Touching Evil

CHAPTER THREE

Since she was forced to wait until Saturday afternoon to see Hollis Templeton and knew better than to try arranging another interview with Ellen Randall so soon, Maggie found herself at loose ends on Friday. Her small house was too quiet and the bright studio where she painted held no appeal, so late in the morning she picked up the sketch pad that went virtually everywhere with her and drove across town to another small, rather shabby house.

She went around to the back door that was never locked, pushing it open and calling out a hello.

"Studio," he called back.

Maggie picked her way through the usual clutter of books, magazines, newspapers, and half-finished craft projects to the studio, an addition to the house that was in stark contrast to the rest. Not only was it roomy and very bright due to numerous windows and skylights, it was also extremely neat and well organized, with paints and brushes stored precisely and canvases stacked in wooden bins. Various props and materials for drapes were kept ready on shelves between the windows, and the assorted chairs, lounges, and tables often used for backgrounds were arranged simply to comfortably furnish the large room.

In the center of the room an artist worked at an easel on a nearly completed canvas. The subject was a woman, and though she wasn't present in the flesh it was clear from the charcoal sketches pinned to another easel nearby that she had posed more than once for the artist.

The artist himself was about thirty, a tall and lanky man with the face of an angel-or so Maggie had always thought. She'd never seen an angel, but she had seen traffic literally stop and mouths drop open when this man walked by, and she figured he was about as close to heavenly perfection as earthly mortals were likely to get. He had long, wheat-gold hair he wore tied back at the nape of his neck, and his faded jeans and work shirt were, as usual, flecked with paint.

"Half a minute," he said without looking at her, his attention fixed on the careful shading beneath his subject's left ear.

"Take your time. I was tired of my own company and just came by to visit," Maggie said.

He sent her one quick glance from very pale blue eyes that were almost unnervingly discerning, then continued with his work. "Not like you to be bored," he said.

Maggie sat down at a clean but scarred wooden table and watched him. "Not bored exactly. Restless. I'm supposed to go talk to the most recent victim tomorrow, and until then there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do. It's very wearing on the nerves, just sitting around waiting for the next attack."

"I warned you," he murmured.

"I know you did. But why didn't you also warn me that Hollis Templeton would ask for me by name?"

He stopped working and looked at her steadily. "Nobody told her your name?"

"No."

"What do you know about her?"

Maggie shrugged. "She's an artist, but she's new in Seattle and I think the work she did on the East Coast was mostly commercial stuff, so we wouldn't have heard of her. Late twenties, single. From the photo I saw, she was attractive before the attack. I don't know about now."

"He took her eyes."

"Yes. Removed them-very neatly, according to her doctors. No acid this time. He used a knife or scalpel and seems to have known what he was doing. Little damage to the optic nerve, to the eye socket and eyelids. Which is why they decided to try the transplant."

"Was it successful?"

"You tell me."

He smiled slightly and turned back to his painting.

"I hate it when you do that," Maggie told him.

"Do what?" His tone was innocent.

"Ignore a question. I start really dreading it when you don't want to answer."

"Whether Hollis Templeton sees again is entirely up to her."

"Well, that's cryptic enough. Did they teach you to talk like that at seer school?"

"I didn't go to seer school."

"Prognosticator's school, then."

He chuckled. "That either."

When it became clear he wasn't going to say anything else, at least for the time being, Maggie sighed and opened her sketch pad. For several moments she stared at the vague outline of a rapist's face, then swore beneath her breath and closed the pad again.

"I really hate this, Beau," she said.

"I know you do. I'm sorry."

"But not sorry enough to be a little less cryptic."

"Being sorry has nothing to do with it."

"Free will."

He nodded and stepped away from the easel to begin cleaning his brushes. "Free will. You have to make the decisions and choices facing you of your own free will."

Maggie watched him broodingly. "And yet you know what those decisions and choices are going to be. Which argues that fate is set, my destiny planned-and there is no such thing as free will."

"Then let's call it the illusion of free will."

"You can be very maddening sometimes, you know that?"

"You tell me so often enough." Beau disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes and returned with two canned soft drinks. "This stuff is very bad for us," he said vaguely. "I read it somewhere." He handed her a can and sat down across from her to pop the top of his own.

