Travel was light at this time of day, so she would probably be able to get there with a few minutes to spare, she told herself. That would give her enough time to scope out the area. The local park was predominantly designed for families who wanted to enjoy having picnics with their children.
She assumed that Miranda had picked that particular location to ensure her own safety. The woman had sounded genuinely spooked when she had talked about “Bluebeard” to her.
Her pulse hammering, Krys arrived at the park in minutes. She pulled into the park via its only entrance and then drove into the general area that was reserved for people who wanted to enjoy the family park.
Given that it was the middle of the week, there weren’t all that many people in the park. In Krys’s estimation, the park attendants probably outnumbered the people who had actually come to the park to enjoy a picnic with their small children.
Ian’s car had turned out to handle a lot better than she had thought it would. It had started out a little sluggish, but once it kicked into gear, it drove very smoothly.
Thank heaven for small favors.
After parking the car in a designated spot for vehicles, Krys went to the appointed area that she’d agreed to meet the woman—by the picnic tables.
Every step she took seemed to vibrate through her.
She looked around, and at first she didn’t see a lone woman who resembled the general description Miranda had given her. She was afraid that the woman had had a change of heart.
And then a movement by one of the tall shade trees along the perimeter caught her eye. She saw a flash of yellow. Looking, she saw that it turned out to be blond hair.
Krys wanted to call out to the woman, then decided against it. During their brief conversation earlier, Miranda had struck her as being definitely skittish. Krys didn’t want to risk scaring her or say anything that would make Miranda take off before she had a chance to talk to her.
So Krys picked her way carefully over to the woman’s location, keeping her stride even and never taking her eyes off her.
She didn’t say a single word until she was practically right on top of her quarry.
“Miranda?”
Startled, the tall, thin woman swung around. Krys couldn’t tell if Miranda was going to bolt or take a swing at her. Prepared for anything, Krys took a precautionary step back and caught the woman by the arm.
“Miranda, it’s me. Krys,” she told the woman in a calming voice meant to reassure her. “You called me earlier, remember?”
Myriad emotions filtered across the attractive face. Krys couldn’t even begin to guess what was going through Miranda’s head.
“You’re here,” Miranda finally said in an almost surprised, breathless voice.
“Yes, I told you that I would be,” Krys said. “And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you,” she apologized. She saw the woman’s eyes darting about. It made her think of a deer that had been caught in the headlights and didn’t know which way to run. She guessed at what Miranda was afraid of. “Don’t worry, I didn’t bring anyone with me. I’m alone. Completely alone,” Krys emphasized.
“Just like me,” she thought she heard Miranda murmur coldly under her breath. And then a strange look came into the woman’s sad eyes. “How do I know that you came alone?” Miranda asked. “You could have people planted all around here,” she accused in a nasty voice. “Listening.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Krys insisted. “You told me not to.”
But Miranda’s eyes continued darting around the immediate area. “I don’t want to stand out in the open like this,” she insisted. “Anyone can see us.”
Krys looked around, then pointed over in the distance. “There’s a more secluded area a little ways from here. There’re some benches there overlooking the lake.” She smiled, recalling something she had once read. “I think it’s a romantic spot for teenagers. They go there at night thinking that they were the first ones to ever invent giving in to their romantic urges.” She was hoping to put the other woman at ease. “We could go there if you like. Nobody will bother us in the daytime,” she speculated.
Miranda nodded. “That sounds good,” she agreed. She gestured ahead of her. “Why don’t you lead the way?”
Something cautioned Krys not to move ahead. Instead she said, “The terrain is a little bit rocky around here. I think we’d be better off going over there together. That way, if one of us happens to slip, the other one can grab her arm and hold on to her.”
Miranda’s expression told Krys she didn’t really like this suggestion, but finally the woman pressed her lips together, sighed and reluctantly nodded. “All right, we’ll do it your way. Where’re these benches again?”
“They’re right this way,” Krys answered.
She began to slip her arm through Miranda’s. She intended on guiding her to the benches, but the woman abruptly jerked her arm away, acting as if she had just been burned.
“What’s the matter?” Krys asked, surprised by the other woman’s reaction.
“You touched me!” Miranda cried, her voice cracking. And then she seemed to get herself under control. “I don’t like being touched.”
Being touched probably reminded Miranda of what Bluebeard had done to her, or perhaps even what he might have tried to do to her, Krys thought. She should have realized that.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized to Miranda. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, you weren’t thinking, were you?” Miranda accused, raising her voice again, glaring at Krys. “You weren’t thinking at all.”
Krys stared at the woman. Miranda was beginning to look more and more wild-eyed and incensed.
She had dealt with crazy people before and this was beginning to feel like that, Krys thought. “Excuse me?”
“No, I can’t,” Miranda shouted at her. Before Krys was able to say anything or realized what was happening, Miranda seemed to be having a meltdown right in front of her.
The woman pushed her hard. Krys stumbled, hitting her back against one of the trees that were spread out in the immediate area. They offered seclusion for those who wanted it.
She should have given this more thought, Krys realized, before she agreed to this location. She stepped away before Miranda was able to slam her against the tree again.
