Secret Witness
Jessica Andersen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JESSICA ANDERSEN

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say hi!

For my critique partner, Liana Dalton, who always knows when to say, “You can do better!” and when to say, “Where’s the rest?”

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

“Jilly? Jilly, where are you?” Stephanie Alberts launched herself up the stairs toward her daughter’s bedroom. The starched white lab coat tangled around her calves. The nerves that had sizzled to life when Maureen had called her home from work clutched at her heart.

Not this, her mind begged. Please not this.

“Are you in here, baby?” she called into the frilly little room, trying to keep it light in case Jilly was only hiding. “Look! Mommy’s home early. Don’t you want to come out and play?”

There were no furtive, laughing eyes peering out from beneath the bed. No thumping of tiny feet running across the thick braided rug.

The little room was full of things—stuffed animals and model horses and the ruffled child-sized bed that Steph and Luis had picked out before Jilly was born. But there were no miniature red sneakers sticking out from beneath the frothy pink curtains. No stifled giggles.

“Jilly? Jilly, answer me or you’re going to be in big trouble!” The sick feeling in Steph’s stomach was getting worse by the minute. Where was her baby?

She felt a touch on her shoulder and whirled, hoping against hope—but it was only her aunt Maureen.

“She’s not in the house. I told you, I looked everywhere. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” The older woman’s gray eyes filled. Her soft cheeks trembled. Even so many years ago, when she’d told the eight-year-old Steph that her parents were dead, Maureen hadn’t looked this devastated.

The comparison was terrifying. Steph pushed it aside. “She has to be somewhere! If she’s not in the yard, then she’s in the house.” Her voice rose. She couldn’t help it. “She has to be here! Jilly? Jilly, you come out here right this minute!”

The doorbell rang and Steph glanced out the window. A blue-and-white cruiser was parked on the cobblestones outside the narrow house, looking out of place amidst carefully tended homes whose exteriors had barely changed since Paul Revere’s ride.

“The police are here,” she said on a note of rising hysteria as the bell rang again. “Why are they here? Oh God, what if—?”

Maureen tugged her into the hall, down the stairs, and Steph could feel the other woman’s hand shaking, could hear the quiver in her voice when she said, “I called them right after I called you. I swear to you, Stephanie, that I didn’t take my eyes off Jilly for more than a moment. I think…”

Maureen couldn’t finish.

Steph tried to force words between her numb lips, but they stuck as her aunt opened the door to reveal a pair of uniformed officers standing shoulder to shoulder. The bottom dropped out of her world as reality kicked in.

Jilly was gone.

WHEN HIS cell phone burbled a tinny version of Beethoven’s Fifth, Reid balanced the weights on his chest, glared at the phone and lost count of his repetitions.

“Don’t answer it,” he told himself firmly. It was his first day off in over a month, for heaven’s sake, and he’d planned on doing some serious relaxing.

He deserved it. The Solomon brothers were behind bars awaiting arraignment, and even District Attorney Hedlund had grudgingly agreed that Reid and his partner had built a solid case against the two punks. The owners of the robbed convenience stores had all agreed to testify, and Chinatown was safer by another two criminals. It was a done deal. Da-da-da-DUM. The phone seemed to ring louder the longer he ignored it. He started to get that itchy feeling between his shoulder blades that he usually got just before a takedown went south. Or maybe it was just sweat running down his back and he was a paranoid cop who was always ready to assume the worst. Da-Da-Da-DUM. “Damn it.” He banged the free weights back onto their rack and snatched up the phone. “Peters.”

There was no answer. In the background, he could hear the squawk of a radio and loud, urgent voices.

Reid snapped, “Sturgeon, is that you? What’re you doing at the station? This is our first day off in forever, and—”

“Detective Peters?” The soft, tearful female voice was most definitely not that of Reid’s partner, but it sounded familiar. His heart gained a beat and he angled the phone away from his ear for a belated glance at the display.

“Yes, this is Peters.” His libido gave a big BA-BOOM when he saw the number and the name, but then the radio squealed again in the background and the itch intensified. “Miss Alberts? Stephanie? What’s wrong?”

Loud silence again, then she gulped, clearly fighting a sob. “I’m sorry to bother you on your day off, but you gave me your card…” He was drawing breath to tell her it was fine and please get to the point when she hiccupped and said, “My daughter’s gone.”

Reid’s stomach sank like a stone. He’d never met Stephanie’s daughter, but his mind quickly supplied the image of another child, a broken body lying curled around a rag doll that was no more lifeless than the little girl. God, he hated it when there were kids involved.

“I’ll be right there.”

When he pulled up in front of Stephanie Alberts’s house a few minutes later, Reid thought that the collection of cruisers and uniforms outside the lovely historic home seemed an abomination. Nothing bad should happen in a neighborhood where flags streamed from every front door and the Freedom Trail was a red stripe down the middle of the brick sidewalk on either side of the cobblestone road. Tasteful brass plaques gleamed beside doorways, engraved with the names of builders and dates and important moments in the American Revolution.

This was Patriot District. Nothing bad should happen in Patriot. It was a national landmark, for Chrissakes.

“I’m sorry, sir. You can’t go up there.” A uniform reached out to detain Reid and he yanked out his badge.

“Peters. Chinatown. And don’t get in my way,” he snarled.

Though they both knew he had zero jurisdiction, the rookie nodded him through.

Smart kid.

