“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Right now, I just want a drink.”
“A drink?” They let her walk between them, and she headed toward the exit.
Richard frowned. “Shouldn’t you go home?”
“I am going home,” she said. “I have booze there too.”
“Can we give you a lift?” Andy asked, concerned.
She waved him back. “I’ll take a cab.” She was dressed somewhat. And looked a little bizarre, being half painted and half not. But she disappeared out the front door with the casual, confident stride of somebody who wasn’t fazed by her appearance.
“We need to contact those two people who saw and heard them,” Richard said.
“Yeah,” Andy said. “I’ve got messages from both.” He called the first name on his list. “This is Detective Ganderwahl. I’m calling about the incident that you witnessed this evening at the bar.” He listened for a few minutes. “And then you scared him off, I understand.” He listened some more.
On the outside of the conversation, but hearing just enough to keep him in the loop, Richard stood there impatiently, until Andy ended the call.
“So, that changes things a little bit,” he said.
“In what way?”
“Apparently this guy had a job for her, but it was a different kind of job.” And Andy waggled his eyebrows.
“Ah, shit. So I presume she resented it, struggled, it got ugly, and he knocked her in the head.”
“When Naomi and her man came outside, they were laughing and giggling, having a good time, lots of kissing and cuddling going on, but, when he mentioned a price, she got furious and hit him, and he hit her back.”
Richard barely held back a smile. “Yeah, slightly different story and definitely not connected to our killer.”
“We hope,” Andy said. “We know what assumptions can do to our cases.”
“Yes, I hear you,” he said. “Good enough. We’ll follow up, but I’m not sure how we’ll find a guy who may have hit her in self-defense.”
“Which is most likely why she didn’t want to make a statement.”
“Exactly.”
Andy stood for a long moment and asked, “You were talking with Cayce?”
Richard nodded, keeping his face deliberately blank. “Yes, trying to get more information on Gruber and Fenster. I need to run Frankie down, as I’m still looking for contact information for both of them.”
“No luck looking them up?”
“No luck finding last names,” he said with a look at Andy. “Something about the nature of the art world.”
Andy nodded. “Well, I’m heading home,” he said. “It’s been a damn long day.”
“Yeah, I’m following.” He sent a quick text to Cayce, telling her that Naomi was her usual self and not to worry.
He headed on toward his home. The problem was, even though his mind should be on the case, all he could think about was Cayce. She’d looked so vulnerable, so different from the woman that he’d seen up until now that it gave him an insight into who she was as a person. The one she never let anybody else see—although he suspected that Elena had had many chances to see it. He really wanted to know what was in the two women’s backgrounds.
As soon as he hit home, he brought out his laptop and researched the two of them. He went back twenty years. Cayce was thirty-two. Elena was thirty-one. And then decided he needed to go back twenty-five years, maybe even twenty-seven.
It took him a while, but he finally found a case with Elena’s name. Her last name had been changed when she was ten. She had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Only one mention was in all the articles, even in the case files he’d managed to find, of the one friend who’d saved her, sneaking into her bedroom that night and half dragging her from the house to the hospital and safety. That one friend had been Cayce. Elena was put into the foster care system and hidden away. Which explained why Cayce had lost touch with Elena for so many years. A trial date on the rape of Elena had been set, but the stepfather had disappeared before it got underway and hadn’t been heard of since.
Richard sat back, stunned. “Cayce was right. Something like that went way past all normal relationships.”
He could understand now why the two had been so close. Their kinship covered decades. Cayce had mentioned something else in later years, of having come together and Elena saving her that time. He wondered if it was a similar situation. And, though he hunted, he couldn’t find any information. So, even if Cayce had also suffered abuse, it hadn’t gone criminal, and he didn’t have an old case for it. And he found nothing on the internet about it at all.
He shook his head and thought about the lives of the two women who only had each other, but, once they found each other, it was something more precious than gold. And then he realized just how devastated and alone Cayce must feel now. With Elena gone—that one light in her life, that one person Cayce could always trust—Cayce had no one.
*
So much light was in her work. Halo stared through the window at the wall mural. So pretty. Too pretty. Must be bad. Evil.
He shoved his hands deep into his oversize coat and hunched his shoulders. His mother’s words were ever-present in his head. You can’t paint. You can’t draw. That’s the devil’s work. He chooses his minions by the skill he gives them. No one should create such works without his permission. Remember that.
How could he forget? His art had been part of his soul. The evil part.
Good boy. Bad boy. And the litany carried on.
Chapter 12
Waking up the next morning, Cayce could feel some of her vigor returning. She didn’t understand how or why, but it was almost as if that breaking of the dam last night had helped.