Miranda looked absolutely furious as she spit, “I can’t excuse you at all.”
She needed to get this woman to calm down. “Miranda, I think you’d better—”
“I’d better what?” Miranda shouted viciously. “Not kill you for taking the only person I ever loved away from me? Is that what you want?”
Krys stared at the woman. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh don’t play dumb with me. I know what you did. You hounded that wonderful man with those awful, prejudiced newspaper articles of yours until he had nowhere to turn. You were actually going to have him facing a death penalty. But I saved him,” she boasted. “I managed to help him escape. And he promised to take me with him. Promised that we were going to start a whole new life together,” Miranda said happily. And then fury creased her brow. “But you wouldn’t give up, would you? You had the police looking for him, hounding him,” she shouted, her face turning ugly.
How could the woman even think that? “Miranda, he killed a lot of women for their money,” she said, trying to somehow reason with the woman.
“He had a right to live, too!” Miranda cried. “Until you took that away from him.” She was all but shrieking now. “Well, I can’t bring him back, but I can sure as hell make you pay for taking him away from me!”
The second she saw the woman reaching into her purse, Krys knew what was going to happen next.
Her heart slammed into her chest, beating madly. She knew if she tried to grab the woman’s hand there was a very good chance that she would wind up getting shot poin
t-blank. But the odds seemed to be equally against her if she stood there and did nothing because then she would wind up getting shot, too.
“You don’t want to do that,” Krys told her, doing her very best not to let Miranda see just how very frightened she was.
“Oh, but I do. I really do,” Miranda answered. “You act like you’re so smart, but you don’t know anything. You didn’t even have a clue that I was the one who’s been trying to kill you.”
“That was you?” she cried, widening her eyes as if she was stunned. From the moment that Miranda had begun ranting, she had started to suspect as much. But right now, Krys was playing it for all it was worth, stalling and pretending to be impressed by the woman’s deviousness. “Really?”
“Yes, it was me,” Miranda bragged, throwing back her head, her hair flying over her shoulder. “And when I missed, I bet you thought that you had some kind of a charmed life, didn’t you? Well, you don’t!” she shouted into Krys’s face. “You were just lucky. You ducked to pick up something when I shot at you and then the next day, the guy pulled you out of the way just as I was about to hit you with the van. But your luck couldn’t last forever and it just ran out,” she declared gleefully. “I’ll be kinder to you than you were to Alan. I’ll let you make your peace with your maker.”
“You’ll let me pray?” Krys asked, scanning the immediate area and desperately trying to find something she could use as a weapon.
“Yeah, I’ll let you pray. But pray fast,” Miranda ordered, cocking her weapon.
“I’d rethink my next move if I were you,” Morgan warned the would-be killer as he stepped forward.
His weapon was drawn and aimed right at the woman.
Miranda shrieked a curse as she swung around and pointed her gun at Morgan.
Chapter 24
Krys didn’t even remember thinking, just reacting. It all happened at lightning speed. Realizing that, because of her, Morgan would be dead in less than a moment, she grabbed Miranda’s wrists and pushed them high overhead with all her strength as she struggled to gain possession of the weapon that Miranda was pointing right at Morgan, about to discharge it.
Krys was aware of being utterly terrified. She could literally see the scenario playing itself out in her head and she couldn’t let that happen.
She and Miranda were instantly locked in a deadly battle, shifting from one position to another.
Morgan tried to get off a clear shot. But he couldn’t, not without risking the possibility of hitting Krys.
Struggling, Krys succeeded in getting Miranda off balance by kicking the taller woman’s legs out from under her. Miranda’s weapon went flying just as Krys threw her full weight right on top of the furious woman. The latter was cursing a blue streak.
That was the moment Morgan finally managed to get a clear shot at the stalker. “This ends right here!” he ordered.
The sound of the detective’s weapon being cocked punctuated his warning. The gun in his hand was pointed at Miranda, who was still on the ground.
“You can get off her now, Krys,” he said. “And as for you,” he told the stalker, “you can stand up!”
Staggering to her feet, Miranda let loose with a wild, guttural screech as she lunged at Morgan. She looked as if she wanted to kill him with her bare hands.
The screech had warned Morgan and he met the head-on attack with a right cross, aimed at Miranda’s chin. She fell to the ground, knocked out cold. Morgan lost no time in whipping out his handcuffs and cuffing Krys’s crazed, unconscious assailant’s hands behind her back.
Shaken, hardly believing it was finally over, Krys blew out a breath. “Lord, I am so glad to see you,” she cried, throwing her arms around the man who had just saved her.
Krys’s words didn’t quite get the response she had expected.
With her stalker out cold and safely handcuffed, all the fear that Morgan had experienced in the last half hour came pouring out and he shouted at Krys.
“Why the hell would you come out here by yourself like this?” he demanded angrily. “Do you have some kind of a death wish?”
Krys stared at him, her mouth falling open. All the gratitude she had felt a second ago instantly transformed into anger. That was when it suddenly occurred to her that Morgan had come to her rescue far too conveniently.
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 happen
ed. 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.
Cavanaugh In Plain Sight (Cavanaugh Justice Book 42) Page 22