Peters saw Stephanie’s aunt Maureen first. She grabbed him and ushered him to the back of the narrow house. He heard movement upstairs, and knew the Patriot District cops were doing their thing. The house felt like terror and tears, an all-too-familiar litany in Reid’s world.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” There were stifled sobs in Maureen’s eyes and voice, and the hand on his arm trembled. The two of them had met across Stephanie’s hospital bed a year ago, and the older woman looked no less frantic now than she had when her niece had been brought to the hospital, badly beaten by a man Reid should’ve gotten to first. “I only took my eyes off Jilly for a moment. Not even that. More like a split second, and she was gone.”

She ushered him to the back of the house, where Stephanie was sitting with pictures of a dark-haired child heaped in front of her on the kitchen table. In the most recent of the photos, the girl looked about three or four years old.

“We only need a couple,” Officer Murphy from Patriot said, and the woman at the table nodded jerkily. The cut-glass light above the table shone down on her, picking out the russet highlights in her curly hair and placing her lowered face in soft shadow.

Not for the first time, Stephanie Alberts reminded Reid of the Renaissance paintings down at the Museum of Fine Art—all porcelain skin and delicate curves. He’d seen paintings like that when he was a boy, before the old man had found out about the art class and hit the roof.

Since then, there had been no time for art appreciation, and very little time for Reid to think of Stephanie Alberts.

But he had anyway.

“Of course. Silly of me.” She stirred the photographs with her index finger.

“Steph? Detective Peters is here.” Maureen tugged Reid into the room. Stephanie’s head snapped up. Her eyes immediately filled with relief and more tears and Reid felt a rush of uncharacteristic emotion.

Especially uncharacteristic for a cop who’d been repeatedly turned down by the woman in question.

He wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her everything would be okay. He wanted to offer her his shoulder to cry on, and stroke her back until she was done. He wanted to hold her hand the way he’d done those four long days it had taken her to wake up in the hospital.

But he didn’t. Instead, he looked away from the woman who’d told him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to be involved with him, turned to Officer Murphy and said, “I know I don’t belong here, but it’s my day off. Cut me some slack and let me help. I’m a family friend.”

Leanne Murphy’s canny eyes cut from Peters to Stephanie and back again before she nodded. “We can use all the help we can get.”

STEPH WASN’T SURE why it had seemed so imperative that she call Detective Peters. She barely knew the man. They’d met at her work, when the Watson lab at Boston General’s Genetic Research Building had been the scene of several crimes.

Steph’s boss, Dr. Genie Watson, had been brutally attacked in the lab darkroom. At first, it had seemed a random—though horrific—event, but a string of “accidents” and a car bombing had soon followed. Genie had been the target of a madman intent on protecting an inheritance he wasn’t genetically heir to.

It had been during the investigation that Steph met Detective Peters. Even then, she’d been uncomfortable around the man. She’d just begun an intense relationship with a pharmaceutical rep named Roger, and it seemed disloyal for her to notice Peters’s piercing eyes, broad shoulders and long, swinging strides. So she’d resisted the attraction and focused on Roger—and she’d nearly paid with her life when it turned out that her new boyfriend was using her to gain access to the lab.

One dark night, Roger had taken Steph’s keycard, her self-respect, and nearly her life. Then he’d gone after his real target—Genie Watson.

Genie had survived, thanks to the protection—and love—of Dr. Nick Wellington, her former adversary. Now her husband. Steph had survived, too, though she’d been in the hospital for several weeks recovering from the beating.

Peters had been there, she remembered, sitting by her bedside, his eyes hooded with dark thoughts. Part of her had wanted to reach out to him, but she’d forced herself to turn away. Later, she’d refused his calls. He was a reminder of a time she’d rather forget. A near-fatal misjudgment that had proven again that she had abysmal taste in men and was better off alone.

She wasn’t even sure why she’d kept his card, but it had leapt into her hand after the first wave of police questioning had finished and the officers had begun the search. When he’d arrived, for a moment, she’d felt as though everything was going to be okay. He’d see to it, though he didn’t look quite like the Detective Peters she remembered.

She was used to seeing him in a suit and tie. Even when he’d visited her in the hospital, he’d been wearing work clothes, with his tie loosened and his top button undone. But her call had interrupted his day off, and Stephanie realized something she’d only suspected before… Detective Reid Peters, handsome enough in a suit and tie, was downright devastating in casuals.

The jeans and cutoff sweatshirt didn’t detract from the commanding impact of his wide shoulders or the military-straight posture that stretched him to a full six-three. The soft shirt clung to bulges and ridges that the suits had covered, and Steph wondered how she could have forgotten the striking contrast between his mid-brown crew cut and the light hazel, almost gold of his eyes.

Then she wondered how she could be thinking of such things when her daughter was missing.

Peters asked Officer Murphy, “How long has the girl been gone?”

Having noticed the female gleam that had entered Murphy’s eye when Reid arrived, and hating herself for caring, Stephanie snapped, “Almost two hours. Maureen called me at two-ten and it’s close to four now.” The reality of it closed in and all thoughts of the handsome detective fled when Steph stared down at the photographs spread across her kitchen table. It was four. Jilly should be sitting there eating crackers and peanut butter. “She missed her snack.”

Tears threatened again, and she cursed herself for all of it. Faintly, she heard Maureen sobbing in the living room and her head throbbed where the hairline crack had long since knit. She wished that once, just once, she had someone other than Aunt Maureen to lean on.

Sometimes they were barely enough to prop each other up.

