Secret Witness

by Jessica Andersen

  He imagined Sturgeon in swimming trunks, surrounded by his three grandkids and grinned. Tried not to imagine Sturgeon and his trim, zippy wife engaged in a game of “Oops, I lost my bikini top!” and failed.

  Tried to imagine himself taking children and a wife to a water park and scowled.

  Sturgeon chuckled and hitched himself onto the corner of Reid’s desk. “You wouldn’t be begging me if you had a wife of your own, you know.”

  Reid rolled his eyes. “Don’t start.”

  It was beyond him how Sturgeon had managed to stay married thirty years and counting. He was the guy who threw the curve on cop demographics—the one half of one percent that was happily married.

  The noise level started to rise as the shift changed. Sturgeon didn’t bother to lower his voice and a passing rookie snickered when the detective said, “I mean, what’s the problem here? You’re healthy, employed, only mildly lazy, and although I don’t really see it, Jennie tells me that you’re H-O-T hot. Apparently, your ass is exquisite.”

  There was a guffaw from three desks over. Reid glared, but couldn’t tell which of his so-called friends it had been.

  “I don’t,” he said in measured tones, “want to talk about your wife’s opinion of my ass.” Though he was flattered in a sick sort of way. “I don’t want to talk about my sex life.” Or lack thereof. He hadn’t dated steadily since he’d accidentally yelled the wrong woman’s name in the throes and had been summarily dumped on his head. When he’d gone to find the witness whose name he had yelled, he’d arrived at her house only to learn she’d been put in the hospital by a man who’d been on his list of suspects to question the next day.

  He hadn’t yet forgiven himself for that one. Nor had he quite escaped the feeling that there was something not quite right about her kid’s reappearance the day before.

  “And…” He pushed the thought aside and pointed at his partner. “I most certainly don’t want to talk about your sex life.”

  Unperturbed, Sturgeon unwrapped another mint and popped it home. He shrugged. “Then what do you want to talk about? You gonna tell me what’s bugging you, and why there’re enough coffee cups on the desk to prove you spent the night here on your first day off in over a month?”

  Reid scowled at the telltale cups. “I was working.”

  “On what? There’s nothing on our desks except some leftover paperwork and old coffee cups. Don’t tell me you came in to do paperwork—that’s really sick. And don’t tell me you like the coffee.”

  “Stephanie Alberts’s kid was snatched yesterday.”

  Sturgeon inhaled his mint. “Come again?”

  “Remember Stephanie Alberts? Redheaded lab tech from last year’s trouble over at Boston General?”

  Sturgeon nodded and sketched a set of curves in the air to indicate that he remembered her. She was hard to forget, and both of them had been burned by that case when her boyfriend—who was barely even a suspect—had beaten her into a coma.

  There had been a police detail outside the house where she was attacked and it hadn’t made a damn bit of difference. She’d still ended up in Boston General, hooked to more machines than Reid had ever seen.

  “Yeah, I remember her. The daughter was snatched? Why didn’t you call me?”

  Reid shrugged. “It was over quick enough. Uniforms from Patriot District found the girl across the street in a park.”

  “Then she just wandered off, right? No snatch.”

  “Looks that way,” Reid answered.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  Sturgeon knew him well. Reid nodded. “It doesn’t feel right. The kid was gone for a couple of hours and the aunt swears she checked the park right away when she disappeared. Kid’s not even four, so she couldn’t have gotten very far in any case…”

  “You ask Jilly?”

  Reid was surprised that Sturgeon remembered the little girl’s name when he hadn’t. But then again, Sturgeon had kids of his own. It was probably in the daddy manual that you had to remember other kids’ names.

  Too bad Reid’s old man hadn’t read that particular owner’s manual. Reid shook his head. “Kid doesn’t talk.”

  Sturgeon frowned. “No?”

  “The doctors say she’ll talk when she’s ready. The aunt made it sound like the parents’ marriage ended badly and slowed her down.” Reid wondered what messy meant. He hoped it hadn’t been abuse, though he’d seen enough of it over the years. “She was just starting to talk when Steph was hospitalized last year.”

