"Sara, Alec, missing person at Boston City Hospital." Thomas slid the slip across the table. "Sara's primary."
"How do you lose someone from a hospital?" Alec asked incredulously.
"Maternity ward," Sara whispered, the words blurring in front of her eyes. "Gregory Itzin, age...forty-eight hours."
"Oh, God," Jonas whispered, and Sara looked up to see Thomas studying her intently.
She stood, almost knocking the chair backward. "All right. Let's go."
~*~
"Did anyone touch the bassinet?" Sara asked, shining her flashlight at the plastic cradle, illuminating its corner of the hospital basement.
"Yes - Kara did, and I did." Jane Henderson, the maternity nurse, hugged her sides tightly against the chill of the cellar. Scrubs weren't made for warmth, only for comfort and ease of movement. "Kara, she's the one who found it. She's in high school, she volunteers here as a candy striper. She was putting the old flower cart with the other broken carts, and she saw it in the corner there."
Sara's flashlight tracked left to shine on the plaque that read "Morgue" with an arrow under it, and then back to the right. "You just leave them there?"
The nurse shrugged. "Yes. Sometimes we're able to cannabalize old ones for parts. We're on a strict budget."
"I know the feeling," Sara murmured in response, thinking of how hard Thomas had fought to replace the GC/MS last month. "All right. I should be fine down here; have you given your statement yet?"
The nurse nodded yes while Kara shook her head no. "Then Kara, you're going to go with Officer Staniwicz and he's just going to have you describe how you found it. First, though, I'm just going to need to take your fingerprints."
The girl, a slightly overweight teenager, jerked her chin up and narrowed her eyes in confusion. "But I didn't do anything."
"This is just to prove that. I'm going to dust for fingerprints and I need a way to eliminate yours from the others I'm going to find. Mrs. Henderson, I'm going to need yours too." Sara set her kit down on a hospital stretcher stripped of its wheels. "I think you can turn the lights on...Officer?"
Staniwicz nodded from where he stood near the elevator doors and reached across to hit the light switches. Sara turned off her flashlight when the room flooded with light - or as much light as the bare bulbs could project into the furthest musty corners. Taking comfort in the standard movements, she took her fingerprinting materials out and set the ten-cards out on the stretcher, walking first Jane and then Kara through the process and answering a few of their questions. It was a basic exercise, one she had gone through hundreds of times, and it served to return her thoughts to the orderly precision they needed to be on a crime scene.
"You're all set," Sara told Kara with a reassuring smile. Jane had left as soon as the fingerprinting was done, hurrying back to the maternity ward. "Just remember to talk to Officer Staniwicz."
The teenager offered her a shy smile as she washed the last of the ink off using the wet wipe Sara had offered her, and then turned to leave.
Sara was already unpacking more items from her kit and laying them out on the stretcher. She knelt down and confirmed what she'd suspected - the floor was filthy, and gritty; not enough dirt to hold a shoeprint, but just enough to interfere with any attempt she might make to lift treads electro-statically. There were a few smudges made when someone had braced him or herself to shift the carts - the bassinet had been shoved far into the corner - but they could have belonged to either the kidnapper or Jane or Kara trying to get to the corner.
With that in mind, Sara uncapped the fingerprinting powder and began to dust the metallic surfaces of the carts that had been disturbed to reach the bassinet. Depending on how long the junk had been down there, she could be lifting ancient prints, but anything she gathered could add weight to a circumstantial case.
Twenty minutes later, she reached the bassinet, and she tucked the brush and jar into her vest for now; she didn't want the fingerprinting powder interfering with any trace she might pick up.
The sheets were blue; the hospital's way of identifying at a glance that the infant swaddled in them had been a boy. There had once been a blanket, as well, but it had disappeared along with the baby. The remaining light sheet was crumpled in a ball - a ball that looked far too big to be just the scrap of fabric that was required to cover a day old infant.
Sara photographed, changed the angle, and photographed again, finally setting down the camera to reach into the bassinet and slowly unravel the wadded blanket. Wrapped in the blanket were a pair of scrubs; plain and pale yellow, stiffly new. Painstakingly, she went over the fabric inch by inch as she straightened it out, searching for hair or fiber. Nothing jumped out at her, but she backed up a few feet and grabbed some paper evidence bags, separating the sheet from the scrubs and marking off all the necessary information. She could examine it more closely at the lab, and swab for epithelials.
When she separated the shirt from the pants, a scrap of blue plastic fell out - the baby's wristband. Sara picked it up and felt tears sting the corners of her eyelids. Angrily, she rubbed at her eyes with a corner of her sleeve. "Dammit," she whispered as she dropped the wristband into an evidence bag. Somewhere upstairs was a mother with a matching band on her wrist who might never see her baby again.
And that line of thinking was going to get her into nothing but trouble. Sara returned the evidence bags to the stretcher and dusted the bassinet for prints, lifting several clear fingers and palms and even more partials.
"Hey, Sara?"
She nearly dropped the powder-laden brush into the bassinet. "Dammit, Staniwicz, you scared me half to death."
The detective spread his hands wide. "Sorry. Anyway, if you're done down here, they're looking for you upstairs."
Sara gave the basement corner one last look-over, and nodded absently in acknowledgement as she repacked her kit. "I am. It will need to stay sealed, though." She ducked back under the yellow tape.
Staniwicz shifted nervously. "So...um...what do you think our chances are?"
"With missing persons, it's the first forty-eight hours that are crucial," Sara said, as if by rote. "But that's in a situation where you assume your missing person is able to act, to affect the situation they're in. An infant?" She pressed her lips to a thin line and shook her head slightly.
