Grievous Sin

It was exhilaration followed by agony. Detective Sergeant Peter Decker of the LAPD had just witnessed the birth of his healthy, strapping daughteronly to see his wife, Rina, whisked away into the emergency room with complications from her long, hard labor. For awhile, it was touch and go. But just as things started to calm down and Rina seems to be on the road to recovery, a different tragedy strikes. Another family is thrown into an agony that only new parents could know-Baby Girl Rodriguez has been stolen from the hospital nursery. The family's ordeal is Peter's as well, because it is the very nursery that his daughter peacefully slept that same night. The head nurse, Marie Bellson, seems to be missing as well. Despite his exhaustion, Peter makes it his professional and personal mission to find Baby Girl Rodriguez and the nurse that allegedly stole her. Bellson and the infant have vanished without a trace. Nobody in the hospital saw them leave, not even Decker's grown daughter, Cindy, who was tending to her half sister that night. Everyone interviewed agrees that Marie Bellson was fanatically devoted to the welfare of the newborns and would sooner die than harm one. That reputation, and a suspicious bloodstain on the floor of the hospital garage, are all that remain of the night nurse. Untill Bellson's car is found at the bottom of a cliff. Chilled by the thought of a baby floating free in a dangerous world, Peter and his partner, Marge Dunn, drive themselves to untangle Bellson's murky past. What they find is a double life with roots in the radical sex and drug culture of the sixties, a tragically broken home, a male geriatric nurse with something to hide, and a mysterious lady bodybuilder that knows to much. Torn between his own family's pressing needs and his obsession with finding the missing infant, Decker refuses to let Baby Girl Rodriguez be chalked up as just another statistic. But the harder Decker works, the more he realizes time is running out. Copyright 1993 by Faye Kellerman. Published by Fawcett Books.