Free Irish Stewed by Kylie Logan Page B

appreciate your help. This is the most exciting thing that’s happened around here in a long time. Jack and I worked together, and when I got this assignment . . .” Her cheeks flushed. “Well, this is the biggest break I’ve had in my career. Anything you can tell me will put me one step ahead of the competition.”
    I led the way into the kitchen and when we got there, I dumped my cold coffee, refilled my coffee cup, and poured a nice, hot cup for Kim.
    “So what do you think Jack was doing here?” Kim asked.
    “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
    She flinched. “You mean you don’t know? You mean . . .” As if she might actually see something interesting in a kitchen that was so far out of date I wondered how anyone could cook anything in it, she looked around at the fryers and the grill, at the tiny salad prep station, and out the pickup window where Sophie’s one and only cook passed food through to the servers. “Do you believe what the police are saying, that Jack Lancer actually broke into the restaurant with the guy they arrested, the one who was stealing copper in the basement?”
    I didn’t think it fair to reveal what Declan and I had already determined. Someone broke into the basement, all right. But chances were, that someone wasn’t Jack. Whoever was downstairs had never come upstairs. Which meant Jack couldn’t have gotten up here from down there and the person who was down there—Owen—could never have been up here. Jack must have come in through the back door. But why? And if he was with Owen, why wouldn’t the two of them just come in together?
    I finished my coffee and set down my cup. “Do you believe it?” I asked Kim.
    “The kid could have been desperate,” she suggested.
    “Desperate enough to kill? To cover up his copper stealing?” I shook my head. “Even if he was, from what I saw of Owen Quilligan, he was young and fit. Jack would have been no match for him. To me, that means if he ran into him and wanted to keep him quiet and get away, the kid could have punched Jack in the nose and run. Or whacked him with a piece of copper tubing, knocked him out cold, and gone on stripping the copper out of the building. But he didn’t. He didn’t even finish stealing what he started to take. The kid is the one who ran, and he left the copper where he dropped it. Seems to me, the question has to be why.”
    A new thought hit me. “Did he carry a weapon?” I asked Kim.
    “Jack?” She had just taken a sip of coffee, and she swallowed so hard, I heard the gulp. “I don’t think so. I don’t think . . .” She made a face. “That just doesn’t seem like the Jack I knew. And even if he did carry a weapon, why would he bring it here to your restaurant?”
    Just hearing the words, a prickle of annoyance shot over the back of my neck. “If you’re going to get your anonymoussource right, you can start there,” I told her. “It’s not my restaurant.”
    “Of course not. You’re not Sophie. Not that I know her or anything,” she added. “Until I was assigned Jack’s story, I’d never been here before. I mean, why would I be? It’s not like it’s a dinner destination. I mean, for anyone.”
    She was working her first big story so I guess she was allowed to be a little nervous and a little thoughtless, too, so I cut her a little slack.
    A little was all I ever cut anybody.
    “So what kinds of stories was Jack working on?” I asked Kim.
    Her shrug was noncommittal. “From what I could see when I went back to the station last night and looked through his files, just the usual. Something about school cafeteria lunches not being nutritional enough. Something about the local food bank Robin Hood, too, though that file was so slim, I have a feeling it was initiated by a tip and then Jack discovered there really was nothing to the story. I mean, really, how interesting could it possibly be to do a story about somebody who leaves anonymous donations at the St.