There was a sudden commotion at the front of the house. Feet pounded on the upstairs floorboards and excited voices shouted outside. Officer Murphy grabbed the muted radio at her belt, turned up the volume, and barked a question. Steph couldn’t understand the response, but she knew what the sudden tension in the room must mean.

For better or worse, they’d found Jilly.

Her stomach heaved and she tasted bile as a parade of macabre images flashed through her mind, courtesy of every forensics program she’d ever watched on TV. She tried to make her legs carry her outside. Tried to ask the question, but was afraid to because until someone said otherwise, she could believe that Jilly was okay. She had to be okay. Steph didn’t think she could bear it if anything happened to Jilly. The little girl was her lifeline. Her life. A perfect little person who’d been created by an imperfect union.

Steph felt Peters behind her, and drew an ounce of strength from his solid presence, which was more familiar and welcome than it should have been. He asked the question while her stomach tied itself up in knots.

“Is the girl okay?”

Steph might have found it odd that Peters hadn’t said Jilly’s name once since he’d arrived, but that thought disappeared the instant Officer Murphy smiled. “They found her across the street in that little park. She’s okay.”

Thank God! was Steph’s only thought as her feet carried her out the door to her daughter.

A SCANT HOUR later the Patriot cops were ready to pack it up and call it a day, but Reid wasn’t so sure.

“Something about this just doesn’t feel right,” he insisted. “You’re telling me that a three-and-a-half-year-old girl wanders across the street, down a half mile of paths, and nobody sees her? Then two hours later, a jogger tells Officer Dunphy he saw a little girl over by the duck pond, and boom! There she is? Where was she the rest of the time? And where’s the jogger?”

“We have his name and number,” Officer Murphy replied, irritated. “And it’s not unheard of for a young child to follow, say, a puppy and end up lost. Jilly is home, and the paramedics said there’s absolutely no evidence of anything being…done to her. We’re canvassing the neighborhood to see if anyone saw something suspicious, and beyond that it’s a closed case. Why don’t you go…console Miss Alberts rather than trying to make my job harder than it has to be?”

Reid glared, but couldn’t completely fault Murphy. She had a point, there was zero evidence that Stephanie’s daughter had been the victim of anything more than a lapse in babysitting on her great-aunt’s part. And she was also right that he was there strictly as Stephanie’s friend, not as a cop.

Speaking of which…he should probably be going. Crisis over. Time to get on with his day off.

He scratched at the low-grade itch between his shoulder blades and nodded curtly when Murphy excused herself. He glanced into the living room, feeling as though his eyes were being forced there by a magnetic pull. Mother and daughter were wrapped around each other on the couch, and it tugged at his heart to see Steph’s soft red curls clutched in the little girl’s fist. The kid was awake and seemed content to snuggle in her mother’s lap.

Reid couldn’t blame her. And boy, did he need to get out of here.

He didn’t do the kid thing. He did the casual thing.

But the bad feeling he just couldn’t shake compelled him to ask Stephanie, “Are you sure she won’t answer a few simple questions, even if you ask them?” It seemed to him that three and a half was plenty old enough for some gentle interrogation, even if Officer Don’t-Make-My-Day-Longer-You-Schmuck Murphy thought there was no reason for it.

But Stephanie shook her head. “Jilly’s a little shy. She doesn’t talk much. We’re working on it.” She dropped a kiss on her daughter’s dark hair, and Reid found himself wondering about the little girl’s father.

Again, he thought of paintings. He hadn’t been to the MFA in fifteen years and hadn’t painted in longer, but Stephanie Alberts made him think of art. So did her daughter. While Stephanie could have been the model for Botticelli’s misty, ethereal Birth of Venus—before Venus got fat—her daughter had stepped straight out of the Spanish works of the next century. She was a study in sharp angles and warm, dark eyes.

“What about her father?” He hadn’t meant to ask, but once the question was out there, Reid consoled himself with the thought that it was a logical next step. More often than not, kids were snatched by family members.

“Luis? What about him?”

“Would he take her?”

Stephanie clutched her daughter until the child squirmed a protest. “She wasn’t taken. She wasn’t. She just wandered off.” But Reid could see the doubts in her big blue-green eyes. Or were those his doubts? “And besides, Luis is…Luis couldn’t have taken her.”

“Detective? The others are leaving now.” At Maureen’s gesture, Reid joined her at the front door. They bade goodbye to the last of the Patriot District cops.

When he was alone with the older woman, Reid said, “Stephanie’s daughter doesn’t talk at all?”

Though they hadn’t kept in touch, he and Maureen had become friends of a sort while they had both watched over Stephanie’s bed at the hospital. The older woman nodded. “That’s right. We keep hoping she’ll start speaking again, but…” She shrugged. “Not yet.”

Reid glanced back toward the living room. “It would help if she could tell us what happened today.”

Maureen’s gray eyes sharpened. “You don’t think she just wandered?”

He shrugged. “There’s nothing to say any different. I just like to be thorough, that’s all.” Not wanting to dwell on his unfounded suspicions, Reid changed the subject. “Have you taken her to any specialists? Do you know why she’s…quiet?”

He didn’t really want to know about the kid, he assured himself. He didn’t do kids. He was just gathering all the information he could. Then he’d be on his way home.

“Her father left when she was about a year old,” Maureen supplied after a quick glance into the other room. “It was…messy. Jilly had just begun talking, but shut down after that. The doctors said not to worry, she’d sing when she was ready. She’d just started to come out of her shell last fall…”

She trailed off and Reid nodded. “And then Steph was attacked.”

