Jessica Andersen - Secret Witness

When he glanced pointedly at the pepper spray, she shrugged. “I don’t usually work this late, and it was so deserted, and the phone kept ringing—” She broke off. “Anyway, I’m very sorry I tried to spray you. Lucky for both of us it didn’t work. Although…” She frowned. “If you’d been anyone else I’d have been in trouble.”

He bent and picked up the offending canister. “You forgot to flip the safety off.” He demonstrated. “See?” Then he tossed it back to her, not caring to ask whether she had a permit. He’d rather she have it than not, given the neighborhood they both worked in.

Now that there was no longer a body obstructing their path, the elevator doors whooshed shut. Irritated with both of them—and particularly with the fact that he could practically taste her on his lips though they’d never kissed, Reid jabbed the button marked Lobby before he turned on her. “What’s going on, Stephanie? What’s wrong? You can tell me. I’m your friend.”

He meant it. He wanted to help. He hadn’t even told Sturgeon about the Makepeace DNA. He’d said only that it was delayed.

Surprisingly, she snorted. “Yeah, and I have great taste when it comes to choosing guys to place my trust in.” She leaned back in the elevator car and crossed her arms. “Why are you here, Detective Peters? Checking on your test results again? I told you I’d have them in a few days.”

Reid thought of her embezzling ex-husband Luis. He thought of the ex-boyfriend who’d used her to gain access to the Watson lab and almost killed her when she was no longer useful. How could he possibly say, but I’m different?

And was he really so different? He carried a gun. He knew how to disappear in Chinatown and how to find information down by Boston Harbor. He dreamed of blood and of a little girl’s hollow, dead eyes, and when he woke all he wanted to do was curse and hit something like his old man used to do.

She was right. She shouldn’t trust him. He wasn’t any different than the others. But he still had a job to do.

The doors slid open. It was the end of the line.

She was out in a flash, but he caught her by the arm and tried not to think he’d touched more soft female flesh in the previous two minutes than in the prior year.

He steered her toward the big revolving doors at the front of the building, though she’d been headed for the back exit. “I thought I’d walk you home.” He could make sure she made it safely. Make sure Maureen and the kid were okay.

Make that damn itch go away.

She balked. “You needn’t bother, Detective Peters. I’ve been getting to and from work for several years now. I know the way.”

“How about I come over for coffee then?”

“No.” She tried edging around him toward the back exit again, but he held firm and sighed. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

“We could have coffee down at the station, but I’m sure yours is much better. What do you say?”

As he had long suspected, Stephanie Alberts was anything but stupid. “A threat, Detective? On what basis?”

He touched a hand to the tender spot on his cheekbone. What the hell did she carry in that purse, anyway? “Assaulting a detective, for one.” Seeing she was not inclined toward sympathy, he finally said, “And tampering with evidence, Stephanie.” Her face drained of color and she swayed. For a quick moment he thought she might faint.

But she didn’t. She narrowed her eyes. “And just what do you mean by that?”

So she was going to tough it out. “I saw the Makepeace film on your desk. The markers didn’t line up. The DNA isn’t a match. You’re deliberately obstructing my investigation and I want to know why.”

“Oh, and you’re an expert at reading DNA fingerprints now, are you?”

Truth or bluff? Reid wasn’t sure he could tell any more. He shook his head. “Of course not, but Dr. Watson explained them to me once and they seemed pretty easy. Either the bars line up or they don’t.”

Her lovely jade eyes narrowed even further. “Ever hear of an artifact, Doctor Peters?”

He shook his head. “Not in the context we’re talking about, no.”

“Well, genius, it just so happens that if the thermocycler temperature is wrong when the experiment is run, you can get nonspecific interactions called artifacts. They’ll show up when you develop the film, but not before. They’re not real results. Just garbage.”

“Oh, come on,” he fired back. “That sounds…”

Plausible. Hell.

He frowned. “Then you mean…?”

She nodded, and a little bit of smugness crept into her expression, pushing the other emotions aside. “That film you oh-so-cleverly snitched off my desk didn’t mean a thing. Like I told you before, you’ll have to wait until the end of the week for the test results.”

Truth or lie?

“Now… You want to tell me why you thought it necessary to scrounge around my desk? How would you like it if I went through that notebook of yours?”

He’d be damned if he’d apologize for doing his job. But he felt the anger recede a bit and wondered whether she might not be telling the truth after all.

He shrugged. “I’d probably have—” kittens. Which reminded him. “Oh, hell. She Devil.”

The little calico cat had been asleep in his underwear drawer late last night when he’d stopped by the house to change his clothes before heading to the station. She looked like she’d swallowed a football and it had gotten stuck. Sideways.

That had been—he glanced at his watch—more than twenty hours earlier. “I beg your pardon?” Stephanie Alberts drew herself up to her full, imposing height of about five-foot-nothing and tried to look down her nose at him. “What did you call me?”

If someone had asked him a month ago which came first, the job or a mangy stray cat, Reid would’ve laughed that it was even a question. Now he wavered. Stephanie kept insisting there was nothing wrong, and yet… He shook his head. “Not you. There’s someone waiting for me at home and I’m late. Since you’re okay, I think I’ll go…” He gestured toward the revolving door and her eyes narrowed.

“I thought you wanted coffee.”

Boiling water. Towels. Sharp, sterilized knife. His mind came up with a reasonable-sounding list of items. But what if something went wrong?

Growing up, he hadn’t been allowed a pet. Hadn’t even known he liked animals until the little scrap of orange and black and white fur had appeared on his fire escape in a blinding rainstorm and howled until he let it in. She—and the size of the cat’s stomach left no doubt that it was a she—had eaten an entire can of albacore tuna, scratched his hand and barfed on the ugly Oriental rug he’d inherited from the old man.

Reid was hooked.

He’d taken her to the vet, bought a bagful of expensive toys before figuring out that she preferred crumpled balls of wax paper, and after going through a whole box of Band-Aids in the first week, christened the beast She Devil.

He was expecting her to give birth to a litter of demons any minute now, but the blessed event had been pushed from his mind by his worry over a woman who quite clearly neither needed nor wanted his help.

“Detective Peters? Coffee?”

He shook his head. “Not right now, thanks.” Stephanie was fine. She’d explained the Makepeace film pretty convincingly, and as for the incident in the elevator, well, just about any woman steeling herself to walk through Chinatown at night could be excused for being nervous—especially considering what had happened in that very lab just the previous year. “Okay then, can I give you a lift home?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No thanks. You just be on your way, and—”

STEPHANIE WAS TALKING to thin air. Peters had practically sprinted out the revolving door to the street. She blew out a breath and unknotted her fingers from the purse.