Touching Evil

CHAPTER NINE

Despite what she'd told John, Maggie hadn't intended to go back out on Monday evening, not after the day she'd had. But a couple of hours' rest, a hot bath, and hot soup all combined to make her feel much more like herself. And restless.

She was used to being alone, more or less. Her father had died before she was born, and Beau's father had departed the scene not long after his birth; Alaina Barnes Rafferty had not been an easy woman to be married to. Or to be the offspring of, come to that.

Neither Maggie nor Beau bore her any malice; she had loved them both, something they had never doubted. But her artistic gifts had caused her more pain than pleasure, demanding much of her time and energy and leaving little for her children. Which was probably why they were so close as adults: growing up they had only had each other.

Still, with differing careers, she and Beau sometimes went weeks without seeing each other, and since virtually all of Maggie's friends were cops who worked difficult hours, she found herself alone often enough to be accustomed to it. Usually, anyway. But not tonight.

She went into her studio, thinking it might help to work for a while, but since she didn't have a commission at the moment and didn't feel particularly inspired, instead found herself staring broodingly at the single canvas propped on her working easel-blank except for the vague outline of long hair and the indistinct shape of a face.

Unidentifiable.

"I'm losing it, that's the problem," she muttered.

The image was a virtual duplicate of the one in her sketch pad, a few uncertain lines too tentative to provide any sense at all of an individual. She didn't even know for sure that he had long hair, just guessed that he did because both Hollis and Ellen Randall had felt something like that brush against their skin.

Maggie had felt it too.

She shivered and turned on the small stereo system she kept in the studio, filling the silence with quiet, pleasant music. It was dark outside, but the lighting in the studio was excellent, and the music made the room feel warm and… safe.

At least for now.

Frowning, Maggie moved the canvas off the easel and put a clean blank one in its place. She went to her worktable and chose brushes and tubes of color, mixing the latter on her palette without really thinking about what she was doing.

When her tools were ready, she stood before the easel and gazed at the blank canvas for a moment, then took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Beau said she could do this if she tried, if she could trust in her own abilities enough to let go of her conscious control. It wasn't an easy thing to do, and so far Maggie had resisted every attempt.

But as she stood there with her eyes closed, listening to the soft music and keeping her mind as blank as possible, a strange thing began to happen. It was almost as if she drifted away, almost as if she fell asleep and began dreaming. The dream was peaceful, with soft music in the background and the sound of her own steady breathing up close, and all she could see was blue sky stretching forever, the expanse broken only intermittently by fluffy white clouds. She seemed to be far away, and getting farther away moment by moment, and yet she could still hear the music, hear herself breathing, smell the familiar scents of her studio.

It was a very peculiar feeling. It seemed to last only a moment or two, yet she had the strong sense of the passage of time, and when she opened her eyes abruptly with an odd, jarring sensation of shock, it was to find herself standing at her worktable with her back to the easel. Her palette lay before her, covered with gobs and blobs of paint she didn't remember selecting.

When she looked at her hands, it was to see more paint, bright and dark flecks and smears of color on her skin from wrists to fingertips and, even more, heavily spattered on and completely ruining her sweater. As if she'd been working hard, and for a long time. When she touched the paint on her sweater hesitantly, most of it felt nearly dry to the touch. She was using acrylic paints rather than oil, but still…

Her fingers felt stiff, cramped, and there was an ache between her shoulder blades, the sort of ache she got only after hours working at her easel.

There was no clock in the studio. Maggie fumbled to push up the paint-encrusted sleeve of her sweater to see her watch and was deeply disturbed to see it was after midnight.

Hours. She'd been in here for hours.

She gripped the edge of the worktable, conscious now that her breathing was no longer steady, that she was acutely aware of the canvas on the easel behind her. She could feel it there, whatever it was she had painted in a state of virtual unconsciousness, almost as if it leaned toward her, reached out for her…

She was terrified to turn around.

"Paint on canvas," she whispered. "That's all it is. Just paint on canvas. Probably not even a recognizable image. How could it be, when my eyes were closed, when I wasn't thinking of anything in particular?" Maggie drew a deep breath. "There won't be anything there, except paint on canvas. That's all."

But even with those reasonable words said aloud like a mantra, it took all the self-command Maggie could muster to force herself to turn around and look at what she had done.

"Jesus," she whispered, staring in horror at what was unquestionably the best work she'd ever done.

The painting, all too hideously complete, was done almost entirely in slashes of black and flesh tones and scarlet, yet for all the limited use of color the central image looked so lifelike that it might have breathed.

