“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 wife, he could see why Finn never had a chance. There was something almost hypnotic about the way the woman looked at him, and he had a hunch that it was a twin thing.
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 advantage of having your sister marry into our family. One of us would have been there in a heartbeat.
“As a matter of fact, even if you weren’t part of the fa
mily, 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 to get into that right now.
“Never mind,” he said, waving his words away.
Krys looked at him. “I think you should know that once I’m engaged in a puzzle, I don’t just back off. You were the one who started this,” she reminded him. “Just what did you mean by someone shooting at you figuratively?” she asked.
He blew out a breath. “Funny you should use the word ‘engaged,’” he commented.
Krys cocked her head, studying Morgan. “You were engaged and one of you broke it off?” she asked. She saw the startled expression on the detective’s face and knew that she’d guessed correctly, at least in part. “I’m fairly good at reading people,” she told him without any undue vanity. “Do you want to fill in the rest of it for me?”
Whether he was about to say anything further, or was just going to put her off, she wasn’t about to find out at that point, because Sean Cavanaugh picked that moment to push open the rear doors. Exiting the building, he quickly came down the back steps.
His first words, however, were not directed at Morgan.
“Nikki, what are you doing back from your honeymoon so soon?” he cried, holding out his arms to her. “I thought you and Finn were going to be gone for another week. Is everything all right?” Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Sean embraced the woman in front of him before she could say a word in response.
“That’s not Nikki, Uncle Sean,” Morgan tactfully informed the man.
Releasing Krys, Sean stepped back and then took a closer look at the young woman. The expression on his face clearly indicated that he didn’t think he had made a mistake. Looking at his nephew, he said, “You’re kidding me, right, Morgan?”
Krys pulled her shoulders back and raised her head so that the man could get a better look at her, although experience had taught her that people never saw a difference between them because she and Nikki looked eerily exactly alike.
“Actually, Chief Cavanaugh, he’s not,” she told him. “I’m Nik’s twin sister.” She put her hand out to him. “Krys Kowalski.”
Sean took the hand that was being offered to him, but he glanced rather uncertainly at his nephew as he shook it. “Really?”
“Really,” Morgan told his uncle. “Why don’t you show the
chief the picture you showed me?” he prodded Krys. Morgan figured that was the fastest way to deal with his uncle’s disbelief and dispel it.
Krys inclined her head and took out her wallet. She pulled out the photograph she had shown Morgan earlier and handed it to the older Cavanaugh.
Taking the photograph in hand, Sean studied it at length in surprised silence, then handed it back to her. He was clearly caught off guard.
“I had no idea,” he confessed.
“Apparently nobody did,” Morgan commented to his uncle.
“That’s not entirely true,” Krys contradicted him. When the two men looked at her quizzically, she told them, “Nik told Finn she had a twin. But since I wasn’t going to be able to make the wedding, I told Nik to spare herself a lot of questions about why her only relative wasn’t at her wedding and just not mention me to anyone else until I was finally able to come to Aurora in person, and I could meet everyone then.” She glanced toward her vehicle. “It seems like my plan was pushed up a little.”
Sean put his hand out again for the photograph. Krys gave it to him, and he studied it even more closely this time.
“You look completely alike,” he marveled. “If you hadn’t said the photograph was genuine, I would have guessed that it was a gag, something artificially put together to fool people,” he said, giving the photograph back to Krys.
“No gag,” she assured him and tucked the photograph back into her wallet. “And for the record,” she told Sean, “I’m five minutes older and one inch shorter.”
The older man nodded, taking the information in. “Well, I’m sorry you missed the wedding, but welcome to the family.” His smile was warm and welcoming. She found it oddly similar to Morgan’s fleeting smile, although the two men really didn’t look that much alike. “Andrew is going to get a kick out of finding this out,” he told her. “Now.” The CSI chief turned toward Morgan. “I’m assuming that you didn’t call me out here to meet this young lady. What’s this all about, Morgan?”
“I’ve got a crime scene for you and your people to go over,” Morgan answered.
Cavanaugh In Plain Sight (Cavanaugh Justice Book 42) Page 3