Charlotte Douglas - Storm Season

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.”

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.