  “Steph?” Sturgeon wrinkled an eyebrow.

  “Ms. Alberts. Anyway, questioning the kid was out, and Murphy over at Patriot didn’t think much of my suspicions.”

  “Leanne Murphy is a good cop,” Sturgeon commented, and Reid heard the subtext—If she doesn’t think there’s anything suspicious, she’s probably right.

  Reid shrugged. “So I took a walk around the park. Talked to a few neighbors.” And had gotten more information about Steph’s ex than he had about her daughter’s disappearance.

  He’d checked. Luis Monterro was still in prison on an embezzlement conviction. But the itch between his shoulder blades hadn’t gone away.

  “Any evidence of a snatch?” Sturgeon asked, “Or are you just looking for an excuse to sniff around a lady who’s already turned you down twice?”

  “I don’t sniff.” The only reason Sturgeon got away with comments like that was that he was a good partner and friend. Otherwise, Reid would’ve shot him a long time ago. “And no, there’s no evidence she was kidnapped.”

  “Then let’s get to work.” Still perched on Reid’s desk, Sturgeon reached over to his own and snagged a pile of torn notebook paper. He shuffled through. “Let’s see—we have cleanup work on those two Santos punks, mostly paperwork.” He tossed the scrap back on his desk. “A visit with D.A. Hedlund, and a lab run for the last batch of results.”

  Reid snagged the last piece of paper from Sturgeon’s hand and tucked it into his own neat notebook. “I’ll take the lab, you deal with Hedlund.”

  “Fine.” Sturgeon cut him a glance and grinned. “And say hi to her for me, will you?”

  Reid scowled and straightened his tie.

  THE WALLS were watching her. She was sure of it. She could feel him out there, somewhere, watching to make sure she didn’t make a mistake. Or was he watching the house instead? That was an even more terrifying thought. Though she’d insisted that Maureen keep Jilly inside for the day, he knew where they lived. How she walked to work.

  He knew.

  Stephanie glanced down at the blue latex-encased hands working their way through a plate of samples, and wondered whether they were still attached to her body. She hadn’t consciously told them to set up the experiment, but they seemed to be doing fine without her.

  What was she going to do? She looked quickly around the lab for the zillionth time, half expecting to find a stranger standing over by the ultra-low temp freezer, watching her. But there was nobody there.

  Molly was at her bench working on the last few experiments they’d need to finish before they announced the discovery of the Fenton’s Ataxia gene—a coup for their boss Genie Watson, whose best friend had died of the disease.

  Terry was at the computer, his Adam’s apple bobbing now and again as he struggled with the last part of his dissertation. Though a laboratory genius, Terry was a disaster at putting things into words. Normally, Steph would’ve been at the computer with him, helping make the science into language. But today she was frozen at her bench, afraid that the watcher would interpret the least social contact as betrayal.

  I’ll send her back in pieces.

  She glanced out past the reception area, to where the lab leaders’ offices were dark. Genie and Nick were at a two-week genetics conference in Hawaii. Steph wished they were around. After everything they’d been through the year before, which had culminated with Nick subduing the murderous madman, Steph thought they would know what to do.

  But then again,
the lab leaders would probably insist on going to the police, and that wasn’t an option.

  There was no way Steph was endangering her child or her aunt by making yet another catastrophic error in judgment. She was going this one alone. She had no choice.

  Beep-beep…beep-beep…beep-beep.

  She glanced at her lab timer, a sophisticated clock that allowed her to monitor up to ten different experiments at once. Today, there was only one display in action, and it was blinking 00:00.

  The Makepeace film was ready for processing.

  Glancing around one more time, still convinced that she was being watched, Steph collected the freezer cassette from the counter where she’d let it defrost. Be a match, she prayed, though she feared it wasn’t.

  Normally, DNA gels didn’t need to be frozen down with their films, but since one of the samples in this experiment had been badly degraded seminal fluid from the little girl’s rape kit, Steph had needed to intensify the radioactive signal before she could see the results. Freezing the trapped radioactivity at minus eighty slowed the particles down long enough for them to bounce off a reflective screen and pass through the X-ray film a second time, effectively doubling the signal.

