Secret Witness

by Jessica Andersen

  “We think he thinks his DNA is on file somewhere, which means he was arrested for a crime that would call for a DNA sample to be taken.” She cross-checked the markers from the Makepeace sample against an obscure database run by an upstate New York college. No match.

  “That’s not much help,” Reid mused. As he paced the confines of the small room, he reminded Steph of a caged animal. Feral and primitive. All long, hard muscles and sleek skin. Stop it, she told herself fiercely and tried to pay attention to what he was saying. “…takes DNA samples for most felonies at this point, so he could’ve been arrested for most anything.”

  The sound of the lobby buzzer interrupted them. Steph reached for the Admit button beside the computer-room door, but Reid held up a hand. “I’ll get it.”

  He drew his gun and went to answer the door. Steph shuddered at the reminder that locks or no, police protection or no, she was still in grave danger. She thought of Jilly and was glad she and Maureen were far away with Mortimer to protect them.

  She thought of Reid and shivered again, knowing that it was foolish to want him, and wanting him just the same.

  REID RETURNED to the computer room with Sturgeon right behind him. He took one look at Stephanie sitting at the computer in her oversized white lab coat and felt his temperature spike.

  He didn’t want a kid or a family, but he wanted her.

  “Any ideas?” Sturgeon asked.

  Reid shook his head, reminding himself to think of the job. The job, not the woman. “I think the DNA is played out for now.” He saw Steph’s shoulders slump and scowled. “We’ll have to hit the pavement and turn over a few rocks in Chinatown. There’s enough bad blood in the neighborhood that somebody will turn if we lean hard enough.”

  It sounded good in theory, but the detectives both knew the process could take weeks or months. And they both agreed that the escalating pattern of violence suggested that Stephanie and her family had mere days before the perp tried something else. What had begun as a simple blackmail had evolved into an obsession. The DNA evidence was an excuse for him now, nothing more.

  The man on the phone simply wanted to hurt Stephanie and her daughter. Kill them for the joy of it. The sport. They had become his.

  Reid consciously relaxed his fingers, which ached from being balled into tense fists.

  He heard her whisper, “Bad blood.”

  “What?” Sturgeon perked up. Reid noticed that Steph’s shoulders had straightened and a spark of battle had entered her eyes.

  “Bad blood,” she repeated. “You said something about bad blood, right?”

  Reid nodded. “Most of the locals are related somehow, and those that aren’t are feuding with each other at any given moment.”

  She grinned suddenly. “I have an idea. Give me five minutes.”

  The detectives crowded closer as she pulled up a search engine and changed several boxes from 1.0 to 0.5. She exited the code and got back to a main screen. “Right now, we’re looking for a name, right? Or at least a direction.”

  “Right,” Reid said, getting an inkling of what she had in mind. He felt the first glimmer of a tingle in his chest. It was the opposite of the itch on his back. The tingle meant things were starting to go right.

  Maybe.

  Fingers flying, she entered the data from the rape kits. “So I’ve adjusted the search parameters to give us any names that match by fifty percent or better, rather than the hundred percent we usually search by.”

  “What will that do?” Sturgeon bit down on a fresh candy and tucked the crinkling wrapper into his pocket.

  “Well,” she replied as she hit Enter and sat back while the computer whirred and said Processing. “If everyone’s related to everyone around here, maybe family members of his have been uploaded into the local database for having committed crimes of their own.”

  Reid asked, “Is that legal?” at the same time Sturgeon asked, “Why just the local database?”

  Steph grimaced. “Legally, it’s borderline. Not all of this type of work has been reliably legislated yet, and that’s why we’re just searching the local database. First off, if he’s related, chances are he’s local. And second,” The computer began uploading a new screen and all three of them leaned forward in anticipation, “The local database is administered through you guys. I’m not brave enough to mess with a federal search engine.”

  The graphics loaded slowly. As they waited, Reid asked, “Couldn’t you lose your certification if anyone found out?”

