He suddenly realized that Toni was in the room when he saw the stunned look on her face. He had obviously said too much. But no one had ever managed to push his buttons the way this woman did, and he couldn’t even begin to explain why, not even to himself.
“You know, Morgan, we do have a lot of resources available to the police department that can be put to good use,” Toni reminded her brother-in-law.
“I know that,” he said.
“Then why don’t you use them?” Krys asked. “Between the two of us, maybe we can come up with some answers,” she said hopefully. With the prospect of possibly regaining some semblance of control over the situation, Krys was beginning to feel better.
Morgan frowned slightly. “I liked it better when you were being vulnerable,” he told her.
Krys shot him a less-than-pleased look. “I didn’t,” she told him. “Vulnerable people get taken advantage of. That isn’t my style.”
Time to wrap this up, Morgan thought. “Anything else?” he asked the medical examiner.
Toni shook her head. “Not right now. I’ll let you know if I find anything else,” she promised, “but to be honest, I’m not expecting any more surprises.”
“I’d say that we’ve had just about enough surprises for one day,” he told Toni. And then he looked at Krys. “You have anything you want to ask?”
Krys paused for a moment, as if thinking. And then she answered, “I’ve got just one question for you,” she told the examiner.
“Go ahead,” Toni encouraged.
Krys took in a breath, as if to steel herself. “Was it quick?”
The medical examiner looked at her sympathetically, impressed that Krys should care this much about a woman who was, from what she had gathered, in essence a virtual stranger to her.
“I’d say she never knew what hit her,” the other woman told her.
Krys blew out the breath she had taken in. “I guess at least that’s something,” she said. “Thank you for answering my question.”
Toni offered her a quick smile. “Don’t mention it.” She glanced toward Morgan. “It’s nice meeting someone who cares and doesn’t view this whole thing impersonally.” As Krys began to leave with Morgan, Toni called after her, “Nice meeting you, Krys. I just wish it was under better circumstances.”
“That makes two of us,” Krys replied.
* * *
“Do you want to go somewhere for coffee?” Morgan asked Krys the moment they walked out of the morgue and into the corridor.
Krys shook her head. “Not unless that coffee comes with a side order of answers,” she told the detective.
“In my business,” Morgan replied, “those take time.” He paused for a moment as a thought occurred to him. “Since we’re down here, why don’t we stop by the computer lab?” he suggested.
She thought of the puzzle they had dropped in Valri’s lap the last time they had stopped there. She doubted if the woman had come up with any answers, but since Morgan had suggested it, she thought they should check. She had already called ahead to reschedule her appointment at Gerry’s.
“Sure,” Krys agreed gamely. “Might as well get all my disappointments over with at once,” she told Morgan.
“I didn’t peg you for someone who just gave up,” he commented as they went down the opposite direction in the hall.
“I’m not giving up,” Krys protested. “I’m just taking your advice and preparing myself for the worst.”
“I also said, hope for the best,” he reminded her as they went toward the lab.
“Sorry, right now my optimism is in rather low supply.” And then she realized how that had to have sounded to him. “But don’t worry, I’ll rally soon,” she promised. “It’s just that at the moment, I feel a little beaten down—although not nearly as badly beaten down as Claire is—was,” she corrected herself.
Morgan thought it was safer not to comment on what she’d just said.
However, as he walked into the computer lab, he looked at Valri. He found it impossible to gauge her mood. This could be good or bad.
“Listen,” he told his cousin, “if you have anything hopeful to tell us, now would be the time to do it.”
“All right,” she agreed. “But this might be one of those things that qualifies as a bad news/good news situation,” Valri told him.
“We’ve already had one of those today, but go ahead,” he encouraged. “Tell us.”
“You said you wanted me to find out who Bluebeard was,” she reminded the two people at her desk.
“We did,” Morgan confirmed. His breath felt as if it was sticking in his throat as he never took his eyes off her face, waiting to hear what he was almost certain that he was going to hear.
Valri smiled. “Well, I did.”
Chapter 14
Krys stared at the police department’s main computer expert. “You actually found out Bluebeard’s real name?” she asked Valri, hardly able to believe what she was hearing.
Valri was obviously pleased with this unexpected development. “It took a bit of doing,” she admitted to the two people standing at her desk, “but yes, I managed to track down his identity.”
“How?” Morgan asked, stunned. “I mean, I know you’re good, Valri,” he freely admitted, “but this is way beyond good since no one else was ever able to find out just who this diabolical killer is. Ever since he first surfaced, this guy’s been like an ever-changing chameleon.”
Valri merely smiled. She was obviously proud of herself. “Well, it seems that very early in his career, before he began killing his blushing brides, ‘Bluebeard’ was arrested and fingerprinted because his extremely unhappy ‘lady love’ had him brought up on charges. Your guy did manage to give the arresting officers the slip, but not before they got his fingerprints on file,” Valri informed them. “See, here he is almost a dozen years ago, just when he was starting out.”
