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
