LITMIR.BIZ

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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 mouth and managed a whispered, “I understand.”

      There was a satisfied silence, then a murmur in the background. The voice returned. “Oh yeah, and 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

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