The Baby Mission

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Warrick, this is my case just as much as it is yours. Now just give me a few minutes to get some things together so I can take the baby over to my mother’s. I can be there in—” she realized she didn’t have enough information to make a time estimate “—where are you?”

  “I’m still at the field office. But C.J., there’s no need—”

  The microwave bell went off. She opened the door, then drew out the arm that was supporting her baby just far enough to test the temperature of the milk on her wrist. Perfect. Unlike this conversation.

  “Yes, there is a need,” she insisted. “I have a need.” Moving the chair away from the table with her foot, she sat down, then shifted the baby onto her lap. Cradling her daughter to her, she began feeding the infant, all the while never losing an ounce of her indignation. “Damn it, Warrick, I’m still the same partner you always had.”

  “No, you’re not.” His voice was low, steely. Unmovable. “You’re someone’s mother now.”

  That didn’t warrant the preferential treatment. “And as someone’s mother, I want to catch this bastard before he robs some other mother of her child.” She smiled at her daughter, keeping her own voice calm so as not to frighten the baby. But it wasn’t easy when her temper was flaring this way. “Now stop treating me as if I was made of porcelain and give me the courtesy of waiting for me to get there.”

  Soft tone or not, he knew C.J. well enough to know she was mad as the proverbial wet hen. “I’m not sure I want to do that now. You sound like you’re breathing fire.”

  “You bet I’m breathing fire,” she said between clenched teeth, her smile never wavering. “I worked long and hard to get here and I’m not about to give it up because you suddenly feel the need to treat me with kid gloves. I wouldn’t treat you any differently if you had a baby.”

  She heard him laugh. Even though she was angry, the sound rippled against her ear, undulating through her. Did postpartum syndrome include hallucinations?

  “If I had a baby, the world would treat me differently.”

  The baby was chugging away at the bottle, draining it like a trouper. At this rate, C.J. estimated, she would double her size in no time.

  “Very funny. Now let me get off the phone and do what I have to do. And you’d better be waiting for me when I get there or I swear I will fillet your skin off your body when I get my hands on you.”

  She heard him laugh again. “Love it when you talk dirty like that. Okay, I’ll wait. Just don’t take too long.”

  C.J. hung up. The bottle was empty. She put the baby over her shoulder and just before she began burping her, she hit the speed dial to call her mother and switched to speakerphone. Multitasking had become a way of life for her.

  She heard the phone being picked up. “Mom? Guess what—”

  Thirty-five minutes later, C.J. was dashing off the federal building elevator and into the task force room.

  Warrick was the only one in there. He looked up as she entered. “You look winded.”

  She was winded. There had been no need to pack up anything, her mother had spares of all the necessary items for the baby. She’d made the trip from her house to her mother’s in record time. For once, every light was with her. The hardest part was leaving the baby. You’d think it would get easier with each day, she thought, but it didn’t. Some days it just got harder.

  Still, C.J. waved away his observation. She was eager for news. “Never mind my wind, what have we got?”

  He handed her a picture that had come in over the fax less than an hour ago. “Sally Albrecht, twenty-three, blond, blue-eyed, strangled, poetically arranged, pink nail polish.”

  She nodded grimly, taking the photograph from him. This wasn’t the kind of thing any of them welcomed hearing. She studied it for a moment. Like all the others, the latest victim appeared as if she were sleeping.

  “Sounds like our boy’s gotten tired of the local area and is making his way up the coast.” Putting the fax down on her desk, she crossed to the map that had a tight little circle of pins on it. She’d been hoping that they could keep narrowing the circle, not widen it. Usually, serial killer victims were all over the map. This was supposed to make it easier for them. It didn’t.

  When she turned back from the map, she was frowning. “I don’t like it. This blows the whole theory to pieces that he’s a local guy.”

  “I know.” He’d signed out a Bureau vehicle in the last half hour. Ready to go, Warrick gave her one last chance to change her mind. “You sure you don’t want to stay home?”

