Storm Season

“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.”

Kimberly dusted cookie crumbs from her hands. “You want some coffee?”

“Thanks, and the more caffeine, the better.” At the slow and painful rate that I was extracting needed information, it was going to be a long night.

Kimberly abandoned the rapidly diminishing supply of cookies, scooped coffee grounds into a filtered basket and filled the reservoir with water. With brewed coffee trickling into the glass carafe, she puttered around the kitchen, clearing plates, putting mayonnaise and leftover cold cuts into the fridge and placing the half-empty bag of chips in the pantry. I didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know she was stalling. Obviously, Simon was a sore point.

When the coffee had brewed, Kimberly filled two large ceramic mugs, also lavender, and offered cream and sugar. I heaped three spoonfuls of the sweetener into my coffee, then followed her into the living room. I took the chair I’d used earlier, and she settled once again into the corner of the sofa. She cradled the huge mug in both hands and sipped slowly. Sensing she wouldn’t talk until she was ready, I waited.

“I met Simon at Starbucks,” she finally said, “around the corner from my office in Omaha. We used to run into each other every morning on our way to work.”

Her expression turned dreamy with memory. “He was so good-looking, I never thought he’d be interested in me, but one morning I dropped my purse. The contents scattered everywhere, and Simon got down on his hands and knees to help retrieve them.” She smiled, but not at me. Her expression was distant, as if she was lost in the past, reliving the experience.

“I thanked him and apologized for being such a klutz. He said he was glad it had happened, that he’d been waiting for a chance to meet me. He’d recognized me from my picture in the paper.” She looked at me and blushed. “He said he could tell from my columns that I was a fascinating woman.”

“So he had no ulterior motive?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“He never asked to handle your investments?”

Her flush deepened. “Well, yes, but only after we’d gone out together a few times.”

Poor Wynona Wisdom, I thought. All that sage advice for others, and she’d walked straight into the arms of a disaster she hadn’t seen coming. “And I bet you were one of his biggest accounts.”

She nodded. “He was so grateful. If it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been promoted so quickly.”

“And when you realized he was after you for your money, you dropped him?”

Her face reflected sadness, embarrassment and remorse. “I didn’t recognize the financial implications of his interest in me until after the breakup. Funny, isn’t it, how much easier it is to recognize other people’s problems than your own?”

I dipped my head in agreement and thought about Bill and Trish. Did I really have a problem or, in a few days, as soon as Bill found his ex-wife a place to live, would she be out of our lives again with Bill and me back to making wedding plans?

“If you didn’t think Simon was gold-digging,” I said, “why did you break off your engagement?”

Kimberly stared into her coffee mug as if looking for answers. “At first, I was flattered by how attentive he was. You’d think that I, who’d advised so many women to run for their lives from controlling, abusive men, would have recognized the danger signals, but I was as blinded by love and denial as the next woman. It wasn’t until Simon blew up at me for not replacing the two young men on my staff with female employees that I became aware of what he really was.”