The Baby Trail by Marie Ferrarella

Author:Marie Ferrarella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-11-30T13:47:07+00:00

* * *

“So, is everyone all well rested?” Kori asked the next morning. Walking into the squad room, she had called her task force into the conference area.

Simon snorted, dismissing her question. “You ask me, Rip Van Winkle had the right idea with that twenty-year nap he took.”

“Well, if you take that kind of a nap, when you woke up, you wouldn’t be the stud you fancy yourself to be now,” Kori told him.

The men sitting around the table exchanged surprised looks. “Hey, looks like our fearless leader is back among us,” Baxter said to the others.

“I was never gone,” Kori informed Baxter. “But this case involves a really grim situation and, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not about to ‘whistle a happy tune’ until we locate that baby and I’m holding her in my arms—or at least one of us is.”

More of Brian Cavanaugh’s handpicked recruits kept walking in. She recognized several of them from the day before. They all appeared to be ready and willing to help field all the phone calls that were coming in again, hot and heavy.

Kori looked around the room. “Okay, so where are we?”

Officer Alexandra Harper spoke for the volunteers. “We’re still talking to the ‘good Samaritans’ who are calling in, claiming they saw someone taking the baby off the premises. At this point, there seems to be no end to them.”

“I’ll say,” Drew Montgomery agreed, adding his voice to Alexandra’s. “We’ve got reports describing everyone but Santa Claus abducting the baby from the hospital.”

Another officer, Kirk Conway, nodded and spoke up. “One woman swears she saw the baby being carried off in a laundry basket.”

“A laundry basket?” Brodie repeated. “Why didn’t she call someone immediately?”

“Well, according to our so-called eyewitness, she thought she saw something wiggling like a baby in the laundry basket, but when she went to try to investigate, the woman making the rounds and gathering the laundry together shooed her away.”

“‘Shooed her away’?” Kori questioned as she paused to take a long sip of her extremely bracing, eye-opening black coffee.

“The witness’s words, not mine,” Conway explained to Kori.

“And what did this woman say when she was ‘shooed’?” Kori asked.

“According to our so-called eyewitness, the older woman collecting laundry was territorial. She claimed that she would get into trouble and maybe even lose her job if she let everyone touch the hospital laundry. I dunno, I guess there’s a lot of call to touch hospital laundry. Anyway,” Conway continued, “she asked our ‘eyewitness’ to move away from her and the basket.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as rather odd? This woman being so protective of the hospital’s laundry,” Brodie commented.

“Yeah, but hey, it takes all kinds,” Baxter said with a shrug.

Kori thought of the taco server’s story about an older nurse holding a baby. “What did this protective hospital worker look like?”

Conway thought for a moment. “All the eyewitness said was that it was some older woman who looked as if she should have been retired long ago instead of doing laundry like some kind of old-fashioned washer woman.

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