“Was it the same guy?” she cried out, her hand going to her mouth. How horrible. Naomi might not be her favorite person, but no one deserved what happened to Elena.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I have to go interview her.”
“Where is she?” she asked, looking around. “I should go with you.”
“No,” he said. “This is for us to do. You need to go to bed and to get some sleep.”
“After this?”
“For all I know, it’s a plain old mugging,” he said. “She went to a bar. We don’t know that it has anything to do with you.”
She took a slow calming breath and started to relax. “That’s a good point. Naomi does hang out in a lot of bars. Not necessarily nice ones either.”
He nodded. “Exactly. Now go to bed.” He walked over to her, wrapped his arms around her, gave her a very gentle hug, and said, “And please look after yourself.”
Touched, she gazed up at him with misty eyes, saying, “I will. I promise.”
He chuckled. “You’ll promise, but you still won’t do enough of it. However, I’m hoping, after tonight, maybe you’ll do a little more.” He reached down and kissed her gently on the temple. “A lot of people are counting on you. Remember that.” And then he disappeared out her front door.
She stared at the closed door, wondering how her life had just suddenly gone off-kilter. Or maybe it had already gone off-kilter with Elena’s death. But something about his actions tonight, his words, that little kiss on her temple, had helped move things back in the right direction again. Either way, she felt measurably better.
And it was definitely time for her shower and then bed.
*
Richard strode away from Cayce’s door, wondering at his very uncharacteristic inclination to mother her. But something had just been so endearing and so broken about her when he’d seen her at her doorway that he couldn’t do anything else. But now, as he stared down at his phone again, double-checking the information he’d received, he hated that he was suspicious, but what the hell was going on with Naomi?
He finally made it across town to the hospital twenty minutes later. As he walked in, Andy met him at the entrance. His face was grim.
“What does she have to say?”
“Apparently she was at a party,” Andy said, “drinking and having a good time, when somebody told her about a job he wanted her to work on, and he coaxed her outside. She thought she was going out the front door but admitted that she’d had a lot to drink, and he took her out the back door. She didn’t see the blow coming, but she took one punch to the jaw and went down.”
“And then what?” Richard asked, as he strode inside the emergency hallway heading toward where he assumed Naomi was waiting for them.
Andy said, “Apparently another couple was having sex outside, and, when Naomi’s guy hit her, the other couple screamed, and Naomi’s guy took off.”
“I can see that working too,” he muttered.
“Right?”
“So, did she have a lucky save because she’s not the third victim in our possible trio here, or was it something completely random?”
“We don’t have any way to know at this point,” Andy said. “She’s not looking like her normal self.”
“Well, that leads credence to there being an attack.”
“I know. I had the same thought myself. But, just because she comes off brass and brutal, it doesn’t necessarily mean she could have set herself up for something like this.”
“No, of course not.”
As it was, she was getting up and walking toward them. Richard frowned. “Should you be leaving?”
“Like hell I’m staying,” she growled.
“Isn’t it early for you to be at a bar?”
She gave him a hot stare. “I like to live at the bars,” she said smoothly. “You got anything to say about that?”
“No,” he said. “What time did you leave the art world tonight?”
She shrugged. “It was mostly an afternoon get-together leading to an evening drink thing. I left at nine, and I was at the bar maybe forty-five minutes when this guy approached me.”
“Can you give us a description?”
“Well, if you two would talk to each other,” she said, “you would know that I already gave Andy a description.”
Richard looked at Andy.
Andy held up his notepad. “Six feet tall, red hair, heavy makeup.”
“In other words, you couldn’t identify him.”
“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” she said. “I like men. I know men. And this was one I hadn’t seen before.”
“Do you think he was just a whack job? Do you think he had another reason for hitting you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He glared at her. “Tell me exactly what happened in the conversation between you two.”
She gave a negligent shrug. “He said he had a job for me. I assumed it was art because that’s my world. I followed him. I thought we were going to the front door, but instead we headed to the back door. And that’s when he clocked me.”
Something about her words didn’t ring true. He turned to look at Andy. “Did you get a description of the guys who stopped the attacker?”
“I have their contact information,” he said. “They were also pretty inebriated. They may have forgotten by the time we get to them,” he said.
“I was thinking of that too. Let’s head over and grab them first.”
“What about me?” Naomi said sarcastically. “Or does what happened to me just not matter?”
Richard turned and looked at her. “I presume you already told everything to Detective Ganderwahl—that’s Andy. You’ll need to come to the station to file a report.”
She faltered at that and frowned. “I don’t think I want to file a report,” she said. “It’ll impact my ability to get work.”
He stared at her in surprise. “And why is that?”
“Because people who cause waves,” she said, “are not people who others want to work with.”
He could understand that,
