Flawless(21)

“Goodbye, Miss Finnegan. And my thanks again.”

She closed the door and hurried toward the building. When she got upstairs, she was grateful to discover that both her bosses were in consultation. She hurried to her own office and began to write up her report on the parents she had interviewed the other day. Both were heartbroken; in her opinion, neither had in any way been responsible for the death of their child. It was sad, as she’d told Agent Frasier, but infant deaths still occurred through no one’s fault. She was convinced this was just such a case.

Eventually her bosses finished their consultation and came in to see her, quizzing her about her visit to the FBI. They both seemed pleased that she’d been consulted.

“If you’re needed again, you just go right on over, Kieran,” Dr. Miro said.

“We always help whenever we can,” Dr. Fuller assured her.

She smiled weakly. “Of course.”

They left a few minutes later, and Kieran realized she’d worked through lunch and the day was nearly done.

*

Craig spent most of the rest of the day reinterviewing everyone he could get hold of who had been at any of the robberies. The prosecutor, Julian Smith, wanted to charge the men they’d caught with the murders, and they finally got together to discuss that with him late in the afternoon. Craig, Mike and Eagan argued against bringing charges, showed him the security footage, brought up Kieran’s insistence that the tapes showed two different men and emphasized that the men in custody had been caught with toy weapons.

Smith was a hard-ass, though. He wanted to throw everything at the defendants that he could possibly throw. On top of that, the media was already calling them murderers.

Everyone in the city wanted the crime spree to be over.

“They were toy guns!” Craig said, slamming the table with the flat of his hand. “Even a public defender will be able to make that case. Give us some time to work this.”

“Toy guns this time, real ones the last,” Smith said. “You could have been killed, Agent Frasier. I’d think you’d want them locked away forever.”

“And I’d think you would want them charged for the appropriate crimes,” Craig said.

“Yes, well, real guns or not, there are laws—” Smith began.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Eagan protested, raising a hand. “Smith, give my men time to work this. You’re going to want all available evidence and witnesses concurring about the facts, aren’t you?”

Smith finally left in a huff after agreeing to give them more time. “But not too much,” he’d said threateningly.

It was nearly seven o’clock after a damned long night and day.

Mike was heading to the hospital for a checkup. One of the perks of being FBI was that doctors bent their schedules to see you after hours. Craig offered to tag along, seeing as he had no plans for the night.

“Hell, no,” Mike told him. “Leave me alone. Let me be grouchy and crotchety tonight, go in, go home and then hit a bottle of Scotch and my bed. You should go do something fun. Shake off this job for a few hours.”

But when he left the building at last, Craig wasn’t ready to go home.

And he wasn’t sure why, but he found himself heading for Finnegan’s on Broadway.

Maybe he did know why. Kieran Finnegan intrigued him. She’d been helpful, pointing out body language he might not have noticed himself.

But she’d also been nervous. Nervous just because she’d been in an FBI office?

He doubted that.

He had a feeling she was still hiding something. So what the hell was it?

Had she somehow been in league with the thieves?

He relived the previous night in his mind. It didn’t seem likely, though he couldn’t say it wasn’t possible.

It certainly seemed like a coincidence that she’d even been there. She had a day job, and though he doubted she worked two jobs every day of her life, she’d been slated to work at the bar that night. He knew from the NYPD report he’d read through that she had her own apartment near St. Marks Place. Not right next to the pub, but not much of a subway trip, either. On a beautiful day and with a little time, she could even walk it easily enough.

But if she was involved, what was his plan? Come right out and ask her what the hell she was acting so guilty about in the hope she would confess?

She would hardly admit to being guilty, so that wouldn’t do anything except raise her suspicions and make it even harder for him to figure out what was going on.

He would have to take a more indirect approach. Luckily for him, Finnegan’s was known for its food as well as its hospitality and selection of beers on tap.

Couldn’t hurt to get some dinner.

Old double wooden doors with frosted, etched glass faced Broadway, the sidewalk in front protected by a green-striped canopy overhead. Inside there were a number of booths to the right and a few more to the left, tables filling the rest of the room, and a long bar lined with taps at the rear. The place was busy with the dinner crowd and a number of cocktail-hour stragglers. He quickly saw that Kieran Finnegan was there, standing behind the bar and talking to a waitress. A tall man with dark red hair was also working behind the bar—one of her brothers, he was certain.

He started to head that way, then chose a booth that gave him an unimpeded view of the bar instead. He watched the action for a while. Another tall man, this one with lighter red hair, was working the floor along with two young women.