She pulled up another forkful. “They want me to go back to Utah.”
Rick’s fork hesitated before he took a bite. “Is that what you want?”
“No. I know it’s going to be hard. The thought of walking back in that garage makes me physically sick. Going back to Utah now would be hiding. And who’s to say if this man is somehow after me that he wouldn’t follow me there?”
Rick swallowed, chased his food with a drink of water. “That’s a long way to travel for a criminal to seek a victim.”
She kept eating, trying hard to remove her name as the victim in their conversation. “And lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice.”
“You’re a strong woman, babe. I knew that the first time we met.”
There was an actual smile on her face. “We’re back to the babe thing?”
“Yeah, well . . . I put off the Getty for a little while. We still haven’t been on a date.”
“Dinner in bed doesn’t count?” She motioned toward the half-eaten food.
He shook his head. “Nor does breakfast in the hospital.” He shoveled in more food, swallowed quickly, and loaded his fork again. “A date requires a shower, dinner with wine or at the very least an adult beverage, and shoes.” He leaned over and tickled her bare toes.
She laughed, really laughed for the first time in over a week. Rick seemed just as pleased with the sound coming from her lips as she did.
They finished their meal in quiet conversation about almost nothing. When Judy had enough, Rick polished off her plate. He set the tray aside and leaned against the bedpost facing her.
“I need everyone to go home,” she said with a heavy sigh.
“Me?”
She smiled, laid a hand on his lower leg as if to prove he was not part of the everyone.
“Not you. My parents, Hannah. Zach needs to get back to work. Karen hasn’t even been to the Boys and Girls Club since last week. Thank goodness Mike listened and left. Now if I can just get everyone else to follow his lead. It’s like everyone put their lives on hold.”
“Family does that.”
“I know. And I appreciate it but it feels like everyone is staring at me, waiting for me to break.”
Rick ran his thumb over her instep with gentle strokes. “Kinda like you did tonight at dinner?”
“Is that what I did?”
“It is. Being alone when it happens again might require more than a bandage.”
She knew enough about post-traumatic stress syndrome to understand she wasn’t exempt from harboring unhealthy emotions. It had only been a week and the truth was she wasn’t sleeping well. Seemed she wasn’t often hungry . . . well, except when Rick was close by.
“I don’t want to be alone.” She shivered. “I just don’t want to be the quicksand that keeps everyone from their lives.”
He picked up her other foot, rubbed it. “I’m happy to hear you don’t want to be alone.”
The foot rub nearly made her miss his next words.
“When you’re ready to go back to work, either myself or someone from our team will drive you and pick you up. One of us will be at Michael’s home twenty-four/seven.”
Twenty-four/seven? “What?” She opened her eyes, blinked a few times.
“Until this guy is caught, you won’t be completely alone.”
“I told you I was tired of the fishbowl.”
“There won’t be a fishbowl. The security detail is to keep you safe, not make you home-cooked meals.”
“But—”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you believe with all your soul this man isn’t coming back. He took your purse, didn’t kill you when he could have, went through some serious effort to go in and out of that garage to corner you alone. Look me in the eye, Judy, and tell me he won’t be back.”
His words scared her. Primarily because he was right.
She leaned against the bed again, and pulled his foot closer to rub. She wasn’t sure why he was working so hard to protect her. He didn’t owe her. Hell, they weren’t technically even dating. A few stolen kisses and some seriously heavy flirting summed up their relationship. Still, there wouldn’t be any complaints from her lips.
“When I do go back to the office . . . that first day . . . can you be the one who takes me?”
The dimples on his face managed to grin even if his lips didn’t. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Chapter Fourteen
Rick shook himself awake a few hours later, realizing that he’d fallen asleep with Judy’s feet in his lap. She was sound asleep as well. He eased off the bed and tucked the blankets around her. Chances were she’d wake in the middle of the night, uncomfortable with the amount of clothing she had on, but there was no way in hell he was going to take the liberty of undressing her. Maybe at a different time in their life, that would be acceptable. Not today . . . and not in light of everything she’d been through.
After dimming the lights, he made a quiet exit with his shoes dangling from his fingertips.
Down the hall, he noticed the flickering of a television set and poked his head inside.
Sawyer, Judy’s father, and Zach were both propped on easy chairs watching the late news. Seemed everyone else had gone to bed.
“Hey.” Rick made himself known with a simple greeting.
Sawyer sat up, his face a mask of worry.
Rick tossed his shoes to the floor and sat on the sofa between the two of them.
“How is she?” Zach asked first.
“Sleeping.” But that wasn’t the real question. “Your sister is a strong woman, Zach.”
“Didn’t seem strong tonight at dinner,” Sawyer scoffed.
“No. She didn’t. Those things are to be expected, Mr. Gardner. She’ll get through this, not let it beat her down.”
“She should come home with us. It’s safer in Hilton.”
Rick might not be a father, but he understood the need to keep Judy safe.