Valri scrolled down to show them the only mug shot, an early one, that she was able to find on file. He looked almost like an innocent teenager, except for his eyes. His age listed him as being older than he looked.
“So, what is his name?” Morgan asked, looking over Valri’s shoulder.
She scrolled down further. “Well, the name ‘Bluebeard’ gave the arresting officer at the time was Chris Hunter, but as you can guess, that wasn’t his real name,” Valri said.
Krys frowned. “Big surprise,” she murmured to Morgan.
“After he escaped, the arresting detectives were incensed, and they took it upon themselves to try to track him. They eventually found out that his real name was—get this—” she prefaced because the name was so anticlimactically mundane “—Elmer Smith.”
Somehow, the name seemed almost like a letdown. Krys looked at the computer tech. “You’re kidding.”
Valri shook her head as she smiled. “No, I’m very, very serious.”
Krys nodded her head. This was an important step forward. “I guess we go looking for this Elmer Smith,” she said, glancing at Morgan. And then her mouth curved. “I can’t even say that with a straight face.”
“Spoiler alert. You don’t have to go looking for Elmer Smith,” Valri told them when they stared at her in confusion.
Morgan didn’t understand. “Why not?” he asked. “Did he do another disappearing act? Because if he did,” he began to say, anticipating her answer, “he’s not—”
“No, he didn’t disappear,” Valri told them, looking from one to the other. “It turns out that the infamous Bluebeard is dead.”
Krys blew out a disgusted breath. “That’s what he wants everyone to think, but he’s done this sort of thing before. He’s—”
“That’s what I told the police chief,” Valri said, cutting into what Krys was about to tell her. “Which is why the CSI unit chief is having the body flown out here from Arizona,” she told the
duo. “‘Elmer Smith’ should be here sometime tomorrow morning with all the proper papers of identification.”
Morgan saw the stunned, disappointed look on Krys’s face. “How long has he been dead?”
“According to the report, he was killed a week and a half ago,” Valri said.
“How did it happen?” Krys asked, still trying to come to grips with the information.
“According to the detectives who were pursuing him, Elmer was in a car accident. And there was a woman with him,” Valri added. “He was fleeing the police and going over a hundred miles an hour. I guess Bluebeard bought into his own legend and thought he had a charmed life. According to the official report, he lost control of his car, and that’s when he flipped it over an embankment. When the police finally managed to reach them and pull them out, they were both hurt,” Valri said.
Right now, heaven help her, Krys’s attention was only focused on Bluebeard. “He could have faked being hurt,” was her first thought.
“He could have,” Valri agreed, “but he didn’t. Someone caught the whole accident on video. They’re sending it to me and I’m going to use facial recognition on it to make sure we’re dealing with the genuine article and that no one’s trying to put one over on us,” she told the duo. “But it does look like he’s dead.” She could see how frustrated Krys was by this latest development.
“I’ll let you know as soon as the body gets here.” Valri looked from one face to another. “But you realize what this means, don’t you?” she asked, waiting for the information to sink in.
Krys said the first thing that occurred to her. “That no more wealthy widows will be bilked out of their money and then killed for it in order to seal the deal.”
“Well yes, there is that,” Valri granted. “But it also—”
“It also means that if he was killed a week and a half ago, he wasn’t the one who tried to kill you recently. And in case there’s any doubt, he also wasn’t the one who shot Claire,” Morgan pointed out.
“What about the woman with him?” Krys asked. “Did she die too as a result of the accident?”
“That hasn’t been determined yet. She was alive when the ambulance took her to the hospital, but they confessed that they lost track of her after Bluebeard was declared dead,” Valri said.
“So she just disappeared?” Morgan asked, trying to get the story straight.
“Apparently,” Valri told him. “The hospital and the police are trying to sort all that out.”
“Meanwhile,” Morgan said, “We’re losing sight of the big picture.” When Krys looked at him quizzically, he said, “We still have someone out there who seems to want you dead.”
Krys merely shrugged as if that was of no consequence to her.
Valri looked at the other woman in surprise. “Why don’t you look more upset?” she asked. Maybe the full import of this development hadn’t sunk in yet, she thought. “This means the killer is still out there, waiting to take you down.”
“I know what it means,” Krys answered. “But it also means that we’re not any worse off than we were before, and at least now a lot of families out there finally get to have closure,” she pointed out.
Morgan shook his head. “You either have nerves of steel, or you haven’t grasped the full seriousness of the situation yet,” he told Krys.
“Oh, I grasp it all right,” Krys assured him. “But I choose to make the best of it.”
Morgan glanced over toward his cousin, and shook his head. “You are one strange, strange lady, Kowalski.” And then he told Valri, “Call me the minute the body gets here.”
“You might want to relay that message to Toni and Uncle Sean,” Valri told Morgan. “They’re the ones who are going to be handling the autopsy as well as the body in general.”
“What about the missing woman?” Krys asked. “Is anyone trying to find out what happened to her?”
“So far, no one seems to know,” Valri admitted.
