Secret Witness

Her daughter had simply wandered away. She hadn’t been kidnapped. Hadn’t been hurt.

Steph tucked Jilly into bed and the little girl didn’t make a sound as she curled on her side and wrapped one thin arm around her favorite stuffed bear. Steph kissed her daughter’s forehead and brushed the dark hair smooth. “Don’t ever scare me like that again, okay, baby? I don’t think my heart can take it.”

Leaving the door ajar and the light on in the hall as she hadn’t done in months, she padded back downstairs, meeting her aunt in the hallway. Maureen was carrying a pair of mugs. Offering Steph the one with a cartoon cat dangling from a tree branch and the caption Hang in There, Maureen said, “Thought we could both use some hot chocolate.”

Hot chocolate in the middle of the summer. It had seemed an odd idea to Steph when she’d first come to live with Aunt Maureen after the car crash that had killed her parents, but over the years she’d realized it was Maureen’s best answer for things she didn’t know how to fix.

Steph had downed gallons of the frothy liquid in those first few months.

“Bless you.” She took the mug and they both collapsed on the couch. Steph sipped, coughed and grinned as the liqueur kicked at her chest. “Hot chocolate, hot toddy, same thing.” She closed her eyes. “You were a rock today, Aunt Maureen. I can’t thank you enough.”

Maureen shook her head. “Don’t thank me. If I’d been paying better attention, this never would have happened. I was watching her and that man next door was making an awful racket on that horn of his. I turned my head for an instant to demand that he have some respect for the sanctity of our neighborhood, and when I looked back…she was gone.”

Aunt Maureen’s eyes welled up at the memory, and her lower lip began to tremble. Then, as if her words had conjured it, there was a wail from outside. The eerie noise shivered up several octaves, then ran back down like water, leaving the hairs standing up on the back of Steph’s neck.

She had a quick vision of the lost souls of the Revolutionary War calling to each other across the cobbled streets.

The sound rose again, eerie and sad, and Maureen swore, tears forgotten in the face of her long-pitched battle with their neighbor. “That man! Has he no sense of decency?”

She launched herself from the couch and stomped for the front door, seeming not to notice that the banshee screech had resolved itself to a glissando of sweet, sexy saxophone.

The door banged open and Steph heard her aunt bellow, “Mortimer, you dog, I’ll sue you for noise pollution, see if I don’t! Cut that out!”

Her words were answered by what sounded like a Bronx cheer à la saxophone, and the door slammed shut behind Maureen, muting both the sax and the yelling. Steph didn’t bother to run upstairs and close Jilly’s door, knowing that her daughter could sleep through anything—

Including the digital ring of the telephone.

Steph picked up the handset and glanced at the display, which read Out of Area. It should’ve read No Number Listed Because I Pay To Negate Your Caller ID. She sighed. Some pieces of technology were downright useless.

She punched Talk. “Hello?”

Silence. A dead, heavy, pregnant silence. Then breathing.

Steph rolled her eyes. “If you’re trying to scare me, you’ll have to do better than that, buster. I walk through the Combat Zone on the way to work.”

There was a chuckle. Then a harsh, oily voice. “I know how you walk to work, bitch. I also know where your pretty little girl went today, and it wasn’t the park. Have I scared you yet?”

Scared wasn’t the word for it. Not even close.

Terror, pure and clean, knifed through her like a scalpel and left her bleeding fear. She sucked in a breath, heard her aunt and Mortimer arguing outside and felt as if she was drowning.

She could almost feel the person on the other end of the line smile. “Thought that might get your attention. Here’s the deal. Today was a warning. I have a little job for you. If you do it, you and your family will be safe. If you don’t, or if you tell anyone about this, you’ll get the little girl back in pieces next time. Or I’ll do the old woman. Or both. Do you understand?”

Her whole body shaking, Steph could only nod into the phone. When he continued to wait, she tried to speak through her suddenly parched mouth and managed a whispered, “I understand.”

There was a satisfied silence, then a murmur in the background. The voice returned. “Oh yeah, and no cops or both the kid and the old woman are dead. Understand?”

Steph could feel the walls of the cage slide into place around her. Felt the fear bleed through to drip on the floor. She managed, “I understand,” and felt the numbness spread up her fingers to her heart. “What do you want me to do?”

