“As a matter of fact, even if you weren’t part of the family, someone would have been there to take your statement about what happened,” he told her. In his recollection, he’d never met anyone who had ever been this laid back about being the target of a shooting.
But Krys shook her head. If she had it to do all over again, under the circumstances, she still wouldn’t have done anything differently.
“All I wanted to do was get out of there before whoever had taken a shot at me realized that I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t about to hang around waiting for them to make a second attempt. I didn’t even go home,” she added as an afterthought.
Morgan looked at her. She kept arousing his curiosity. “Where did you go?”
“I checked into the Aurora Hilton on Main and MacArthur,” she told him. “It’s the biggest hotel in the city and I thought that with all those hotel people around, I’d probably be safer there than in my own house—or at least I hoped so.”
She had a point there, he thought. “But didn’t they find you checking in without any luggage a bit suspect?”
“Oh, but I did have luggage,” she contradicted him. When Morgan looked at her with some confusion, Krys explained, “I have a to-go bag in my trunk in case I have to take off for somewhere at a moment’s notice.”
Of course you do, he thought.
“Where did this shooting take place?” he asked, realizing that she still hadn’t given him an exact location.
Krys sincerely doubted she would ever be able to wipe the memory of this shooting out of her mind. “In the Weatherly Laboratories parking lot. That building is adjacent to the Weatherly Pharmaceutical building,” she added, although she was fairly certain he had probably already known that.
“You said this happened around eleven thirty?” he questioned as he pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves he had in the pocket of his suit jacket.
“Or thereabout,” Krys answered, trying her best to be as accurate as possible. “I was in a huge hurry to get out of there. Pinning down the exact time wasn’t really the first thing on my mind.”
If he found her answer flippant, he gave no indication. Instead, he had other questions for her. “Did anyone follow you?”
She didn’t answer him right away. Instead, she reviewed the scenario in her mind first, then said, “No, not that I could see. The streets were pretty deserted at the time, if that helps,” she added.
“How about when you got to the hotel?” he asked. “Did you see anyone approaching then? Or did you notice anyone coming toward you? Think,” Morgan emphasized, his eyes all but holding her prisoner as he waited for Krys to answer him.
“I am thinking. I only saw the hotel valet, and he was parking cars. He seemed really surprised when he took a look at my blown-out car window, but I guess they train hotel staff not to ask questions.”
Morgan frowned as he finished carefully surveying the vehicle. For now, he didn’t see anything unusual, beyond the very obvious.
“So much for hoping to find any incriminating prints,” he murmured under his breath.
“The shooter didn’t try to shoot me from the inside of my car and he apparently didn’t leave a bomb in my car, so no, I don’t think that his fingerprints could be found inside my car.”
“‘He’?” Morgan repeated, waiting for her to elaborate on why she was using that particular pronoun.
“Or she,” Krys allowed. “I told you, I didn’t see the shooter.”
Rather than say anything, Morgan nodded at what she had just said, and he got on his phone.
Krys took note of the fact that whoever he was calling didn’t answer immediately. When they did, she picked up on the fact that Morgan’s voice took on a friendlier tone than the one he had used with her.
“Hi, Chief, it’s Morgan. If I haven’t caught you at a bad time, would you mind coming out here for a minute? I need to have you look at something,” he told the man on the other end of the call. “In the back parking lot,” he specified. “Yes, our building,” he confirmed.
“Calling your superior?” Krys asked as soon as Morgan ended his call.
“No, one of my uncles,” he answered.
Krys frowned slightly. “You realize that doesn’t narrow things down for me,” she pointed out.
“Sean. The head of the day CSI unit,” Morgan clarified for her. “By the way, he might not be overjoyed that you drove away from the crime scene—and that you drove over in an active crime scene to boot.”
The way she saw it, it couldn’t really be helped. Krys shrugged. “I didn’t exactly have much choice in either case. My first priority was staying alive. Sorry if that necessitated my going against the rules.”
He supposed he could see why she’d gotten her back up. No one reacted well to having their mistakes pointed out. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound as if I wanted you to risk your life by staying there. You did the right thing, leaving,” Morgan said and then sighed. Maybe he owed her some sort of an explanation. He didn’t usually see only one side of an incident, but this hadn’t been a normal week for him, either. “I’m coming off a bad week,” he told her.
Krys laughed shortly as she looked at what was left of her driver’s side window. “Apparently there’s a lot of that going around,” she quipped. “Someone take a shot at you, too?”
“Only figuratively,” he replied. He glanced over toward the rear double doors, but Sean hadn’t come out yet.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Krys said gamely. “How does someone try to shoot you ‘figuratively’?”
He thought of the breakup he had just gone through, a breakup that bothered him a great deal more than he’d thought it would. There was no way he was about
