If anything, that made Reid feel worse. If he’d been a better man that morning, he wouldn’t have put that look in the little girl’s eyes.
He turned the doorknob. “You ready?” When Sturgeon nodded, Reid flashed him a sick-feeling grin. “Okay, you be the good cop.” He glanced at his knuckles, which felt swollen and bruised though he hadn’t hit a thing. “And I’ll be the bad one.”
STEPHANIE GLANCED UP as Detective Sturgeon entered the sparse white room that might have intimidated her if she wasn’t already at the end of her rope. Reid was on his heels and she could see the lines of temper tight across his forehead. His shoulders were tense, and he wouldn’t look her in the eye. She wondered what had happened in Chinatown. Why he’d left her house so abruptly that morning. What it all meant for her and Jilly.
Lose the samples.
The voice had to know who’d raped the little girl. He’d probably done it himself. Steph shivered, though the little room was warm enough. She wished she’d given in and let Maureen come along, but she knew Jilly and her aunt were safer with Mortimer.
“Miss Alberts.” Sturgeon offered her a peppermint, and when she declined, unwrapped it for himself. Stephanie took the moment to look at Reid, who was leaning against the wall at Sturgeon’s back. He was glowering at a section of mirrored glass and she wondered whether there was someone on the other side, watching them.
Watching her.
“I’m very sorry to hear about the vandalism at your home last night,” Sturgeon began. “Are your aunt and daughter okay?”
Steph cut him a glance. Last night? She’d assumed this was about the Makepeace DNA. About the “message” Reid was supposed to have received. If it wasn’t…maybe she still had a chance to “lose” the samples and keep Reid out of it before the voice pulled him in.
The message from Jilly’s bed had haunted her dreams and her waking hours. Do it. Lose the evidence or find your daughter’s head here the next time.
She had no choice.
“Last night?” she repeated with all the cute innocence she could muster, which wasn’t much, considering how guilty she felt about lying to Peters. “Well…I went upstairs to put Jilly to bed, and when we got to her room I saw that someone had been in it…”
After a half hour or so, Sturgeon turned to his partner, who was still leaning up against the wall. “Will you go get us something to drink, please?”
While Reid was gone—and Stephanie felt his absence acutely—Sturgeon led her back over the previous afternoon and evening, and asked a few questions about Jilly’s disappearance the day before that. She answered numbly, trying to see into the future and know what was the right path to take.
Tell them? Don’t tell them? What would protect Jilly best? Steph had trusted the wrong man before and had almost lost her life. She couldn’t afford to choose wrongly again.
Reid returned with the drinks and sat for the first time since the meeting had begun, choosing the chair to Steph’s left and placing a bulging envelope on the table. Even looking at Sturgeon, she could feel Reid’s presence like a pulse of energy along the left side of her face. She could feel him staring at her, and a secret, guilty thrill rustled inside her when he shifted and his bare forearm brushed against hers.
“Do you have any idea what the words meant? Why did the intruder spell out Do It on your daughter’s bed?”
Steph shook her head at Sturgeon’s question. “Honestly, I have no idea, Detective.” She’d never been less honest in her life, but kept the image of her daughter’s face firmly in her mind.
She had to protect her family at all costs.
Peters fidgeted with the thick envelope and she wondered what was inside.
“Are you sure you have no idea?” It wasn’t the first time Sturgeon had repeated a question, and she had been careful to keep her answers consistent each time.
She sipped from the cup in front of her and paused, surprised. It was hot chocolate. She glanced over and a trickle of warmth stole through her.
“Miss Alberts?” Sturgeon prompted.
“No,” she answered. “I don’t have any idea why someone might want to write Do It on my daughter’s bed in broken model horse legs.” She shuddered. The legs had been particularly macabre, which she supposed had been the point. “Why? Did you find something?” Did you get a phone call? she wanted to ask Reid. Have you checked your messages and gotten one from a voice that makes you think of death?
Has the voice told you what you’re supposed to do?
