into her background yet.
Sadie’s brow twitched in confusion. Memory must elude her after enduring the trauma she had. She slowly turned her head and soft chocolate-brown eyes fringed with thick dark lashes found him. Their clear, dramatic beauty struck him. The unexpectedness made him clamp down on the attraction. She stared at him for endless seconds, confusion going to recollection and then purely personal observation.
“This is Jasper Roesch,” Steven said. “The founder of DAI put him on Bernie’s case.”
“Oh.” She stared at him awhile longer and then her brow twitched again. “Where am I?” She looked around the room.
“You were shot outside Dark Alley Investigations,” Jasper said.
She stared at the ceiling awhile and then seemed to connect more dots. Driving up to DAI, getting out...
“I remember going there, but I don’t remember what happened after I got out of my car.”
“Someone drove by in a stolen car and shot at you,” Jasper said. “There were two, a driver and a passenger. They both wore hats and sunglasses.” Kadin had run the plates. The car had been found outside town.
“She was coming to see you about the murder of Bernie King,” Steven said to Jasper. “He was a homeless man going through Sadie’s reestablishment program at the Revive Center. There are no leads.”
Jasper nodded a couple of times. “I’ve got a call in to the lead investigator. I’ll meet with him and get all the details.”
“I saw you in front of Dark Alley Investigations,” Sadie said to Jasper.
“Yes. I saw you, too. You were a little hard to miss.” While he meant because of the men who’d shot at her, she was hard to miss for an entirely different reason. He wondered if he revealed too much about how seeing her had impacted him. A moment of awareness of the effect of that first sight passed between them.
Jasper shook off the distraction. “The doctor said you’d be released by the end of the week, but you’re going to need time to recover. I’ve got some security guards ready to accompany us to your house.”
“I don’t need security. I have my own.” She looked up at Steven with a soft, exhausted smile that revealed how much she valued the man, maybe as a family member but probably more as her head of security. She valued his protection.
Jasper began to have a lot of questions. Sadie had her own security, worked remotely and liked reclusiveness, although he didn’t quite believe that. Steven had seemed to throw that out for Jasper.
What were the two of them hiding?
“Don’t argue with the man, Sadie,” Steven said. “You said it—this about more than murder.”
“I’m only talking about getting us there safely. I’ll evaluate what you’ve got on your property and decide if it’s enough,” Jasper said. “How’s that?”
“Thank you,” Sadie said tiredly. “I don’t want to tell anyone they’re out of a job.”
He didn’t care where the security came from, as long as it was solid. If hers met DAI requirements, they’d be fine. And they’d spare DAI the resources.
Sadie’s head rolled to the side and she stared across the hospital room.
Steven put a reassuring hand on her arm, above the IV.
“Why would the killer come after me like that?” she asked. “I thought I was safe here.”
“Shh,” Steven said. “Get some rest.”
Jasper had to agree the killer going after her seemed extreme. And why would more than one? There had been two in that car.
Jasper refrained from asking why she had to be safe. He’d like to question Sadie without her esteemed security head in the room.
“We’ll discuss the case in detail once I’ve had a chance to review the file,” he said.
“I hope you have better luck than the San Francisco police,” Sadie said.
“If I relied on luck I wouldn’t be working for DAI,” Jasper said.
Her exhausted eyes found his and he felt her appreciation. “That’s nice to hear, Mr. Roesch. It’s upsetting to think Bernie’s murder will go unsolved. He was so dear to me.” Sadie paused, seeming to fall into thoughts of the dead man, who clearly was someone close to her. Did she get close to all of her homeless people or did only a few stand out?
“He had so much going for him,” she gave him a hint by saying. “Not every homeless person is as successful as he would have been. He was so close to starting a new life.”
And now whoever had killed him may have a reason to stop her from hiring an agency like DAI to investigate his murder.
“Who knew you were going to hire DAI services?” he asked.
“Just Steven. He talks to the police in San Francisco for me and comes to meet me occasionally.”
For her? “Do you mean he’s taken over keeping in contact with the police?”
“Yes.”
“That’s true now,” Steven interjected, “But at first Sadie badgered the police to work harder on his case.”
“And you think they didn’t like the badgering?” Why had she withdrawn from her badgering? Why hand that task over to Steven? Was it a rich woman thing or would the answer tell him more about her reclusiveness?
“No. We thought she’d be safer if she let me look into things.”
There was that hypersensitivity to safety again. He’d table that for a while. “Have you told anyone? Talked to anyone about the murder? Friends? Family?”
She stared at him as though thinking it an unusual question. “No.”
“You don’t talk to anyone other than Steven?” No one?
She looked up at the ceiling in thought and then back at him when something must have come to her. “I did tell my friends at The University Club. And my household staff all know.”
He’d check all of them out when he arrived at her house. “University Club? What is that?”
“It’s a women-only club in London,” Steven said. “She flies there almost every month.”
“What about closer to home?”
“I live in a very remote area near Jackson Hole. I do go to the golf club, but I’m not close to anyone there. I belong to an online social club and have gotten a little chatty with one of the other members.”
As wealthy as she was, he wasn’t surprised she belonged to elite groups, but an online social club sounded more mainstream.
“What kind of social club?”
“Dating.