“Yes. We didn’t tell Jilly what had happened, of course, but children know things. She’s been extremely shy ever since. Steph has been talking recently about more therapy, but Jilly hated it so much before that we’re afraid of making things worse.” Maureen shrugged. “And then this…? I don’t know what happens now.”

Reid touched Maureen’s shoulder. “She’s home. That’s what matters, right? Leave the rest of it to the police—it’s our job.”

Like it had been their job to arrest small-time drug dealer Alfonse Martinez six months ago, never dreaming that the ensuing firefight would take the life of a three-year-old girl who wasn’t supposed to be in the house in the first place. A little girl who looked an awful lot like Stephanie’s daughter.

He really needed to get out of here.

Reid touched Maureen’s shoulder again, then took himself back into the living room to say goodbye, standing far away from the pretty, domestic scene on the couch. If his own father hadn’t been enough to convince Reid that cops have no business around small children, the memory of that little girl curled around a blood-soaked rag doll had driven the point home.

There was no way to mix a badge with family.

And since Stephanie was a mother and Reid was a cop…well, he was just lucky she’d turned him down last year when he’d let lust overrun his good sense and asked her out. Twice.

Lucky. Yeah, that was it.

She lifted her head from her daughter’s hair and gave him a watery smile. The kid had dropped off to sleep with one thumb in her mouth and her other hand clutching her mother’s hair. Steph stood, balancing the little girl easily on one hip. “Follow me up? I want to put her down for a nap, then maybe you’ll join me in a cup of coffee.”

Reid felt a tightness in his chest, a strange tug of war. Then he took a step away and held up an impersonal hand. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m going to take off. Everything seems okay here.”

“Oh.” The warmth in her jade-green eyes faded a little, the corners of her wide, generous mouth turned down at the edges, and the misty radiance around her dimmed a bit. “I’m sorry, I thought… never mind.” Her mouth turned up again and she held out her free hand to him. “Then thank you so much for all your help. I’m sorry to have interrupted your day off.”

He took her hand and felt as though he ought to kiss it. Suckle her fingers one by one.

Hit himself over the head with a brick until sanity returned.

He gave the dainty hand a brisk shake instead. “That’s my job, Miss Alberts. I’m just glad your daughter is back safe and sound. I…I guess I’ll see you around.” And he escaped out onto the cobbled street with barely a goodbye for Maureen.

Once he was outside and felt that he could fill his lungs for the first time in hours, Reid sucked in a deep breath and took a casual look around the neighborhood while he waited for his heartbeat to return to normal.

He thought about the free weights back at his place near the Chinatown station house. Thought about the frozen pizza he’d planned for his dinner, and about the Red Sox game that was scheduled to start in an hour. Thought about She Devil, the enormously pregnant stray cat that had adopted him a few weeks ago and just that morning had started building a nest in his underwear drawer.

He thought about his day off.

And headed for the park where Jilly Alberts had been found.

“WELL, I GUESS I read that wrong,” Steph murmured to her sleeping daughter as she climbed the stairs, then put Detective Peters and his incredible…intellect out of her mind. Mostly. Tonight was for Jilly, not for sexy detectives in cutoff sweatshirts, or for a moment of forgetting that she’d sworn off men for good.

She paused in the doorway, thinking of how panicked she’d been standing in her daughter’s bedroom just hours ago. She could hardly believe that the horror had ended in hours rather than the days that seemed to have elapsed between Aunt Maureen’s call to the genetics lab and the police finding Jilly unharmed in the park.

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?

He didn’t have much experience with kids, but he’d heard the fierceness in Sturgeon’s voice once or twice when one of the guppies had been threatened in very minor ways. Stephanie had been so determinedly tough the day before he supposed she might be suffering the backlash.

But if she looked over into the darkness next to that big machine one more time…

“Are you okay?” he asked, jerking his head at the corner. “You seem nervous.”

She shook her head in quick denial. “No—not nervous. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

He nodded slowly, not believing her for a second but still not sure whether her daughter’s disappearance had freaked her out or there was something else. “Okay, then.” He paused. Clearly today wasn’t a good day to ask her out for lunch. Then again, Reid thought, never would be a better time to ask her out—she had a kid, and Sturgeon’s success aside, no kid needed a cop around.

So he shrugged, pushed aside the image of her wearing a lab coat, a pair of red high heels and nothing else, and said, “I need to pick up the latest DNA results for Sturgeon’s and my cases. That’d be Makepeace, Garcia and Roberts.” He knew it was careless of them to name their DNAs rather than numbering them so the results were blinded for the researchers, but really, what interest did a lab tech have in messing with police work?

She shook her head and clutched the papers tighter to her chest. “They’re not ready yet.”

That was not the answer he’d been looking for. “Not ready? What do you mean, not ready?” They needed those results for court dates, damn it. “Sturgeon got a message on his voice mail that they’d be finished this morning. Something go wrong?”

The itch intensified.

Stephanie shook her head. “You can have Garcia and Roberts, they’re all set.” She gestured at a pair of folders on her desk labeled with the names. “But the other isn’t finished yet.”

An empty folder labeled Makepeace lay open on the desk. “What happened to it? Is there something wrong with the sample?” Please don’t let anything be wrong with the sample, he thought. D.A. Hedlund would have a cow and shifty, scummy Makepeace would walk on the one rape they’d managed to pin on him, out of a series of six.

Though the links between the ex-con handyman and little Mae Wong’s rape were largely circumstantial, they’d been enough to arrest him and warrant the DNA sample. All they needed to get a conviction was a DNA match…but they needed that match. The case was a no-go without it.

