Touching Evil (11 page)

"Then who?" Scott demanded. "You and I stumbled into this just tossing around ideas because we were frustrated there wasn't more we could do. How likely is it that somebody else took the same turns and reached the same possibility?"

"Not very," she admitted. "Besides which, if this note was intended to be helpful, then why give it to us anonymously and make damned sure there were no prints on it? Why not come forward and explain themselves?"

Slowly, Andy said, "Unless whoever it is knows there's a connection because he—or she—knows or suspects who the rapist is. It wouldn't be the first time a family member or suspicious wife or girlfriend knew just enough to worry about it but was too afraid or ashamed of their suspicions to come forward openly."

"A good possibility. But why the hell did they have to pick my car? And how'd they unlock and then re-lock the doors without leaving signs, dammit?"

"Maybe it was a locksmith," Scott offered, only half joking.

Andy shrugged. "Hell, maybe it was just somebody who knows cars well enough to be able to get into yours, Jenn. Or had an electronic key that worked. In these days of glorified electronics, it's getting easier rather than harder to jack cars, so why not? Anyway, until we find out who left the note, there's no way of knowing."

"I really hate not knowing," Jennifer said gloomily.

Andy picked up the scrap of paper and studied it more closely. "Do any of those books of yours have murders listed for 1894?"

"Nothing like what we have here, or at least I don't think so. I might be able to find other books, but when I found these they seemed to be all the ones available on local unsolved crimes."

"That means we'll have to depend on our own police files. And we'll have to look all the way back to 1894."

Scott groaned. "Shit. I can already tell you that either we do the legwork ourselves, going into the basements and storage rooms of the other buildings to dig into the files, or else somebody's going to have to make it a priority request to get us some more willing hands. Andy, I've been pretty cagy about asking so far—I haven't wanted to say what case it is, not when all this is so . . ."

"Iffy?" Jennifer supplied dryly.

"Weird," Scott corrected. "Call a spade a spade. Anyway, without something more solid to go on, I
didn't really want to tell file clerks in the other divisions why I was interested in the old files. And I sure as hell wouldn't want to talk to the detectives about it—at least not until we're sure there's a connection."

"Not even then,' Andy ordered after only a moment's thought. "We keep this among ourselves for the time being. If our guy is a copycat and we've managed to find his playbook, I sure as hell don't want to show our hand. The last thing we need is anybody outside the team discovering what we've found and broadcasting the info."

"That means we do the legwork." Jennifer didn't appear to be nearly as daunted as Scott was. Her eyes were very bright and she was smiling a little. "We'll need some kind of excuse, Andy, if we don't want the other cops to start wondering what we're up to. I mean, how often do we need to dig up files over a hundred years old?"

Andy pursed his lips as he considered that, his mind turning over various possibilities. Then he smiled. "I've got it. Everybody knows Drummond is ambitious as hell and always coming up with this theory or that plan to improve police efficiency so the political powers that be will take notice. So we tell anybody who asks that he's got a new bee in his bonnet and has us hunting down records of past crimes in order to do a comparative study. As long as it's one of you asking and not me, I don't see anybody tying it to a current investigation, and most especially not this one."

"Because we're glorified gofers," Scott said, sighing.

"No," Andy corrected, "because I've had TV cameras shoved in my face as the lead detective on this investigation; the rest of our team is thankfully invisible to the public—and to most cops outside this division.

Just keep your requests casual and try to sound completely bored with the whole thing."

"Are you going to tell Drummond about this?" Jennifer asked.

"Not yet. Not unless and until we have some very solid connections between past victims and present ones."

Voicing a reluctant thought, Jennifer said, "What if we do all this work and still end up with information that doesn't help us stop this creep? Knowing how many women he plans to attack won't help us identify possible victims before he gets them. Records this old, we're lucky to get sketches and reasonably accurate descriptions of the victims, and we can only connect those to crimes he's already committed."

"So what good will it do us to find all the files?" Scott echoed.

"It might do us a lot of good," Andy said. "Think about it. If this bastard is copying past crimes, he has to have a source for his information. And if we're lucky, it'll either be books like those Jenn found—or our files. Either way, we may be able to find something—a name on a library card or notation by a police file clerk that a certain file was checked out for research purposes by whoever. Anything that might point us in his direction."

"Would he have been that careless?" Jennifer wondered.

Andy smiled. "Careless? What possible fact or lead would have caused us to look a hundred years into the past for clues? The very idea is absurd."

Across town in his studio, Beau Rafferty worked on the painting that was his latest commission, using an
exceptionally fine brush to get the most painstaking detail exactly right. He was a perfectionist. Always had been.

And he had an ever-present sense of his surroundings, a built-in radar that told him whenever someone was near. Even when they didn't make a sound opening his front door or moving through his house to the studio.

"One of these days, I'll have to start locking that door," he said without turning around.

"That might be a good idea. These are dangerous times."

"The times are always dangerous. People never change." Beau glanced back over his shoulder at the visitor. "Is that why you're here?"

"Don't you know?"

Beau returned his attention to the painting and very carefully shadowed a character line in the lovely face. "No. I didn't see you. I probably should have, I guess. You're usually around when bad things start happening."

"Bad things have been happening here for quite a while."

"Yes. So what brings you now? Maggie?"

"Would that surprise you?"