If it could have breathed.

The woman lay sprawled against a dim, indistinct background, her wispy dark hair fanned out around her head and visible only because of the blood streaking the strands. Her head was slightly tilted and turned so that she seemed to gaze at the watcher in a mute plea for help that had never come.

Between her open, bruised, and puffy eyelids, more darkness peered out because her eyes were gone, the empty sockets seeping blood that trickled down her temples.

Her sensitive mouth was slightly open, the delicate lines of her lips misshapen by swelling and bruising, and another thin line of blood trailed down over her chin and jaw. On the other side of her face, an ugly bruise marred the high cheekbone.

She was naked, her body so petite it almost seemed childlike with its small, high breasts and gently rounded belly. But there was nothing childlike about what had been done to her. The breasts bore more horrible bruising and one nipple was missing, the ragged wound showing the unmistakable marks of teeth. The rounded belly had also been sickeningly mutilated, laid open from the sternum to the pubic bone in a single deep slash agape in wet scarlet.

Her legs were splayed wide, knees slightly raised, and more blood streaked her thighs and had pooled between them in a congealing puddle of crimson and maroon.

Around one delicate ankle was a thin gold chain from which dangled a tiny gold heart.

It was that final poignant detail that shattered Maggie's frozen horror. She dropped to her knees, fighting to keep from retching, unable to tear her eyes away from the painting, from the dreadful image of a dead woman she had never seen before in her life.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6

It was something of a joke around the department that Luke Drummond was proud of the fancy conference room in his station, proud of the wide, polished table that could seat more than twelve in nicely comfortable chairs and provide them lots of elbow room in which to… do whatever it was he pictured them doing in the room. Nobody had ever been quite clear on what that might be.

The truth was, the room had never been used for anything more than an occasional hand of poker when the late shift got bored. Until now, anyway.

Andy decided it was high time the conference room was actually used for something remotely resembling police work, and since both the usual investigatory methods and Scott and Jennifer's work were beginning to pile up paper they needed to keep handy and in some kind of order, it seemed logical to use that space. So Andy commandeered the room and within a couple of hours that morning had efficiently shifted the bulk of the files and other paperwork on the investigation from various desks in the bullpen to the conference room.

The room had at least been set up to facilitate such a move, so it was a simple task to have the switchboard reroute relevant calls to the multiline phones in there, and Andy pretty much rerouted himself to the room on a semipermanent basis.

"We also have a bit more privacy in here," he told Scott and Jennifer when they gathered there shortly before lunchtime. "I won't declare this room off limits to those not actively involved in the investigation, but I will make it known that anything in here is to be considered confidential."

Jennifer shifted a cinnamon toothpick to the other side of her mouth and said, "And by doing so we can hope that they won't think we're nuts or, if they do, that they won't talk about how nuts we are."

Andy shook his head. "I doubt anybody's going to think we're completely nuts, not with this." He nodded toward the bulletin board they had just finished setting up. "We have sketches, photos, or descriptions of four victims in 1934 closely matching four of our victims. That has to be more than coincidence, and it has to mean something."

"Yeah, but what?" Scott wondered.

"That's what we have to determine. Which means we'll use every source we can until we figure it out."

"Does that mean you're telling Garrett about this?" Jennifer asked.

"Yeah. Drummond insisted we keep some of the crime-scene and victim details confidential, but he didn't say a damned thing about our speculation and lines of research. Garrett's smart, and he has sources we can use. So I'm telling him. Maggie too. I'll try to get them both in here this afternoon."

Jennifer tapped the folded newspaper lying on the table before her. "Well, since Garrett got his picture in the paper today and the reporters are hotly speculating that he's assisting the police because of his sister being a victim, I imagine you'll be hearing from an unhappy Luke any time now."

Andy sighed. "Yeah, I know. What the hell was I doing letting a civilian into the Mitchell house when our forensics team was still working there, for Christ's sake. I know what he'll say. And if he doesn't like the way I'm running this investigation, he can run it himself."

Jennifer grinned. "Aw, he won't want to do that. Might ruin his nice manicure or get blood on his shoes. If you lean on your acting talents and make like you want to dump it all in his lap, he'll probably make himself scarce for at least the rest of the week."

"It's a thought," Andy said, brightening.

Scott laughed, but said, "Well, we should have plenty to keep us busy. Even running into dead ends takes time."

"No sign of the rest of the files from 1934?" Andy asked.

"Nope. But I haven't stopped looking. If the damned things exist, I'll find them."