"Bastards," Staniwicz spat out.
He was still young. He would learn.
She hated herself for thinking that.
"Upstairs, you said?"
~*~
"I didn't get much up here," Alec said, gesturing with the latex glove he had just pulled off. "The sign-out log indicates that Gregory was taken to his mother at approximately ten-thirty pm. They tell me that's just before shift change. Thing is, they're not really sure who went to pick the baby up. They don't note who it was until they get the baby back to the nursery."
Sara wrapped her arms around herself and stared into the nursery without really seeing anything, trying very hard not to focus on the rows of tiny sleeping babies.
"So what it looks like happened is, someone brought the baby to her mother at ten-thirty, and then whoever went to pick up the baby just...didn't come back. Brought the bassinet down to the basement, and then just walked out. Probably through the emergency room; there were several accidents right in a row, and it was busy down there." He was reading from his notes, written in perfect shorthand, carefully bulleted. Sara eyed the steno pad and wondered how he hadn't even dented the corners of the cardboard cover.
"Inside job," she observed softly, stating the obvious, dropping her hands to her sides and curling her fingers into fists.
"Looks like." Alec returned the steno pad to his evidence kit and folded his arms. "They look so peaceful," he commented, and Sara looked at him sideways, surprised by the observation - and that it was her he would choose to make it to.
"Yeah," she breathed softly, remembering the feel of soft, downy skin against her cheek and suddenly finding it hard to breathe.
"Sara...Sara?"
Alec was shaking her shoulder, and she furrowed her brow and looked up at him before the pain caught her attention. Her hands were bleeding, tiny crescent-shaped cuts from her fingernails. She stared down at the red blood against the pale skin and blinked, uncomprehending.
"Are you okay?"
She shook herself, and looked up at Alec's worried face. Alec. Worried. Not good. "Yes," she answered simply, flattening her fingers out and covering the blood on her hands. "Have you talked to the mother yet?"
He shook his head. "Not yet. Would you like me to..."
"I'll do it," she snapped, more harshly than she'd intended, but the idea of Alec worrying about her in any way grated on her. They'd been competing for too long to revert to friendship. It was safer, in a sense, when they were enemies.
She rocked backwards on her feet to give herself the momentum to leave the nursery and didn't examine her hands more closely until she'd rounded the corner. The cuts weren't deep, but they were bleeding freely, and they stung.
There was a public bathroom just to her right, and she leaned into the swinging doorway, careful not to touch anything. The water and soap stung, and she hissed out through her teeth in frustration. The fact that she was in a hospital and could get the cuts taken care of in a much more hygienic manner was not lost on her as she dabbed away the soapy blood and crumbled the cheap brown paper towel into a tight wad.
The maternity ward rooms weren't far from the nursery, and it was easy to tell from the officers standing outside the door which room belonged to the mother - Monica Itzin.
Sara had not expected her to be barely sixteen.
She looked like she'd cried some hours ago, eyes red-rimmed but on the mend. The female officer by the bed was talking to her in a low voice, but she wasn't paying attention, staring out the window. Her dark hair was spread across the white pillow, and she was thin - her body seemed to barely make a lump in the sheets.
Sara leaned against the doorway, both hands on the handle of the evidence kit.
Monica turned her head to look at Sara. She had beautiful dove gray eyes, almond-shaped and set above flawless cheekbones. Had she passed that facial structure on to her son?
Or had his eyes come from his father?
Beautiful, clear, blue eyes...
No.
"Hey," Sara said, the word coming out cracked and harsh. She cleared her throat and tried again. "I'm ah, I'm with the Crime Lab. I just need to ask you a few questions." Monica nodded slowly, and Sara took that as an invitation to come over and sit down on the rolling stool by the bed. "About what time did the nurse come back to...to pick up Gregory?"
"Around eleven o'clock," Monica replied, so quietly Sara almost had to lean over to hear her.
"Okay," Sara said, nodding. "Did she touch anything in the room?"
Monica shook her head slowly, side to side, but didn't vocalize her answer.
"We've got a working composite sketch," Officer Linda Nevins said quietly from across the bed.
Sara nodded again. "Do you remember what she was wearing?"
"The same thing as all the other nurses."
"Scrubs?"
Monica shrugged.
"Do you remember what color they were?"
"Yellow. Light yellow," the girl murmured.
"Was it someone you had seen before?"
"I don't know. Maybe. I don't really remember. I was tired." Her voice was petulant, childish, and she made a moue of frustration. "I'm still tired."
"Okay." Sara reached down for the fingerprinting equipment. "I'm just going to need to take your fingerprints, so I can narrow down the fingerprints I took from the bassinet." She set the ten-card on the bed and rolled Monica's ice-cold fingers in the ink, pressing them firmly onto the thin cardboard. "If you remember anything else..."
"Yeah, they gave me their cards. Plus, they're here, like, all the time anyway." The beautiful gray eyes narrowed in anger, and Sara tried to give the girl the benefit of the doubt. She'd probably just gone through the hardest day of her life.
"Thank you for your help," Sara said, and managed to keep the sarcasm out of her voice, suddenly frustrated by Monica's reactions. Irrational, she knew - what had she expected? Why had she expected anything? - but still, affecting the way she was dealing with the young mother.
Linda caught her as she was leaving the room. "She's had a rough day. We can't even imagine - "
"Yes. We can," Sara said coldly, shrugging off the officer's arm while a voice in the back of her mind screamed at her to reach some sort of emotional equilibrium with this case - if she kept swinging between extremes like this, it would destroy her.
She left Officer Nevins standing in the doorway, staring after her.