“Yes. We found something.” Steph jumped slightly when Peters spoke close beside her. His voice was hard and unyielding. A muscle pulsed at his jaw and she wondered how she could be so afraid and so drawn at the same time. The voice on the phone frightened her. The man inside the cop made her want to trust. “And you’re going to tell us what you know about it.”
He upended the envelope and shook the photographs out and all thoughts of trust and passion fled. Her stomach clenched as the glossy enlargements slithered across the table, a lurid cascade of white tile and pink water. White flesh and red slashes.
Stephanie’s world tilted on its axis. Bile pressed at the back of her throat and she swallowed a scream until it sat, thick and leaden in her stomach.
Red lipstick on a white face. Garish red hair spilling across a pale bedspread, clashing with pink-dyed pistachio words.
Last Warning.
“Oh God!” She stood up and the chair clattered to the floor behind her. She clapped both hands to her mouth to keep the curses and the tears and the screams and her breakfast from rushing out in one huge geyser of horror.
The dead woman’s eyes stared at her. The mouth screamed silently. Her fault. A message. If she’d switched the DNA right away, this wouldn’t have happened. The voice would have been satisfied.
She staggered back, away from the photos. Away from Peters, who grabbed a photograph of the woman’s staring eyes, of the way her neck seemed to end at the bedspread, her life marked by nothing more than a dark stain beneath. He thrust it toward Steph. “Her name was Honey. Got that? Honey.” He shoved the photo closer and his quiet voice was louder than his shout had been that morning. “Tell us what you know about the messages.”
She shuddered and felt a single tear slide down her cheek.
“Detective Peters,” Sturgeon snapped. “That’s enough.”
Reid glared at him. “She’s lying. Don’t you see that?” He grabbed another photograph and turned back to Stephanie. Showed her the headless body sprawled in the bathtub. “Now tell me! What does Do It mean? What about Last Warning?” He shook the photograph. “What if this was your aunt? What if it was Jilly?”
She saw it then. Saw Maureen’s eyes looking up at her in mute appeal. Saw a child’s body tossed carelessly into an old claw-footed bathtub. Saw the blood, heard the screams.
And she broke.
“That’s just it!” She slapped the photograph from his hand and swiped the rest from the table. They fluttered to the floor and lay there, weeping and bloody like the young woman they showed. “Don’t you get it? He took Jilly. He said he’d send her back in pieces if I told. He said he’d take Maureen, too.”
An unnatural calm descended over her like the sudden silence in the interrogation room, and she nodded at Reid. “He saw you at my house last night…hell, maybe he even saw you at the lab earlier. Either way, he decided you were in this with me. He called just after you left and said he’d sent you a message.”
“Son of a—” Reid shot to his feet and began pacing, taking a wide berth around the sloppy pile of crime scene photographs. She could tell he was furious, though she wasn’t sure whether he was mad at her or the voice on the phone. “What about Do It. What does he want you to do?”
She dropped her face into her hands, because it was simpler than looking at either of the men. Simpler than facing her own choices. “He wanted me to falsify evidence. I was supposed to make sure the results of the Makepeace DNA test came back positive. If I didn
’t, he said the next time he takes Jilly I’ll get her back in pieces.”
Reid cursed again and came to a stop, resting his forehead against the privacy window. “And now? What does he want now?” His words echoed strangely off the tinted glass.
“Now he wants us to lose the evidence. If we don’t, he says my family and I will die.” All three of them looked down at the crime scene photographs, but Steph was the one who said it. “I think he’ll do it, too.”
Neither of the detectives contradicted her and Steph put her head on her folded arms, trying to block out the memories. The fears. She thought herself too scared for tears. Then she felt Reid’s hand on her shoulder and she discovered she wasn’t, after all, too scared to cry.
HE HELD Stephanie and cursed himself for her sobs. That it was his job to break the witness and get to the truth was immaterial. That the truth was the only thing that would keep Jilly and Maureen safe was beside the point. The point was that Reid had done it. He’d terrorized her until she broke.