“Sorry,” she said, not looking sorry at all. “Technical difficulties. There was a problem with the thermocycling temperature, so the DNA didn’t amplify correctly and I couldn’t finish the test. I’ll rerun the experiment today and have the results later in the week, okay?”

No, damn it. It wasn’t okay. Reid didn’t like the look in her eye, and he didn’t like that the test wasn’t done.

“Steph?” Another tech’s voice interrupted, “Genie’s on the phone for you. She wants to talk about the last batch of sequencing.”

Steph glanced from the lab phone and back to Reid, scowling as though she wished he would disappear. When he didn’t, she made an irritated noise and stalked over to talk to her boss.

Reid couldn’t have asked for better timing. He’d have to thank Dr. Watson the next time he saw her…once he asked her what the hell was going on in her lab. After making sure Steph was busy on the phone and had her back to him, he shuffled through the two finished folders she’d given him. The proper paperwork was there—along with the computer printout of the scanned film results and the calculated probabilities for and against DNA matches. They were both matches, thank God. Reid only hoped they went three for three.

He looked at the Makepeace folder again. It was still empty. No paperwork, no printout.

What had she been crumpling against her lab coat? Makepeace’s results?

Reid shifted a few papers on her desk and uncovered an X-ray film of the type Genie Watson had once tried to explain to him. One side was labeled Makepeace, the other side Rape Kit Sample, along with a bunch of other stuff, labeled Ladder and CEPH and a few he couldn’t even read.

“Couldn’t finish the experiment, eh?” Reid murmured as he slid the film onto a flat lightbox and clicked it on the way Genie had shown him. The gray plastic sprang to life and he saw two rows of dark lines marching down the length of the film like grocery-store bar codes.

We test thirteen highly variable sites within the human genome, he remembered Genie explaining the DNA tests that could free or condemn a criminal with nothing more than a shadow of a bloodstain. Through chance, it’s possible that two people share the same size marker on one or both of their chromosomes. But the likelihood of two people—unless they’re identical twins—being the same at every one of those thirteen markers is so low as to be non-existent. She had paused, then grinned. “Unless you were on the O.J. jury—in which case that point-zero-nine-percent of a chance is enough to cast doubt.”

Reid remembered chuckling at the joke. But he wasn’t chuckling now. Even to his untrained eye, it was clear that the Makepeace side and the rape kit side of the film didn’t even come close to matching.

“Damn it.” He and Sturgeon had been so sure James Makepeace had abducted little Mae Wong, raped her and left her for dead in a Dumpster down by the Science Museum. She’d lived—barely—but she would never be the same laughing, happy child Reid had seen in the pictures pressed on him by Mrs. Wong. The detectives had been fiercely glad to pin the crime on Makepeace, a slimy, basement-dwelling handyman who had access to the Wong home, priors for assault and sexual misconduct, and no alibi.

This had been the first of the rapes with DNA left behind, and the first involving a child. Though the break in pattern had bothered Reid, there were enough similarities that he and Sturgeon had hoped to nail down the one case and build up the others. They had done their jobs and come up with Makepeace.

Though he’d howled his innocence to anyone who’d listen, the wriggly piece of excrement had been held on Reid and Sturgeon’s say-so—and lack of bail money—pending the DNA results and a trial.

They’d been so sure of him. Even the D.A. liked the Wong case. But it wasn’t Makepeace’s genetic material that had been taken from the little girl’s torn body. He hadn’t done it. Reid dropped the film back on Stephanie’s desk and swore viciously, helplessly, knowing that it wasn’t enough.

They didn’t have their man.

“Sorry about that,” Steph said, returning to her bench. “The day Nick and Genie left for a conference in Hawaii, we had a breakthrough in the Fenton’s Ataxia project. We convinced her not to fly home, but…” She trailed off when she glanced at his face. Shrugged. “But you’re not interested in that, are you? You’re here for your results.” She tapped the two files. “Here they are. I’ll have the Makepeace results for you by the end of the week. Sorry for the delay.” Her voice didn’t tremble as she lied straight to his face.

Reid felt his fist clench and wanted to hit something. This was a child they were talking about.

“No problem,” he lied right back. “I’ll catch you later in the week. Thanks for these.” He lifted the finished folders in farewell and retraced his steps through the thirteenth floor to the elevator. He gritted his teeth and stabbed the elevator call button.

He didn’t know what was going on, but he was sure as hell going to find out. And if Stephanie Alberts was screwing with his evidence, she’d be sorry.

Very, very sorry.

Chapter Three

Steph was alone in the lab that night, just shutting down the last of the big machines, when the phone rang. The sound shattered the humming silence like a scream.

“Damn!” She put a hand to her thumping heart and stared at the instrument as it rang a second time. She imagined a dead-sounding whisper, a snarl of accusation because she’d talked to a cop. A chuckle as he told her Jilly was gone.

The phone rang again. “It’s not him,” she told herself. “Just pick it up.”

But she couldn’t. Her feet were frozen in place, and she felt a sudden surge of the nausea that had been building ever since she’d looked into Detective Peters’s gorgeous golden-brown eyes and lied her ass off.

She’d lied to a cop about an investigation. She was going to hell—or jail, whichever came first.

If the voice didn’t get her before then.

The phone rang a third, fourth and fifth time as she stared at it. Then it stopped. The answering machine did not click on.

He’d hung up.