“If she hides in Utah now it could cripple her forever. The world isn’t any more unsafe today than it was yesterday or will be tomorrow. The sooner she joins the world again, the stronger she’ll be.”
Sawyer glared at him. “I can’t watch over her from home if she’s not there.”
“Are you suggesting you’ll stick to your daughter’s side every hour of every day? My guess is the days of you doing that passed a long time ago.” Rick was too tired to get in a pissing match of right and wrong with Judy’s dad, but the stubborn man wasn’t listening to reason.
“This wouldn’t happen in Utah.”
“C’mon, Utah has problems, too, Dad,” Zach told him. “Judy has us here.” Rick was happy to see Zach nod in his direction to be included with the “us.”
“I hate this, Zach. Didn’t want her here to begin with.”
“We all hate this. We all want her safe.”
Rick sat forward and met Sawyer’s eyes. “Judy will have round-the-clock protection, not only with a physical bodyguard taking her to and from work, but weekends and evenings. Michael already approved more audio and video monitoring of his home. We will find who did this to her, and she will be protected while we search for him. I want this bastard more than you can possibly know, Mr. Gardner. I’ll keep your daughter safe.”
Sawyer pointed a finger in his direction. “I’m keeping you to your word.”
Judy’s father grumbled as he lifted his tired frame from the chair and retired for the night.
Zach and Rick sat in silence for a several minutes, the newscast flashed images of all the awful things happening in the greater Los Angeles area. The media had grown tired of the criminal activity around one of Hollywood’s elite, which suited Rick just fine. The picture of Michael and Judy dancing was the primary shot the media managed to use over and over. The same feed of the parking garage filled with police and caution tape was a constant reminder when Rick turned on the TV.
“Maybe she should go home for a while,” Zach said.
The skin on Rick’s arms chilled. “I have more resources here to protect her.”
“No one is after her in Utah.”
It was time to bring Zach closer to a truth realized by the authorities. “This man is after her. He targeted her and there’s no guarantee he wouldn’t follow her to Utah or anywhere else to hurt her again.”
“Are you sure?”
Almost 100 percent. “In the service, going with your gut often saved your life.”
“So keeping her here is going with your gut?”
Didn’t sound like Zach agreed. “Judy wants nothing to do with going home. In fact, she wants everyone visiting to return to their lives. She’s going back to Michael’s on Monday, where I will have someone shadowing her every moment she’s not at her desk at work.”
“And if this dirtbag works with her?”
Rick had thought of that, too. He and Neil had already placed a temporary worker at the office building who would watch her there as well. Between the undercover spying and the monitoring of everyone surrounding Judy, they should know if there was any unusual attention given. “She’s covered there as well. Just not an obvious shadow.”
Zach sighed. “I guess that’s all we can do. I don’t think any of us are going to rest easy until this guy is caught.”
Rest easy. Hell, the only restful sleep he’d had was the past two hours at Judy’s side. The mention of sleep had him covering a yawn.
“You can crash here,” Zach offered.
Being close to her, even a few bedrooms away, would give him some peace for a few hours. He knew he needed to reboot his brain. The only things waiting at home were blank monitors and an empty house. “I think I’ll take you up on that offer.”
Zach pushed off the chair, turned off the TV. “C’mon. The advantage of having a house this size is accommodating a large family.”
“We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t question you, Mr. Evans.” Detective Raskin had taken over the investigation from the reporting officers. He and his partner, Detective Perozo, sat on opposite ends of the table. From the defensive pose of Perozo, he was playing bad cop, where Raskin kept a smile on his face.
“Damn right it’s your job,” Rick told him. “Should have questioned me within twenty-four hours.”
The detectives glanced at each other then back at him.
Rick knew the delay had more to do with his personal circle of friends and diplomacy. But in his opinion, those things shouldn’t ever take precedence over some protocols. Questioning a boyfriend, or in the case of him and Judy, a romantic interest, should have been a major priority.
Rick let them lead the questions. They started with the usual suspects, when had he met Judy, what was the nature of their relationship. Where was he when Judy was attacked and was he with anyone?
“I arrived at Mr. Wolfe’s Beverly Hills home at ten minutes before seven. Our date was set for seven.”
“Where were you prior to that time?”
“Experiencing the joys of traffic. Before that, I was at my residence in Tarzana. My home and that of Mr. Wolfe have twenty-four-hour video surveillance which will show me leaving and arriving.”
Detective Perozo leaned forward. “But at six thirty you weren’t captured on any videotapes.”
“None that our team monitors. I gave myself forty minutes to get to Judy’s. I left my house at six twenty, give or take a few minutes.”
“What do you drive?” Detective Raskin asked.
“A Ducati.”
“A motorcycle?”
“Yes.”
“So you can weave in and out of traffic but you left forty minutes early for your date on a route that should have only taken you what . . . twenty minutes, less even?”
“I picked up flowers.”
“Where?”
After Rick told them, they both grew silent.
He knew what was coming, even before the next words were uttered.
