Noah finally stopped in the middle of the street, walked over to a bench and sat down. He put his head in his hands and didn’t say anything for a moment. I sat down next to him and waited.
Finally, he rubbed his eyes and looked up, his gaze fixating on something across the street. “How did she die?” he asked softly.
“She was strangled.”
“Jesus.” He dropped his head back into his hands. I wanted to reach out, to touch his shoulder, to comfort him in some way, but I had a feeling that would just make him more upset. I didn’t want to risk the chance of him rejecting me, of him pushing me away, his walls coming up and forcing that distance between us. “When did it happen?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “They’d just found her body when they called me.”
He shook his head again. “She was only twenty-two,” he said. “She wasn’t even… she still lived with her parents. She wasn’t even done with school.” Something about the way he was talking about her betrayed a certain familiarity, more than one would have with an employee.
“Did you… did you have a relationship with her?” I asked carefully.
He shook his head. “No.”
I didn’t want to annoy him, or push him, and I knew he was upset. But what I said next had to be said. “Noah, that won’t matter to the police. They’re going to know you had a connection to her. You shouldn’t have shown up at the crime scene like that. And you shouldn’t have punched Josh. You were so lucky that the police weren’t closer. Josh could still press charges, he could –”
“Now you’re defending him?” Noah asked. He shook his head. “After what he did to you?”
“I’m not defending him,” I said. “I’m just saying that you can’t let what Josh did start to effect your case. It looks really bad, Noah.”
He turned to me. “You think I did it?”
“What?”
“Do you think I murdered those women?”
“What I think doesn’t matter.” The last thing I wanted was for him to think that my opinion had anything to do with his case. No one’s opinion did, except for the police and the jury, if it came to that. And I was pretty sure it might be headed that way. One woman dead, okay. Two women, awful. But three women? All connected to one man? It looked bad. Really, really bad. If he wasn’t arrested, it would be a miracle. And if he did get arrested, he was going to need Professor Worthington. In fact, he was probably going to need even more than that -- he was going to need Professor Worthington to head a team of high-powered lawyers, all working together.
“I didn’t ask you if it mattered,” Noah said. “I asked if you thought I did it.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, and he turned to look at me. His eyes had softened, and it was that same expression I’d seen on him in the lobby yesterday, the expression that made me feel like he did care about me, that this wasn’t just fun to him, that it wasn’t just about sex.
The thing was, deep down, I didn’t think he did it. I’d been with him, I’d spent time with him, and I liked to think I had a good read on people. He just didn’t seem like the type of man who could kill someone, let alone three someones, with his bare hands.
But another part of me felt like I was being ridiculously naïve, that I’d slept with him and my emotions and my hormones were clouding my brain when it came to the facts of the case. How many times had I watched tape of trials or police interviews where someone’s mother or father insisted there was no way their son or daughter could have committed that rape, or that murder, or that assault, even though there was DNA evidence linking them to the victim?
I thought those people were ridiculously stupid. And now I might be turning into one of them.
“Answer me,” Noah said.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
He nodded, then stood up and started walking down the sidewalk toward his limo, which was parked against the curb.
I watched him go, my heart beating fast in my chest. I had a sinking feeling that if he got into that limo and pulled away, he was going to be gone forever, that I would never get a chance to be with him again. The thought was unbearable. A wave of despair and desperation washed over me, scrubbing away any kind of protests my brain was preparing.
I rushed after him and knocked on the window of the limo.
For a second, I thought he was going to refuse to talk to me.
But then the window rolled down.
Our eyes met, and I didn’t have to say anything.
He opened the door and let me in.
***
Once we were at his apartment, everything changed.