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
