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goes along with them.”
    “Good. Take care of yourself.”
    Sloane stepped back inside and shut the door, more convinced than ever that there wasn’t a shot in hel these men had fooled the FBI agent who’d interviewed them.
    “Did you get what you wanted?” Matthew demanded. “Do you believe everyone here is innocent?”
    Sloane turned to face her father. “I never doubted their innocence. Their acting ability? Now that’s another matter entirely.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning I walked into a freaked-out meeting of the Knights of the Round Table. Things rapidly deteriorated the longer I stayed. And that’s given the fact that you told them I’m clueless about everything except the burglary.”
    Her father began nervously gathering up empty beer bottles. “So you don’t think the FBI bought our story.”
    “No way. Every one of those guys is a mess.” Sloane raked a hand through her hair. “I wish you’d let me talk to Derek.”
    “We’ve been over this before. The answer’s stil no. Look, Sloane, not one of us has been contacted again by that Special Agent Wil iams. So he must have accepted our story and assumed we were just nervous about being interviewed by the FBI.” Matthew continued cleaning up, tossing dirty paper plates into a large trash bag. “We’re no longer on their radar.
    Period.”
    “You’re burying your head in the sand. FBI investigations take months, sometimes years. If they’d figured out what happened with the real and the fake Rothbergs, the story would be out. The media would be al over it. This one’s juicy. A man was murdered. And, according to the provenance, you guys were the last ones to do business with him before he was kil ed; maybe even the last ones to see him alive.”
    “We didn’t kil Cai Wen. They can’t charge us with anything.”
    “Oh, come on, Dad.” Sloane walked over and planted herself in his face. “You’re not naive. You know that the law isn’t always fair, or right. Besides, this is about more than your innocence. It’s about protecting you from the real kil er. You know what he’s capable of. Who knows if he’l go away? Who knows if he’s acting alone?” Matthew went very stil . “Why? Did you find out something? Is he part of some crime ring?”
    “I’m not sure,” Sloane answered honestly. “But I do know that he stole a valuable painting. I know that he traveled from Hong Kong to here, that he owns a Mercedes, and that he has the contacts to track you down. That tel s me he’s got money. He also has a bodyguard, hangs out with thugs, and arranged for your chance encounter to happen in an area of Chinatown that’s fil ed with gang-run casinos and brothels. That tel s me he’s got power in dangerous circles. He doesn’t sound like an arbitrary kil er to me.”
    “I never thought he was. But you’re not talking about just a group of thugs. You’re talking about Asian organized crime.”
    “Yes, I am.”
    Sloane watched the color drain from her father’s face.
    “You didn’t go down this path before,” he said, his voice unsteady.
    “It didn’t automatical y come to mind.”
    “But now it has. And you wouldn’t pul it out of thin air. Which means Derek told you something.”
    “Nothing concrete. He can’t discuss Bureau business. But I can sense he’s worried. And that worries me. Because if he knows more than we do about whoever broke into this apartment, my guess is that it involves C-6. Mom said the intruders were speaking some Chinese dialect. It doesn’t take a genius to put together the pieces. And if Asian organized crime is involved, that’s even worse than our original idea that you were just being warned off by Cai Wen’s kil er and whoever hired him.” Matthew’s jaw was working. “You think we walked into an even bigger hornet’s nest.”
    “Yes, I do.” Sloane wasn’t going to sugarcoat this, not with so much at stake. “Which brings me to my next point. Derek is pressuring me about the move.