Perozo pulled a chair from the table, turned it around, and straddled it. “So you leave your house at six twenty. It’s possible with a Ducati to make some good time and arrive close to Beverly Hills, or say Westwood by six thirty.”
Rick’s fist clutched in his lap. He hadn’t mapped out his own timeline and realized now how bad it might look. “Looking in the wrong direction will only delay you finding the right man.”
“You said yourself we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t look at every possibility.”
They asked questions for the next half hour, which Rick answered, but with as minimal information as he could offer.
With the police station behind him, his firearm secured to his side where it belonged, Rick dialed Neil’s number.
“I need you to pull up all the surveillance tapes of the Tarzana house and Michael’s on the night of the attack.”
“Wanna tell me why?”
Rick straddled his bike and kicked the stand up. “Because I just became their number-one suspect. I’ll meet you at your place in fifteen.”
An hour later Rick would have been pulling his hair out if it wasn’t already military short.
Neil sat quietly and studied the tapes. “There’s no way they can pin this on you.” He backed up the Tarzana feed, watched as Rick walked through the house and set the alarm. The next time they witnessed Rick was driving into the Beverly Hills estate. He removed a single rose from the back pocket of the bike. It was banged up from the drive, but it was there. The time stamp said 6:52.
“We’re looking at this knowing I didn’t do it. They are looking at this thinking I did. I leave my home at six twenty, haul ass to Westwood, manage to ditch the bike somewhere nearby and wait for Judy to leave her work.”
Neil stopped him. “How do you know she’s at work? Did you call her?”
He grew hopeful, then the hope faded. “I tapped her car.”
“You did?”
“Shortly after she moved in. She thought the security was a joke.”
Neil kept staring at him.
“You telling me Gwen’s car isn’t tapped?”
Neil broke off eye contact.
“Exactly.” He went on. “So I know she’s at work. A court order will find the tap, and removing it now or denying it makes me look guilty.”
“And you know about cameras in parking lots. Have you been to her work?”
“I drove by it once before she moved here. Never went in and didn’t go in the garage.”
“But a lawyer will twist that.”
Lawyers sucked that way. “They’ll assume I know the garage, know her routine.”
“Her routine changed that night. She stayed late, got caught up talking to her boss. How would you know that?”
True. “I wouldn’t. I left my home to get to hers for date night.” For the first time since he left the station he started to breathe again.
“We do specialize in surveillance. Military background . . . they’ll assume and look for some way that you’d know she was still in the office or see what she was doing.”
“They won’t find anything.”
“But they’ll look.”
“OK. What’s my motive? I like this girl. She finally agreed to go on a date with me. Why would I attack her twenty minutes before?”
Neil shrugged. “You’re upset she wasn’t preening for you? Upset she didn’t take the date serious enough to get home early? Your manhood wasn’t strong enough to endure all the rejection and you’re twisted up now that you are going on a date.”
Rick rolled his eyes. “Lame.”
“Each potential motive will have to be proven wrong. And that will keep them from arresting you.”
He ran a hand down his face as if wiping it would erase all this bullshit.
“They will also conclude that because of the nature of your current employment and your taping of Judy’s initial questioning, and our involvement from the beginning, that you’re making sure you cover your tracks.”
“Jesus, Mac, you’re not helping.”
<
br /> “Oh, am I supposed to be helping, Smiley? I thought I was supposed to think logically. You want sugarcoating, go to the candy store.” The use of their old names back in active service sobered him.
“All that aside, driving to Westwood in ten minutes on the 405, even with a motorcycle, would take quite a daredevil act. The route through Beverly Hills isn’t exactly a swift entrance and exit.”
“I bought the flowers.”
“Most flower shops aren’t magnets for crime. Chances are there won’t be any cameras and even if there are, the likelihood any footage was kept would be slim after a week. Best we can hope is for an eyewitness that can ID you.”
“That can ID me and give a time I was in the shop.”
“Exactly.”
No matter what angle he looked at, he didn’t look good.
“We’re doing exactly what the cops are doing. We’re focused on me and not on who did this.”
Neil nodded. “If we don’t focus on you, clear your involvement, they will never look for anyone else.”
Chapter Fifteen
Rick and Neil arrived at Zach’s house together, both wore stoic masks, and neither of them volunteered anything before Rick whisked her out the door.
The offshore winds kept Judy’s hair blowing in every direction. The way Rick kept glancing at her as they separated from everyone in Zach’s house made her nervous.
“How’s your day been?” he asked, which he’d already managed to ask when he walked in the house.
When she didn’t answer, he finally met her eyes.
“You’ve already asked that. Something’s happened.”
They reached the bench overlooking the sea and he encouraged her to sit. Sitting before talking was never a good sign.
“Did you find out something about him?”
He shook his head with a heavy sigh. “No.”
It wasn’t often Rick didn’t have a smile close to the surface.
She reached for his hand, and for the first time since the attack tried to cheer someone else up. “How bad can it possibly be?”
His beautiful green eyes kept hold of hers. “The police questioned me today.”
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