The voice turned hard. Implacable. “Make sure the Makepeace DNA is a positive match. Or else.”

Chapter Two

The next morning, Stephanie awoke feeling as though she’d slept in a bed that was three sizes too small for her. When she glanced around at the animals and ruffles and felt the small, hot bump of her daughter beside her, she realized that was exactly what she’d done.

Then she remembered the rest of it and her stomach clenched like a fist.

“God!” She jolted in the bed and her hands flew to Jilly, grabbing up the sleepy girl and making sure she was really there.

Another child might have yelled in protest, but not this one. She just looked up at Steph with wide, worried eyes as if to say, What’s wrong this time? She’d lived through so much already—Luis’s rages, Steph’s tears, her time in the hospital after Roger…

What’s wrong this time? Jilly’s eyes asked, and Steph might have laughed, but she was afraid it would come out a scream, because everything was wrong.

Send her back to you in pieces, the dead dark voice whispered at the edge of her mind and it wasn’t until Jilly started to squirm that Steph realized she was clutching her daughter even tighter, as though a mother’s arms would be enough protection.

At the thought of protection, her mind jumped immediately to the sight of Detective Peters lounging in her kitchen doorway the day before, bulging arms crossed over the wide chest of the cutoff sweatshirt. Snug, faded denim and a gun tucked at the small of his back. Amber, knowing eyes that had changed when they’d looked at the child.

No cops or both the kid and the old woman are dead. No. She couldn’t call him. She’d been warned and she’d learned her lesson about trusting men. She was on her own, and the only way to be sure of Jilly’s safety was for her to go to work and run the experiment. The voice had said so.

The Makepeace samples were already prepared, taken from the rape kit Detective Sturgeon had delivered a week ago. She’d seen it in the papers, though she tried not to read anything about the lab cases she handled for the police. The headline had jolted her, Suspect Charged in Chinatown Child Rape, and she’d read several paragraphs of lurid details before realizing that the rapist’s DNA was sitting in her lab fridge.

Now she wondered.

Make sure the Makepeace DNA is a positive match. Or else. Did the voice have reason to believe it wouldn’t be a match? Did he know for sure that Makepeace hadn’t done it? Because he had raped the little girl himself? If so, that was even more reason to protect Jilly any way she could. Steph shivered in the warm air of a summer morning. She saw a yawning chasm opening up in front of her, a choice she’d never thought to make.

If the DNA matched, Jilly and Maureen were safe. If it didn’t…

The alternative was unthinkable. Therefore, there was only one solution.

The DNA would match. She’d make sure of it.

DOWN THE STREET from Boston General Hospital, Sturgeon’s voice cut across the usual din of the Chinatown Station. “Hi, honey. I’m home!”

Reid let his feet slide off the edge of the desk and thump to the floor while he glared at his partner. “Go suck on a peppermint, Sturgeon,” he said, but he didn’t really mean it.

Fifty-something, jowly and slightly pop-eyed, Reid’s partner bore an unfortunate resemblance to his animal namesake. He was also one of the sharpest men in Chinatown, and Reid had been honored when the veteran detective had partnered him seven years earlier.

Sturgeon pulled one of the candies from the breast pocket of his already-rumpled suit and held it out. At Peters’s headshake, he shrugged, unwrapped the pinwheel with a deft one-handed flick, and popped it in his mouth.

“You have a good day off?” he asked around the peppermint.

Reid shrugged. “It was fine. You?” He didn’t need to ask. If it’d been a lousy day, Sturgeon would be crunching the candy with a vengeance. The rate at which he devoured mints was a pretty good barometer of his mood.

“Took Jennie and the grandkids to that water park in New Hampshire. They’ve got this great new slide that shoots you down the hill almost in freefall.” Sturgeon’s eyes took on a faraway, happy look. “The kids loved it, and while we were standing in line this pretty blonde lost her bikini top on the way down.” He grinned. “Jen tried to act mad that I looked, but later that night she gave me this reenactment…” Sturgeon trailed off and Reid held up a hand.

“Enough! No more, please. I’m begging you!”

He imagined Sturgeon in swimming trunks, surrounded by his three grandkids and grinned. Tried not to imagine Sturgeon and his trim, zippy wife engaged in a game of “Oops, I lost my bikini top!” and failed.