  He was just trying to be kind, she told herself. She had to remember that and stop taking offense where none was intended. There was no doubt in her mind that if he had some personal reason impeding him, she’d be trying to get him to stay behind.

  C.J. nodded. “I’m sure. After my mother finished complaining that the Bureau doesn’t let me have a life, she was thrilled to have to watch the baby.”

  “I’ve got a company car waiting downstairs. Let’s go.”

  Walking through the office door first, Warrick didn’t bother holding it open. C.J. put her hand out in time to keep it from shutting on her. “Hey!”

  Warrick looked at her innocently. “You said not to treat you any differently from any of the other guys, remember?”

  She strode past him to the elevator and punched the down button. “I don’t recall you slamming the door in any of their faces.”

  “No slamming,” he pointed out. “Just every man for himself.”

  “Person,” she corrected as the elevator arrived and opened its doors. C.J. walked in ahead of him. “Every person for themselves.”

  Warrick followed her in and sighed. He pressed for the first floor. “I got a feeling this is going to be a long road trip.”

  Santa Barbara was approximately 150 miles north of the county that had previously been the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s stomping grounds. Ordinarily C.J. loved driving up the coast, but the unexpected rain with its gloom made the trip dreary.

  They’d flipped a coin, and Warrick had lost the toss. Taking the keys, he’d gotten behind the wheel of the midsize vehicle the Bureau had provided.

  C.J. settled back in her seat and stared straight ahead. The rain was almost mesmerizingly hypnotic, causing everything farther than twenty feet away to appear surreal.

  “You know, it’s funny, but I miss her.” She glanced at Warrick to see if he was laughing. He wasn’t. “When I’m on the job, I find myself missing her, and when I’m home, my mind keeps going back to the case.”

  That was the complaint of more than one special agent. He could feel the car beginning to climb. Warrick swallowed to relieve the pressure in his ears. “Welcome to the world of parenthood.”

  She laughed shortly, shifting in her seat. Rain made her restless. Or maybe it was this case. “How would you know?”

  He shrugged. “I read a lot.” Moving with the curve in the road, Warrick spared her a glance. “You know, Rodriguez could just as easily have come with me.”

  C.J. thought the man was a good agent, but he liked his weekends to himself. “Rodriguez is still in love. Leave him with his fiancée.”

  Driving was getting a little trickier. Warrick slowed their speed down to a careful thirty-five miles an hour. “Well, Culpepper isn’t in love.” Not the way the man liked to complain about his wife, although Warrick suspected that there was a measure of affection in the grousing. “I know he would have been more than happy to make the trip to Santa Barbara.”

  C.J. looked at him incredulously. “You telling me that you’d rather have Culpepper sitting here next to you than me?”

  For an optimistic woman, she had a habit of twisting his words to give them a darker meaning. “No, I’m telling you that it would have been okay for you to sit this one out.”

  C.J. wished he’d stop trying to make things easy on her. How could she feel like his equal if he kept insisting on spreading out his cloak for her so she could walk over the puddles without getting her
shoes dirty?

  “No,” she told him quietly, firmly, “it wouldn’t have.”

  “C.J. you’re a new mother—”

  Not that again. “Not so new,” she contradicted. “Sure, I’m a mother now, but I’m also a special agent with the FBI.” And that was very important to her. She’d had to buck not just her mother, but her father as well to get to where she was. And that didn’t begin to take in the male agents along the way who resented having a woman on equal footing with them. In many ways it was still a man’s world. “It’s who I am and I’m damn proud of it. I’ve just got to find the proper balance to this combination, that’s all. And you throwing up roadblocks all the time isn’t exactly helping.”

  What was the use? thought Warrick. Mules had nothing on C.J. He slowed down more as a car, traveling in the opposite direction, its tires plowing through large puddles, sent an even heavier shower of water their way. For a second the windshield was obscured. Rain brought out the nutcases, he thought, all driving as if they had something to prove.