Steph felt a massive shudder crawl down her back and she fled through the lab, slapping at switches and grabbing her purse almost as an afterthought. She was halfway to the elevator when she remembered.

I know how you walk to work, bitch.

The phone began to ring again. She shoved at the door to the elevator lobby and caromed into the little space, frantic to be away from the ringing phone and the voice in her head. Frantic to get to her daughter. She punched her security code into the door lock with trembling fingers and turned to jab at the elevator call button.

The car was already moving up toward the thirteenth floor.

He’s coming, she thought hysterically, he knows I didn’t tell Detective Peters that the Makepeace DNA was a match. He’s coming.

She pressed the other call button again and again, as though she could hurry the second elevator by doing so.

Eight…nine…ten…

He’s almost here!

Steph threw herself back at the security door and tried to key in the override code that would let her back in the lab after she’d punched in All Clear for the Night.

Her mind blanked. “What is it?” She fumbled at the little round numbers. “Oh-four-four-six-nine, right?” The door didn’t click. The light flickered red, warning her that another wrong code would freeze the lock for the night. “Come on, you bastard,” she snarled. “I bought you. I programmed you. Let me in!” She miskeyed again.

The lock buzzed angrily and the red light shone solid. She wasn’t getting in before morning.

Eleven…twelve…

Steph suddenly remembered the little gray canister in her purse—required equipment for any woman working in or near Chinatown. She scrambled for it. Grabbed it.

Thirteen…ding!

Screaming at the top of her lungs as her two-week self-defense class had taught her, Steph leaped for the widening crack in the elevator doors and aimed the nozzle directly at her attacker’s face with one hand while she swung her purse with the other.

And at the last moment saw the surprise in his familiar golden-brown eyes.

WHILE HIS MIND was still grappling with the sight of Stephanie Alberts attacking him with pepper spray in one hand and a leather purse in the other, Reid automatically chopped the canister out of her hand and tossed it toward a corner of the elevator, noting as he did so that it hadn’t fired because she’d failed to flip the safety. Once she was unarm—

Bonk! The elevator tilted when something impossibly heavy thumped him upside the head, and Stephanie’s face—now looking more horrified than afraid, with her mouth making a big round O of surprise, loomed in front of him.

“Detective Peters!”

Afraid she might belt him with her purse again, Reid grabbed her wrist and stepped back, directly on top of the pepper spray. The metal canister shot out from underneath him and he flailed backward with one hand while the other pulled Stephanie with him on the way down.

They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, half in and half out of the elevator door, which dinged impatiently when it tried to shut itself on his kidneys. Stephanie struggled to right herself, nearly unmanning him with a pointy kneecap. Reid grabbed her upper arms and tangled his legs with hers in self-defense before barking, “Quit it!” when she kept squirming. “You’re okay!”

What the hell was going on?

He shook her again, hoping to get through and she stilled. Froze. Seemed to realize where they were and how. Reid could feel her soft round breasts pressed against his chest, and he could swear he could feel her heart start to pound as the possibilities dawned on her.

Or maybe that was his heart, tempered only by the cop in him that remembered she’d been geared for attack when the elevator doors had opened. Though he could neither see nor sense immediate danger, he could feel it thrum through her body and into his.

Or maybe that was something else. Something far more dangerous. Far more insidious.

“It’s okay,” he repeated as the warmth spread and he felt her body soften as his did the opposite. He lowered his voice, “I’m here, Stephanie. You’re safe.”

It was the wrong thing to say, he could feel the change in her, though he couldn’t have explained it. She tensed, and he hoped she hadn’t just realized that he kept his gun in a shoulder holster, not his pocket. When she pushed herself off him and stood, the imprint of her soft curves hummed along his nerve endings like fire.

“I’m sorry, Detective Peters. I…” He could see the shields slam back down, could see her tuck her problems back into that place he couldn’t reach and resisted the urge to bare his teeth. “I’m sorry. Being up here alone gives me the creeps sometimes, especially after what happened last year.”

And by God, she wasn’t a half-bad liar. She brushed at her sleeves and patted her riotous red hair as though proper grooming would prove that everything was just fine.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Reid stood and resisted the urge to grab her shoulders. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to kiss her or shake her. Or both.

When he glanced pointedly at the pepper spray, she shrugged. “I don’t usually work this late, and it was so deserted, and the phone kept ringing—” She broke off. “Anyway, I’m very sorry I tried to spray you. Lucky for both of us it didn’t work. Although…” She frowned. “If you’d been anyone else I’d have been in trouble.”

He bent and picked up the offending canister. “You forgot to flip the safety off.” He demonstrated. “See?” Then he tossed it back to her, not caring to ask whether she had a permit. He’d rather she have it than not, given the neighborhood they both worked in.

Now that there was no longer a body obstructing their path, the elevator doors whooshed shut. Irritated with both of them—and particularly with the fact that he could practically taste her on his lips though they’d never kissed, Reid jabbed the button marked Lobby before he turned on her. “What’s going on, Stephanie? What’s wrong? You can tell me. I’m your friend.”

He meant it. He wanted to help. He hadn’t even told Sturgeon about the Makepeace DNA. He’d said only that it was delayed.

Surprisingly, she snorted. “Yeah, and I have great taste when it comes to choosing guys to place my trust in.” She leaned back in the elevator car and crossed her arms. “Why are you here, Detective Peters? Checking on your test results again? I told you I’d have them in a few days.”

