Yes, it was. And she was certain they hadn’t caught them all.
She waved a hand in the air. “Kevin, stop worrying about me and get your beauty rest. You need it to be a singing chip. I love you—good night.”
She headed into her bedroom. She was suddenly deeply tired.
She was almost asleep when she heard Kevin’s sleepy voice. “Who is it?”
She sat up and looked at her bedside clock. Almost one o’clock. Was he rehearsing lines?
Hurriedly crawling out of bed, she went to her bedroom door and peered out.
Kevin was standing by the door, puzzled.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Thought I heard someone at the door. Guess not. There’s no one there now, anyway,” he said. “But I could have sworn I heard someone playing with the lock.” He shrugged. “Sorry I woke you. Probably just some drunk from downstairs looking for a place to crash.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
She gave him a quick hug and reminded him to get his beauty sleep.
She went back to bed. But then she began to wonder.
Had someone been trying to get into her apartment? Not just any apartment, her apartment?
And if so...
Why?
She tried to be logical. Kevin had to be right. Some drunk had just wandered up from below. It wasn’t an unheard-of occurrence, as she knew firsthand. They ran a pub, after all. Most of the time people more or less knew their limits, and when they didn’t, Declan refused to keep serving them.
But alcohol was a moneymaker. Not every establishment was as careful as Finnegan’s.
And yet...
She tossed and turned, glad that her twin was in the living room and that she had not one but two serious dead bolts on her door.
CHAPTER
FIVE
THEY HEADED OVER from Queens on the three-lane Francis Buono Memorial Bridge, known unofficially as the Rikers Island Bridge.
She’d never been to Rikers Island before, either, though her employers had been there often enough.
“You been here before?” he asked, as if reading her mind.
She shook her head.
“It’s pretty amazing. Inmates may be held here pending trial. Maybe their attorneys couldn’t get them bail, or maybe they couldn’t pay it. Or they might have been sentenced to under a year. Anything longer, and they’d be in prison. Rikers is a jail.”
She nodded, pretty sure that she’d more or less known that.
“How many inmates?” she asked.
“At any given time? More than thirteen thousand, but with guards and staff, including civilian employees, there may be as many as twenty thousand people on the island—even more on some days. It’s like a city unto itself.”
“You’ve been here before, obviously.”
He nodded. “Too often.” He glanced her way. “This whole place is a mess. You’ve got New York prosecutors, federal prosecutors, even Jersey prosecutors, working here. But we’re the ones charged with getting and presenting evidence. Any prosecutor’s success always comes down to the evidence and statements—and ideally confessions—we can give them. Of course, they’re also the ones who make the deals in spite of that evidence.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I just haven’t been here before.”
“But this is what you do, right?” he asked. “Work with criminals.”
“So far I’ve only dealt with people who might be charged,” she said. “And usually the situation is sad. I think I told you—I talked with a couple suspected of killing their baby, but the expert physician who was brought in agreed that the child simply stopped breathing. Crib death. Not smothered, poisoned, ignored... I write a lot of reports,” she added. “Interview witnesses. It’s amazing how people can be in the same place at the same time and see completely different things.”
“Because everything is perception,” he said. “Everything we see is filtered through the way we perceive it.”
“And here I liked to think I went to school for something useful,” she said.
He laughed. “I didn’t mean to suggest that you didn’t. Your help with the crime-scene footage was pretty amazing—you saw a lot that I didn’t. But that more or less proves my point.”
“Will their attorneys be present?” she asked.
“No, oddly enough, I think they actually want to talk. They seem to want to convince us that they might be thieves, but they’re not murderers.”
They arrived, headed through security and then went on to the building where the suspects were being held.
They went through another security check, where Craig turned over his gun. He seemed to know the guard who escorted them to the room where a man in jail coveralls was handcuffed to a table, waiting for them to arrive.