"No, not really. You were back east when it started, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"They never put it together when it started." Beau shook his head. "Not so surprising, I suppose. He's always more lucky than he is careful. And he's very careful."

"He doesn't want them to see him."

Beau turned at last from the painting, frowning as
he began to clean his brushes. "But Maggie will see him. Sooner or later. She's determined to. The only question is, will she see him before he sees her."

"I know."

"I want to help her."

"I know you do. But you can't."

"I could at least tell her what to watch out for. Who to trust."

"No. You can't do that, and you know it. Free will. You've already told her too much."

Beau put his brushes away and studied his visitor wryly. "I haven't told her about you."

"I appreciate that."

"Do you? I wonder." Beau shook his head. "Never mind. I don't think I want to know after all. Is there a particular reason you came to see me today?"

"Yes. I wanted to talk to you about Christina Walsh. And why she died."

CHAPTER
SIX

MONDAY,
 
NOVEMBER 5

Gazing around the large, spacious room, Quentin
said, "There are hotel rooms and then there are hotel rooms."

Without looking up from her laptop, Kendra said, "That's the third time you've said something like that. Keep it up, and John will think the FBI makes its agents stay in backstreet dives crawling with roaches and rats."

"I never said it was that bad." Quentin went into the kitchenette to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee, then came back into the parlor. "But you must admit—this is much, much better than our usual digs."

Kendra did look up then, rather absently glancing around the spacious, airy parlor of their two-bedroom suite. It was a room geared to business functions, with half the space taken up by a generous desk containing every modern technological amenity—including a multiline phone, a fax machine, and a computer supplied by the hotel—and a conference table that seated eight. On the other side of the room, a sitting area grouped around a large television promised relaxation, conversation, or entertainment.

It was a luxurious space in the sense of true luxury, nothing ornate or gilded, but beautiful, well-made, and comfortable furnishings and fixtures, and muted but tasteful decorating. Not exactly surprising for the best hotel in the city.

She smiled slightly as she watched Quentin contemplate with satisfaction the oil painting hanging over the desk, but said mildly, "With your taste for luxury, I don't know why on earth you ever joined the Bureau."

"I don't have a taste for luxury, I just enjoy being in a room that isn't a carbon copy of every other room in the place."

Pretending as always that she hadn't noticed him neatly evade the implied question about his past, Kendra said, "Well, while you're enjoying that, could you please hand me the forensics file? Once I get the last of that fed into our personal-investigation database here, we'll have everything the police
say
they have."

"You're as paranoid as John is," he told her, taking a file from the stack on the desk and handing it across the conference table to her.

"I resent that," John said, coming out of Quentin's bedroom, closing up his cell phone. His leather jacket was hanging over a chair in the sitting room, and he slid the phone into a pocket before joining them at the conference table.

"You should never resent the truth," Quentin said. "Did you get hold of Maggie?"

"I got her voicemail. Asked her to drop by here in the next couple of hours if possible or to meet me at the station at four." John gave Quentin a wry look. "I was very polite and low-key. No pressure, no demands, just a pleasant request."

Seriously, Quentin said, "There will come a time for demands, John, believe me."

"What do you mean?"

It was Kendra who answered, her gaze remaining on the files whose information she was feeding into the laptop's database; her fingers flew even as she spoke. "In this sort of investigation, the emotions of everyone involved tend to grow more powerful and erratic as time goes on. Naturally. Not just for the victims, but for the investigators as well. It'll be hard on all of us, but particularly on an empath. At some point, Maggie's natural instincts for self-preservation will demand that she distance herself from all the pain around her."

"And that's when we make demands?" John asked, watching Kendra in unconscious fascination. It was his first encounter with Quentin's usual partner, and so far he wasn't having much luck in figuring her out. A quiet, contained woman with rich brown hair and soft brown eyes, she was pretty without being in any way extraordinary—except that she obviously was.

"That's when we'll have to. Always assuming she's a help in the investigation and not a drawback."

"Why would she be a drawback?"

"Powerful emotions tend to cloud the mind and affect judgment, among other things. Worse for an em-path, naturally. Maybe she's learned to handle that, or maybe not. If not, feeling her own and everyone else's pain could drive her to do things she wouldn't ordinarily do."

"For instance?"

"She could get careless with her actions or incautious in sharing information. Get obsessed with a particular line of investigation to the exclusion of all else or, conversely, have increasing difficulty in even remembering things from one day to the next. She could strike out at those around her."

Quentin murmured, "That would be us."

Kendra nodded, but added, "She could also feel driven to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, whatever the cost to herself."

"You said her instincts for self-preservation would protect her," John objected.

"Eventually, yes. But from all we've been able to find out, Maggie's been doing this for some years, which means she has to be strongly motivated to see it through. But this is quite probably the worst investigation she's been involved in, given the depth and scale of the sheer human suffering. Rape is bad enough for any woman to just have to imagine; feeling that physical and emotional trauma even at second hand has got to be sheer hell. When you hurt badly enough, you'll do almost anything to stop the pain as quickly as possible."

"She could do that by walking away."

"Could she?" Kendra glanced up, her fingers pausing only an instant, then continued with her work and continued speaking calmly. "Whether or not you believe she's an empath, John, you can't deny that for anyone to deliberately expose themselves on a regular basis to the worst pain and trauma experienced by other people argues an incredible amount of resolution and dedication. She's driven to do this out of some deeply felt motivation, and whatever it is, it won't allow her to just walk away."