“Maybe he kidnapped her and when she saw her chance, she wound up killing him,” Morgan said.
“That would definitely be poetic justice,” Krys agreed.
Morgan looked at Krys. “You know you, when the body gets here, you don’t have to—”
She didn’t let him get any further. “The hell I don’t,” Krys declared, anticipating what he was about to say. “All those families of those pitiful, unfortunate ‘brides’ aren’t the only ones who want closure. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” she told Morgan. “I chased after these stories until I felt as if I was a member of all those dead women’s families and that this was being done to me, too.”
Morgan had been in that same position as well, having gotten so caught up in a case that he needed resolution as much as the victim’s families did. He knew all about that edict of not allowing a case to get personal, but being human, he couldn’t always keep things at a distance.
So he wasn’t about to waste words to try to talk Krys out of feeling that way. Krys was a big girl and knew her own mind.
“I guess we’d better go back and give Toni the ‘good’ news,” he said to Krys.
“I already took care of that for you,” Valri told her cousin.
He should have known, Morgan thought. “You notify Uncle Sean, too?” he asked.
She surprised him by saying, “No, I left that for you. I’ve got to get back to my own work sometime,” she said, nodding at the papers spread out on her desk.
“And here I thought you thrived on multitasking,” Morgan told her with a grin.
“Thank you for everything,” Krys told her, stopping short of hugging the computer expert.
“Don’t thank me until we get whoever’s after you off the street and put away,” Valri replied.
The next moment the woman was completely immersed in her work.
“You look a little shell-shocked,” Morgan said to Krys as they left the computer lab.
She didn’t hear him at first, not until she realized he was talking to her and played back his words in her head. “I am,” she admitted.
“You want to talk about it?” he suggested.
“Not really.” Then, because he was including her in this investigation and she felt she owed him an explanation, Krys said, “You know how you feel when you’ve spent such a long time waiting for something to happen and when it finally does, it doesn’t seem as if it’s actually real?”
“Yes?” Morgan acknowledged, waiting for her to continue.
“Well, that’s how I feel right now. I’ve been waiting for that guy to pay for what he’s done and now that he’s gone, somehow it doesn’t feel like it’s real.” She pressed her lips together and then suddenly, she shook her head as if to shed the thought. “I don’t have the luxury of trying to dwell and wallow in the feeling. Nik is going to be back in less than a week and there’s still this killer out there who has to be found and put away before she gets back.”
She wasn’t worried about herself. She was worried about her sister, he thought. That put her in a class by herself.
“Like I said, don’t worry,” he told her. “Everyone’s on this.”
She realized that he had gotten into the elevator. This wasn’t where he’d said they were going. “Shouldn’t we be going to see your uncle to tell him that Valri located Bluebeard’s body and it would be arriving here by tomorrow morning?” she asked.
“I decided that notifying him and his team would amount to overkill,” Morgan told her. “You’d be surprised at how fast word travels here. Incredibly fast.”
“But Valri said you should tell him,” she reminded Morgan. “So don’t you think—?”
He knew what she was going to ask and he shook his head. “I know Valri. She said that purely for your benefit.” He knew that his cousin probably viewed it as reinforcement, to make Krys feel as if the situation was proc
eeding the way it should.
For her part, Krys wasn’t sure that she understood. “My benefit?”
He nodded. “So you wouldn’t think that we were dropping the ball now that Bluebeard was dead,” he told her. Pausing, he added, “You did come across as being rather antsy.”
She supposed that he had a point. “Because until I see that monster’s body buried, I’m not going to relax for a second,” she confessed. Krys paused for a moment, then made a decision. “I know you’re going to think I’m pushing too hard, but—”
“You want to go and officially tell Sean about the body coming,” Morgan guessed.
“Yes,” she said with feeling.
He took a breath and then said, “All right. Far be it from me to deny you a simple request,” he told her. “You want to notify Sean, we’ll go notify Sean.”
“Thank you,” she told him.
“Don’t mention it,” he told her.
Dutifully, Morgan went to where the crime scene investigation unit was housed, in the basement next to the computer lab. He notified Sean about the body that would be arriving at the morgue the next morning.
Sean, who for all the world resembled a younger version of Brian, the Chief of Detectives, looked properly impressed. “So they finally have an identity?” he marveled.
“That’s what Valri said,” Morgan told him.
“This is fast, even for us,” Sean couldn’t help commenting. He looked at Krys. “You know, I think that the stars just aligned themselves for our benefit this time.” Sean smiled at the journalist who had been relentlessly pursuing this story from the beginning. “Maybe you turned out to be lucky for all of us.” And then Sean turned toward his nephew. “When’s the body due in?” he asked.
It was Krys who answered his question. “The plane will land first thing tomorrow morning. Valri said someone would call us when it finally arrived.”
Sean nodded. “That would be my department,” he said. “Once the body is delivered, I’ll notify the ME on duty.”
Cavanaugh In Plain Sight (Cavanaugh Justice Book 42) Page 13