After a second, Morgan managed to shake himself free mentally—but it wasn’t easy.
She smiled, anticipating both his response and his apology. She plowed ahead. “Come with me.”
Said the spider to the fly, Morgan couldn’t help thinking, wondering if maybe it might be a good idea to tell someone where he was going.
The next moment, he told himself he was being ridiculous. He would be right outside the police building. What could possibly happen to him in the middle of the police parking lot?
Standing up from the table, he gestured toward the door that led directly out into the hallway. “Lead the way,” he told her.
Her mouth curved in what he could only think of as a seductive smile.
His mind was going to strange places, Morgan thought. This confirmed it. He was definitely in need of a vacation.
Once in the hallway, Krys strode over toward the elevator.
“Out of sheer curiosity,” Morgan began, “just what are you going to show me?” he asked.
There was that smile again. “Proof,” she answered.
“What kind of proof?” he asked.
Krys had learned a long time ago that people were more readily convinced of a point if there was a buildup to it rather than having everything revealed to them at once. It made for a good article and by the same token, revealing something bit by bit kept the audience.
Right now, she wanted this detective to get the full effect of what she liked to think of as “the reveal.” No one would go to these kinds of lengths just to convince someone—in this case a police detective—that they weren’t making something up.
The sun seemed exceptionally bright as they walked outside the rear of the building, so much so that it was almost difficult to see more than just a few feet ahead of them.
Standing on the top step, Morgan looked around. They were facing the back parking lot and nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary to him. A number of squad cars as well as police motorcycles were out at this point, patrolling the streets of Aurora in an ongoing attempt to keep its citizens safe and to continue maintaining Aurora’s reputation as one of the country’s safest cities of its size.
“Okay, what is it you want to show me?” Morgan asked her. He was now convinced that, in the end, this was all going to be just one big wild goose chase, aided and abetted by this woman’s admittedly very creative imagination.
“It’s down here,” Krys said. She nodded in a general direction, beckoning for him to follow her down the steps to the parking section that was reserved for civilians coming into the police station.
Well, he had come this far, Morgan thought. He might as well see this through to the end. The sooner she showed him whatever it was that she wanted to show him, the sooner he could get back to doing actual police work.
He was surprised when she brought him over to an ordinary-looking blue sedan. It made him think of one of his sisters’ dream car, the one Jacqui had religiously saved all her money for until such time as she could afford to buy the vehicle outright, rather than just pay the vehicle off in time. But that was just Jacqui. She claimed that she wouldn’t feel the car was actually hers unless she was able to pay for it all at once.
“Is that your car?” Morgan asked as they walked up to it from the passenger side.
“It is,” Krys answered.
“My sister would say you that you have great taste,” he commented.
She recognized it for what it was, obviously a left-handed compliment. “But you wouldn’t?” Krys asked, curious.
Morgan shrugged. Unlike some of his cousins, he wasn’t a car guy. He never had been.
“I find that one car is as good as another,” he answered. “As long as it’s running, that’s all that really counts.”
She looked at the car that had come very close to being her coffin. “Well, it’s still running,” Krys replied.
He picked up on the slight note of hesitation in her voice and put his own interpretation to it. “Having car trouble?” he guessed.
Krys laughed softly under her breath. “Yeah, you might say that,” she answered.
Approaching the passenger side of the vehicle, she stopped for a moment, then continued walking, circling around to the driver’s side.
Seeing that she wanted him to follow her, Morgan humored Nikki’s sister.
He stopped dead when he saw the shattered glass on the driver’s side of the vehicle. Absorbing the total picture, his mouth dropped open.
“Wow,” he said, recovering.
“That wasn’t the first word that came to mind for me,” Krys told him.
“When did this happen?” he asked, circling the vehicle entirely, then coming back to the driver’s side for a more in-depth look.
“Last night,” she answered. “Around eleven thirty or so.”
She sounded almost calm, he thought, and he had to admit he admired the fact that she wasn’t being hysterical since it was obvious that someone had done this intentionally. A lot of people he knew would have been, both male and female. How far away from the window had she been standing when this happened? Morgan couldn’t help wondering.
“Are you all right?” he asked, looking at Krys again, this time searching for any sign that she had been hurt or grazed.
“Other than feeling a bit shaky,” she answered, “I’m okay.”
“Did you tell the police?” he asked as the full impact of what he was looking at and what she had gone through sank in.
Krys turned to look at him. “That’s what I’m doing right now,” she answered simply.
Chapter 3
“Well, better late than never,” Morgan said in response to Krys’s blasé handling of the whole matter. “But you still should have called the police the minute it happened rather than waiting until the next morning. You know, that’s the