  Ignoring the bite of cold metal through the thin latex gloves, Steph lugged the lightproof film cassette to the developer room and tried not to look back over her shoulder as she stepped into the hall.

  Last year, Genie had been attacked inside the black, close room. She’d been badly beaten and left for dead. Though the space had been cleaned and repainted since, going through the revolving door and hearing it rubba-thump behind her still gave Steph the willies, particularly today. What if he came in while she was developing the film? She’d be trapped.

  The light lock gaped at her like a screaming black mouth, and she stepped into it on unsteady legs and let it roll shut behind her. When nothing sprang out of the darkness to grab her, she processed the clammy film as quickly as possible and escaped back into the lighted hallway. She snatched the processed X-ray film from the delivery port before it was completely dry.

  And cursed sharply. Hopelessly.

  At the other end of the hall, one of the techs looked up at her oath. “Everything okay, Steph?”

  “Sure, Jared. Everything’s fine,” she answered automatically as her brain raced.

  Make sure the Makepeace DNA is a positive match.

  “Everything’s fine,” she repeated to herself just in case saying it made it true.

  But it wasn’t fine.

  The Makepeace DNA wasn’t a match.

  What the hell was she going to do now?

  REID PAUSED in the elevator lobby of the thirteenth floor and buzzed to be let in. He remembered the first time he’d seen Boston General’s Genetic Research Building, and the big, hulking machines and the crisp, white-coated people that moved among them. It looked like something out of one of the science-fiction movies he’d watched as a kid when there wasn’t a cops-and-robbers flick playing.

  But this wasn’t science fiction. It was real. And in the nine months the Chinatown station had been subcontracting its DNA forensics out to the Watson/Wellington lab, their conviction rate had risen ten percent.

  Even D.A. Hedlund was grudgingly impressed.

  The door swung open automatically as someone buzzed him in from within the maze of corridors that wound through the thirteenth floor. And as he turned toward the Watson side of the labyrinth, Reid remembered the day he and Sturgeon had been called out for an assault and attempted rape on this very floor.

  Reid had been moved by the white-coated woman covered in blood and crumpled beneath a stainless-steel sink. He had been glad to see that Genie Watson was breathing and almost conscious when they carried her out of the tiny room on a stretcher. He had been annoyed at the number of feet that had tracked the blood evidence around the room, and he had been dreading the phone call he would have to make, canceling yet another date with Yvette. But then again, she’d been getting clingy. Making noises about commitment and—gulp—kids. He remembered thinking that maybe it wasn’t a bad thing he was canceling on her again. He’d pushed his way out of the developer room, turned toward a knot of murmuring white-coated technicians to begin the necessary round of questioning—and felt like he’d been shot point-blank in the chest while wearing a Kevlar vest.

  She was so tiny the lab coat swallowed her up and didn’t even hint at her figure. Her curly red hair was so vivid that it had looked out of place against all that sterile white, and her wide, worried eyes had looked like wet jade.

  Suddenly Yvette’s five-foot-ten seemed gargantuan, her expensive hair too blond and her clothing too tight and colorful. He hadn’t had the heart to tell Yvette about his waning desire for her, but she’d figured it out soon enough.

  “Detective Peters?”

  And there she was again. Dressed in a lab coat.

  He looked around. Somehow, his feet had brought him to Stephanie’s bench. She was standing, staring up at him with a sheaf of printouts clutched to her chest. The pages crinkled as her fingers tightened on them. They were already badly wrinkled, which was unusual for the military precision of the Watson lab.

  “Can I help you, Detective Peters? If not, I’m quite busy. I have work to catch up on from yesterday.” Though not quite rude, her tone certainly wasn’t friendly. Tension seemed to emanate from her in waves, and as he watched, her eyes slid to a shadowy corner of the lab.

  A tickle traveled across his left shoulder blade.

