“Kieran!” Jimmy called to her.
She walked over to his table. “Hey, Jimmy.”
“Bobby is doing well, I hear?”
“He’s going to be fine.”
“Ah, now, that’s a relief,” Jimmy said. He looked at his watch. “It’s so irritating when people don’t show up.”
“Someone is a no-show, huh?”
“Yes, but enough of my bad mood. You look quite professional today,” he said.
“I ended up working today,” she said. “Your beer is empty. Want another? Or maybe a coffee?”
“Irish coffee,” he said, as if he’d come up with a great idea.
“I’ll be right back with one,” she told him.
“That will be great. I’ll drink that, and then I’m done waiting.” His eyes widened. “Damn!”
“Damn what?”
“I forgot. I’ll bet that’s why he’s not here.”
“Why who’s not here?”
“Gary Benton. I forgot—I’m sorry. You asked him to stay away. Although, don’t you think that’s kind of silly. Sometimes marriages don’t work out. Doesn’t mean people should be banned from the best pub in town.”
“We haven’t told Gary he can’t come in here. We’ve just asked him to have some decency and stay away when Julie—who, quite frankly, he’s treating very badly—is here, which, I admit, is often.”
Jimmy shrugged. “He said she had a fit because he forgot to feed her dogs. That’s not exactly a hanging offense.”
Kieran decided that it wasn’t worth trying to explain how he’d left the animals in their own filth and without food or water, much less that he’d found it amusing to leave other women’s panties in Julie’s bed.
“I’ll get you that Irish coffee,” she told him.
She was in the area, so she decided to check on the married couple and then the musicians after she brought Jimmy his coffee.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“No, we’re good, thanks,” said the one with the full beard.
There was definitely something odd about the man.
Could he have something to do with the robberies? Or the murders?
Was he watching her, waiting to hire another contract killer to do her in?
She smiled. She hadn’t really heard him speak much before, but now she had an opening. “You have an interesting accent,” she told him. “Where are you from?”
“Georgia,” he said. “The country, not the state.”
“Well, welcome to Finnegan’s.”
She walked away, still disturbed.
Then she reminded herself that they ran a pub. She didn’t have to like every customer. And it was unlikely the two men were involved in any way with the robberies or her own troubles. For one thing, she’d never seen them before yesterday.
Still...
She was telling herself to forget them when she saw that Jimmy had left his table to speak with them. Strange, but hardly proof of anything.
She headed back to the office, where Kevin was seated in front of the computer. He looked up at her and shook his head. “We need help.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said.
Kevin eased back in his chair. “I’m trying to get the quarterly taxes ready for the accountant,” he said. “And I just got a call. A commercial for a dating service. I get to be a real person in this one. With a hot date,” he added. “I don’t even have to audition. But I feel guilty saying yes when Declan asked me to handle this. And now we’re all looking after Bobby, too—which is a pleasure, of course.”
Kieran smiled and sat down in the chair across from him. “It’s the curse,” she said. “Feeling that you were born guilty. The Irish-American curse, and it affects all thirty-five million of us with Irish lineage. Did you know at one time in the 1860s a quarter of the population of the city was Irish?” She grimaced. “I listen to Danny too much, huh? All that trivia rubs off.” She squared her shoulders. “Okay, how can I help?”
“The pub does well. I know that at first, after Dad died, Declan was careful not to hire anyone because we desperately needed the income ourselves. But now...we have to hire more help. You and Danny and I all have other jobs, and I’m worn out, frankly. I don’t know about your social life, but I’m glad about this commercial, because that’s all the dating I’m going to be doing for a while.”
She smiled. Sure, Kevin was her twin. But he was tall and smart and considerate, not to mention good-looking. He could have a dozen dates a week if he wanted to.
“We’ll talk to Declan,” she said. “I’m sure he’d be fine with hiring a few more people.”
Kevin laughed. “Trusting anyone outside the family is not in our big brother’s nature,” he reminded her. “Hiring even one more server is going to be torture for him.” He took a deep breath, then met her eyes, his expression serious. “I’m not sure he should be trusting family, either.”
She stared at him. “What are you saying?”
“Everything that’s going on,” Kevin said quietly. He lowered his head. “I pray Danny isn’t involved.”
“Danny would never be involved in murder,” she said.
“Not intentionally. You’re right on that.”
“I should call Julie and check on Bobby,” Kieran said.
“I just called. He’s in a new room, out of critical care. Julie and he are doing fine, and there’s still a cop outside his door.”
“Good,” she murmured. Yes, good. Things were going well on that front.
There were other problems, though, other situations that could possibly be solved. Situations that also seemed to revolve around the events occurring far too close to them and Finnegan’s.
There was the problem of possible danger to Tanya, who had risked a great deal to speak with Kieran.
