“I’ll find it,” Mike said. “There should have been an alarm tripped somewhere; hopefully, someone will know.”
He turned and was gone.
Kevin stared at Craig. “Why are you standing here? We should go. We should follow him. My sister is missing!”
Craig hurried down the stairs. “It’s through here, Kevin. It’s through here somewhere.”
“What?”
Craig waited until he reached the crypts.
“Hey, all of you!” he shouted.
The spotlights used for work in the crypts were on; the immediate area by the broken wall was alive with light.
The light naturally faded deeper into the crypts.
“The far end! The far left end of the crypts!” Craig said. “Get back there and break anything you need to and check the walls. There’s an entrance that goes to the next basement or foundations here somewhere. Help! Please, help. It’s Kieran’s only chance.”
They turned, white-faced, to do as he instructed. But Craig raced past them.
And he imagined Kieran, unconscious, lying on a tomb or a slab...
He reached the far left wall. He pushed past corpses, ignored skulls, created huge drafts of bone dust...
The picture had frozen in his mind.
Kieran, lying vulnerable. And the killer staring down at her, ready to stab her in the heart. Ready to keep her perfect for all time to come.
* * *
Kieran crept slowly through the rows of the dead, careful not to brush past the skeletal fingers that protruded here and there, afraid that they would break and fall—and give away her position.
She could barely see, making it difficult.
“Death will have no power on your beauty.”
She held still for a minute; she couldn’t see, but neither could the killer. All she had to do was keep moving...
Light suddenly shone a bit of a distance away. She winced and shrunk down; the killer was in another row. She was safe so far.
The glow allowed her to see that she was next to the skeleton of what she assumed to have been a very big man. The bones had disarticulated. She glanced toward the light and willed herself to be as silent as possible.
She said a silent prayer and begged the dead man’s forgiveness.
Then she carefully curled her fingers around the femur.
She held it tightly and inched forward.
“I have light now, my lovely, I have light! Oh, my dear girl! Had you only finished drinking. I didn’t wish to cause you fear! I never scared my beautiful girls. Well, poor Sadie! But she just didn’t finish her drink, either. Sadie... I must go for Sadie. The human mind is so...strange. She might never remember, but...then again, she might.”
Kieran kept moving. She realized that the killer was walking quickly now.
He had the advantage of his light.
Suddenly, another flashlight blazed, and she heard a booming voice.
“Stop! Stop where you are, you bastard!”
Two lights gleamed.
And Kieran realized that she was caught between them.
So close... She’d been so close, nearly to the place where light seemed to glow—or had glowed, until the bold lights flared.
“Stop!” the newcomer called out again.
“Run, Kieran!” she heard then. “It’s Gleason! It’s Roger Gleason!”
“Kieran, it is Roger Gleason. But I’m not a killer! The bastard down here is the killer!”
She had no sense of direction. She couldn’t tell whether Gleason’s voice was coming from where she had been...
Or coming from where she was going.
“Let her alone!” Gleason called out again.
“What? You’re going to kill her—and me?”
Kieran heard someone rushing up behind her. She turned and swung hard with the femur, as hard as she could.
At the same moment she came in contact, hands reached for her, ready to pull her down.
“Kieran!”
She heard her name called again, and this time, she knew the voice.
Craig.
Then the skeleton at her side suddenly began to move—as if it reached out for her, as well. As if it tried to embrace her with decayed and crippled fingers...
The skeleton fell to the floor, and bone dust rose around her in a cloud.
Craig rolled through onto the interment slab in the wake of the dead; he quickly hopped to his feet by her side.
His gun was raised.
Kieran saw that Roger Gleason was just a few feet to her left.
And Henry Willoughby was to her right.
Craig looked at Gleason.
Then he turned in the other direction. “Henry Willoughby, you are under arrest for the murders of Jeannette Gilbert, Cheyenne Lawson, Cary Howell and the kidnapping of Sadie Miller. Sir—”
He never went further. Willoughby rose with a howl of rage that seemed to echo through the crypts as if a thousand lions roared.
He had a huge knife raised high in his hand, and he was aiming for Kieran’s heart.
She couldn’t stop the scream that tore from her throat.
And she screamed and screamed as Craig fired his Glock and Willoughby fell against her, the knife wrenched out of his hand just before it reached her chest.
