A Dangerous Game

“Hey!”

“You know, men—and women—in different agencies can be jerks.”

“Yeah, they can.”

“Don’t you be the jerk, huh?”

Craig lowered his head with a half smile on his face.

Mike was right.

He was being a jerk. But a jerk doubly convinced that they had to find a killer—and fast.

He looked at Mike. “How’s your Russian?” he asked.

“Worse than my Spanish,” Mike told him.

“You don’t speak Spanish at all,” Craig reminded him.

“I rest my case. Actually? I’m kind of lying. I do speak some Russian. Had a Russian great-great-grandma who watched after me when I was a kid. Why?”

“I was thinking we might head out to Brighton Beach,” Craig said. They had a friend working at a restaurant out by Brighton Beach pier. Jacob Wolff had been born in America; his mother had been Russian and his dad had been born in Israel. He worked undercover for a division of the FBI linked with Homeland Security—his job was to blend in with the locals so that he could hear all the chatter. Russian mob operations had become a more and more serious factor to the city in the past few years. So far, he’d been able to warn the authorities in time to stop two car bombs and the assassination of a local councilman—all without giving away his cover.

He listened. And when people were comfortable in a place, they tended to speak a little too openly—dismissing a waiter as a nobody.

“What? You don’t think his friends will look at us and think, Well, hell, they’re FBI right off the bat?”

“Not if we go undercover, too.”

Mike groaned. Craig had done a lot of undercover work, changing his look drastically for each assignment. Mike was an up-front, flat-out, find-the-truth kind of a guy.

Dress up wasn’t his thing.

“So swim shorts and Crocs, huh? Enough to look like we’re wannabe beach boys, huh?”

“No one is ever going to call me a boy,” Mike said. He had Craig by a decade and was—as Craig liked to tease him—an old geezer in his midforties.

“Wannabe beach whatevers? Come on, we won’t really be working. I’ll buy you a fizzy drink with an umbrella,” Craig said.

“Don’t you dare.”

Craig grinned. “We’ll head to my apartment.”

“Thought you were mainly living at Kieran’s apartment.”

“Yep, that’s why we’re heading to my place.”

“Think you ought to call her? Let her know that the case is a priority for us and that we’re part of the joint task force?” Mike suggested.

“I’ll let her know,” Craig told him. “I just...”

“What?”

“I just need to try to figure out something to tell her that actually suggests we’re making headway on solving the case.”

* * *

“You know you did it. You can’t keep lying. You stalked her—you stalked her and then you killed her,” Kieran used her fiercest voice, trying to sound like a cop.

Her twin looked at her and arched a brow. He lowered his head, trying to hide a smile. “No,” he said simply.

“We can understand how it happened, how you must have felt—”

“No,” Kevin said again.

“She rejected you. You felt like an ass.”

“No,” Kevin said again.

“You were humiliated. In front of so many people.”

“No, damn you!”

Kevin looked up at her with fire in his eyes. “You idiots. Don’t you understand? I loved her. Whether she did or didn’t love me, I loved her. I would have never hurt her. I didn’t kill her, and when you get your heads out of your asses you’ll discover the truth. I’m innocent, and I’m done talking. I want my lawyer—now.”

“He’s not here yet. We still have time—”

“Get the hell out! I’ve asked for my lawyer and from here on out, we will wait for him to arrive.”

Kieran set the script down and looked at her brother with a smile. “Wow. Did you do it?”

“Nope. I am innocent,” he told her, and grimaced. “My character is innocent, at any rate. You see, he’s a rock star, and it really does look like he did it at first. The cops believe it was him—until they find a kid who was too terrified to come forward. She was actually killed by her stepfather. Because she totally rejected him!”

“You’re really good,” she told him, leaning an elbow on the desk. They were in the office at Finnegan’s. She was sitting in Declan’s chair. She’d returned from the soup kitchen with Mary Kathleen at about three, and Kevin had been there ready to run lines with her.

She’d popped into the back office to eat some fish and chips, and Kevin had joined her. They’d been running his lines for the filming that would take place on Monday and Tuesday.

“You’re pretty good at that emoting thing yourself,” Kevin told her.

“No, I’m not. You were laughing at me.”

“Just because you’re not a big black cop who used to be a linebacker,” Kevin said.

“Ah, but I love Arnie Westmore!” Kieran said. And she did. The actor who starred as the lead detective on the show Kevin would be filming was both strikingly handsome and definitely talented. He really had been a linebacker, too, with the Jets. She was thrilled that Kevin had scored a role on the show.

There was a tap on the door. Kieran jumped up, hopeful that it was Craig.

She had managed not to call him yet—mainly because she had kept busy all day.