Tried to imagine himself taking children and a wife to a water park and scowled.

Sturgeon chuckled and hitched himself onto the corner of Reid’s desk. “You wouldn’t be begging me if you had a wife of your own, you know.”

Reid rolled his eyes. “Don’t start.”

It was beyond him how Sturgeon had managed to stay married thirty years and counting. He was the guy who threw the curve on cop demographics—the one half of one percent that was happily married.

The noise level started to rise as the shift changed. Sturgeon didn’t bother to lower his voice and a passing rookie snickered when the detective said, “I mean, what’s the problem here? You’re healthy, employed, only mildly lazy, and although I don’t really see it, Jennie tells me that you’re H-O-T hot. Apparently, your ass is exquisite.”

There was a guffaw from three desks over. Reid glared, but couldn’t tell which of his so-called friends it had been.

“I don’t,” he said in measured tones, “want to talk about your wife’s opinion of my ass.” Though he was flattered in a sick sort of way. “I don’t want to talk about my sex life.” Or lack thereof. He hadn’t dated steadily since he’d accidentally yelled the wrong woman’s name in the throes and had been summarily dumped on his head. When he’d gone to find the witness whose name he had yelled, he’d arrived at her house only to learn she’d been put in the hospital by a man who’d been on his list of suspects to question the next day.

He hadn’t yet forgiven himself for that one. Nor had he quite escaped the feeling that there was something not quite right about her kid’s reappearance the day before.

“And…” He pushed the thought aside and pointed at his partner. “I most certainly don’t want to talk about your sex life.”

Unperturbed, Sturgeon unwrapped another mint and popped it home. He shrugged. “Then what do you want to talk about? You gonna tell me what’s bugging you, and why there’re enough coffee cups on the desk to prove you spent the night here on your first day off in over a month?”

Reid scowled at the telltale cups. “I was working.”

“On what? There’s nothing on our desks except some leftover paperwork and old coffee cups. Don’t tell me you came in to do paperwork—that’s really sick. And don’t tell me you like the coffee.”

“Stephanie Alberts’s kid was snatched yesterday.”

Sturgeon inhaled his mint. “Come again?”

“Remember Stephanie Alberts? Redheaded lab tech from last year’s trouble over at Boston General?”

Sturgeon nodded and sketched a set of curves in the air to indicate that he remembered her. She was hard to forget, and both of them had been burned by that case when her boyfriend—who was barely even a suspect—had beaten her into a coma.

There had been a police detail outside the house where she was attacked and it hadn’t made a damn bit of difference. She’d still ended up in Boston General, hooked to more machines than Reid had ever seen.

“Yeah, I remember her. The daughter was snatched? Why didn’t you call me?”

Reid shrugged. “It was over quick enough. Uniforms from Patriot District found the girl across the street in a park.”

“Then she just wandered off, right? No snatch.”

“Looks that way,” Reid answered.

“But you don’t think so.”

Sturgeon knew him well. Reid nodded. “It doesn’t feel right. The kid was gone for a couple of hours and the aunt swears she checked the park right away when she disappeared. Kid’s not even four, so she couldn’t have gotten very far in any case…”

“You ask Jilly?”

Reid was surprised that Sturgeon remembered the little girl’s name when he hadn’t. But then again, Sturgeon had kids of his own. It was probably in the daddy manual that you had to remember other kids’ names.

Too bad Reid’s old man hadn’t read that particular owner’s manual. Reid shook his head. “Kid doesn’t talk.”

Sturgeon frowned. “No?”

“The doctors say she’ll talk when she’s ready. The aunt made it sound like the parents’ marriage ended badly and slowed her down.” Reid wondered what messy meant. He hoped it hadn’t been abuse, though he’d seen enough of it over the years. “She was just starting to talk when Steph was hospitalized last year.”

“Steph?” Sturgeon wrinkled an eyebrow.

“Ms. Alberts. Anyway, questioning the kid was out, and Murphy over at Patriot didn’t think much of my suspicions.”

“Leanne Murphy is a good cop,” Sturgeon commented, and Reid heard the subtext—If she doesn’t think there’s anything suspicious, she’s probably right.

