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.”
Chapter Two
The next morning, Stephanie awoke feeling as though she’d slept in a bed that was three sizes too small for her. When she glanced around at the animals and ruffles and felt the small, hot bump of her daughter beside her, she realized that was exactly what she’d done.
Then she remembered the rest of it and her stomach clenched like a fist.
“God!” She jolted in the bed and her hands flew to Jilly, grabbing up the sleepy girl and making sure she was really there.
Another child might have yelled in protest, but not this one. She just looked up at Steph with wide, worried eyes as if to say, What’s wrong this time? She’d lived through so much already—Luis’s rages, Steph’s tears, her time in the hospital after Roger…
What’s wrong this time? Jilly’s eyes asked, and Steph might have laughed, but she was afraid it would come out a scream, because everything was wrong.
Send her back to you in pieces, the dead dark voice whispered at the edge of her mind and it wasn’t until Jilly started to squirm that Steph realized she was clutching her daughter even tighter, as though a mother’s arms would be enough protection.
At the thought of protection, her mind jumped immediately to the sight of Detective Peters lounging in her kitchen doorway the day before, bulging arms crossed over the wide chest of the cutoff sweatshirt. Snug, faded denim and a gun tucked at the small of his back. Amber, knowing eyes that had changed when they’d looked at the child.
No cops or both the kid and the old woman are dead. No. She couldn’t call him. She’d been warned and she’d learned her lesson about trusting men. She was on her own, and the only way to be sure of Jilly’s safety was for her to go to work and run the experiment. The voice had said so.
The Makepeace samples were already prepared, taken from the rape kit Detective Sturgeon had delivered a week ago. She’d seen it in the papers, though she tried not to read anything about the lab cases she handled for the police. The headline had jolted her, Suspect Charged in Chinatown Child Rape, and she’d read several paragraphs of lurid details before realizing that the rapist’s DNA was sitting in her lab fridge.
Now she wondered.
Make sure the Makepeace DNA is a positive match. Or else. Did the voice have reason to believe it wouldn’t be a match? Did he know for sure that Makepeace hadn’t done it? Because he had raped the little girl himself? If so, that was even more reason to protect Jilly any way she could. Steph shivered in the warm air of a summer morning. She saw a yawning chasm opening up in front of her, a choice she’d never thought to make.
If the DNA matched, Jilly and Maureen were safe. If it didn’t…
The alternative was unthinkable. Therefore, there was only one solution.
The DNA would match. She’d make sure of it.
DOWN THE STREET from Boston General Hospital, Sturgeon’s voice cut across the usual din of the Chinatown Station. “Hi, honey. I’m home!”
Reid let his feet slide off the edge of the desk and thump to the floor while he glared at his partner. “Go suck on a peppermint, Sturgeon,” he said, but he didn’t really mean it.
Fifty-something, jowly and slightly pop-eyed, Reid’s partner bore an unfortunate resemblance to his animal namesake. He was also one of the sharpest men in Chinatown, and Reid had been honored when the veteran detective had partnered him seven years earlier.
Sturgeon pulled one of the candies from the breast pocket of his already-rumpled suit and held it out. At Peters’s headshake, he shrugged, unwrapped the pinwheel with a deft one-handed flick, and popped it in his mouth.
“You have a good day off?” he asked around the peppermint.
Reid shrugged. “It was fine. You?” He didn’t need to ask. If it’d been a lousy day, Sturgeon would be crunching the candy with a vengeance. The rate at which he devoured mints was a pretty good barometer of his mood.
“Took Jennie and the grandkids to that water park in New Hampshire. They’ve got this great new slide that shoots you down the hill almost in freefall.” Sturgeon’s eyes took on a faraway, happy look. “The kids loved it, and while we were standing in line this pretty blonde lost her bikini top on the way down.” He grinned. “Jen tried to act mad that I looked, but later that night she gave me this reenactment…” Sturgeon trailed off and Reid held up a hand.
“Enough! No more, please. I’m begging you!”
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