Reid thought of her embezzling ex-husband Luis. He thought of the ex-boyfriend who’d used her to gain access to the Watson lab and almost killed her when she was no longer useful. How could he possibly say, but I’m different?

And was he really so different? He carried a gun. He knew how to disappear in Chinatown and how to find information down by Boston Harbor. He dreamed of blood and of a little girl’s hollow, dead eyes, and when he woke all he wanted to do was curse and hit something like his old man used to do.

She was right. She shouldn’t trust him. He wasn’t any different than the others. But he still had a job to do.

The doors slid open. It was the end of the line.

She was out in a flash, but he caught her by the arm and tried not to think he’d touched more soft female flesh in the previous two minutes than in the prior year.

He steered her toward the big revolving doors at the front of the building, though she’d been headed for the back exit. “I thought I’d walk you home.” He could make sure she made it safely. Make sure Maureen and the kid were okay.

Make that damn itch go away.

She balked. “You needn’t bother, Detective Peters. I’ve been getting to and from work for several years now. I know the way.”

“How about I come over for coffee then?”

“No.” She tried edging around him toward the back exit again, but he held firm and sighed. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

“We could have coffee down at the station, but I’m sure yours is much better. What do you say?”

As he had long suspected, Stephanie Alberts was anything but stupid. “A threat, Detective? On what basis?”

He touched a hand to the tender spot on his cheekbone. What the hell did she carry in that purse, anyway? “Assaulting a detective, for one.” Seeing she was not inclined toward sympathy, he finally said, “And tampering with evidence, Stephanie.” Her face drained of color and she swayed. For a quick moment he thought she might faint.

But she didn’t. She narrowed her eyes. “And just what do you mean by that?”

So she was going to tough it out. “I saw the Makepeace film on your desk. The markers didn’t line up. The DNA isn’t a match. You’re deliberately obstructing my investigation and I want to know why.”

“Oh, and you’re an expert at reading DNA fingerprints now, are you?”

Truth or bluff? Reid wasn’t sure he could tell any more. He shook his head. “Of course not, but Dr. Watson explained them to me once and they seemed pretty easy. Either the bars line up or they don’t.”

Her lovely jade eyes narrowed even further. “Ever hear of an artifact, Doctor Peters?”

He shook his head. “Not in the context we’re talking about, no.”

“Well, genius, it just so happens that if the thermocycler temperature is wrong when the experiment is run, you can get nonspecific interactions called artifacts. They’ll show up when you develop the film, but not before. They’re not real results. Just garbage.”

“Oh, come on,” he fired back. “That sounds…”

Plausible. Hell.

He frowned. “Then you mean…?”

She nodded, and a little bit of smugness crept into her expression, pushing the other emotions aside. “That film you oh-so-cleverly snitched off my desk didn’t mean a thing. Like I told you before, you’ll have to wait until the end of the week for the test results.”

Truth or lie?

“Now… You want to tell me why you thought it necessary to scrounge around my desk? How would you like it if I went through that notebook of yours?”

He’d be damned if he’d apologize for doing his job. But he felt the anger recede a bit and wondered whether she might not be telling the truth after all.

He shrugged. “I’d probably have—” kittens. Which reminded him. “Oh, hell. She Devil.”

The little calico cat had been asleep in his underwear drawer late last night when he’d stopped by the house to change his clothes before heading to the station. She looked like she’d swallowed a football and it had gotten stuck. Sideways.

That had been—he glanced at his watch—more than twenty hours earlier. “I beg your pardon?” Stephanie Alberts drew herself up to her full, imposing height of about five-foot-nothing and tried to look down her nose at him. “What did you call me?”

If someone had asked him a month ago which came first, the job or a mangy stray cat, Reid would’ve laughed that it was even a question. Now he wavered. Stephanie kept insisting there was nothing wrong, and yet… He shook his head. “Not you. There’s someone waiting for me at home and I’m late. Since you’re okay, I think I’ll go…” He gestured toward the revolving door and her eyes narrowed.

“I thought you wanted coffee.”

Boiling water. Towels. Sharp, sterilized knife. His mind came up with a reasonable-sounding list of items. But what if something went wrong?

Growing up, he hadn’t been allowed a pet. Hadn’t even known he liked animals until the little scrap of orange and black and white fur had appeared on his fire escape in a blinding rainstorm and howled until he let it in. She—and the size of the cat’s stomach left no doubt that it was a she—had eaten an entire can of albacore tuna, scratched his hand and barfed on the ugly Oriental rug he’d inherited from the old man.

Reid was hooked.

He’d taken her to the vet, bought a bagful of expensive toys before figuring out that she preferred crumpled balls of wax paper, and after going through a whole box of Band-Aids in the first week, christened the beast She Devil.

He was expecting her to give birth to a litter of demons any minute now, but the blessed event had been pushed from his mind by his worry over a woman who quite clearly neither needed nor wanted his help.

“Detective Peters? Coffee?”

He shook his head. “Not right now, thanks.” Stephanie was fine. She’d explained the Makepeace film pretty convincingly, and as for the incident in the elevator, well, just about any woman steeling herself to walk through Chinatown at night could be excused for being nervous—especially considering what had happened in that very lab just the previous year. “Okay then, can I give you a lift home?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No thanks. You just be on your way, and—”

STEPHANIE WAS TALKING to thin air. Peters had practically sprinted out the revolving door to the street. She blew out a breath and unknotted her fingers from the purse.