  “I’m not throwing up roadblocks,” he told her. “And I thought I was helping.”

  “Think again.”

  They needed a break. His eyes on the road, Warrick switched on the radio. He wanted some music to take the place of their voices.

  She frowned at his selection and changed the station.

  He switched it back, then batted away her hand when she reached for the dial again. “I’m driving, I get to pick the music.”

  “I’m driving on the way back.”

  He didn’t bother looking her way. “Deal.”

  Crossing her arms in front of her, C.J. settled back in her seat again and watched the rain fight an endless skirmish with the windshield wipers.

  She could never get used to it, C.J. thought. The smell of the bleak, dismal area where the Medical Examiner did his gruesome work permeated her senses even as she tried to breathe through her mouth.

  The victim’s body had been taken to the morgue. The local coroner had held off on the mandatory autopsy until the FBI special agents could get there. The moment they’d gone to the sheriff’s office, the man had brought them here.

  C.J. tried to divorce herself from the fact that the body on the table had been a person with aspirations and dreams under a day ago. Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. She succeeded only marginally. Glancing at Warrick’s profile, she saw that it remained stoic. Didn’t he have any feelings?

  Steeling herself, she approached the table.

  “When was the time of death?” Warrick asked the heavyset man in the white lab coat.

  The M.E., a Dr. Hal Edwards, glanced at the notes on his clipboard before answering.

  “As near as I can place it, about fifteen hours ago.” He flipped the pages back in place, retiring the clipboard to a desk. “I hate to tell you this,” he looked from one to the other, “but you’ve probably figured it out already. Most of the clues have been washed away. It’s been raining steadily here for the past few hours.”

  “Who found the body?” C.J. asked. She resisted the desire to brush back the victim’s hair. There were no signs that the woman had suffered. She supposed that was some consolation to the victim’s family, although not much.

  “A jogger running for cover stumbled over her in the park. Called the police.”

  “Man?” Warrick wanted to know. It was not unheard of to have a killer take a life then pretend to be the first one on the scene to try to avoid suspicion.

  “Woman. They had to give her a sedative to calm her down.”

  C.J. couldn’t take her eyes off the girl’s face. “God, she looks like a kid.”

  “We’ve got a positive I.D.” the M.E. told her. “She was older than she looked.” This time he didn’t refer to his notes. The facts were still fresh. “Waitress in a local restaurant. No priors, decent girl. Engaged to be married. She looked like she fit the description of the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s victims, so we called you.” He recited the similarities. “Bruising around the neck, died of asphyxiation, pink nail polish.”

  C.J. carefully circled the girl, moving away from the M.E. The marks around the girl’s neck were dark, ugly. She could almost feel the killer’s hands around her own throat, literally choking the life out of her. C.J. shivered, looking down at the girl’s hand. Something nagged at her. She picked it up to examine it.

  The polish looked darker than the others had been. She looked closer.

  Putting the lifeless hand down again, C.J. raised her eyes to the other two occupants in the room. Both men were looking at her. “This isn’t his work.”

  The M.E took exception. He gestured toward the body. “The MO matches.”

  Warrick always teased her about her hunches, but 75 percent of the time C.J. was right. He’d learned to take her seriously. “You think someone else killed her?” C.J. nodded.

  “She was found the same way,” the M.E. pointed out. “On her back, hands folded around a rose. Choker around her neck.”

  That was it, she realized, what had bothered her when she looked at the fax the police had sent. “What kind of choker was it again?”

  Edwards referred to his clipboard, scanning through two pages before answering. “Cameo.”

  Warrick shook his head. “Our boy uses cheap costume jewelry. Pearls.” He glanced at C.J. “What made you realize this wasn’t our serial killer?”