  Seeming convinced there was nothing in the shadows, she brushed past him. The starched white cotton of her lab coat feathered across the back of his hand, leaving a hot wave of arousal in its wake and reminding him that about a year ago he’d developed a thing for lab coats. For redheads wearing lab coats and nothing else…

  Test results, he reminded himself, you’re here for test results. Then, when he took in the tense set of her shoulders and the nervous darting of her eyes, his reasons for being there suddenly seemed less important than they had a moment ago. The tingle centered on his spine.

  Something was up.

  “How’s your daughter?” he asked casually. “Any ill effects from her field trip yesterday?”

  She flinched, as though fearing he knew something she didn’t, then shook her head. “Um, no. She seems fine. In fact, I think she’s come through this better than either Maureen or I. I’m still a basket case though, thinking of what might have happened, and if Maureen even lets her step foot outside the house today I’ll be surprised.”

  There was a quick tremble in her voice, and she fiddled with a mechanical pencil as she spoke, clicking the lead and then tapping the point on the hard lab bench until the fragile graphite snapped. Reid wondered whether that was all there was to it. Leftover nerves? Or something more?

  He didn’t have much experience with kids, but he’d heard the fierceness in Sturgeon’s voice once or twice when one of the guppies had been threatened in very minor ways. Stephanie had been so determinedly tough the day before he supposed she might be suffering the backlash.

  But if she looked over into the darkness next to that big machine one more time…

  “Are you okay?” he asked, jerking his head at the corner. “You seem nervous.”

  She shook her head in quick denial. “No—not nervous. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  He nodded slowly, not believing her for a second but still not sure whether her daughter’s disappearance had freaked her out or there was something else. “Okay, then.” He paused. Clearly today wasn’t a good day to ask her out for lunch. Then again, Reid thought, never would be a better time to ask her out—she had a kid, and Sturgeon’s success aside, no kid needed a cop around.

  So he shrugged, pushed aside the image of her wearing a lab coat, a pair of red high heels and nothing else, and said, “I need to pick up the latest DNA results for Sturgeon’s and my cases. That’d be Makepeace, Garcia and Roberts.” He knew it was careless of them to name their DNAs rat
her than numbering them so the results were blinded for the researchers, but really, what interest did a lab tech have in messing with police work?

  She shook her head and clutched the papers tighter to her chest. “They’re not ready yet.”

  That was not the answer he’d been looking for. “Not ready? What do you mean, not ready?” They needed those results for court dates, damn it. “Sturgeon got a message on his voice mail that they’d be finished this morning. Something go wrong?”

  The itch intensified.

  Stephanie shook her head. “You can have Garcia and Roberts, they’re all set.” She gestured at a pair of folders on her desk labeled with the names. “But the other isn’t finished yet.”

  An empty folder labeled Makepeace lay open on the desk. “What happened to it? Is there something wrong with the sample?” Please don’t let anything be wrong with the sample, he thought. D.A. Hedlund would have a cow and shifty, scummy Makepeace would walk on the one rape they’d managed to pin on him, out of a series of six.

  Though the links between the ex-con handyman and little Mae Wong’s rape were largely circumstantial, they’d been enough to arrest him and warrant the DNA sample. All they needed to get a conviction was a DNA match…but they needed that match. The case was a no-go without it.

  “Sorry,” she said, not looking sorry at all. “Technical difficulties. There was a problem with the thermocycling temperature, so the DNA didn’t amplify correctly and I couldn’t finish the test. I’ll rerun the experiment today and have the results later in the week, okay?”

  No, damn it. It wasn’t okay. Reid didn’t like the look in her eye, and he didn’t like that the test wasn’t done.

  “Steph?” Another tech’s voice interrupted, “Genie’s on the phone for you. She wants to talk about the last batch of sequencing.”

  Steph glanced from the lab phone and back to Reid, scowling as though she wished he would disappear. When he didn’t, she made an irritated noise and stalked over to talk to her boss.

  Reid couldn’t have asked for better timing. He’d have to thank Dr. Watson the next time he saw her…once he asked her what the hell was going on in her lab. After making sure Steph was busy on the phone and had her back to him, he shuffled through the two finished folders she’d given him. The proper paperwork was there—along with the computer printout of the scanned film results and the calculated probabilities for and against DNA matches. They were both matches, thank God. Reid only hoped they went three for three.