Maggie followed suit. "You swear to me you can't tell me who the rapist is?"

Beau frowned. "There's no sense of identity, and I can't see his face. That's something I would tell you if I could, Maggie, believe me. There's nothing in the seer's handbook about protecting monsters."

"He is that, you know. Inhuman."

"I know."

"I have to stop him."

"You mean you have to try."

"Yes. Yes, of course that's what I mean."

"You're helping, Maggie."

"Am I? I don't have a sketch yet."

"Maybe not, but you're helping those women. If they have any kind of a life when this is over, it'll be largely due to you."

"Then why don't I feel better?"

Quietly, he said, "Because you've let yourself get too close to them. You won't be able to do this much longer if you don't back away a bit. Try to stop feeling everything they feel."

"Teach me how to do that and I'll give it a shot." She laughed, but the sound held no amusement. "We're running out of time. It's only going to get worse from here on out, Beau, we both know that."

"Even so, stop trying to carry all of the load yourself. You can't do this alone, I've told you. You have to trust someone else to help you."

"Someone other than you."

"I'm… outside the loop. My job is to offer cryptic warnings, remember?"

"Yeah, right."

Beau smiled slightly, but it was sympathetic rather than humorous. "I wish I could do more."

"Then do more, dammit."

"The seer handbook, remember? We all have to play by the rules, Maggie. Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, testing the ground, feeling our way, studying the signs. So wary of doing something that might make things even worse. You've been doing that too. Otherwise you would have told them the truth a long time ago."

"And how am I supposed to tell them the truth? Andy, the other cops? How will they ever understand? Hell-how will they even believe me?"

"When you don't quite believe it yourself,' he murmured.

"It isn't an easy thing to believe, to accept."

"I know."

"You could be wrong about it," she said, more of a question than a statement.

"I really wish I was, Maggie. For your sake." He watched her for a moment in silence, then said, "Is Garrett here yet?"

"Yes. He was at the station yesterday. Wanted to talk to me about Christina."

"Did you tell him?"

"The truth? No. I lied. I looked that man in the eye and lied to him about his sister's death."

"Why?"

"Because… I don't know why. Because he wouldn't suffer less for knowing the truth. Because he'd blame himself for something he did, or failed to do. Because Christina wouldn't want him to know. Because he wouldn't believe me." She lifted her drink in a mocking salute. "Or maybe just because I'm a coward."

"I don't think that was it."

"Don't you? I'm beginning to wonder. I'm afraid, Beau. I'm scared to death."

"Of the future?"

"Of now. What if I'm not strong enough? Or smart enough, or quick enough? I wasn't before."

"You will be this time."

"Is that from the seer? Or just from you?"

"From me."

Maggie sighed. "That's what I thought." She brooded in silence for several minutes, then said abruptly, "Garrett. You're wrong about him."

"Am I?"

"Yes."

"Well," Beau said affably, "I've been wrong before. Not often, mind you, but it has been known to happen. Time will tell, won't it, Maggie?"

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, time will tell."

Andy Brenner had been a cop almost fifteen years. He loved the work, even though it had cost him his marriage-which wasn't exactly an unusual price for cops to pay. Half the guys in the department were either divorced or trying to make a second marriage work better than the first one had. And the female officers didn't seem to have it any easier.

Like most of the spouses, Andy's had hated the long hours and lousy pay, the stress of knowing her husband waded in filth virtually every day and might not come home except in a flag-draped box. But, even more than that, Kathy had hated his commitment to his job.

Well, Andy could hardly change that. Hell, he couldn't even apologize for it. A cop wasn't much good to anybody if he wasn't dedicated, was he?

No.

Which was why he was staying late yet again on this Friday night. Going over files he'd already studied so many times the information was practically embedded in his brain cells. Only now there was nobody waiting for him at home, pacing the floor or drinking too much wine after a supper alone.

"Andy?"

He looked up. "I thought you left hours ago, Scott."

Scott Cowan shook his head. "No, Jenn and I were just in the back digging through some of the old files." He was holding a dingy gray folder in his hands.

"What the hell for?"

"Just following up on a hunch."

