The Crying Game

Chapter One

The cold was so chilling as Janice Cooper stepped into the New York City streets, she was almost tempted to go back inside and spend the night in the airport. She was almost ready to just sleep on a bench inside the heat filled airport until summer rolled around again. At least then she'd be warm.

She shivered slightly, moving to adjust the wool scarf she was wearing so that it covered any exposed skin she may have been showing. She gripped her suitcase tightly as she walked to the edge of the busy streets, holding out a hand to flag down a cab.

A yellow cab came to an abrupt halt right in front of her and she wasted no time in heading around back, popping the trunk, placing her luggage inside and then circling around to the backseat where she hurried inside, huddling in the warmth of the heat that was blasting through the cab's vents.

"626 1st Avenue," Janice spoke up.

The driver grunted in acknowledgment and as the car pulled away from the curb and into the insane traffic New York was known for, Janice blew on her hands, hoping her warm breath would thaw them some.

She stared out the window as they passed. The mark of mankind was everywhere you looked in New York. The cars as the honked and their engines as they drove, the tall, impressive buildings of offices and homes. The shops—both for food and for clothing and many other things you didn't even know you needed.

As they headed to Janice's destination, she saw the Empire State Building, hovering proudly over the other buildings. She saw a lot of people—wrapped up head to toe to protect themselves from the cold—crossing the street, cameras in their hands. No doubt they were tourists.

New York City was much like France in the fact that they both seemed to have wide-eyed tourists visiting them every single day of the year, no matter how cold or how hot. And Janice knew very well New York City winters could get bitingly cold and their summers could get swelteringly hot.

After a while, they fought their way through the traffic and Janice instructed the driver to pull up next to yet another tall building surrounded by glass windows.

She paid him, got her things from the trunk and stood outside of the building for a long time, staring at it.

She hadn't been home in seven months. She'd had to fly out to Paris to solve the murder of a French baron undercover. She had worked as a maid for the baron's widowed wife and his stony-faced son. The perfect thing about being a maid was that rich people deemed you irrelevant. In those seven months that she stayed with the late baron's family, she had learned almost all of their secrets. The wife had been having an affair long before her husband had died—almost eight years—with her very attractive bodyguard. Her son had been aware of the affair and the baron had been aware of it, too, but chose not to leave his wife much to his son's disgust and disappointment.

It wasn't until the bodyguard had his first "accident" that Janice began to suspect the son. He seemed like a deeply angry man and according to the other maids, the argument he'd had with his father shortly before the man's murder was heated. Sometimes disgust and disappointment and frustration drove people to murder. Janice saw that happen often.

But when the son had ended up in a terrible boating "accident" everything clicked into place for Janice and, compiling all of her notes she solved the case. The son had killed his father, but only because his "mother" had requested it. The kicker of the story was, the mother wasn't really his mother at all—at least not biologically—she was his stepmother. The widow had indeed been having an affair with the bodyguard, but she'd also been sleeping with her stepson behind closed doors. When the baron found out, he'd had a heated argument with his son and his wife and was intent on divorcing her and disowning his son.