  She held up the victim’s hand. “I think the nail polish is just a coincidence. It’s the wrong shade. More important than that, it’s chipped. Our killer puts it on after they’re dead.” Her expression was grim. “Not much chance of chipping then.”

  Placing the hand respectfully beside the body, she moved around to the victim’s feet. C.J. raised the sheet. “And also, it matches her toes. None of the others had painted toenails.” She draped the sheet back over the victim’s feet and looked up at the coroner. “I’m afraid it looks like you’ve got yourself an independent copycat murder, Dr. Edwards.”

  Chapter 8

  The rain was coming down harder, beating down on all sides of the car.

  C.J. looked at her partner as he carefully guided the vehicle. “Think whoever killed that girl is a groupie?”

  They’d gone back to the sheriff’s office after leaving the coroner and told the man their findings. Signing off on the case, they’d gotten back on the road within the hour, stopping only long enough to get something to go from a fast-food restaurant. The crumpled-up wrappers were now tucked inside the greasy paper bag on the floor behind her.

  Warrick’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Despite their earlier agreement about C.J. driving back, she had deferred to him. Much as it pained her to admit it, of the two of them, he was the better driver.

  It wasn’t easy holding his own against the weather, Warrick thought. The roads were tough to negotiate and getting tougher by the minute. Rather than let up as the weatherman had predicted, the rain was coming down progressively harder.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” There were a lot of reasons to make the murders appear similar. “Maybe just someone looking to kill Sally and throw the blame somewhere else.” He figured that was the most likely reason. The car kept swerving as the wind picked up. Keeping in his lane had become a monumental challenge. The lines were all but obliterated by the rain. “What I do think is that we’d better get ourselves an ark or get off this damn road. This stuff doesn’t look like it’s going to stop coming down.”

  C.J. frowned. Visibility was getting worse and worse as the windshield wipers, set on high, were clearly losing their battle with the rain. Except for precious single moments right after a pass, the rain had all but obscured the windshield.

  To back up his suggestion, he added, “I remember passing a motel just on the outskirts of the city. After that, there’s nothing for miles.” He looked at her. It was their only alternative, but he left it up to her. “What do you want to do?”

  “What I want to do is get home.” C.J. pressed her lips together, fr
ustrated. There was no way they were going to make it tonight. “But the sensible thing to do, I guess, is get a couple of rooms for the night and get an early start in the morning.”

  He nodded. He had slowed down considerably. The vehicle was barely crawling as it was. At this rate the trip would take more than twice the time.

  “The rain might not let up by morning, but at least there’ll be some light to help us see something.” Warrick slanted a quick glance at her before gluing his eyes back on the windshield. Not that it helped all that much. “No sense tempting fate.”

  They’d already avoided one near accident just after the fast-food restaurant. A big rig, going the opposite way, had swerved, taking up too much of the road. They’d had to quickly scramble to the side, into what would have been a dirt shoulder. Because of the rain, it had almost become a river of oozing mud. Her heart was still trying to recover from the scare.

  But weren’t they tempting fate in a different way, stopping at a motel like this?

  C.J. squelched her uneasiness. There was clearly no other sane choice. Besides, they were both adults, both sensible. In addition, they’d be in separate rooms. No reason to worry.

  A smear of lights broke across the right corner of the windshield. C.J. squinted.

  “There it is,” she said, “that’s the motel—I think.” At this point it was difficult to identify anything positively.

  “I see it.”

  Warrick slowed the vehicle even more, practically inching his way over as he searched for the entrance to the motel’s parking lot. Finding it, he traveled approximately two feet before abruptly stopping the car.

  “What’s wrong?” C.J. asked.

  “Is it me, or is that parking lot a lake?” From what he could make out, the center of the lot appeared to be underwater. “I think we’d better stop right here.” Warrick pulled the vehicle over to the side as far as he could.

  C.J. realized they had no choice but to get out and make a run for it to the rental office which, according to a neon sign, was directly beneath an arrow and off to one side.