Secret Witness

by Jessica Andersen

  It was actually fairly hard to contaminate DNA, but he didn’t have to know that. Having him in the building was distracting enough without him hovering over her shoulder and breathing on the sensitive spot at the back of her neck she hadn’t even known existed. He jumped back and repeated the question from a distance.

  Her hands trembled slightly as she swirled the light-green liquid around inside the tube. “Nothing’s wrong. And everything.” She gestured at the rape kit. “I’ve never seen the victim before, you know?”

  She wished she’d seen a picture of the young woman when her head was still attached to her body. Perhaps that would have dulled the images that kept slashing through her mind. She pictured the naked, headless body in the tub. Pictured the swabs doing their work.

  And trembled.

  Peters cursed. “This is a bad idea, and probably skirts the edges of legal. Someone else should do this. I’ll see if the state lab has room for it.”

  Steph shook her head. “No way. They’re backed up for weeks, that’s why you brought the work to Boston General, remember? Besides, I can do it.” She had to do it. Jilly’s safety was at stake.

  The detective cursed again, then fell silent as he watched her process all of the samples with ruthlessly steady hands. She could feel the anger and the accusations tumble off him like rain.

  But when he spoke, it surprised her, and unaccountably made her angry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…” He trailed off and she shook her head.

  “Of course you ‘meant to,’” she snapped, turning to irritation when guilt prodded too deeply. “You meant to shock me with those photos. Horrify me. Make me feel so wracked with guilt that I’d tell you what you wanted to know.” She stabbed a pipette full of ethanol into the oral sample and watched the DNA precipitate out of the solution like spun silk. “Well, it worked.”

  “Stephanie…” He reached out toward her, and Steph had never been so glad for the protection of a lab coat and surgical gloves.

  “Don’t contaminate the field,” she ordered, and he dropped his hand.

  Da-da-da-DUM! The burble of his cell phone sliced through the tension and she felt her shoulders slump as he looked at her one last time as though she still wasn’t getting the point. Then he answered the phone with a bark. “Peters!”

  He turned away, and as she spun the samples down to let gravity separate the precipitated DNA strands from the lighter liquid, all she could make out were a string of uh-huh’s and muttered expletives.

  When he slapped the phone shut, he was scowling even harder. But when she lifted an eyebrow in question, he shook his head. “Nothing.”

  She wasn’t sure whether that meant the call wasn’t important or that he wouldn’t share the information with her. So she went back to work.

  Now that the DNA was stuck to the sides of the plastic tubes, she could dump the spent solution into a waste receptacle. She placed the tubes in a spinning vacuum drier in the hall and set the timer for fifteen minutes.

  Snapping her gloves off, she tossed them in the direction of the trash. “I’m going to the fourth floor for a cup of something. You want any?”

  Even through his mood, Peters found a ghost of a grin, bringing out the dimple on his left cheek that she hadn’t noticed until the moment she’d found him asleep on her daughter’s bed. Lust was a hard punch beneath her aching heart, painful and unwelcome.

  “I’d love a cup of ‘something,’” he answered.

  She almost withdrew the invitation, but didn’t. The fact that he was angry with her was almost a good thing. He wasn’t likely to kiss her again if he was pissed at her. And she didn’t think she could handle another kiss right now.

  Maybe not ever. Their clinch in her kitchen the night before had been the sort of kiss she’d been waiting her whole life for. It had touched a piece of her that nobody had found before. Not Luis. Not Roger. Nobody.

  And he was a cop who didn’t like kids. Period.

  “Mail call,” Terry caroled as they passed him in the front office. The grad student was signing for a flat brown package. “It’s for you, Steph. Order something fun?”

  She shrugged and headed for the elevator, aware of Peters following close behind. “Probably those new spin columns I’m trying. Just toss it on my desk, okay?”

  Terry nodded. “Sure thing.”