She didn’t want Tanya to end up in a hospital like Bobby—or worse.
She considered suggesting they could all pool their resources and put up bail for Tanya Lee Hampton. But that didn’t seem like a good idea anymore, not with so much already going on with her family and the pub and their financial concerns.
But she knew who else might be able to help Tanya.
“I’ll be back. I need to make a phone call,” she told Kevin.
Outside in the hall, she looked through her phone contacts, hoping she had a number for Simon Krakowsky. To her relief, she did. She must have gotten it from Julie or Gary at some point. She was afraid it might be the store phone, but it went straight through to him.
Now she just hoped he felt grateful enough for her help catching the thieves that he would be willing to do her a personal favor.
She identified herself, and he immediately said how pleased he was to hear from her. She drew a deep breath and explained her call.
“She really needs help, and I know she’ll appear at her trial and that you’ll get your money back. I’d stake my reputation on it. In fact, I am staking my reputation on it,” she told him.
“I’ll take care of it—anonymously,” he promised her.
“That easily?” she asked.
“Absolutely. I owe you,” he assured her.
“You don’t owe me,” she told him.
“Then just think of me as a humanitarian. Either way, consider it handled.”
She thanked him and rang off, then headed back into the office. “Day job,” she said to explain her absence.
“I rest my earlier point,” Kevin said.
She nodded. “Point taken. For now, I have to start looking for Joes,” she said.
“Joes?”
“Yep. Declan told me to go through the receipts and find anyone named Joe or Joseph.”
“Okay. Go for it.”
She booted up
the second computer and had already found eleven possibilities when there was a knock at the door. It was Declan, escorting Detective Mayo.
She handed Mayo the list of what she’d found already. She’d annotated it with all the information she had, adding a note if it was a regular, even about how old they were and what they did for a living, if she knew.
“Excellent work,” Mayo said. “And I’ve brought my laptop, so if you’ll log me on, I can help.”
Declan left them to it, and for the next hour the three of them worked in near silence, except for the occasional pertinent comment.
When they finished, she printed out the results for Mayo, who folded them up and tucked them in his pocket.
“Thank you,” he said. “Wish I could stay for dinner, but there are a few other places in the city I want to look in on for myself,” he said. “Do some more investigating of my own.”
Kieran frowned. Something was definitely going on. Clearly Mayo wasn’t the one in charge of this investigation.
Kieran walked him to the door.
“Take care, Miss Finnegan,” he said with genuine concern. “I mean it.”
“I will,” she promised. Then she headed back to the bar, where she saw that Jimmy was still seated with his two new friends.
She stopped by their table. “Can I get you anything?”
“We’re fine,” Jimmy said. “I’m just talking music with these two fine fellows.”
“Great,” she said, leaving quickly.
She found Kevin at the bar talking to Declan.
They both looked up at her, and Declan said, “Kevin is going to go with you to your apartment, and then he’ll hop the subway back to his place.”
She looked at her twin. “You’re not going to stay over?”
He shook his head. “I have to get some things at my apartment.”
“Then it’s senseless for you to see me home,” she said. “I can just get a cab.”
“Not alone,” Declan told her.
Normally she would have argued with him, would have assured him that she knew which areas were safe and which weren’t, and that she knew how to watch out for suspicious people and stay out of the shadows. After all, she was a native New Yorker.
But things were different now that she knew someone wanted her dead. She could have told one of her brothers.
But they would have called in the cops, not to mention the FBI, and she would have been putting Tanya in danger, besides.
“Okay,” she said simply.
By the time Kevin opened the pub door for her, she was worried that she might be putting her brother in danger, as well. Maybe she should say something. No. She had talked to Tanya in confidence.
But this was her brother....
She sensed something, and turned to see the two musicians getting up and starting toward the door.
Following her.
She stepped out to the sidewalk, and then something snapped in her and she spun around, nearly slamming into the musician from Georgia. Without stopping to think how crazy she sounded, she demanded, “Why are you following me?”
“Kieran!” Kevin protested.
But suddenly she knew. It wasn’t anything in the way he looked.
It was his scent. The faint yet sensual scent of the aftershave he wore.
Her eyes widened, but she managed not to blurt out his name, something in her mind warning her that it might not be safe.
“You bastard,” she muttered.
“Kieran!” Kevin protested again.
A cab pulled up just then to let someone out, and she spun around, raced toward it and practically leaped inside, shaking.
Special agent Craig Frasier had been spying on her family—on her—just waiting for one of them to give themselves away.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
“KIERAN, PLEASE, LET ME IN.”
Craig stood outside her door, aggravated and yet kicking himself. She was no fool, and she’d jumped to at least part of the right conclusion the minute she’d figured out who he was.
