Operation Bassinet. Joyce Sullivan
riding her hips. “Come in. The house is a mess, but that’s life.”
The house was not a mess. It was lively and colorful and an irritatingly normal example of how Mitch thought average nondysfunctional, middle-class families lived. He followed her through an entryway cluttered with a child-size pair of red boots, library books and Halloween decorations into a funky living room painted in dramatic colors and furnished with a beige sofa piled with pillows and two gargantuan armchairs. The armchairs covered in olive velvet made him think someone had a grandmother who’d liked Victorian furniture. In an alcove off the kitchen Mitch could see the child whose abandoned drinking cup he’d swiped the other day—dancing along with a furry critter on the TV.
“Have a seat, Mr. Halloran.”
“Is your husband home, ma’am? I’d really like to speak to both of you.”
Those green and gold eyes shone with dewy tears. “My husband died two years ago in a rock climbing accident.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Mitch said, caught off guard. The list of babies they’d been investigating had been too long to do thorough background checks on each family. They’d received confirmation from the lab about the DNA match less than two hours ago.
He took a seat on the sofa as Stephanie Shelton perched on the edge of one of those gargantuan chairs and folded her arms across her chest, bringing even more attention to the color of her bra beneath the transparent fabric of her blouse. “Why would someone from the Find Riana Foundation want to talk to me? Wasn’t she the little girl of that famous couple who were killed in an explosion last month?”
“Ma’am—”
“Please, stop calling me that. Teachers and librarians swathed in polyester prints are ma’ams. My name’s Stef.”
Mitch started to sweat. Damn, she looked so defense-less—so your-best-buddy’s-younger-sister nice. She’d already lost her husband. An image of her dancing around the garbage can when he’d staked out her house four days ago, two fingers held up in a two-point salute after she and Keely chucked a decaying jack-o’-lantern into the can, shimmered vibrantly in his conscience.
His news was going to kill her.
He cleared his throat and told himself to remain unplugged from the drama. “Stef, are you aware of the date Riana Collingwood was kidnapped?”
She frowned. “I think it was the day after my daughter was born. I remember seeing it on the news a couple of days after Keely and I were discharged and being relieved that we weren’t still in the hospital. Of course, the Collingwood baby wasn’t born at the same birthing center, but still, it made me nervous.” She shuddered. “I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must be for that baby’s parents to have their child taken like that. But I still don’t understand why you’re here. I didn’t know the Collingwoods.” Her eyes were clearly puzzled.
In the other room Mitch heard Keely singing a catchy tune about apples and bananas. He mentally cursed a blue streak as the icy hole inside him bore painfully into his soul. There was no way to put off saying the words that would change this woman’s life into a living hell.
He laced his fingers together. “Mrs. Shelton, I have evidence which leads me to believe that whoever abducted Riana Collingwood switched her with your daughter.”
Stef Shelton started to laugh. “This is a joke, right? My brother-in-law put you up to it? He’s such a jerk—” The words died on her lips as her gaze met his. Mitch looked steadily back at her, trying to stay as detached as possible, while fear spontaneously combusted like twin gold flames in her eyes.
She wrapped her arms around her middle as if trying to hold herself together. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What are you saying?”
Mitch felt his stomach catapult out of the wall of his torso and pass through a meat grinder as he observed her every facial reaction, her every gesture, for the tiniest hint of falseness. But there was none. His chest hurt as he sucked in air and he swallowed hard against the anger and the disgust that some lowlife scum had destroyed this lovely young woman’s life.
She shook her head, her eyes pleading with him. He steeled himself against a compelling urge to reach out to her. The same type of sympathetic reaction that had had him unwisely reaching out to Theresa Lopez two years earlier when her twelve-year-old granddaughter had been kidnapped.
He’d seen his grandfather in Theresa Lopez’s anxiety-lined face. Saw the thin fingers worked to the bone to support a grandchild who was her sole reason for being. He’d twisted himself inside out trying to bring Carmen home. But he’d lost precious time chasing the wrong lead. By the time he’d realized his error and directed searchers to the killer’s home, Carmen was dead and her killer, the sixteen-year-old boy who did Theresa’s yardwork, had hung himself.
Theresa hadn’t deserved to lose her granddaughter, nor did Stef Shelton deserve what had happened to her. She probably helped old ladies across the street and baked cookies and banana bread for her church’s bake sales.
“I wish to God I didn’t have to tell you this, but that little girl in the other room is Riana Collingwood. DNA tests have confirmed it.”
“DNA?” She glanced toward the alcove, horror streaking her beautiful face like fissures in a broken mirror. “What are you talking about? Keely’s my daughter! I labored thirty hours bringing her into the world.” Her angry gaze shot back to him. “I should know my own baby!”
Mitch struggled to remain detached, with his fingers glued together, so he couldn’t give in to an unprofessional impulse to offer a pair of arms to hold her up. She looked whiter than a sheet of paper and about to crumple.
“There’s no mistake. Riana’s family wants her back. I’m here to make sure that happens, and help you find your daughter.” And to prove to himself that he was the kind of cop, the kind of man his grandfather had wanted him to be.
After the Lopez case, he’d transferred out of the Robbery Special Section, a bureaucratic misnomer because it handled both robbery and kidnapping investigations, into the Rape Special Section in what he saw as a strategic career move. Because of his excellent record, he was assigned high-profile rapes and serial rapist investigations and promoted to Detective II, but over time he began to perceive his transfer and his new achievements as an act of cowardice rather than a step up the departmental ladder. He’d turned his back on the children who’d needed him. He was no longer the man he’d thought he was.
The Collingwood case—or Operation Bassinet as his new employer called it—was his chance to find himself again. Failure was not an option.
Stef stared in numb disbelief at the blond Hollywood Goliath. She no longer thought that his butt was of the same superior grade as her favorite movie star’s. Or that his eyes were the dark cobalt of her Mexican glassware. He was the ugliest, most horrid waste of tanned skin she’d ever seen. And she’d bet his sun-bleached-blond hair wasn’t even natural.
“You’re lying. Or it’s a mistake…or…” She gulped a cleansing breath, pushing her hands out as if ridding the air of toxins. She had to think clearly here, but apples and bananas were whirling in a merry-go-round pattern in her head.
The Neanderthal-brained ex-cop was more likely to see reason and come to the conclusion he’d made a mistake if she stayed calm. She pasted on the let’s-be-reasonable smile she’d reserved for unruly passengers in her former days as a flight attendant. “First of all, how could you possibly have DNA evidence that says Keely isn’t my daughter?”
His cobalt eyes drilled into her, dead serious. There was nothing reasonable about his tone. Each word lacked compromise and lacerated her heart. “Mrs. Shelton, the Foundation received a ransom demand eight days ago. Two items were included with the note— Riana’s hospital identification bracelet and two hairs. A reputable lab conducted DNA tests which told us that while the bracelet had traces of Riana Collingwood’s DNA on it, the hair came from another child. It led us to believe that there were at least two people involved in Riana’s abduction and that one of