  She slid her eyes toward him and he felt the punch low in his gut. “Do you think I give a rat’s ass about that when Maureen’s and Jilly’s lives are at stake?”

  Reid was saved from answering when three lines popped onto the screen.

  Lucas Reynolds—.58 match.

  Sinclair Bott—.53 match.

  Simon Bott—.53 match.

  And all of a sudden, they had names.

  Reid felt the anger flare and swore in that moment to personally track down each one of them and hurt them for daring to go after Stephanie.

  Daring to go after his woman.

  STEPH YELLED after his retreating back, “Where are you going?”

  “Get back here,” Sturgeon barked. “Those names aren’t the guy, remember?”

  She was surprised. Of the two of them, Reid had always been more interested in the genetics being done at the lab. She would’ve expected him to grasp the concept of her search before Sturgeon did, but it had been Reid running out the door with a murderous set to his jaw and a sharp gold gleam of anger in his eyes.

  She’d never thought of Detective Peters as impulsive.

  But perhaps Reid was. And perhaps his feelings for her went deeper than she thought. Deeper than he thought—or would admit.

  “Yeah, right. Sorry.” He retook his seat, pulling it close enough to the computer that Stephanie could feel his heat at her back, feel the anger spiked with frustration. Or was that her frustration? “Relatives. I forgot. So all three of these guys are related to our perp?”

  Steph shifted screens and tapped an inquiry. “Not necessarily. We’re playing a game of averages. On average, parents, children and siblings share fifty percent of their DNA. But they can also randomly share stretches of DNA with unrelated people. Since we’re only looking at data from thirteen markers, it’s possible that our bad guy shares half of them with an unrelated person just by chance.”

  The computer spat out three sheets of paper as Reid asked, “So how can we tell which is which? Guess?”

  Steph told herself to ignore his tone. She felt it too—the itchy, twitchy restlessness that said they were getting closer to the answer. The shifting heat that said they were getting closer to each other when they should have been moving apart.

  It was too much. And too little.

  “No,” she replied. “No guessing. Now we back it down a level and look at the markers themselves. If our bad guy is the parent or child of one—or more of these guys,” she said, thinking of the two men on the list with identical surnames, “they will share one copy of each of the thirteen markers, right?”

  Sturgeon cocked an eyebrow. “And if they’re brothers?”

  “Then we have to work the averages,” Steph admitted. She pulled the sheets from the printer tray and compared them to the DNA samples they’d been flogging all morning. She whistled.

  “Got something?” Reid leaned over her shoulder and she felt his breath on a previously undiscovered sensitive spot behind her ear. She trembled slightly, and heard his breath catch. Felt the temperature in the computer room skyrocket.

  And focused harder on the printouts. “Yes, I’ve got something.” She set aside the printout labeled Reynolds and placed the other two side by side.

  Sinclair and Simon Bott’s markers matched exactly. They were a hundred percent identical. And when she placed the DNA profiles from the rape kits beside the Botts’ printouts, it was obvious that they shared one copy of each marker.

  “I thought you
said that a hundred-percent DNA match only happened if it was the same person,” Reid challenged.

  Steph shook her head. “There’s one case where that’s not true. Identical twins.” She tapped Simon and Sinclair’s printouts. “These two are identical twins, and one of them is either the father or the son of the voice on the phone.”

  They got it. Sturgeon was already on the phone.

  Reid leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re amazing.” Then he stood and reached for his own phone. “Let’s get to work.”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Reid cursed and slapped the phone shut. He shook his head. “Sinclair’s kids have juvenile records, but we’re going to have to petition for access. I don’t think I explained the fifty percent thing very well.” He paced the little room, scratching the middle of his back with a pencil. “We don’t have that much time.”

  And that, more than anything, told Steph that he felt it, too. They were running out of time. Something bad was going to happen.

  She had a sudden urge to call Mortimer’s cabin yet again and make sure Maureen and Jilly were safe. Instead, she leaned forward to readjust the search parameters for the local database and bump them back up to a hundred percent match. And paused.