* * *
“She knew. Kieran knew all along somehow that it had to do with New York’s underbelly. Well, that, and a very sick man,” Kevin said.
He was sitting with Craig at Finnegan’s, in a back booth. It was Friday evening; they’d both spent the day in Craig’s FBI office.
Kieran had been an intended victim.
Craig had fired his weapon—and killed Willoughby.
There was no question that he’d had no choice; paperwork just came with the situation.
And, of course, there was the untangling of it all.
“I wonder if we would have found her if Mary Kathleen hadn’t decided that it was ridiculous to let a glass of good champagne go down the drain,” Kevin murmured. Then he leaned forward. “How did you know, though? I was furious at first that you didn’t want to run straight to the building where she’d been when she disappeared. How did you know?”
“Kieran knew. She kept saying that the killer was getting in and out through an adjacent building. We just had to find out where the connection was, deep in the crypts. Shaw’s team helped, and Roger Gleason. He knew that he was innocent and that someone had framed him with that splotch of blood in his office.”
“Why?” Kevin asked. “What made Willoughby a killer?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to leave it to the experts to figure it out. What I’ve gotten so far—now that his house has been searched—is that Willoughby lost his wife about a decade ago. She’d been consumed by cancer. She’d been a beautiful woman. In his warped, sick mind, Willoughby wanted to find women as perfect as she had once been—and let them stay perfect. But, of course, they kept decaying on him. I don’t know—maybe we’ll never know—what he was really trying to do. Maybe he even wanted to get caught. But if we’d served a search warrant on him instead of Gleason, we might have known right away.”
“How?” Kevin asked him.
“He had a well-worn copy of Romeo and Juliet on his desk. Maybe he was somehow able to see himself as a young man again, trying to find the right Juliet. We’ll never have all the answers.”
Kieran came by their back booth then, flopping into it.
She looked no worse for wear. Since they’d arrived, she’d been in a flurry.
She didn’t really need to help out; Danny had taken over the bar, and they had a number of employees working the floor.
She’d been determined to do so.
Mary Kathleen was fine, but she and Declan were home. They’d needed the night.
Craig looked her. She smiled. She seemed especially vibrant.
“Not fazed,” Craig murmured. “You know, most people might consider what you went through last night to be a bit traumatic.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just felt the need to help out and...” She paused and glanced at Kevin, and Craig realized that it had just been one—incredibly eventful, but one—week since John Shaw had found the body of Jeannette Gilbert.
“You don’t need to tiptoe around my feelings,” Kevin said. He smiled at his sister. “We’ve lost before. We made it together. I know that I will weather this. I’m going to mourn Jeannette. She was wonderful, and I shouldn’t forget her, nor should the world. But I’m all right.” He grinned. “In fact, Miss Ball-of-Energy, I have a meeting in a few minutes.” He made a face. “A director I met at the party, go figure. He’s putting on a revival show—Godspell.”
“And he thinks you’d be a good—”
“Christ. Yep, go figure.”
“I think you’d be wonderful,” Kieran told him.
“We’ll see,” Kevin said. “I probably still have to go through an audition and all.”
“Break a leg,” Craig told him. “I’m not so sure I should say that in this family, but...”
“Hey. No one broke anything,” Kieran said.
“Technically,” Kevin said, “you did break a leg. You broke a leg all over Henry Willoughby. I guess I shouldn’t be so flippant. The man is dead. I can’t be sorry.” He seemed to give himself a mental shake. “Anyway, as much as I respect you, Special Agent Frasier, and as a much as I love you, sister-lass-Kieran, you’re at my booth and I have a meeting.”
Kieran smiled and rose and grabbed Craig’s hand.
“We’re going,” Craig said, rising with her.
They waved to Danny behind the bar; he seemed to be in his element. The talk that day was about everything that had happened.
Danny, of course, had eyewitness accounts of parts of the action.
Finnegan’s was booming.
Of course, Le Club Vampyre would reopen soon; Roger Gleason has been proved completely innocent of all charges. In fact, the club would wind up being incredibly popular.
There was already talk of a movie being filmed there.
In the car, Craig turned to Kieran. “You’re sure you’re all right? You don’t want some time, some sessions with...with your employers?”
She smiled. “You saved my life.”