"In the meantime," Jennifer said, looking at Andy, "anything new in the search for Samantha Mitchell? Since we've been in here trying to get organized this morning, I hadn't heard."

"No, nothing new. I've got teams out canvassing the neighborhood and every patrol in the city keeping their eyes peeled for that lady. It's like she dropped off the face of the earth."

"What about Maggie's hunch? Did forensics get anything from the Mitchell's game room?"

"A couple of things, yeah. They picked up chemical traces of chloroform on one spot in the carpet not too far from the door, as well as a few strands of Mrs. Mitchell's hair. And there are some very faint signs that he got into that room through a window. There was a short in the security net that the system didn't pick up for some reason."

"A short he caused?" Scott wondered.

"Could be. The really interesting thing is that Mitchell insists his wife never-but never-stayed alone in the house without having the system on. So if the attacker knocked her out with chloroform-"

"Then who deactivated the system at the front door?" Jennifer finished.

Andy nodded. "Exactly. It was deactivated at the control panel by the front door, so he either knew or was somehow able to obtain the security code. And it wasn't one even a hacker could figure out just by using the predictable numbers-phone numbers, anniversaries or birthdays, and so on. Our resident electronics wizard says our guy is either very, very good or very, very lucky."

Jennifer said, "And since we already know he beat a top-notch system in order to snatch Laura Hughes, we can assume he's very, very good."

"That would probably be a safe assumption."

Scott said, "How come Maggie tumbled to it being the game room Samantha Mitchell was abducted from? I mean, how come our guys missed it the first time through?"

"I asked them that," Andy said. "They had lots of reasons, but what it all boiled down to is that they concentrated on the expected points of entry like the front and back doors. Needless to say, they won't make that mistake again."

Jennifer smiled slightly. "I'll bet. You can tear the bark off a tree with that temper of yours when you're really pissed, Andy."

"I was really pissed."

"I'm not surprised."

Scott said plaintively, "But how did Maggie know?"

"Instinct," Andy answered promptly. "And she's got enough sense to check the unexpected as well as the expected. Just like you two. Keep it up, will you?"

Scott nodded, faint puzzlement still lingering on his face.

Andy decided he'd make a lousy poker player.

Jennifer said, "The other victims were found within forty-eight hours of being abducted, so if it is our guy, we should know something by tomorrow."

"Yeah," Andy said. "Question is, will Samantha Mitchell be a living victim or a dead one?"

To say Maggie hadn't slept well was an understatement, and she was feeling unusually raw and edgy when she went to Beau's house on Tuesday morning. She let herself in and made her way to the studio, calling out hello as she went.

Beau glanced up from the portrait he was working on and said immediately, "Have some coffee."

The pot was already on the worktable, along with two cups and the milk Maggie preferred.

"So you knew I was coming," she muttered, pouring herself a cup and sitting down.

"I thought you might be, yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Call it a hunch."

"Goddammit, Beau!"

He smiled slightly. "Okay, it was more than a hunch."

"I could really dislike you sometimes, you know that?"

"I know. I'm sorry, Maggie."

She sat in silence for some minutes, drinking her coffee and watching him paint. Then she sighed a bit raggedly. "She's dead, Beau. Samantha Mitchell is dead. And her baby with her."

He paused to wipe off one of his brushes, gazing at her soberly. "I'm sorry about that too. Have they found her body yet?"

"No. But they will."

"When?"

"You tell me." She stared at him challengingly.

He returned to his painting but after a moment said, "Tomorrow, I think. Early tomorrow. Or maybe late tonight. Hard to tell."

"Do you know where?"

Beau was silent.

"Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she's not dead yet. If we could find her as soon as possible-"

"It wouldn't make any difference," he said softly. "She's dead already, Maggie. You know she's dead already."

Maggie knew, but she'd been hoping… After a long moment, she said, "Yesterday at her house, while I was walking through, I felt her. And when he grabbed her… she was so scared. So scared. For herself. For her baby. She knew neither one of them would survive. From the instant he grabbed her, she knew."

Beau painted for a moment, then asked, "Did she know who he was?"

"The same way I know who he is. Not a face, not a name. Just evil. Just evil alive and walking around pretending to be human. I have to stop him. I have to."

"Yes."

"And there isn't much time left. I feel that too. More and more with every day that passes. If I don't stop him soon, it'll be too late. It's my last chance, Beau."

"You don't know that."

"Do you?"

"No."

She laughed without humor. "If you did know, would you tell me?"

"Probably not."

"Free will again."