He didn’t know what had given him away. He’d changed his voice, and he knew his accent had been good, not to mention his disguise was worthy of the big screen.
And yet somehow she had seen right through everything.
When she didn’t answer he said, “Kieran, I’m going to start suspecting a lot more than you think I do if you don’t talk to me.”
That did it. The door swung open. She stood there in her stocking feet, hair streaming around her shoulders, eyes shooting off sparks of fury.
“I can’t believe you!” she snapped. “The whole time, you were only there to watch my family, thinking you were going to trip one of us up. What, do you think I was with the jewel thieves that night and they were all so stupid they forgot I was their partner and took me hostage? Or maybe you think Declan’s the bad guy. Yeah, Declan. He just pretends to work his ass off running the pub. He really meets with master criminals and the KGB and the IRA and you name it, ready to tear down the political infrastructure of the world.”
“Kieran—”
“Or how about Kevin? Screw acting. Maybe he’s really a drug dealer when he’s not figuring out the best way to rob a bank.”
“Kieran—”
“I know! It’s Danny. One look at him, and you just know he’s a vicious killer.”
“Kieran, stop it!”
He stepped forward, forcing her back into the living room, where she flew at him, ready to beat her fists against his chest. To his amazement, she seemed to deflate the minute she touched him.
He wrapped his arms around her, but she pulled back, walking away from him.
“You have no right to suspect my family,” she said. “I can absolutely guarantee you that my brothers would never, ever be involved in anything that hurt people.”
“Did I say I suspected your brothers—or you—of anything?” he asked her.
“No, but...”
“Are you worried about what your brothers might be caught up in?”
“No!” Kieran protested. “No!”
“Are you worried about yourself?” he asked quietly. “Or even Julie?”
She turned away and walked into the kitchen, taking a bottle of Jameson’s from the cabinet. She poured a liberal portion into a glass.
He smiled. He’d never seen her drink and doubted that she did so often. Few bartenders imbibed on a regular basis, probably because they saw the effects of too much alcohol on a regular basis.
“Were you going to offer me one?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Aren’t you on duty? Aren’t you always on duty?”
“No. Well, a lot of the time, yes,” he admitted. “But not now. I’ve never been on duty here, with you, Kieran,” he said quietly.
For a moment, he thought that she believed him as something softened in her eyes.
“Suit yourself,” she said, pushing the bottle toward him.
He found a glass and poured himself a shot. A small one. He lifted the glass to her.
“I swear to you, I don’t know what crazy ideas you’ve got in your head, but you’re wrong. I’m not in disguise because I’m after your family. What I believe—and with good reason—is that Finnegan’s has been used as a meeting place by both sets of thieves, the ones you helped us catch and the copycats who are still out there. I was there in disguise because some people already know me there, and who’s likely to talk about their criminal plans if they think an FBI agent might overhear?”
She swallowed her whiskey straight, set the glass down hard and stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?”
“You might have inadvertently given me away.”
“Really. So you think I’m an idiot?”
“Kieran, stop right there,” he said, his voice quiet but authoritative. “I didn’t want to put you at risk, that’s all. I think you’re far more afraid than I am that someone in your family is somehow involved in this.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. As if any member of my family would ever try to kill me,” she snapped.
He paused for a moment, studying her. “So you think someone was trying to kill you?”
She nodded, but then her temper flared again. “If you don’t take off that ridiculous disguise, I can’t talk to you.”
“Fair enough.”
He turned and headed for the bathroom, searching through his pockets for the spirit-gum remover. He looked at himself in the mirror over the sink as he methodically metamorphosed from musician to lawman. Contacts first. The wig was easy, the facial hair less so. As he worked he noticed that Kieran had poured herself another shot of whiskey and was leaning against the door frame, sipping as she watched him.
He could tell that she was furious without even looking at her. The air vibrated with the angry heat emanating from her.
She reached over at one point for a tuft on his chin he hadn’t reached yet. He started to thank her, then realized she wasn’t pointing it out as she ripped it off, leaving the skin underneath stinging.
“Missed a spot,” she said as she retreated back to the doorway.
He went after her, grabbing her shoulders. “Look, I get it. You’re angry. But I don’t think you’re mad because you think I’m after your brothers. I think you’re mad because I actually fooled you. And I’m sorry, but this is what I do, especially when people are dead and I want to bring their killers to justice. No matter what I feel about you, I swore an oath, and I owe the dead the best I have. And if you can’t deal with that, I’m sorry. Meanwhile, I fully believe that someone wants to kill you, I just don’t know why, but my best guess is that they think you know something that’s a danger to them. And maybe you do and just don’t know yourself what it is. As for your family...dammit, Kieran, if there’s a reason why you think I’m after them, a reason why you think one of them might be involved—even unintentionally—tell me now.”