She wrapped her arms around her middle as if trying to hold herself together. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What are you saying?”
Mitch felt his stomach catapult out of the wall of his torso and pass through a meat grinder as he observed her every facial reaction, her every gesture, for the tiniest hint of falseness. But there was none. His chest hurt as he sucked in air and he swallowed hard against the anger and the disgust that some lowlife scum had destroyed this lovely young woman’s life.
She shook her head, her eyes pleading with him. He steeled himself against a compelling urge to reach out to her. The same type of sympathetic reaction that had had him unwisely reaching out to Theresa Lopez two years earlier when her twelve-year-old granddaughter had been kidnapped.
He’d seen his grandfather in Theresa Lopez’s anxiety-lined face. Saw the thin fingers worked to the bone to support a grandchild who was her sole reason for being. He’d twisted himself inside out trying to bring Carmen home. But he’d lost precious time chasing the wrong lead. By the time he’d realized his error and directed searchers to the killer’s home, Carmen was dead and her killer, the sixteen-year-old boy who did Theresa’s yardwork, had hung himself.
Theresa hadn’t deserved to lose her granddaughter, nor did Stef Shelton deserve what had happened to her. She probably helped old ladies across the street and baked cookies and banana bread for her church’s bake sales.
“I wish to God I didn’t have to tell you this, but that little girl in the other room is Riana Collingwood. DNA tests have confirmed it.”
“DNA?” She glanced toward the alcove, horror streaking her beautiful face like fissures in a broken mirror. “What are you talking about? Keely’s my daughter! I labored thirty hours bringing her into the world.” Her angry gaze shot back to him. “I should know my own baby!”
Mitch struggled to remain detached, with his fingers glued together, so he couldn’t give in to an unprofessional impulse to offer a pair of arms to hold her up. She looked whiter than a sheet of paper and about to crumple.
“There’s no mistake. Riana’s family wants her back. I’m here to make sure that happens, and help you find your daughter.” And to prove to himself that he was the kind of cop, the kind of man his grandfather had wanted him to be.
After the Lopez case, he’d transferred out of the Robbery Special Section, a bureaucratic misnomer because it handled both robbery and kidnapping investigations, into the Rape Special Section in what he saw as a strategic career move. Because of his excellent record, he was assigned high-profile rapes and serial rapist investigations and promoted to Detective II, but over time he began to perceive his transfer and his new achievements as an act of cowardice rather than a step up the departmental ladder. He’d turned his back on the children who’d needed him. He was no longer the man he’d thought he was.
The Collingwood case—or Operation Bassinet as his new employer called it—was his chance to find himself again. Failure was not an option.
Stef stared in numb disbelief at the blond Hollywood Goliath. She no longer thought that his butt was of the same superior grade as her favorite movie star’s. Or that his eyes were the dark cobalt of her Mexican glassware. He was the ugliest, most horrid waste of tanned skin she’d ever seen. And she’d bet his sun-bleached-blond hair wasn’t even natural.
“You’re lying. Or it’s a mistake…or…” She gulped a cleansing breath, pushing her hands out as if ridding the air of toxins. She had to think clearly here, but apples and bananas were whirling in a merry-go-round pattern in her head.
The Neanderthal-brained ex-cop was more likely to see reason and come to the conclusion he’d made a mistake if she stayed calm. She pasted on the let’s-be-reasonable smile she’d reserved for unruly passengers in her former days as a flight attendant. “First of all, how could you possibly have DNA evidence that says Keely isn’t my daughter?”
His cobalt eyes drilled into her, dead serious. There was nothing reasonable about his tone. Each word lacked compromise and lacerated her heart. “Mrs. Shelton, the Foundation received a ransom demand eight days ago. Two items were included with the note— Riana’s hospital identification bracelet and two hairs. A reputable lab conducted DNA tests which told us that while the bracelet had traces of Riana Collingwood’s DNA on it, the hair came from another child. It led us to believe that there were at least two people involved in Riana’s abduction and that one of them was afraid of being double-crossed so they switched Riana with another baby. Whoever sent the ransom note is obviously unaware that they have the wrong child. We checked nearby hospitals for infant girls admitted during that time and came up with a list of possible matches. I collected Keely’s drinking cup from your yard the other day when you and Keely were raking leaves and cleaning up your Halloween decorations. Her DNA matched Riana Collingwood’s DNA. She is Riana Collingwood.”
