Their Baby Girl...?: The Baby Mission / Her Baby Secret

C.J. hung up. The bottle was empty. She put the baby over her shoulder and just before she began burping her, she hit the speed dial to call her mother and switched to speakerphone. Multitasking had become a way of life for her.

She heard the phone being picked up. “Mom? Guess what—”

Thirty-five minutes later, C.J. was dashing off the federal building elevator and into the task force room.

Warrick was the only one in there. He looked up as she entered. “You look winded.”

She was winded. There had been no need to pack up anything, her mother had spares of all the necessary items for the baby. She’d made the trip from her house to her mother’s in record time. For once, every light was with her. The hardest part was leaving the baby. You’d think it would get easier with each day, she thought, but it didn’t. Some days it just got harder.

Still, C.J. waved away his observation. She was eager for news. “Never mind my wind, what have we got?”

He handed her a picture that had come in over the fax less than an hour ago. “Sally Albrecht, twenty-three, blond, blue-eyed, strangled, poetically arranged, pink nail polish.”

She nodded grimly, taking the photograph from him. This wasn’t the kind of thing any of them welcomed hearing. She studied it for a moment. Like all the others, the latest victim appeared as if she were sleeping.

“Sounds like our boy’s gotten tired of the local area and is making his way up the coast.” Putting the fax down on her desk, she crossed to the map that had a tight little circle of pins on it. She’d been hoping that they could keep narrowing the circle, not widen it. Usually, serial killer victims were all over the map. This was supposed to make it easier for them. It didn’t.

When she turned back from the map, she was frowning. “I don’t like it. This blows the whole theory to pieces that he’s a local guy.”

“I know.” He’d signed out a Bureau vehicle in the last half hour. Ready to go, Warrick gave her one last chance to change her mind. “You sure you don’t want to stay home?”

He was just trying to be kind, she told herself. She had to remember that and stop taking offense where none was intended. There was no doubt in her mind that if he had some personal reason impeding him, she’d be trying to get him to stay behind.

C.J. nodded. “I’m sure. After my mother finished complaining that the Bureau doesn’t let me have a life, she was thrilled to have to watch the baby.”

“I’ve got a company car waiting downstairs. Let’s go.”

Walking through the office door first, Warrick didn’t bother holding it open. C.J. put her hand out in time to keep it from shutting on her. “Hey!”

Warrick looked at her innocently. “You said not to treat you any differently from any of the other guys, remember?”

She strode past him to the elevator and punched the down button. “I don’t recall you slamming the door in any of their faces.”

“No slamming,” he pointed out. “Just every man for himself.”

“Person,” she corrected as the elevator arrived and opened its doors. C.J. walked in ahead of him. “Every person for themselves.”

Warrick followed her in and sighed. He pressed for the first floor. “I got a feeling this is going to be a long road trip.”

Santa Barbara was approximately 150 miles north of the county that had previously been the Sleeping Beauty Killer’s stomping grounds. Ordinarily C.J. loved driving up the coast, but the unexpected rain with its gloom made the trip dreary.

They’d flipped a coin, and Warrick had lost the toss. Taking the keys, he’d gotten behind the wheel of the midsize vehicle the Bureau had provided.

C.J. settled back in her seat and stared straight ahead. The rain was almost mesmerizingly hypnotic, causing everything farther than twenty feet away to appear surreal.

“You know, it’s funny, but I miss her.” She glanced at Warrick to see if he was laughing. He wasn’t. “When I’m on the job, I find myself missing her, and when I’m home, my mind keeps going back to the case.”

That was the complaint of more than one special agent. He could feel the car beginning to climb. Warrick swallowed to relieve the pressure in his ears. “Welcome to the world of parenthood.”

She laughed shortly, shifting in her seat. Rain made her restless. Or maybe it was this case. “How would you know?”

He shrugged. “I read a lot.” Moving with the curve in the road, Warrick spared her a glance. “You know, Rodriguez could just as easily have come with me.”

C.J. thought the man was a good agent, but he liked his weekends to himself. “Rodriguez is still in love. Leave him with his fiancée.”

Driving was getting a little trickier. Warrick slowed their speed down to a careful thirty-five miles an hour. “Well, Culpepper isn’t in love.” Not the way the man liked to complain about his wife, although Warrick suspected that there was a measure of affection in the grousing. “I know he would have been more than happy to make the trip to Santa Barbara.”

C.J. looked at him incredulously. “You telling me that you’d rather have Culpepper sitting here next to you than me?”

For an optimistic woman, she had a habit of twisting his words to give them a darker meaning. “No, I’m telling you that it would have been okay for you to sit this one out.”

C.J. wished he’d stop trying to make things easy on her. How could she feel like his equal if he kept insisting on spreading out his cloak for her so she could walk over the puddles without getting her shoes dirty?

“No,” she told him quietly, firmly, “it wouldn’t have.”

“C.J. you’re a new mother—”

Not that again. “Not so new,” she contradicted. “Sure, I’m a mother now, but I’m also a special agent with the FBI.” And that was very important to her. She’d had to buck not just her mother, but her father as well to get to where she was. And that didn’t begin to take in the male agents along the way who resented having a woman on equal footing with them. In many ways it was still a man’s world. “It’s who I am and I’m damn proud of it. I’ve just got to find the proper balance to this combination, that’s all. And you throwing up roadblocks all the time isn’t exactly helping.”

What was the use? thought Warrick. Mules had nothing on C.J. He slowed down more as a car, traveling in the opposite direction, its tires plowing through large puddles, sent an even heavier shower of water their way. For a second the windshield was obscured. Rain brought out the nutcases, he thought, all driving as if they had something to prove.

“I’m not throwing up roadblocks,” he told her. “And I thought I was helping.”

“Think again.”

They needed a break. His eyes on the road, Warrick switched on the radio. He wanted some music to take the place of their voices.

She frowned at his selection and changed the station.

He switched it back, then batted away her hand when she reached for the dial again. “I’m driving, I get to pick the music.”

“I’m driving on the way back.”

He didn’t bother looking her way. “Deal.”

Crossing her arms in front of her, C.J. settled back in her seat again and watched the rain fight an endless skirmish with the windshield wipers.

She could never get used to it, C.J. thought. The smell of the bleak, dismal area where the Medical Examiner did his gruesome work permeated her senses even as she tried to breathe through her mouth.

The victim’s body had been taken to the morgue. The local coroner had held off on the mandatory autopsy until the FBI special agents could get there. The moment they’d gone to the sheriff’s office, the man had brought them here.

C.J. tried to divorce herself from the fact that the body on the table had been a person with aspirations and dreams under a day ago. Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister. She succeeded only marginally. Glancing at Warrick’s profile, she saw that it remained stoic. Didn’t he have any feelings?

Steeling herself, she approached the table.

“When was the time of death?” Warrick asked the heavyset man in the white lab coat.

The M.E., a Dr. Hal Edwards, glanced at the notes on his clipboard before answering.