  Bott.

  Reid’s head came up, and she wondered whether she had made a noise. Or perhaps he was as attuned to her as she was to him. Scary thought. “Find something else?”

  “No. Not exactly.” She exited the local database and brought up the lab’s main menu.

  “Well, what exactly?” Sturgeon asked, closing his own phone.

  She was aware of the men crowding back around her, wondered if they expected a miracle. Well, she just might be able to deliver. “When we first started subcontracting for you, I ran a set of samples on a man named Bott.” She felt a frisson of excitement as she found the proper file.

  “Sinclair Bott’s samples might have come through here,” Sturgeon remarked. “He’s upstate for aggravated assault.”

  Steph shook her head. “Not Sinclair. Not Simon either. Aha!” She found the gel number listed in the film database. The results weren’t computerized because there had been no reason to scan them. DNA wasn’t uploaded if the defendant was found not guilty. “Derek Bott. Charged with date rape.”

  Sturgeon nodded. “Right. According to Chinatown station records, Simon Bott’s been out of circulation for six years and doesn’t have any kids. Sinclair has five boys, one of which—Derek—beat a rape count earlier this year when he claimed to have had consensual sex with the girl earlier in the evening and had an alibi for the time of the attack. The girl backed out at the last minute and the case was dropped.”

  The detectives followed Steph out of the computer room and into the hall outside Genie Watson’s office, where the majority of the archived films were stored in long gray filing cabinets. The smell of charred plastic and cleaning solution was more pronounced out here, and Steph thought briefly of the scorched wreck that used to be her desk. Thought of her daughter and aunt. She glanced at the retrieval number and slid open the appropriate drawer.

  “So if you’ve run Derek Bott’s DNA before, why didn’t his name come up on any of the searches?” Reid asked.

  She pulled the film out and held it up to the light, as though she might be able to tell right then and there if he was the one. Then she snorted at the fancy. They were just black bars on a gray piece of film.

  But if they matched the other films back at the desk she’d appropriated from Jared…

  “He wasn’t convicted,” Sturgeon pointed out. Steph nodded.

  “Exactly. We’re lucky the experiment was run here and that I remembered the name.”

  “In other words,” Reid followed the information to its logical conclusion as they marched through to the Wellington lab. “Our access to this DNA data is illegal, unethical and completely inadmissible in court.”

  Steph slapped the films on the light box. “Yeah. Got a problem with that?”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and scowled. “No,” he said. “No problem at all until it’s time for a warrant or a conviction.”

  “Just get him away from me and my family,” she said as she flicked on the fluorescent bulb of the light box. “That’s all I care about.”

  Black bars sprang to life against transparent gray film and Reid cursed bitterly. Triumphantly. The name Derek Bott was written across the top of the new film in Genie’s familiar MD scrawl, but it could just as well have read Wong, or Moreplease.

  Because the markers were identical.

  “Let’s go get him,” Reid said.

  Sturgeon grinned fiercely. “Right behind you.”

  Reid turned to her and she saw his eyes blaze with determination. “Engage the night locks behind us and wait here, okay? I’ll call when there’s news and I’ll put a uniform in the lobby.” Steph nodded numbly.

  Hope that this would end it all warred with fear that Reid might be hurt and lodged like a ball in her throat. She felt tears press, but willed them back. Felt words hover but couldn’t voice them. Wanted to kiss him good luck but didn’t have the nerve.

  Wanted to kiss him goodbye but didn’t have the heart.

  So she locked the door behind the detectives and sat down at Jared’s desk to wait. When the phone rang, she let the machine pick it up.

  The heavy breathing lasted a long time before he giggled and hung up.

  Stephanie put her face in her hands and wept.

  Chapter Ten

  Normally, Reid didn’t mind waiting for all the pieces to be in place. Right now, it was driving him insane. He wanted this done. Now.