This is what she’d wanted, right? She’d wanted him to go away and leave her alone. She’d hoped he would buy the “artifact” story she’d cooked up after she’d glanced over from her phone conversation and seen him looking at the Makepeace film. She’d prayed he wouldn’t insist on driving—or worse, walking her home, leaving her to make the voice on the phone believe that she hadn’t told him anything.

“So this is a good thing,” she told herself firmly. “He’s gone and I can go home.”

Then why did she feel like scratching the eyes out of the woman Detective Peters was running to? Why did she feel such a twisting sense of betrayal that he’d asked her for coffee when he had someone waiting for him?

“Not everyone says coffee and means sex, Stephanie,” she lectured herself sternly. Her face flushed at the word and her skin heated at the memory of the good, solid bulk of the detective’s body beneath hers in the elevator and the heavy warmth that had stolen through her. The quick throb of her pulse as their limbs intertwined, and…and she’d sworn off men for good.

You have terrible taste, she told herself, don’t even go there. And besides, you’ve done nothing but lie to Detective Peters for the last twelve hours. That’s not exactly a great basis for a lasting relationship.

Or a brief, explosive one. The thought brought a quick liquid heat.

“You okay, Miss Alberts?” She jolted and shot a glance at the back hall of the lobby, relaxing when she saw the night watchman’s familiar stocky form. Though thoughts of the handsome detective were a momentary distraction, the fear that the man on the phone was watching her stayed near. Lurked.

“I’m fine, Bobby.” When had the words I’m fine become a mantra? “Just heading home.” She looked out past the revolving glass doors and suppressed a shudder. She didn’t want to go home through the Zone. Not tonight.

“It’s late, Miss Alberts, why don’t you take the catwalk over to the train station? It’ll be safer.”

She seized the idea gratefully. Usually, she spurned the T because the hospital was a mere ten-minute walk from her house and it took twice that to wait for the train. But tonight the brightly lit, well-guarded MBTA station seemed like heaven. “I’ll do that, Bobby. Thank you.”

So she took the catwalk and waited for the train. But the feeling of being watched didn’t go away.

LATER THAT NIGHT, Reid trotted up the old granite steps and banged on the nail-studded door with the cast-iron knocker. There was something to be said for the charm of the Patriot District, he thought as he scanned the narrow cobbled street. There were flower boxes at every window overflowing with period-correct plantings, and a discreet kiosk on the corner filled with brochures.

A sweet slide of saxophone drifted out of the window next door, making Reid think of beignets and open-air cafés.

Though the neighborhoods were only fifteen minutes apart by foot, Patriot was a far cry from the open markets and seedy underbelly of Chinatown. He wasn’t sure which he preferred.

He knocked again, and a little wooden window opened in the big wooden door. Jade-green eyes stared out at him.

“Well, that’s not very safe,” he commented. “I could stick a gun right through there and start shooting. Aren’t peepholes considered historically accurate around here? They’re certainly safer. You never know who’s going to come knocking.”

The eyes blinked. Then Steph’s voice said, “You’re absolutely right. I’ll keep it closed from now on.”

The little window slid shut.

It took him a full minute to realize she wasn’t going to open the door.

He knocked again, harder, and started to feel prickles on the back of his neck. On the pretext of scratching his head, he scanned the neat neighborhood again. Nothing. Patriot might be pretty to look at, but there were certainly plenty of places to hide.

Or else he needed a vacation. A long one, with sun and beaches, and curvy redheads wearing string bikinis.

Or lab coats.

“Stephanie? I need to talk to you.” He knocked, and kept knocking until he heard a dead bolt being shot from inside.

“Go away,” she said, then contradicted herself by opening the door. “What do you want?”

“Coffee,” he said, and pushed his way into the house. “Your aunt here?”

“No. But why don’t you come in and make yourself at home?” she offered sarcastically as he prowled through the first floor and found nothing amiss. “Maureen’s out for the evening.”

He found Stephanie’s daughter in the living room, playing quietly with a model horse and a stuffed bear. She was galloping the bear around with the horse on the bear’s back. He supposed it made sense to a three-year-old.

“Hey, kid,” he said, because it seemed rude not to acknowledge her, and the girl gave him a blinding smile that lit her whole face and shifted something inside his chest.

God! That human beings could ever do something evil to a child. He felt suddenly small, tainted by the things he’d seen. The things he’d done.

When the little girl stood up and walked toward him, Reid took a step back and bumped into Stephanie. The brief contact reminded him of their almost-clinch in the elevator, and the shadows in her eyes reminded him of questions still unanswered.

She quirked a smile. “Don’t like kids much?”

“It’s not that. It’s just—” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t see them at their best too often, you know?”

“Too many tantrums?”

Too much blood, he thought. Too many babies hanging on their mothers’ legs while their daddies were dragged out the front door. But he said, “Something like that.” Noticing that Stephanie was holding a pair of mugs, he reached for one. “Thanks.”

At her invitation, he sat on a stiff-looking old-fashioned chair that startled him by being comfortable. Stephanie sat on the sofa. She sipped her drink. “Why are you here, Detective? Wasn’t your… company glad to see you?”

Reid glanced at the four parallel scratches on his arm. “She wasn’t in a very good mood. I think she’s feeling fat.”

There was a little tug at his pant leg, and an inquiring noise, like a small bird chirping. He looked down at the kid. Her lips were pursed, and another chirp emerged. “She whistles?”

Stephanie nodded. “Maureen said she started it this morning. We’re hoping it’s a sign that she’s getting ready to talk again.”

The girl frowned as though concentrating, and warbled a few more notes.

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