“You know this is heating up, if you’ve got a name and if we’ve got somebody with good reason to hate this woman.”
“Sounds like they pretty well hated each other,” she murmured. She picked up her cell phone and dialed the number she’d been given, and, when a man answered, she asked if it was Kirby.
“Yes, who’s this?” he asked, his voice deep.
“This is Detective Kate Morgan,” she said smoothly. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Oh, doesn’t that just figure? The stupid bitch gets herself murdered, and, of course, you come after me.”
“Well, anybody who had an antagonistic encounter with her is almost guaranteed to have us come knocking.”
“It was hardly antagonistic,” he argued. “As a matter of fact, it was all in good fun, until she took it too far.”
“By hitting you with the car.”
“She was way out of line doing that,” he stated in outrage. “Okay, so I was being an ass, but you know that’s the way I was back then. I’m not like that now.”
She changed her tone. “You want to tell me exactly what happened?”
He gave a shortened version, but it was along the same lines as what the chairman of the running club had given her.
“Have you seen her since?”
“A couple times, and then I finally realized that it took too much effort to avoid trouble with her, when all I really wanted to do was just go out there and run,” he explained. “I did move away for a time. Then I ended up back in Vancouver again.”
“Why?”
“Work,” he said. “I work for a tech company, and I did try Alberta for a while, but it wasn’t for me. I asked to come back and eventually was given a transfer here again. It’s that simple.”
“Do you still run in that same area?”
“Not very often,” he stated, “bad memories and all. It’s not exactly a place I would want to go back to.”
“Anybody else have a problem with her?”
“You should have asked if there’s anybody whodidn’thave a problem with her,” he quipped. “She was a very difficult woman.”
“What about her friend Robin?”
“They both were very difficult,” he declared. “If you gave them a wide berth, it was fine, but they were very over-the-top, very loud, and very assertive personalities. Two peas in a pod. And, if one ever started to calm down, the other one would egg them back on again.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“No, not really. Their husbands are bloody saints to have put up with that,” he said in disgust.
She stayed silent on that because one had a much worse relationship than the other, although it wasn’t that great for either of the husbands. At least that’s the way it looked right now. As she sat down to update her notes, she asked Kirby, “Have you seen them anytime in the last six months?”
“Only on the front page of the news when it reported they had been murdered,” he replied. “I’d be a hypocrite to say that I’m sorry because I really can’t drum up too much sympathy. For their families, yes, of course, especially the kids. However, honestly, both women were very difficult to be around.”
“Any idea who might have done this?”
“Seriously?” he asked. “Okay, they were irritating as hell, but that doesn’t mean that anybody would be upset with them enough to go through the trouble of trying to kill them.”
“Right,” she said. “Anyway, if you think of anything else, please let me know.”
“Will do.”
Then she stopped and asked, “By the way, where were you on the day that they were killed?”