The idea of this man wandering around her yard—snooping for evidence so he could rip her daughter from her life infuriated her. Her hands fisted on her hips. “You were in my yard, spying on us?”
He didn’t look the least bit apologetic. “I saw no reason to upset you unnecessarily. Keely was only one of many children we were investigating.”
Stef wanted to claw his iceberg heart out. He was demolishing her world—and her heart—with one crushing sentence after another. “This is insane. You’re not taking my baby from me!” She faltered, blindsided by a memory of the second night she’d spent in the hospital with Keely.
She remembered awakening to the sound of her hospital door closing. Oh, God!
Full-blown panic gripped her heart. What if the person who’d entered her room hadn’t been a nurse? What if the Hollywood Goliath was actually telling the truth?
“I want other tests done at a lab of my choosing,” she snapped, clutching the arm of her chair for support.
“Of course. No one wants to make a mistake with a matter this serious.”
She hadn’t expected him to agree to that demand, which convinced her this was no joke. She lurched to her feet. Her sister Lorraine worked in a law firm as a paralegal. She could help her find a lawyer. “I’m calling a lawyer.”
He stood up, too, towering over her. For a second the serious intensity of his expression shifted to something that bordered on genuine sympathy. She had the distinct impression he was about to touch her, but then he locked his expression up tight and threw away the key.
“I’d rather you not do that,” he said.
“Why? Because I’ll discover this is some scam? I think it’s time you left, Mr. Halloran.”
His jaw flexed into an intractable bulkhead, his mouth a flat line. He removed a paper from his pocket. “Read this. It’s the ransom note from the kidnappers.”
Stef heard time throb in her temples like a hammer striking a stake as she made herself take the note from his strong brown fingers. Fingers that were strong enough to take her baby from her. But he’d have to kill her first!
She read the note, each terrifying word.
Riana Collingwood is alive. She is a bright, pretty child with her father’s eyes and her mother’s smile. Prepare a five million dollar cash ransom and await further instruction.
Five million dollars! Oh, God, that wasn’t good.
Neither was the last line.
Involve the police this time and lose her forever.
Stef started to hyperventilate.
The man who had just destroyed her life took her elbow, his hand hot as the devil’s touch. “Hey, sit back down. Now bend forward and put your head between your knees, okay?
“Just breathe.”
She did what he ordered, even though what she really wanted to do was to smack him.
He sat on the arm of the chair and she felt the tentative stroke of his hand on her back like a zap of electricity. “I wouldn’t advise bringing a third party into this now. It could put your real child’s life in danger.”
She sat bolt upright, still gulping for air.
“I’
m assuming that the hair samples the kidnapper sent belong to your real daughter. We’ll have to do tests immediately to confirm that. Regardless, the Foundation will cooperate fully with the kidnapper’s demand and pay the ransom.” He rubbed a slow circle that burned into her skin and made her forget all about breathing. “There’s no kind or gentle way to say this—if the kidnapper realizes he has the wrong child, he could kill your daughter.”
Stef glared at him, his Hollywood-handsome face inches from hers. She’d heard all she could take. Tears welled in her eyes. God, somewhere in Mitch Halloran there had to lurk a touch of humanity. He’d tried to soothe her when she’d started to hyperventilate and he was stroking her back, infusing her with the iron-core strength of his hand.
“Please, can’t you just go away? The Collingwoods are dead. Just say it’s a mistake. No one will know. Mistakes happen all the time in labs, don’t they?”
His cobalt eyes flickered like shadows in the night, indicating he was considering her request. Her heart filled with hope as she prayed he’d relent.
