Kitabı oku: «Secret Witness»

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.”