And he hated the fact.
He glanced down at the scattered photos and felt Sturgeon’s disapproval like a knife. He knew the older man would have vetoed his plan with the photos in a heartbeat, so he hadn’t told him. But he’d seen no other way to crack through that brittle, protective layer that Stephanie hid behind when she lied.
Now, looking at the fragile curve of her neck and feeling the hot tears soak through his shirt, he wished there had been another way. Any other way.
After a long moment, Stephanie quieted and pushed away. Without looking up, she excused herself for the ladies’ room and the men watched her leave. Heard the door click behind her.
When she was gone, Reid glanced from the photos to his partner and asked the question they’d both ducked from their superior. “Serial?”
Though there hadn’t been any computer hits on similar decapitations, the staged scene smacked of a serial killer. The very thought of such a monster in his own backyard—hell, in Stephanie’s house—made Reid want to punch something. Made him want to yell and curse and rage against it all, smashing at anything that got in his way.
But no. That was the old man’s way of dealing with things. Instead, Reid held out a hand. “Give me a mint.”
Sturgeon complied and crunched a fresh candy of his own. “He’s working up to it, maybe. First the teddy bear, then the hooker…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
“The rapes had been escalating,” Reid observed. It hadn’t been released to the papers, but Mae Wong’s rape was the sixth in a loosely connected string. “They’d been getting nastier and closer together. He might’ve made the jump.”
Sturgeon shook his head. “From raping a little girl to killing a hooker? Doesn’t feel right. Besides, remember that Mae Wong’s rape didn’t fit so well with the others.”
Reid nodded. It had been the only one with DNA left behind, and there were other telling dissimilarities. Though it had superficially matched the other incidents, it felt different. He tried a theory on for size. “So maybe Mae Wong isn’t part of the pattern. Maybe the same perp did the earlier streetwalker rapes and Honey Moreplease, but not the little girl.”
“That would work,” agreed Sturgeon, “But we have a connection between Mae Wong and Honey Moreplease through Stephanie. It stands to reason they’re all the same guy.”
Reid scowled. “Stands to reason, maybe, but I don’t like it. The pattern doesn’t fit yet.”
The door opened quietly, and Stephanie came back in, looking pale and tired. Reid felt his heart stutter in his chest and wanted nothing more than to take her away from all the ugliness and soothe the fears away.
Can’t think that way, he told himself. She’s a job, nothing more.
Because his instincts had been right. She was in real danger and he couldn’t afford to be distracted right now. It could mean Jilly’s life. Stephanie’s life.
So instead of reaching for Stephanie as he wanted to, Reid gestured her to a chair. “We have a few more questions we’d like to ask you.”
And after that, they would make a plan. One thing was for sure, though. He had no intention of letting Stephanie out of his sight until this was all over.
Whether she liked it or not.
Chapter Six
“What the hell’s going on?” Molly asked with her typical lack of diplomacy when Stephanie and Peters got to the lab later that morning. “Why are you late and why is Detective Peters here? Is everything okay with Jilly?”
“Jilly’s safe with Aunt Maureen.” Steph could answer that one truthfully, and only fibbed a little when she added, “And I’m helping the detective with a rush job.” She jerked her head back toward the distinctive shape of the evidence kit in his hands.
“Oh. Ick.” Molly stepped back, as Steph had known she would. “Thought you guys had police labs for that sort of stuff. Don’t leave it on my desk, okay?”
“Over there,” Steph waved Peters over to her bench while she grabbed a fresh lab coat. She thought she saw his eyes flash when she pulled the starched white cotton from its hanger, but that had to be an illusion. Ever since they’d left the station he’d been on automatic pilot, barely responsive to her feeble attempts at conversation.
Which was fine. She wasn’t feeling chatty either. She’d just thought conversation would keep her from screaming. Her head was pounding in a relentless beat and she was wound so tightly she feared a single touch would shatter her into a thousand pieces.
