Secret Witness

by Jessica Andersen

  “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 buildin
g 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!”