  They rode down to the fourth floor in silence, and Steph found herself acutely aware of Reid’s breathing and the way he flexed his fingers as though he wished he was holding something. When they stepped out of the close little car, he touched her arm and she stopped, feeling the contact all the way to her toes.

  She turned to him. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry about this morning.”

  It wasn’t what she’d expected. “I thought we already went through this. You wanted to scare me with those photos. It worked. I may never sleep again.”

  He shook his head. “No. Not the photos. I’m sorry for barging into your house like that and scaring you and your daughter.”

  “Oh.” His outburst had been a minor ripple in the tidal wave of drama she’d been living through the last few days. Apparently he thought it was more. “Why are you sorry for that and not the photos?”

  “Showing a witness crime scene photographs is acceptable police work,” he replied. “Yelling at a woman and child in their own home is not. I’m sorry for it. It was unprofessional and won’t happen again.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. You’re forgiven for yelling. Coffee or tea?” She pushed into the cafeteria and shoved a carry-out cup in his direction.

  He didn’t take it right away. “That’s it?”

  She looked at him sideways. “People yell. Kids cry. You get over it—no big deal. You should hear Maureen and Mortimer go at it some days. They really hate each other.” Though she wasn’t so sure of that any more. The two had arrived at the same time the night before. Coincidence? She wasn’t sure.

  She continued. “Tell you what. I’ll forgive you for yelling at me this morning if you forgive me for lying to you yesterday.”

  It would take her longer to forgive herself, and an eternity to forget the sight of Honey’s sightless brown eyes, but she didn’t think she could bear to spend the rest of the day feeling his anger radiating from her bench area.

  He shrugged one shoulder, and the dimple put in a quick appearance. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Well, you should be. I should’ve told you about the phone call yesterday. I wasn’t thinking straight.” She wondered if she ever would again. “But if you’re sticking around until this experiment is done, I’d like to declare a truce.” She stuck out a hand. “Truce?”

  Reid stared at the hand for a moment, and his eyes blazed gold.

  Instead of shaking it, he lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a warm, intimate kiss to her knuckles. His eyes flickered to hers and her pulse jumped several notches. “Truce,” he breathed across the suddenly sensitive skin, and Steph wondered when she’d become a ball of nerves centered around her first two knuckles.

  She yanked her hand away and covered her sudden confusion by jamming her cup beneath a random spigot and filling it to the brim while her heart thundered in her ears.

  “Come on, then,” she said, spinning and heading back toward the elevator a full five minutes before her timer would start its annoying beep. “Let’s get back to work.” She wouldn’t—couldn’t—deal with her attraction to Peters right now.

  They rode upstairs in a tense silence that was broken only when they walked back through the reception area and saw Molly chatting with a uniformed courier. “You guys are keeping the couriers busy today,” Reid commented.

  Steph nodded as they walked into the lab. “Looks like it. This is our usual guy. The other package must’ve been a special delivery.” She paused and turned back to Reid as something niggled at her. “But why would Petrie Pharmaceuticals pay for special delivery of spin columns?”

  She saw the knowledge in his eyes just
as it clicked in her own brain, but it was too late.

  With a deceptively mild whump! her lab bench exploded in a ball of orange flame and detonating lab chemicals.

  Something hard and heavy slammed into Steph, and she found herself face down beneath Terry’s bench at the far end of the lab. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move. But she could hear. The sound of shattering glass and screams made her long to close her eyes and hide. The sound of running feet and slamming doors let her know the others were fleeing.

  With good reason. The lab flammables were going up like rockets.

  Relatively safe beneath the granite bench, Steph turned her face away from the noise and pressed her cheek against Reid’s sleeve, only then realizing that he had pushed her to safety and was covering her with his own body for protection.

  Protection. “Jilly! Aunt Maureen!” She struggled and managed to roll over beneath him before he grabbed her and pinned her more securely. She saw a clear liquid rain down on the other side of them as a bottle on Terry’s bench shattered.

