Storm Season Page 3

  “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “I’ve been going out of my mind.”

  “You told my secretary someone’s trying to kill you?” I glanced past her into the spacious living area and saw no other occupants. “Is everything okay here?”

  As a former cop, I’d made my share of calls to sort out domestic disputes, and I didn’t want to be surprised by a Mr. Kimberly Ross jumping out of the woodwork with blood in his eyes.

  “No, everything isn’t okay.” Her voice shook with emotion. “The woman who was killed in the parking lot this morning wasn’t the real target. That was supposed to be me.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Kimberly Ross appeared to be in her early forties, but with her face puffy from crying, I couldn’t accurately judge. She wore designer jeans that revealed her tendency toward pudginess and a gauzy tunic top. Her feet were bare. If she’d applied makeup earlier, her tears had obliterated every trace. Her square jaw and wide brow gave her a somewhat masculine appearance and, under different circumstances, her face could have been pleasant, but fear contorted her features and rolled off her in palpable waves.

  “I came as fast as I could,” I assured her in my most soothing tone, hoping to help the woman pull herself together before she lost it completely, because she was teetering on the edge of hysteria. “Why don’t you fill me in on the details?”

  “Come in.” Kimberly stepped aside in the marble foyer for me to enter.

  I followed her into the expansive living room with a soaring vaulted ceiling and was blown away by the view. Her condo filled the twentieth story, and floor-to-ceiling glass on both ends of the living area presented endless views of the Gulf on the west and a panorama of Clearwater Harbor on the east. The walls and plush carpet were pale lavender, the same tone as the modern upholstered furniture. Throw pillows in pastel pinks, yellows and blues and an oversize oil painting in matching hues above the pink marble fireplace were the only visual relief from the unrelenting lavender. I felt as if I had stepped into a gigantic Easter basket. The only things missing were fake grass and chocolate bunnies.

  Kimberly waved me to a chair and curled into the corner of the sofa nearest me. My presence must have eased some of her fears, because she’d calmed somewhat, even though her hands still trembled. “Thank you for coming so quickly.”

  I nodded. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

  “Detective Adler recommended you.”

  “You spoke with him?”

  “I didn’t know about the murder in the parking lot until he knocked at my door. He said they were questioning everyone in the building, but I hadn’t seen or heard anything.”

  “Did you know the victim?”

  The muscles of her face flinched, and her lower lip quivered, threatening fresh tears. She nodded. “Sister Mary Theresa, such a sweet woman.”

  “Somebody shot a nun?”

  Kimberly nodded again and hooked strands of kinky hair behind her ears. “Her parents, Dennis and Eileen Moynihan, live on the second floor. Their daughter was here from Boston for her annual visit. Now they’ll be taking her back to Massachusetts to bury her.”

  If Doc Cline and Adler’s theory was correct, the killer had waited in a hotel room next door for his victim. The shooting appeared planned, not random.

  “Who’d want to kill a nun?” I asked.

  “Nobody. They wanted to kill me, but poor Mary Theresa died instead.”

  Hoping to nip her waterworks in the bud, I asked, “Why are you so certain you were the target?”

  Kimberly took a deep, shuddering breath. “Mary Theresa and I look enough alike to be twins. Dennis and Eileen were struck by the resemblance the first time I met them when I moved in three years ago. In fact, they call me their other daughter and fuss over me as if we really are related. And, like you said, who’d want to kill a nun?”

  “The better question, then, is who would want to kill you?”

  She unfolded her legs from beneath her and stood. “Come with me.”

  I followed her through the lavender and pastel haze to a set of frosted-glass double doors. She threw them open and motioned me inside the large but windowless room, illuminated by a huge skylight. A customized maple workstation curved around one corner and was topped by a computer, fax machine, printer, scanner and multiline telephone. Bulletin boards above the work area bristled with papers and notes of every size and color, held in place by pushpins. A set of ceiling-high shelves, crammed with books, filled the opposite wall, and tall file cabinets flanked both sides of the workstation.

  I was the detective, but I didn’t have a clue. “Someone wants to kill you because you work at home?”

  Kimberly brushed past me, picked up a newspaper clipping from the desktop and handed it to me. It was the latest copy of “Ask Wynona Wisdom,” a syndicated advice column that ran in newspapers all over the country. More than simply advice to the lovelorn, the column fielded questions on every aspect of life, from decorating and pet problems to etiquette and family relationships. Wynona Wisdom was an expert on everything, and the reading public had devoured her opinions for more than fifteen years. I’d felt moved on several occasions to write to her concerning my overbearing mother but, so far, had resisted the temptation. A few words on a page couldn’t do justice to the complexity of my maternal parent, a travel agent for guilt trips.

  I glanced at the column again, and Wynona’s picture, a thumb-sized cut, stared back at me.

  “That’s you,” I said.

  “I’m Wynona,” she admitted. “And along with hundreds of letters every day asking for advice, I also receive death threats. I bet Sister Mary Theresa never had a death threat. Hell, she probably never had anyone raise a voice to her. So which one of us do you think is the likeliest candidate to be murdered?”