  “If this was the Old West, we could just go in, shoot the place up and be done with it,” he snarled as he shifted position in Sturgeon’s wife’s minivan for the fifth time in as many minutes. “Instead we’re stuck here waiting.”

  “Look, do you need to go to the bathroom or something?” Sturgeon growled in his best if-I-have-to-stop-this-car-you’ll-be-sorry voice. “Because either go take a walk and leave me in peace or sit down, shut up and stop squirming. We have zero probable cause that we can go on record with, so we have to wait for the go-ahead.”

  Which meant hoping the others could rustle up a reason to bring Bott in for questioning that had nothing to do with his father’s DNA. Until then, they were stuck making sure Bott stayed away from Stephanie and her family.

  Sighing, Sturgeon returned to watching the once lovely, now slightly seedy place across the street from them. The faded green house squatted on a bare patch of ground between two hulking brick apartment buildings. At the border between Chinatown and the Theater District, a few of these neighborhoods persisted in spite of the high-crime, low-income flavor.

  Or perhaps because of it.

  “I’m not squirming,” said Reid, and defiantly uncrossed his legs and crossed them again. “I think I’m getting hives from being in the mommymobile. If we had to wait, why couldn’t we at least have used my car?”

  He knew the complaint sounded suspiciously like a whine. Perhaps it was a function of the minivan. Or perhaps it was something else.

  Something itchy and hot with an unfamiliar sensation running through it that didn’t feel quite like anger. Didn’t feel quite like lust. But certainly felt like something complicated and not at all welcome in Reid’s life.

  “Because this blends into the area better,” Sturgeon replied. He was right. The few cars parked along the narrow road were an odd blend of SUVs and junkers. “And if Bott’s been watching Stephanie’s place, he probably knows your car.”

  Reid couldn’t argue with that. He glanced at his watch. Still five-fifteen. “There’s a good chance that District Attorney Hedlund has gone home for the night without getting our warrant.”

  “Patience,” Sturgeon cautioned. “This is tricky. We had no legal right to access Sinclair Bott’s DNA, and since Derek was cleared of the date-rape charge, his data should’ve been destroyed. Richard is going to have to do some tap d
ancing to even get us the warrant. Have faith.”

  “Sorry,” Reid muttered. “I’m fresh out of that.” He shifted on the cushy seat and wrinkled his nose at the smell of graham crackers and apple juice. “Give me a mint, will you?”

  Sturgeon just slid him a look and passed one over. “Relax. Stephanie’ll be okay.”

  “Did I say I was worried about her?” Reid snapped back. “Of course she’ll be fine. Her and the kid both.” He would see to it if it killed him. Then he’d leave her to find the man of her dreams—the one who’d be a father to the kid and the lover Steph wanted.

  Reid relaxed the fist he’d made at the thought of Stephanie in another man’s bed. At the thought of the kid sleeping in another man’s lap.

  He hated the guy already.

  “The kid’s name is Jilly.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Reid shot back. “Of course I know that. I just…” He trailed off. He just what? He just didn’t want to use her name because that made her more real? Made her more vulnerable to the awful things human beings did to each other?

  Or because the child was the first, last and best reason he couldn’t chase after Stephanie? Because no kid deserved a cop for a father.

  Sturgeon’s cell phone rang. “Sturgeon.” Reid’s partner paused to listen, then nodded into the phone. “Got it. Thanks for trying.”

  Reid groaned when Sturgeon hung up. “D.A. Hedlund couldn’t get the search warrant, could he?”

  “No. We’re going to have to bring Derek in for questioning and hope he gives us enough to hold him on.” Sturgeon shrugged. “Couldn’t really expect anything more, honestly.”

  But deep down, Reid had hoped for more. He’d hoped for a warrant that would allow him to toss Bott’s mangy house, break a few dishes, maybe even slash a cushion or two before they dragged his scrawny ass down to Chinatown for questioning. Because when Bott messed with Stephanie and her family, he messed with Reid Peters. It was as simple as that.