  It could be water. It could be hydrochloric acid. There was no telling.

  They were trapped.

  “Quit! Stay down, damn it. What’s your problem?” They were face to face, only a breath apart and she could see the fierceness in his eyes. Feel the drum of his heart against her breasts.

  Feel her nipples crinkle as the heat from the bomb swirled around them and the sound of running feet and breaking glass faded and the whoop-whooping of the fire alarms began.

  “Jilly,” she whispered almost against his lips. “Maureen. What if he sends them a package too?”

  But even through the fear and the Klaxons and the shouts from the outer office, Steph could feel something warm and feminine uncurl within her and reach out to Reid’s hard, enduring masculinity.

  “Mortimer will keep them safe,” he replied, “And the men watching the house.” They both knew the police detail hadn’t been enough to protect her from Roger the year before. But it seemed enough for the moment, when she was cleanly divided between terror and growing desire for the man who’d saved her yet again.

  “Reid,” she whispered, though she didn’t know what she wanted to say.

  It seemed enough. His eyes flashed yellow gold, and when something on the bench above them fell with a crash, they flinched into each other and their lips met.

  And held.

  There was another explosion, though Steph couldn’t tell if it was in the lab or in her heart. The temperature spiked and heat roiled around them, licking along her skin like a lover though they were safe enough a half a room away from the small fire, tangled together beneath the granite-topped bench.

  His tongue touched hers and his hand slid down her arm. She could feel the heat from his body sear through the rough cotton of the starched lab coat. The linoleum floor was hard against her back, but she welcomed the pressure when he gathered her closer and closer still, changing the angle of the kiss and dragging her along with him into deeper, darker territories.

  He tasted of coffee and let out a groan of sharp frustration that she knew all too well and feared would never be appeased.

  She wanted to pull away and scream for the unfairness of it all.

  She wanted never to pull away again, but rather to lose herself in the taste of him, the feel of his hard, huge body against her, and the feeling of warm safety that stole through her as he wrapped himself around her as though he would never let go.

  Then, over the sound of their breathing and a soft moan that could have belonged to either of them, Steph heard a loud thunk! and a growing hiss all around them, as though it was raining in the lab.

  Reid stiffened and pulled away, turning his head quickly toward the water flooding down outside their temporary shelter in the large space beneath Terry’s desk. “Sprinklers.” Still without looking at her, he stood and glanced around at the lab, silent now except for the hissing of the sprinklers and the last few dying flames. Even the alarms had stilled, leaving only the blink of the exit indicators to show that there was a problem. He reached a hand down. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  He was right, it was time to leave. The overhead blowers had shut down when the fire alarm was activated, and the air was rapidly filling with the stink of chemicals. Steph pressed her sleeve against her nose and mouth, blinked back tears and scrambled to her feet. But her mind wasn’t wholly focused on the smell and the water that rained down around them.

  She felt the cool drops hit her hot, flushed skin, and thought of the man beside her.

  She wanted more of him. All of him. That was all she could think. Not about the bomb, or the lab, or, God help her, even her daughter, Steph could only think that she wanted Reid Peters. Wanted all of him.

  She followed him toward the exit, thinking that the darkroom was on the other side of the outer office, down a short corridor. Her whole body heated as she conjured a picture of the two of them in there, lit only by the dark lights as she untucked his shirt. Let his trousers down just far enough to free the part of him she wanted most. Hitched herself up on the waist-high counter and spread her legs to guide him home—

  “Stephanie.” His voice was as gritty as her throat felt, and she almost exploded right there at the desire in his molten-gold eyes, almost swooned with the need to have him inside her.

  “Yes, Reid.” Yes to all of it. Any of it. Whatever, whenever, however he wanted it. The sharp bite of spilled chemicals in the air and the steady downpour from the sprinklers made her think of springtime and being in love.