  The woman had a point. “Did you explain all this to Detective Adler?”

  Kimberly nodded. “And I told him I needed round-the-clock protection. That’s when he suggested I call you. As soon as the media get hold of Mary Theresa’s identity, the killer will know he missed his target and will come back after me.”

  She left her office, closed the doors, and I followed her into the living room. By now the sun was dipping lower in the west, casting blinding light straight through the penthouse. Kimberly pressed a remote control on the table beside the sofa, and sheer lavender draperies swished closed against the glare.

  I returned to my chair. “You can’t rule out completely that the nun was the target. Or that the killing was random. Remember the snipers in the Maryland area a few years back? Or, more recently, in Phoenix? They didn’t know their victims. They just shot whoever was handy for the sheer terror it caused.”

  “I know.” Kimberly plopped onto the sofa. “But while the police are sorting this out, I don’t want to take a chance.”

  “Understood,” I said. “Our firm can arrange to have someone with you 24-7.”

  With other clients, I would have mentioned how costly that level of protection would be, but judging from Kimberly’s lucrative profession and lavish penthouse, I figured she could afford it.

  “Starting now?” she asked.

  “Starting now. Can I use your phone?”

  She pointed toward her office. “It’s in there.”

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER after completing my calls, I found Kimberly in the kitchen.

  “You hungry?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  Mainly I was being sociable. Thinking about Bill and Trish heading out to dinner together right about now had taken the edge off my appetite. I only hoped he wasn’t planning on sitting with his ex-wife in our special booth at the Dock of the Bay. It was bad enough that the woman was living in our house.

  I’d called Darcy and asked her to go by my condo and pack me a bag. She had a key for emergencies such as this and, happy to log in the overtime, would deliver the clothes and toiletries I’d requested to the penthouse later. I’d also instructed her to tell Bill where I was and that I�
�d be here overnight. I could have called Bill myself but hadn’t wanted to interrupt his dinner plans with Trish. Call me crazy, but I’d rather not know where they were and what they were doing.

  I climbed onto a high stool at the breakfast bar and watched Kimberly remove food from the refrigerator and pantry. She piled cold cuts onto thick slices of bread, smeared them with mayonnaise, heaped the plates high with chips and pickles and opened a bag of chocolate chip cookies and another of oatmeal-raisin.

  She set one of the gargantuan sandwiches and potato chip mountains in front of me. “Iced tea or soda?”

  “Diet Coke or water’s fine.”

  She must have seen me eyeing the feast that would have fed four linebackers.

  “When I’m anxious, I eat,” she explained.

  “I’d be the same way, but there’s usually no food in my house. I hate to shop.”

  She sat across the bar from me and dug into her sandwich. If how much she consumed was a true sign of anxiety, Kimberly was almost ready for the psych ward. Between bites, she asked, “Do you carry a gun?”

  I nodded.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the holster at the back of my waist. Don’t worry. I can reach it in a hurry if I need it. But you have three levels of protection before anyone can get to me: the security officer at the gate, the private elevator that needs your personal code to activate it and the double deadlocks on your front doors. Unless some guy swoops onto your balcony from a helicopter, I won’t be needing my weapon.”

  Her faced paled. She set her sandwich down and gazed toward the windows, covered with lavender fabric, as if she expected an assassin to crash through the glass sliders at any moment.

  “Relax,” I said. “Helicopter assaults happen only in the movies. Unless Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal is your hit man, you’re perfectly safe.”

  I couldn’t tell if my witty assurances made her feel more secure, since she returned to eating with renewed gusto.

  I slid off the bar stool.

  “Where are you going?” she asked in a panic. “You’re not leaving?”

  “I’m checking the locks.”

  I’d already stated how unlikely an attack was at twenty stories up, but she’d hired me for protection, so I went through the motions, if for no other reason than to make her feel better. After securing every glass slider and double-checking the dead bolts on the double front doors, I returned to the breakfast bar and my sandwich.

  I didn’t mention that, if her assailant had formerly served in special forces, twenty stories would be no deterrent, but how many SEALs, recon Marines or Army rangers had time to read “Ask Wynona Wisdom,” much less work themselves into a killing lather over her advice?

  My sweep of the room apparently reassured Kimberly, because she visibly relaxed. The only residual sign of anxiety was the rapidly disappearing cache of cookies.

  She finished off an oatmeal-raisin in two bites. “I’ve never met a private eye before. Your job must be exciting.”

  “It’s mostly paperwork. Background checks, tracking down lost relatives.” After finally calming her down, I didn’t want to ruin the result by sharing some of my more harrowing cases.

  “Was this job, being an investigator, something you always wanted to do?”

  At the rate she was paying me, talk wasn’t cheap, but if conversation kept her mind off her worries, I’d humor her. “I started out as a librarian.”

  “Really? Why the major shift in careers?”

  The passing years had eased the pain to a dull ache, so I could talk about Greg without feeling as if someone had ripped out my heart. “After I graduated from college and started working at the library, my fiancé, a doctor, was killed in the E.R. by a crack addict.”

  “How awful.” My story momentarily distracted Kimberly from the cookies.