"Yes. Free will." Leaving his painting finally, Beau cleaned his brushes and palette, then fixed himself a cup of coffee and joined her. "You're doing the best you can, Maggie. It's all you can ask of yourself."

"It isn't enough."

"It will be. Trust yourself. Trust your abilities and your instincts."

She looked at him steadily. "Yesterday was a real… bitch of a day. First interviewing Hollis and then walking through the Mitchell house. And it got worse. It actually got worse. I painted something last night. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind the way you told me to, and I painted something horrible. It was inside me, Beau. That image, dark and bloody, was in my head, a part of my soul. I could almost… feel her die."

He didn't look surprised and merely nodded. "I told you it would probably happen."

"Not like that. You didn't tell me it would be like that."

"You're an artist, you think-and feel-in images. It's natural."

"Natural? What's natural about painting the corpse of a tortured, mutilated woman? A woman I've never met, never even seen?"

His voice remained calm. "You have to try to distance yourself, Maggie, or this is going to destroy you."

She drew a breath and struggled to keep her voice level. "I told you once before that I was afraid. It's… blinding me, I think. I don't know what to do next."

Beau hesitated, then said, "It isn't your fight alone, you have to remember that. Stop trying to do it all yourself, Maggie. Let them help you. Let him help you."

After a moment, Maggie nodded. "I'll try." She pushed her cup away and got to her feet.

Gazing into his coffee cup, Beau said almost absently, "You might want to show Garrett the painting."

Just the idea made Maggie feel even more raw. "Why? Why should I show him… that… in me?"

"Call it a hunch," Beau said.

"… So that's what we have so far." Quentin frowned at the stacks of papers and files spread out on the conference table in the parlor, then looked at Maggie again. "Not a whole hell of a lot, but probably as much as the investigating officers."

Kendra said, "He didn't mean that the way it sounded."

Quentin lifted his brows. "How did it sound?"

"Arrogant," she explained. "We've only been here a few days, and we're claiming to have as much info as the cops who've been on the case for months. Use your head, Quentin."

"You're a lot more fun when you're typing something," he told her.

"And you wouldn't rattle on like this if you didn't have a dozen cups of coffee in your system. I keep telling you, caffeine is not your friend."

"I am not wired."

"Want me to point out how many times you paced the length of the table while you talked?"

John said, "Ignore the byplay. Apparently, it's their way of working together."

"Yeah, I got that," Maggie said. She was sitting at the far end of the conference table near the windows, chin in hand. "But could we call a truce, guys? Andy wants John and me back at the station this afternoon, and it'd be nice if I got all this clear in my mind so I'll have my story straight just in case any awkward little questions come up."

Quentin grinned at her. "Walking both sides of the street beginning to bug you?"

"Let's just say I'd feel a lot happier if Andy, at least, was in on this parallel investigation of ours. For one thing-" She broke off, wondering irritably if she had any hope at all of keeping things straight.

"For one thing," John finished calmly, "he and his detectives do have-or think they have-something new. Something he's told neither you nor me."

Maggie looked at him. "So you caught that?"

"For a cop, Andy has a very readable face. Either that, or he wanted both of us to guess there was something and press him to find out what it is."

She thought about it, then nodded slowly. "Maybe. Without Luke Drummond holding him on a leash, I think Andy would use just about any resource he could get his hands on to cage this animal."

Quentin said, "So given his druthers, he'd grant you two complete access?"

"I think so, yeah. As a matter of fact, I don't think he'd have too much of a problem with a couple of FBI agents working quietly behind the scenes to help."

"He wouldn't think we were stepping on his toes?"

Maggie shook her head immediately. "Not Andy. Unlike Drummond, Andy's not the least bit political, and he doesn't give a damn who breaks a case or gets the credit for it, just as long as the bad guys get put away. He's a cop to his bones."

"The best kind," Quentin said.

"Yeah. Which is why I don't think he'd protest too much if he found out about you two. With Drummond breathing down his neck and hell-bent not to call in outside help, the fact that you guys are here unofficially is all to the good, as far as Andy's concerned."

John said, "And if Drummond does somehow find out, I'll take the flak. He's already pissed at my interference, and today's newspapers won't make him any happier. I might as well make him good and mad while I'm at it. He can get royally pissed at me for acting without authority and he won't have to blame any of his people for going behind his back."

Quentin glanced at his partner, then said to John, "It's up to you two, of course, but if this detective is likely to be open to our involvement, we say let's tell him. In all honesty we'd prefer at least one cop on the inside and in a position of authority to know we're involved. It would certainly make sharing information easier and more profitable-and it'll undoubtedly make our little jaunt out here more palatable to Bishop."