“Ah, but we’ve established the fact that you are my life,” he told her.
She smiled at that.
“My turn to suck up,” she told him.
“Oh?”
“Your hair...your great hair,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“And what a nose.”
“I hear it’s quite classic.”
“Totally lovely,” she told him.
He frowned. “I don’t think that ‘totally lovely’ sounds very macho,” he said.
“Let’s get to my place. I feel the need for a shower. And, of course, if you want me to go on, I’ll need a little refresher on all that I might appreciate.”
They reached her apartment. They showered.
Kieran found more to appreciate.
And, of course, Craig informed her that he’d have to show her macho, since she was determined on using the word lovely.
And still, deep in the night, after they’d both shown one another several times just how much they really needed one another, Craig held her and asked her, “Are you sure? You’re really all right?”
She rose above him and told him, “Always. I’m with a crack FBI agent, you know. Safe and secure.”
“And loved.”
“And loved. Best part of all,” she said.
He smiled. And he wondered how the hell he could ever figure out how to keep her out of trouble in the future.
It couldn’t be solved that night. So he just held her.
Grateful that she was alive.
Absolutely perfect.
Alive.
And with him.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from FLAWLESS by Heather Graham.
“[Heather Graham] stands at the top of the romantic suspense category.”
—Publishers Weekly
Looking for more from New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham?
Don’t miss out on the first book in her newest New York Confidential series, packed with deadly intrigue, exhilarating romance and heart-pounding suspense:
Flawless
Find out what happens when a criminal psychologist and FBI agent are thrown together by circumstance, drawn together by attraction and threatened by criminal intent...
Order your copy today!
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“Graham is a master at world building and her latest is a thrilling, dark and deadly tale of romantic suspense.”
—Booklist, starred review, on Haunted Destiny
Looking for more reads from New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham?
Complete your library with the spine-tingling Krewe of Hunters series, featuring the FBI’s elite team of paranormal investigators:
Phantom Evil
Heart of Evil
Sacred Evil
The Evil Inside
The Unseen
The Unholy
The Unspoken
The Uninvited
The Night Is Watching
The Night Is Alive
The Night Is Forever
The Cursed
The Hexed
The Betrayed
The Silenced
The Forgotten
The Hidden
Haunted Destiny
Deadly Fate
Darkest Journey
“Dark, dangerous and deadly! Graham has the uncanny ability to bring her books to life.”
—RT Book Reviews on Waking the Dead
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Let the Dead Sleep
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The Dead Play On
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Flawless
by Heather Graham
CHAPTER
ONE
“I’m okay. Really. But I have to tell you what I did. Well, he deserved it, of course,” Julie Benton said over the phone.
“What did you do?” Kieran Finnegan asked. So far, she’d only been half listening; Julie’s tale of woe had been going on for quite a while now.
Kieran wiped the bar, one eye on her task, the other on the patrons in the pub.
Thankfully, at the moment she could easily work and listen, despite the fact that the object of Julie’s venom—her almost ex, Gary Benton—was one of the few other people at Finnegan’s on Broadway, the family downtown pub, one of the oldest in the city.
Julie giggled. “He deserved it,” she repeated.
Kieran didn’t doubt that. She just wished she couldn’t see Gary as she was talking to Julie.
She never minded cleaning Finnegan’s since it was practically her family home. It was a beautiful old place with finely carved wood, a range of tables and booths, and this classic bar with its array of beer taps and collection of Irish whiskeys. Photographs of the pub through the years hung behind the bar. Beyond was a comfortable dining room, equally rich in wood decor and handsome carving.
They weren’t particularly busy at this off-hour of the day, between lunch and happy hour.
Bobby O’Leary was at one end of the bar; although he was an alcoholic long in recovery, Finnegan’s was the center of his social life. He was still one of their favorite customers.
She’d given Bobby his standard soda with lime, and he was reading the Times.
Two groups of business executives on extended lunch hours remained. Three were at one table, and four—including Gary—were at another. Finnegan’s wasn’t even officially open. They closed between 3:00 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., according to the sign on the front door, but their clientele consisted mainly of friends and regulars who knew they could come in and receive service with a smile. Both tables had paid their bills and were lingering over coffee. Kieran had served them all their final refills—managing not to spill any scalding coffee on Gary—before she’d started cleaning.
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