Cuckoo (Paperback)

A serial rapist has a chilling motive: He desperately wants children from his own bloodline, but his loving wife cannot bear children. He uses his position as a hospital employee to penetrate their database where he manipulates tests at the blood lab. As married women outpatients are routinely tested, David adds tests to determine their ovulation cycle. If they are ovulating, he abducts them and injects them with a cocktail of drugs. He rapes them repeatedly, until he is sure they are pregnant, then carefully removes all evidence of his crime and releases them. His victims have lost a week or so of their lives, but because of the drugs, have no memory of their abduction. Like the cuckoo bird, David has placed his children in another's nest. Over several months, he has successfully impregnated several women and it seems no one has caught on. The drugs didn't work on Marcella Roberts. She retained her memory and saw his face. With no other choice, he killed her. Detective Alec Theron investigates Marcella's homicide and interviews the women whose memory was lost. One thing is obvious; they're all pregnant. Putting together the bits and pieces, and the women's activities before and after their memory loss, Theron is led to the hospital lab. As he struggles to tie the serial rapist to his homicide case, Theron must deal with a rival detective who will stop at nothing to see him fail. Theron must also spend his off-duty time searching the city's slums and crack houses for his troubled, runaway daughter.