook his head. It really did take all kinds, the detective thought. “Didn’t she know the kind of insane killer this guy was? What he would undoubtedly eventually do to her?”
“If she knew, she really didn’t seem to care. Or maybe she thought he’d never hurt her,” Krys speculated with a shrug. “Whatever it was, she’s obviously proof that love really is blind.”
“And deaf,” Morgan said. “Don’t forget deaf,” he told her, thinking of all the news stories that had been broadcast about the serial killer when he was captured the first time.
“Speaking of deaf,” Krys said, cocking her head as she listened to the sound in the distance that was growing progressively louder, “are those sirens I hear in the distance?”
Morgan nodded. “They are. That would be the sound of the rest of my team finally getting here,” he told her. “I thought, given the situation, that I might need some backup.”
Krys thought about what had just happened. Just for a moment, she allowed herself to take a deep breath and willed herself to relax—or at least try to.
“Turns out,” she told Morgan as she faced him, “that all I needed was you.”
Krys had certainly held her own against that insane woman, he thought. Anyone else in the same situation would have just gone to pieces.
“You didn’t exactly do so badly yourself,” he said. And then Morgan relived that one awful moment when he saw Krys throw herself at her stalker, wrestling with the woman for possession of the gun. “But don’t you ever, ever scare the hell out of me like that again.”
Krys couldn’t help wondering if that was just a throwaway comment on Morgan’s part or if he was subtly telling her that this wasn’t the end of the line for them, at least not yet.
But she couldn’t ask him that without sounding needy, so she said nothing, keeping the question to herself as the area was suddenly filled with police cruisers as well as CSI personnel.
Morgan put his arm around her, drawing Krys over to the side.
“We’d better get out of everyone’s way right now,” he told her.
They both watched Miranda, still handcuffed and unconscious, being placed on a gurney and wheeled into an emergency vehicle.
“Looks like your nightmare is over,” Morgan said to Krys.
Krys sighed. It was hard for her to really believe that this was all finally over.
Despite her hope to the contrary, the word “over” seemed to almost ominously echo in her head as she slanted a glance at Morgan.
There were reports to be made and paperwork to be filed, not to mention loose ends that needed to be cleared up. None of it was shirked and finally, after what felt like an eternity, everything was completed to everyone’s satisfaction. This included the department heads and the chief of detectives.
By the time Morgan brought Krys back to her house, it was nearly ten o’clock at night.
The house felt somehow lonelier than she’d thought it would as she unlocked the front door. Morgan’s footsteps