Reid shrugged. “So I took a walk around the park. Talked to a few neighbors.” And had gotten more information about Steph’s ex than he had about her daughter’s disappearance.

He’d checked. Luis Monterro was still in prison on an embezzlement conviction. But the itch between his shoulder blades hadn’t gone away.

“Any evidence of a snatch?” Sturgeon asked, “Or are you just looking for an excuse to sniff around a lady who’s already turned you down twice?”

“I don’t sniff.” The only reason Sturgeon got away with comments like that was that he was a good partner and friend. Otherwise, Reid would’ve shot him a long time ago. “And no, there’s no evidence she was kidnapped.”

“Then let’s get to work.” Still perched on Reid’s desk, Sturgeon reached over to his own and snagged a pile of torn notebook paper. He shuffled through. “Let’s see—we have cleanup work on those two Santos punks, mostly paperwork.” He tossed the scrap back on his desk. “A visit with D.A. Hedlund, and a lab run for the last batch of results.”

Reid snagged the last piece of paper from Sturgeon’s hand and tucked it into his own neat notebook. “I’ll take the lab, you deal with Hedlund.”

“Fine.” Sturgeon cut him a glance and grinned. “And say hi to her for me, will you?”

Reid scowled and straightened his tie.

THE WALLS were watching her. She was sure of it. She could feel him out there, somewhere, watching to make sure she didn’t make a mistake. Or was he watching the house instead? That was an even more terrifying thought. Though she’d insisted that Maureen keep Jilly inside for the day, he knew where they lived. How she walked to work.

He knew.

Stephanie glanced down at the blue latex-encased hands working their way through a plate of samples, and wondered whether they were still attached to her body. She hadn’t consciously told them to set up the experiment, but they seemed to be doing fine without her.

What was she going to do? She looked quickly around the lab for the zillionth time, half expecting to find a stranger standing over by the ultra-low temp freezer, watching her. But there was nobody there.

Molly was at her bench working on the last few experiments they’d need to finish before they announced the discovery of the Fenton’s Ataxia gene—a coup for their boss Genie Watson, whose best friend had died of the disease.

Terry was at the computer, his Adam’s apple bobbing now and again as he struggled with the last part of his dissertation. Though a laboratory genius, Terry was a disaster at putting things into words. Normally, Steph would’ve been at the computer with him, helping make the science into language. But today she was frozen at her bench, afraid that the watcher would interpret the least social contact as betrayal.

I’ll send her back in pieces.

She glanced out past the reception area, to where the lab leaders’ offices were dark. Genie and Nick were at a two-week genetics conference in Hawaii. Steph wished they were around. After everything they’d been through the year before, which had culminated with Nick subduing the murderous madman, Steph thought they would know what to do.

But then again, the lab leaders would probably insist on going to the police, and that wasn’t an option.

There was no way Steph was endangering her child or her aunt by making yet another catastrophic error in judgment. She was going this one alone. She had no choice.

Beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep.

She glanced at her lab timer, a sophisticated clock that allowed her to monitor up to ten different experiments at once. Today, there was only one display in action, and it was blinking 00:00.

The Makepeace film was ready for processing.

Glancing around one more time, still convinced that she was being watched, Steph collected the freezer cassette from the counter where she’d let it defrost. Be a match, she prayed, though she feared it wasn’t.

Normally, DNA gels didn’t need to be frozen down with their films, but since one of the samples in this experiment had been badly degraded seminal fluid from the little girl’s rape kit, Steph had needed to intensify the radioactive signal before she could see the results. Freezing the trapped radioactivity at minus eighty slowed the particles down long enough for them to bounce off a reflective screen and pass through the X-ray film a second time, effectively doubling the signal.

Ignoring the bite of cold metal through the thin latex gloves, Steph lugged the lightproof film cassette to the developer room and tried not to look back over her shoulder as she stepped into the hall.

Last year, Genie had been attacked inside the black, close room. She’d been badly beaten and left for dead. Though the space had been cleaned and repainted since, going through the revolving door and hearing it rubba-thump behind her still gave Steph the willies, particularly today. What if he came in while she was developing the film? She’d be trapped.

The light lock gaped at her like a screaming black mouth, and she stepped into it on unsteady legs and let it roll shut behind her. When nothing sprang out of the darkness to grab her, she processed the clammy film as quickly as possible and escaped back into the lighted hallway. She snatched the processed X-ray film from the delivery port before it was completely dry.