  I nodded. “I was so angry about such a senseless waste, I had to do something, so I quit my library job and entered the police academy.”

  “You were a cop?”

  “For over twenty-three years. Detective Adler was my last partner before I retired from the Pelican Bay Department. Then Bill Malcolm and I opened our agency earlier this year. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “How did you become Wynona Wisdom?”

  She made a face, as if the memories were unpleasant. “I got my PhD in psychology and opened my own counseling practice. But I couldn’t stand the continual misery, day after day of listening to people pour out their problems. Guess you and I are alike in that sense. People don’t come to counselors or cops unless they’re in trouble.”

  She had that right. “But as Wynona Wisdom, you still deal with their misery every day, at least on paper.”

  She flashed a rueful smile. “I provide insight or give advice, but I don’t have to watch people self-destruct by ignoring it.”

  I understood. Having clients unable to grasp, and therefore change, the circumstances that caused their problems was probably as frustrating for psychologists as recidivism was for cops, who often arrested people only to have them commit the same crimes again as soon as their sentences had been served.

  “You must get a ton of mail,” I said. “How do you keep up with it?”

  “I have a staff of seven in Omaha. That’s where I’m from, originally. They maintain the office there, sift through the letters, discard questions similar to ones I’ve answered before and send me the queries that are the most timely or interesting. They also help with research, if I need it.”

  “And the death threats?”

  “They keep a file of those, just in case.”

  “You never read them?”

  Kimberly shook her head and reached for another cookie. “I used to, but they were too upsetting. So upsetting, in fact, that I decided to relocate here, become more anonymous.”

  “No one’s ever bothered you here?”

  She shook her head. “Not until today. I guess you cops would say my cover’s blown.”

  “That’s only if the shooter was really after you. We haven’t established that yet.” I took a bite of sandwich, chewed and swallowed. “The death threats, the ones you used to read, what was the basis for them?”

  She laughed without humor. “Most of the psychos didn’t need a basis. One said my picture gave her the evil eye, staring out of her newspaper every morning. Another said he’d followed my advice about not letting his cat roam outdoors, and the feline had died of a broken heart and boredom. And there are always the wackos who say I should roast in hell for getting rich off of other people’s misery.”

  “Did you save those letters?”

  “My staff saves them.”

  “And the envelopes?”

  She nodded.

  I checked my watch. Six-thirty. It would be five-thirty in Omaha, and FedEx didn’t close until after seven. “Can you call your office, have them box up all the threatening letters and overnight them?”

  “Sure, my chief assistant will take care of it. Damn.” She shook her head. “I keep forgetting Steve’s on vacation, but Cindy can handle it. She’s not as efficient as Steve, but this she can manage. But I don’t know what good having the letters will do. Most of them are anonymous.”

  “You say someone wants to kill you. Part of my job is to find out who and, for now, those letters are the only clues we have.” A thought struck me. “Unless you’re involved in a family dispute. Or have relatives in your will who are overeager to inherit.”

  Kimberly shook her head. “My parents are dead, I have no siblings and my only living relative is a great-aunt with dementia who lives in a nursing home in Des Moines.”

  I waved my arm, encompassing the penthouse in my gesture. “You’re obviously a wealthy woman. Who gets all this when you’re gone?”

  I could see the hackles rising on her neck. “That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?”

  “Having me or another of my investigators sticking to you like a second skin to keep you alive and well is about as personal
as it gets,” I said. “You can hire bodyguards to live in your pocket the rest of your life, or we can try to figure out—if you really were the killer’s target—who had a reason to take a shot at you. Then we find him and free you to live normally.”

  Or as normal as life could be if you were Wynona Wisdom.

  She groaned and buried her face in her hands. “I don’t like to think about him, much less talk about him.”

  “Him, who?”

  “My ex.”

  “Ex-husband?”

  She lifted her head and grimaced. “We never got that far, thank God.”

  “I take it your parting wasn’t amicable?”

  “Amicable? It wasn’t even civil.”

  “How uncivil was it?”

  Kimberly’s gray eyes widened. “He threatened to kill me.”

  CHAPTER 5

  One of the ironies of interrogation that I’d discovered over the years was that people seldom tell you what you need to know up front. Often only after endless hours of careful probing does the blooming obvious finally surface.

  “Tell me about your ex.”

  Kimberly made a face. “Like I said, I don’t like to talk about him.”

  “A disgruntled partner from a former relationship should top our list of suspects.”

  “But Simon wasn’t serious about killing me. He was just angry because I’d broken our engagement. And that was three years ago, right before I left Omaha. He’s moved on by now.”

  “You’re sure?” I wondered how much her broken relationship had factored into her move to Florida.

  Kimberly shrugged and reached for another cookie. If Adler and Porter didn’t collar Sister Mary Theresa’s shooter soon, Kimberly was going to need a new set of clothes in a larger size.

  “What’s Simon’s last name and where does he live?” I asked.

  “Anderson. And the last I knew, he was still living in Omaha and working as an investment counselor.”

  “Let me guess. You met him when you were looking for someone to manage the bundles you were earning as Wynona Wisdom.”