Maggie frowned slightly. "Bishop?"

"Our boss," Quentin explained. "Bishop leads our unit at Quantico."

If anything, Maggie's frown deepened. She studied Quentin for a moment, then turned her gaze to Kendra. Abruptly, she asked, "You wouldn't happen to be psychic too, would you?"

Without a blink or a hesitation, Kendra said, "What I am we usually term 'adept,' used more to mean skilled than expert. I'm very mildly telepathic, but I tend to be able to pick up more from objects than people."

"And this unit of yours is entirely made up of… adepts?"

Quentin also didn't hesitate. "More or less. We have some support people who barely qualify as adepts, but most of the field agents are. Varying abilities and strengths. We use our abilities as just another tool to investigate crimes. Needless to say, it's something we generally keep quiet about, at least publicly."

Kendra murmured, "You understand why, of course."

Maggie smiled. "Oh, of course. It's not exactly something the Bureau would want to advertise, especially with its other public-relations nightmares of recent years."

"Exactly."

"And then there's the whole believability factor. Telepathy? Precognition? Not what they usually teach in Criminal Investigation Techniques 101. You're not just using unscientific methods, you're practically out in the ether."

Quentin grinned. "Sometimes even further out. One day I'll have to introduce you to a young medium we know-who talks to the dead."

"I can hardly wait."

"She's convincing, believe me. But for now, yes, traditional cops tend to frown on what they don't understand, even with a solid success record like ours. So even though we're billed as using 'unconventional investigative methods,' we tend to stick to traditional police work as much as possible."

"Mmm. So you generally pretend to be conventional agents with… a few lucky breaks and a little intuition? I'll bet you guys have a hell of a time coming up with reasonable explanations for how you know the things you know."

"It can be challenging," Quentin admitted.

"Yes, I imagine it can. And you're letting me in on it because I am-presumably-psychic as well?"

"We wanted all our cards on the table," Kendra said. "In our experience, psychics outside our unit become much more comfortable working with us once they understand that we understand what they've been going through."

Maggie glanced at John, who was expressionless, then lifted a brow at Kendra. "And do you understand?"

"Frankly, you're a bit outside even our experience, Maggie. We have an empath in the unit, but he's nothing like as strong as you seem to be."

"Or as… uniquely focused," Quentin added. "Is it only violent experiences you pick up on?"

Unlike the two of them, Maggie did hesitate before replying, but finally shrugged and said, "That's strongest, maybe because that's where I've had to concentrate all these years. Places where violent events have happened, people who've experienced trauma and violence. I can usually sense other emotions when I try, but more dimly, and they don't… affect me… the way violence and pain do."

Matter-of-fact but not without sympathy, Quentin said, "Not only is there actual pain and all the traumatic emotions, but it drains you just the way it would if the event had actually happened to you."

She nodded. "Sometimes I just get a little tired, but other times I seem to need to sleep ten or twelve hours before I feel normal again."

"And it's all the senses, isn't it? You feel what they did, see what they did, smell what they did-everything."

Again, Maggie nodded, very conscious now of John's silent attention. He'd told her that Andy had confirmed what she had picked up at the Mitchell house the previous day, but he hadn't said whether the confirmation made any difference to him. And in the presence of the two agents she was guarding herself, so she had no idea what he was feeling.

Kendra said, "It's the same when you bond with victims? When they relive what happened to them?"

"More or less. Sometimes their own minds have… dulled the sharp edges of the pain, and it isn't so intense. Other times their emotions nearly overwhelm me, and I can barely concentrate to ask them questions or listen to their answers." She drew a breath. "Not a lot of fun."

Deliberately, Quentin asked, "So why do you do it? Why do you put yourself through that kind of ordeal, Maggie?"

"Why do you?" she challenged.

He smiled faintly. "My abilities don't hurt me, generally speaking. I don't suffer. But you do. So why do you keep opening yourself up to that kind of suffering?"

Before Maggie could even begin to answer, John's cell phone rang, and she felt his gaze on her as she muttered not quite under her breath, "Saved by the bell."

John said hello, then listened for a moment. His face hardly changed expression, but something in his voice warned them when he said, "All right. We're on our way."

It was Quentin who asked, "What's happened?" "Andy wants us at the station now." John kept his gaze on Maggie. "Thomas Mitchell just received what appears to be a ransom note from the man who kidnapped his wife."