“Is that what you really want me to do, Mrs. Shelton?”
His voice dipped with scorn. “Just go away and forget about your real daughter, who doesn’t have red rubber boots or a real mommy to take her trick or treating?”
Fury gripped her at his callousness. She tried to shove him off the arm of the chair. “You bastard.”
To her shock, he grabbed her in an attempt to gain his balance and landed on top of her in the chair, his chest pressed against hers, his nose inches from her face. She could feel the steely hardness of his muscled body and smell the scents of citrus and sea salt on his skin.
Even his teeth were Hollywood perfect. “You’re not thinking straight,” he said bluntly. “I saw you in the yard with Keely. I know if you thought you had a child out there, you’d move heaven and earth to get her back.”
Stef felt hot tears slip onto her face. Her stomach knotted as she tried to imagine the face of the little girl the kidnapper had described, who’d come from her womb. Yes, in her mother’s heart she desperately wanted her child. But all she could see was Keely’s face—the beloved little girl whom she’d fed and changed, and whose voice was the sound of happiness. She elbowed Mitch in the ribs. “Get off me!”
Oh, God, this wasn’t happening!
“Are you going to take Keely from me?” she demanded as he levered himself off her.
Stef saw the stark truth in his face before he could shutter his expression.
“That’s not my job. My concern is finding out whether the child being held is your daughter and getting her back safely. I’ll need a DNA sample from you. And I’ll need something that might have your husband’s DNA on it.”
“Like what? I have some of Brad’s things stored away that I thought Keely might find comforting to have,” she said, trying to bend her mind to comprehend the sickening thought that her flesh-and-blood child had been in the care of kidnappers for the past thirty months. Her heart jerked. Had her child been neglected? Or abused?
“Did you keep a jacket or a ball cap? Something that may have come in contact with his neck, wrist or forehead is more likely to have his DNA on it.”
“I’ll see what I can find.” She forced herself to stand and brush past his towering frame. On stiff legs, she marched to the alcove to get Keely. She wasn’t leaving Mitch Halloran alone with her daughter.
Her daughter. A sob clawed up her throat. Even if another DNA test proved Keely really was the Collingwood heir, she couldn’t accept for a moment that Keely wouldn’t be in her life forever. As soon as this was over, she’d get a lawyer. Surely no judge in the country would take a baby away from the woman who’d raised it if the biological parents were dead?
But this isn’t any baby, insinuated a doom-and-gloom voice in her mind that sounded remarkably like Mitch Halloran’s blunt-edged baritone. Her sunshiney daughter who loved to dance and sing and bake cookies was the Collingwood heir—the heir to one of the largest family fortunes in the United States.
Who was she kidding?
Stef stopped in the arched doorway to the alcove, overwhelmed by the battle she was up against. Keely, the delightful center of her universe, was pretending to feed toy plastic fruits to a doll. “Eat, baby, eat,” she chanted. She glanced up and saw Stef and her blue-green eyes rounded with empathy.
“Mommy—sad?”
Stef sank onto the floor and pulled Keely into her lap, committing to memory the tropical scent of her hair, the perfect peanut shape of her nose and the snug heaven-on-earth feel of her compact body. How could she bear losing this darling child? “Mommy’s very sad, Kee. But when I hold you everything’s better.”
To Stef’s dismay, Keely started to sing their “I love you” song. The tears Stef had been struggling to hold back burst out in a torrent.
She rocked Keely tightly in her arms. “I love you, too, baby. I love you, too.”
SHE WAS CRYING.
Mitch stiffened as his every muscle tried to deflect the sound of Stephanie Shelton’s anguished sobs. His stomach felt as if it were coated with hot tar. The only thing that made the situation bearable was the hope that she’d soon be reunited with her own lost child.
Mitch knew what a gift a mother like her would be to that child. Everything his own mother had never been.
He’d give Stef a few more minutes, then gently prod her into action. Time wasn’t on their side—there was no way of knowing when the kidnapper would again make contact with specific instructions for the ransom. For all they knew, whoever had switched Riana and Keely could have another plan in the works to switch them back.
