Deadly Fate (Krewe of Hunters #19)(88)

Emmy was able to pull a number of strings for them, though, because of her position with Kimball. She had done bookings as usual. Of course, at the time, she’d had no idea of what was going on.

She’d cried copious tears at first, so finding out anything from her had been very difficult.

Thor wasn’t a psychologist—and psychologists and psychiatrists would have a heyday with it all. He’d taken enough criminal behavior courses to speculate that it had been power both men had been after. For Kimball, money had given him tremendous clout, but it had never been that power over life and death that Morley had wielded. How and when the correspondence between the men had begun, Emmy had no idea. But she knew about secret drawers in Kimball’s desk, and those drawers had led to a wealth of letters. They were coded, of course—they wouldn’t have left the prison walls if they’d included instructions on how to come to Alaska. Cryptologists in the department would be given the task of deciphering just what the letters and phrases had meant.

They would never have all the answers, because both men were dead. Thor’s shot had been a kill shot this time—he had no doubt that Morley would have stabbed Clara with an urgent desire for his last kill if he’d been given the least chance.

And sheer terror had seized Emmy, she had told them—between bouts of hysterical and copious tears—and she was both grateful to be alive and horrified that she had killed a man. She wouldn’t be released from the hospital until this evening or tomorrow. There would be no charges against her—she had killed in self-defense. None of them knew if Kimball would have killed her in an ultimate defiant act or, with Morley, his puppet master, dead, if he would have just let her go.

“I have never been so terrified!” she’d told Thor, shaking in her hospital bed.

She’d been pretty roughed up. Apparently, Marc Kimball had been ordered by Morley to bring Clara Avery to him. She didn’t know what the plan had been to escape the Fate once they’d gotten Clara. Maybe Kimball had been promised in on her—time to indulge in whatever sick fantasies he had, going along with what had appeared to be his absolute infatuation with her. Emmy didn’t know that much. She only knew that Kimball had called her in, slammed her head against a door and put his knife to her throat to make her do what he wanted. He’d made her scream when he’d killed the officer on the ship—that way, they could disappear down to the cast cabins while law enforcement went to investigate the scream. He forced her to speak for him—work for him even through his deadly activities. He seemed to think, in a very malicious and sardonic way, that it was funny. And it would help show that his true intent was indeed lethal.

“What will I do now?” she asked, looking lost.

“Well, you’ll get out of the hospital first,” he told her. She had a nervous habit of working her fingers on the sheets.

She was going to need a lot of therapy, he thought.

“You never had any inkling—I mean, you worked with him closely. You had no idea he might be homicidal himself? He never behaved strangely?” Jackson asked.

“That’s just it—he always behaved strangely,” Emmy told him remorsefully.

“Strange, all right,” Mike Aqlak said. Thor wondered if his partner—there from the minute he could have been, dealing with red tape, the press, acting like a bulwark in many ways—meant Kimball himself, or the whole thing, or even the meek little woman who had managed to kill her boss in self-defense.

Oddly enough, Kimball had finally met his match in the little woman he’d treated so badly for so long.

“What is it?” Mike asked when they left.

“I don’t know,” Thor told him.

Mike thumped him on the back. “You did it. You got Morley again, for good this time—and that bastard, Kimball. You called it with the caverns on the island—you found the damned boat he was using. Hell, my friend, you did what an agent is supposed to do!”

Thor thanked him for his support; Mike grinned and told him he knew that he would be leaving—and that it would be okay.

“Hey, partners meet up again, don’t they?” Mike asked Jackson.

“It can happen,” Jackson said.

Thor wished he felt a little better—he should have been in on the somber celebrations and congratulating that went around among law enforcement. The murders had been brutal and horrible; those women still lay at the morgue, disfigured, disjointed, decapitated and bisected. A ship’s officer had been killed, as well. What had happened had been terrible; but the killer and his accomplice were dead.

He should have been more relaxed. He just wasn’t.

Maybe it was the fact that the manhunts, the searches through the snow, the speculation and the wondering had been so intense, it was impossible to just let it all go.

The media furor wasn’t going to die down for a long time.

What few cabins hadn’t been sold on the Fate went at a premium. Yes, there were areas on the ship that were a crime scene, but the crime scene units and specialized cleaning units would be finished before the set sailing date.

The Fate would keep her deadline—after all, she was the Fate!

Thor had a number of conversations with Clara about that. But she was determined she would sail on the ship. There was no reason she shouldn’t.

“It’s over, Thor. And this is what I do for a living. It’s a good show. Tate Morley and Marc Kimball stole lives. Now they’re dead. They can’t keep stealing. We can’t let them.”