The detectives had agreed that likely her “voice” had either raped Mae Wong, or knew who had. Makepeace’s arrest and the DNA evidence had been publicized enough that the voice had decided to take advantage of the arrest, knowing that Makepeace’s conviction would end the search for the serial rapist.
But if it wasn’t Makepeace, then who was it?
“Let’s get on with it,” said Peters, propping Honey Moreplease’s evidence on Steph’s desk. “First we want to know if Mae Wong and Honey Moreplease were attacked by the same man.”
Steph knew he didn’t expect the samples to match. He’d said the patterns were too different between the two, but it was an angle they needed to work. Besides, once the second rape kit was processed, they’d have the DNA markers for searching the federal and local DNA databases, which was their real goal.
They weren’t going to “lose” the samples as the voice had demanded. They were going to use them to solve the crimes.
And they would hope to God they could keep Jilly and Maureen safe in the process. That was Peters’s job. Hers was to process the DNA evidence.
Steph squared her shoulders, donned her lab coat, and prepared to get to work.
Of course Jared had picked up the wrong size coat again and she had to roll up the cuffs. On a normal day, it would’ve sent her across the floor to holler at him in person. Today she was horrified to feel tears prickle in her eyes.
“Damn it.” She turned away from Reid on the pretext of fussing with a rack of solvents that didn’t need to be fussed with, and pressed a hand to her eyes. She would not cry.
She should have told him yesterday. She’d been stupid to believe she was protecting Jilly with her silence. She pressed harder against her eyes, damning the tears that leaked through, as her mind coughed up a remembered image.
A woman’s head in the center of a tacky bedspread. A dark stain beneath.
“Stephanie?” The touch on her shoulder startled her and she jerked away.
The detective stood near where she’d just been, his hand hovering in midair. An expression that might have been pain flickered briefly in his eyes before he let the hand drop.
“I’m—” Sorry, she wanted to say. But she didn’t have the right. She’d been lying to him almost from the first. She didn’t deserve his forgiveness, and the knowledge hurt more than it should have. She’d been doing what she needed to do to protect Jilly and Aunt Maureen, and in a crazy way even Detective Peters himself, though he’d never thank her for it.
So wh
y did it feel as though she’d been utterly, completely wrong?
Because a woman was dead, she answered herself, and looked at the kit on her lab bench.
“Rape kit’s not processing itself, you know,” Peters observed mildly, stepping away from her. “You want some help?”
“No.” Steph blew out a big breath, snapped on a pair of sterile gloves, and carried the kit to a negatively pressured fume hood that would help to protect the samples from cross-contamination by other DNA stocks. She wiped the area down carefully, though she’d cleaned it herself the night before, and got to work, removing the tubes and swabs from their compartments and keeping careful note of serial numbers and sources. No semen had been found, but the hand that had hung outside the half-filled bathtub had had skin under its fingernails. “I’ve got it from here, and the whole thing will take most of the day to run. I’ve got to extract the DNA and amplify the markers we’re checking before I can run them on any gels. You can come back later tonight if you want. I should have some preliminary results by then.”
But Peters shook his head and settled back in the tall swivel chair at her bench. “I think I’ll stick with you for the day, okay?”
It was anything but okay in Stephanie’s book. She didn’t want him there, didn’t want to feel his presence humming along her nerve endings and didn’t want to brush up against him when she reached for reagents. She especially didn’t want to have to see the look of betrayal in his eyes and know that he wasn’t sticking around because he enjoyed her company.
He was staying because he didn’t trust her not to mess with the results. And she couldn’t blame him.
Wincing, she directed a thin stream of DNA-extracting solution toward the clean test tube she’d used to hold the swab labeled LF for left-hand fingernails.
Instantly, Honey’s face filled her mind again.
“Something wrong?”
Damn the man. He must be watching her like a hawk, waiting for her to make a wrong move. Steph shook her head and refused to move away from the fume hood when Peters stepped closer. “Stay back,” she snapped, “unless you’re planning on breathing on the evidence.”
Secret Witness Page 8