Flexing the tight muscles in his shoulders, Mitch unclipped the cell phone from his belt and punched in The Guardian’s phone number.
“The Guardian,” G.D.’s militarily brusque voice said.
Mitch’s lips curled in wry humor. Uncomfortable with his new boss’s curt directive to address him as sir, he’d quickly dubbed The Guardian “G.D.,” which stood for goddamn. As in goddamn he couldn’t believe he’d handed in his gun and his badge because The Guardian had asked him for assistance with this case.
Mitch had wanted to be a detective since he was twelve, when he’d gone to live with his grandfather who worked as a janitor in the Parker Administration Building of the L.A.P.D.
On days when Paddy’s back had pained him from his shrapnel injury—a nasty souvenir from the Korean War—Mitch would come along to pick up wastebaskets and mop the floors in the Detective Headquarters Division. He’d never thought about not being a police detective. He’d thought he’d probably drag his last breath on the streets of L.A.—a fitting way to go for the life he’d chosen.
Mitch angled a surreptitious glance at Stef who was guiding Keely toward the bedrooms. His heart tightened at the paleness of her face and the moist path of tears on her cheek. For the first time in two years he had no doubt whatsoever that he was right where he was supposed to be.
He could almost hear Paddy telling him to keep soldiering on. It never gets any easier, son.
His chest filled with an echo of longing for the gruff man who’d given him the only home he’d ever known. Who’d given him clumsily wrapped Christmas presents and had taken him to Dodger games to celebrate his birthdays where he’d slipped Mitch sips of his beer. They were not the kind of memories that made sappy movies, but they were incredibly precious to a kid starved for attention.
Mitch realized his thoughts were drifting when G.D.’s voice rumbled, “Who’s calling?”
He snapped back into focus. “Operation Bassinet. It’s Halloran, G.D. I just spoke to Mrs. Shelton. She’s devastated, but she’s on board.”
Concern edged The Guardian’s tone. “Is Riana okay?”
“Right as rain. We should be back in the city tonight. By the way, the husband is dead. Two years ago. In a rock climbing accident. Think there’s anything fishy in that? It could be a coincidence, but whoever abducted Riana from the hospital knew how to rappel.�
�
When Mitch had accepted the job one day after the ransom demand had been received, The Guardian had apprised him of the details of Riana’s kidnapping. The suspect was a Caucasian male who’d sneaked into the maternity postpartum wing during visitor’s hours using a stolen visitor’s badge and a hospital identification bracelet similar to those given to the new dads. He’d hidden in an unoccupied room and zapped the nurse, who’d been returning Riana Collingwood to the nursery after a late night feeding, with a stun gun.
Within minutes the kidnapper had bound the nurse and made his escape with the baby through a hole he’d cut in the second floor window to circumvent the hospital’s state-of-the-art alarm system and the high-tech baby identification bracelets equipped with receivers.
By the time the staff realized the Collingwood heir had been stolen, the kidnapper had been long gone.
“I’ve already assigned some men to do a background check of the family. I’ll ask them to dig up what they can on the husband’s death. Brad Shelton would have been in a perfect position to switch the babies. If a man walked into a hospital carrying a baby, who’d question him if he walked out carrying one?”
“We’re on the same wavelength, G.D.”
“Will you be able to get the husband’s DNA sample?”
“I’m on it.”
“Excellent. We don’t want any doubts as to the identity of the child the kidnapper has. I’ll be waiting for you and Mrs. Shelton at the hotel.”
The Guardian disconnected the call, but not before Mitch heard the distinct cry of a baby in the background and the soothing murmur of a woman’s voice.
That was odd. He hooked his cell phone back onto his belt and went to check on Stef. Had The Guardian been with another client? Or did G.D. have a personal life?
G.D. was a man cloaked in mystery and Mitch was determined to at least learn his name. A man who didn’t know who he was working for was a fool of an employee.
Operation Bassinet Page 2
