“I’m so glad you’re here.” There were stifled sobs in Maureen’s eyes and voice, and the hand on his arm trembled. The two of them had met across Stephanie’s hospital bed a year ago, and the older woman looked no less frantic now than she had when her niece had been brought to the hospital, badly beaten by a man Reid should’ve gotten to first. “I only took my eyes off Jilly for a moment. Not even that. More like a split second, and she was gone.”
She ushered him to the back of the house, where Stephanie was sitting with pictures of a dark-haired child heaped in front of her on the kitchen table. In the most recent of the photos, the girl looked about three or four years old.
“We only need a couple,” Officer Murphy from Patriot said, and the woman at the table nodded jerkily. The cut-glass light above the table shone down on her, picking out the russet highlights in her curly hair and placing her lowered face in soft shadow.
Not for the first time, Stephanie Alberts reminded Reid of the Renaissance paintings down at the Museum of Fine Art—all porcelain skin and delicate curves. He’d seen paintings like that when he was a boy, before the old man had found out about the art class and hit the roof.
Since then, there had been no time for art appreciation, and very little time for Reid to think of Stephanie Alberts.
But he had anyway.
“Of course. Silly of me.” She stirred the photographs with her index finger.
“Steph? Detective Peters is here.” Maureen tugged Reid into the room. Stephanie’s head snapped up. Her eyes immediately filled with relief and more tears and Reid felt a rush of uncharacteristic emotion.
Especially uncharacteristic for a cop who’d been repeatedly turned down by the woman in question.
He wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her everything would be okay. He wanted to offer her his shoulder to cry on, and stroke her back until she was done. He wanted to hold her hand the way he’d done those four long days it had taken her to wake up in the hospital.
But he didn’t. Instead, he looked away from the woman who’d told him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to be involved with him, turned to Officer Murphy and said, “I know I don’t belong here, but it’s my day off. Cut me some slack and let me help. I’m a family friend.”
Leanne Murphy’s canny eyes cut from Peters to Stephanie and back again before she nodded. “We can use all the help we can get.”
STEPH WASN’T SURE why it had seemed so imperative that she call Detective Peters. She barely knew the man. They’d met at her work, when the Watson lab at Boston General’s Genetic Research Building had been the scene of several crimes.
Steph’s boss, Dr. Genie Watson, had been brutally attacked in the lab darkroom. At first, it had seemed a random—though horrific—event, but a string of “accidents” and a car bombing had soon followed. Genie had been the target of a madman intent on protecting an inheritance he wasn’t genetically heir to.
It had been during the investigation that Steph met Detective Peters. Even then, she’d been uncomfortable around the man. She’d just begun an intense relationship with a pharmaceutical rep named Roger, and it seemed disloyal for her to notice Peters’s piercing eyes, broad shoulders and long, swinging strides. So she’d resisted the attraction and focused on Roger—and she’d nearly paid with her life when it turned out that her new boyfriend was using her to gain access to the lab.
One dark night, Roger had taken Steph’s keycard, her self-respect, and nearly her life. Then he’d gone after his real target—Genie Watson.
Genie had survived, thanks to the protection—and love—of Dr. Nick Wellington, her former adversary. Now her husband. Steph had survived, too, though she’d been in the hospital for several weeks recovering from the beating.
Peters had been there, she remembered, sitting by her bedside, his eyes hooded with dark thoughts. Part of her had wanted to reach out to him, but she’d forced herself to turn away. Later, she’d refused his calls. He was a reminder of a time she’d rather forget. A near-fatal misjudgment that had proven again that she had abysmal taste in men and was better off alone.
She wasn’t even sure why she’d kept his card, but it had leapt into her hand after the first wave of police questioning had finished and the officers had begun the search. When he’d arrived, for a moment, she’d felt as though everything was going to be okay. He’d see to it, though he didn’t look quite like the Detective Peters she remembered.
She was used to seeing him in a suit and tie. Even when he’d visited her in the hospital, he’d been wearing work clothes, with his tie loosened and his top button undone. But her call had interrupted his day off, and Stephanie realized something she’d only suspected before… Detective Reid Peters, handsome enough in a suit and tie, was downright devastating in casuals.
The jeans and cutoff sweatshirt didn’t detract from the commanding impact of his wide shoulders or the military-straight posture that stretched him to a full six-three. The soft shirt clung to bulges and ridges that the suits had covered, and Steph wondered how she could have forgotten the striking contrast between his mid-brown crew cut and the light hazel, almost gold of his eyes.
Then she wondered how she could be thinking of such things when her daughter was missing.
Peters asked Officer Murphy, “How long has the girl been gone?”
Having noticed the female gleam that had entered Murphy’s eye when Reid arrived, and hating herself for caring, Stephanie snapped, “Almost two hours. Maureen called me at two-ten and it’s close to four now.” The reality of it closed in and all thoughts of the handsome detective fled when Steph stared down at the photographs spread across her kitchen table. It was four. Jilly should be sitting there eating crackers and peanut butter. “She missed her snack.”
Tears threatened again, and she cursed herself for all of it. Faintly, she heard Maureen sobbing in the living room and her head throbbed where the hairline crack had long since knit. She wished that once, just once, she had someone other than Aunt Maureen to lean on.
Sometimes they were barely enough to prop each other up.
There was a sudden commotion at the front of the house. Feet pounded on the upstairs floorboards and excited voices shouted outside. Officer Murphy grabbed the muted radio at her belt, turned up the volume, and barked a question. Steph couldn’t understand the response, but she knew what the sudden tension in the room must mean.
For better or worse, they’d found Jilly.
Her stomach heaved and she tasted bile as a parade of macabre images flashed through her mind, courtesy of every forensics program she’d ever watched on TV. She tried to make her legs carry her outside. Tried to ask the question, but was afraid to because until someone said otherwise, she could believe that Jilly was okay. She had to be okay. Steph didn’t think she could bear it if anything happened to Jilly. The little girl was her lifeline. Her life. A perfect little person who’d been created by an imperfect union.
Steph felt Peters behind her, and drew an ounce of strength from his solid presence, which was more familiar and welcome than it should have been. He asked the question while her stomach tied itself up in knots.
“Is the girl okay?”
Steph might have found it odd that Peters hadn’t said Jilly’s name once since he’d arrived, but that thought disappeared the instant Officer Murphy smiled. “They found her across the street in that little park. She’s okay.”
Thank God! was Steph’s only thought as her feet carried her out the door to her daughter.
A SCANT HOUR later the Patriot cops were ready to pack it up and call it a day, but Reid wasn’t so sure.
“Something about this just doesn’t feel right,” he insisted. “You’re telling me that a three-and-a-half-year-old girl wanders across the street, down a half mile of paths, and nobody