  “I can’t.” She could see the moment he regained control. The moment he shifted from man to cop and shut her out entirely. Shut himself in. “I won’t. You’re…” He seemed to search for the word. “You’re a victim. It’s not right.” He held her eyes for another long moment as they both heard the hubbub of the rescue personnel arrive in the outer office. He whispered, “I’m sorry,” but she barely heard.

  She heard only the word victim crashing around in her brain as he let himself into the outer office.

  And left her standing in the rain.

  Chapter Seven

  An hour later, Reid was still waiting for his system to level off. It hadn’t yet. He could still feel her. Still taste her.

  It was driving him so crazy, he’d almost asked Sturgeon to stay in the lab and watch her finish the experiment. But he hadn’t been able to leave her any more than he’d been able to tell her the real reason he wasn’t going to follow up on that wonderful, terrifying, explosive kiss.

  No, he hadn’t told her about his father, or about the little girl and the rag doll, or about the look of fear he’d seen too often in his mother’s eyes, a look that he’d seen again in Stephanie’s daughter’s eyes when he’d burst into their kitchen in a rage.

  Instead, he’d blamed it on the job, which was only part of the reason he could never, ever kiss her again.

  “Are you sure they’re safe?”

  He glanced over at Stephanie, watching as she used a ridiculously thin plastic needle to load blue-dyed DNA into the machine that would separate out the samples from Honey Moreplease’s fingernail and tell them if the DNA matched that taken from Mae Wong.

  “Yeah. They’re safe,” he answered, knowing she was thinking of her aunt and daughter. Her own safety, it seemed, was secondary. Finishing the experiment came first. Ever since she’d followed him out of the ruined lab, dripping with water and shivering with shock and cold, Steph had been like a woman possessed.

  The rape kit, paperwork and chemicals that had been on her desk were a dead loss, but little of the rest of the lab had been touched, thanks to the fireproof cabinet that held the most dangerously flammable solvents. The bomb squad had come and gone, pronouncing the timer and homemade explosive crude but effective, and Steph had gotten back to work. The samples she’d extracted from the rape kit had been in a drier down the hall, and the DNA from Mae Wong had been stored in a shielded freezer. So she’d directed Molly to contact Gen
ie and start the cleanup of the Watson lab, sent the other employees home and headed over to the Wellington lab with only a bare glance for the scorched corner that had once been her workstation.

  She’d hardly looked at him in the two hours since. Reid was starting to get twitchy from all the silence, combined with the lingering smell of scorched plastic from the other side of the hall. It was late at night and he wasn’t sure what came next.

  Not a familiar feeling, nor a comfortable one.

  “They’re fine,” he repeated, more to keep the conversation going than from any real conviction.

  She squinted at the gel and added another sample. “Why do you think he sent the bomb? He didn’t even give us a chance to lose the samples. How could he have known we weren’t going to?”

  Her unspoken questions lingered between them. What will he do now? Am I still in danger? Is my family?

  “We’re not sure, Stephanie. It’s complicated.” Confusing. Sturgeon had gone so far as to suggest two perps, one who was threatening her and one who’d planted the bomb. The two MOs didn’t jibe with each other any more than Mae’s rape and Honey’s murder fit the pattern of the earlier rapes. The case was starting to come unglued when it should have been pulling together. It would almost be a relief if the DNA didn’t match. Then they’d have evidence to back up their suspicion of a second perp.

  “Uncomplicate it for me, okay?” She finished loading the samples and covered the ice bucket with a heavy plastic shield while she plugged the leads into the machine and started the electrical current.

  Reid sighed heavily and gave her the bare bones of the theory he and Sturgeon had spent most of the afternoon pounding out as they sat in the far corner of the ruined Watson lab. “Mae Wong’s rape wasn’t the first this guy pulled off. There were at least five others before that fit the same pattern, but no DNA before her case.” Which had always bothered Reid. The perp had left nothing at the other rapes. Why start with that one? Besides, though the setting and the act had been the same, the others hadn’t been children. Why break pattern?