And cursed sharply. Hopelessly.

At the other end of the hall, one of the techs looked up at her oath. “Everything okay, Steph?”

“Sure, Jared. Everything’s fine,” she answered automatically as her brain raced.

Make sure the Makepeace DNA is a positive match.

“Everything’s fine,” she repeated to herself just in case saying it made it true.

But it wasn’t fine.

The Makepeace DNA wasn’t a match.

What the hell was she going to do now?

REID PAUSED in the elevator lobby of the thirteenth floor and buzzed to be let in. He remembered the first time he’d seen Boston General’s Genetic Research Building, and the big, hulking machines and the crisp, white-coated people that moved among them. It looked like something out of one of the science-fiction movies he’d watched as a kid when there wasn’t a cops-and-robbers flick playing.

But this wasn’t science fiction. It was real. And in the nine months the Chinatown station had been subcontracting its DNA forensics out to the Watson/Wellington lab, their conviction rate had risen ten percent.

Even D.A. Hedlund was grudgingly impressed.

The door swung open automatically as someone buzzed him in from within the maze of corridors that wound through the thirteenth floor. And as he turned toward the Watson side of the labyrinth, Reid remembered the day he and Sturgeon had been called out for an assault and attempted rape on this very floor.

Reid had been moved by the white-coated woman covered in blood and crumpled beneath a stainless-steel sink. He had been glad to see that Genie Watson was breathing and almost conscious when they carried her out of the tiny room on a stretcher. He had been annoyed at the number of feet that had tracked the blood evidence around the room, and he had been dreading the phone call he would have to make, canceling yet another date with Yvette. But then again, she’d been getting clingy. Making noises about commitment and—gulp—kids. He remembered thinking that maybe it wasn’t a bad thing he was canceling on her again. He’d pushed his way out of the developer room, turned toward a knot of murmuring white-coated technicians to begin the necessary round of questioning—and felt like he’d been shot point-blank in the chest while wearing a Kevlar vest.

She was so tiny the lab coat swallowed her up and didn’t even hint at her figure. Her curly red hair was so vivid that it had looked out of place against all that sterile white, and her wide, worried eyes had looked like wet jade.

Suddenly Yvette’s five-foot-ten seemed gargantuan, her expensive hair too blond and her clothing too tight and colorful. He hadn’t had the heart to tell Yvette about his waning desire for her, but she’d figured it out soon enough.

“Detective Peters?”

And there she was again. Dressed in a lab coat.

He looked around. Somehow, his feet had brought him to Stephanie’s bench. She was standing, staring up at him with a sheaf of printouts clutched to her chest. The pages crinkled as her fingers tightened on them. They were already badly wrinkled, which was unusual for the military precision of the Watson lab.

“Can I help you, Detective Peters? If not, I’m quite busy. I have work to catch up on from yesterday.” Though not quite rude, her tone certainly wasn’t friendly. Tension seemed to emanate from her in waves, and as he watched, her eyes slid to a shadowy corner of the lab.

A tickle traveled across his left shoulder blade.

Seeming convinced there was nothing in the shadows, she brushed past him. The starched white cotton of her lab coat feathered across the back of his hand, leaving a hot wave of arousal in its wake and reminding him that about a year ago he’d developed a thing for lab coats. For redheads wearing lab coats and nothing else…

Test results, he reminded himself, you’re here for test results. Then, when he took in the tense set of her shoulders and the nervous darting of her eyes, his reasons for being there suddenly seemed less important than they had a moment ago. The tingle centered on his spine.

Something was up.

“How’s your daughter?” he asked casually. “Any ill effects from her field trip yesterday?”

She flinched, as though fearing he knew something she didn’t, then shook her head. “Um, no. She seems fine. In fact, I think she’s come through this better than either Maureen or I. I’m still a basket case though, thinking of what might have happened, and if Maureen even lets her step foot outside the house today I’ll be surprised.”

There was a quick tremble in her voice, and she fiddled with a mechanical pencil as she spoke, clicking the lead and then tapping the point on the hard lab bench until the fragile graphite snapped. Reid wondered whether that was all there was to it. Leftover nerves? Or something more?