"A hunch about what? The rapist?" Not, Andy thought, that there was much chance it was about anything else; the case possessed all of them these days.

"Well, yeah."

"So? Let's hear it."

Scott hadn't been a detective long enough to have a lot of faith in his hunches, and he reddened a bit under Andy's gaze. "Well, I know we fed all the information we've got on this rapist through the computer to look for similar crimes, but Jenn and me were talking today and we started wondering about the old files. Some of those files go back fifty years and more, and none of the info is in the system."

Patiently, Andy said, "I doubt our rapist was attacking women fifty years ago, Scott. That'd make him-what?-seventy-five or eighty now? Not even a little blue pill could help a geezer like that get it up."

"No, that's not the way we're thinking. Something the shrink said at the meeting yesterday. She said this rapist seemed to have his rituals well established, as if he'd been at this much longer than the six months we know he's been active. So we thought he might have found himself some ready-made rituals, copying a much older string of crimes."

"Taking the information right out of our old files?"

"Not necessarily. Jenn checked, and some of this stuff has been written up in books over the years, especially the unsolved crimes. It's a popular subject, Andy, you know that. And it's at least a possibility that our guy could be following somebody else's game plan, isn't it?"

"Anything's possible." Andy pursed his lips for a moment as he considered the idea. "Not bad, Scott. It's an angle we haven't considered. Find anything yet?"

"We're not sure."

"Something else interesting?"

"Something peculiar. At least we thought so. Maybe you can say different." He opened the file and extracted a yellowed sheet of paper, which he handed across the desk. "Just for the hell of it, we started with the really old files, those from more than fifty years ago. Specifically from 1934. Jenn found this in one of them, among some case notes of a murder investigation."

Andy stared down at the sketch and felt a sensation he'd never felt before, as though a cold finger had trailed slowly up his spine. The heart-shaped face and delicate features, the long dark hair… "Who is this? I mean-who was she?"

"She was the victim, Andy. A young teacher, stabbed to death in an alley. Apparently she was pretty beat up, so much so that they used an artist to sketch her the way they figured she looked uninjured, just so they'd have something to show around while they tried to identify her. They found out who she was, all right, but… the case was never solved."

"It must be a coincidence," Andy muttered. "The artist got it wrong, guessed wrong about how she really looked. Or some kind of family tie. What was her name?"

Scott opened the folder again. "Her name was… Pamela Hall. Spinster, twenty-two. No family in Seattle, at least not that the cops could discover."

"Was she raped?"

"Yeah, she was. In those days, though, rape was seldom reported and never investigated, at least as far as I can tell. It was just mentioned by the doctor in his postmortem notes; the cops treated it like a murder, pure and simple. They weren't looking for a sexual predator."

Jennifer Seaton joined them at Andy's desk in time to hear that, and said, "I don't think that term even existed then." She shook her head, more in weariness than anger. "They still thought rape was a forceful act of sex-and nothing more."

"Have you found any other attacks around the same time?" Andy asked.

Jennifer shook her head again. "Not yet. But this one happened early that year, and there are more files we can go through. We just thought we should check with you before we go any further. It wasn't the attack itself that caught my attention-lots of women were killed in Seattle around that time. It was the sketch I couldn't get past."

Andy drew a breath. "I see what you mean. Shit. If this sketch is accurate, she was the image of our first victim, Laura Hughes."

"That's what we thought."

Andy propped the sketch against his phone and stared at it. Probably just coincidence. Hell, it had to be. Still… "Look, it's late, you two should go home. But when you come back on duty, you might want to keep digging in those files, see if you turn up anything else."

Scott nodded, eager to participate more fully in an investigation where, so far, he'd been more of a glorified gofer than anything else. "Sure, I can do that. Jenn?"

"Gladly. Beats the hell out of sitting at my desk taking call after call from panicky citizens."

Scott said, "Hey, Andy, you think we might have something here? Maybe this guy is copying old crimes by hunting for look-alike victims?"

"Maybe," Andy said. "But let's not get too excited just yet, okay, guys? One sketch doesn't mean much, except maybe that all of us have-or had-doubles in the world. Just keep digging, and bring me anything you find."

"You bet, Andy. Want us to leave this file for you?"

"Yeah." Andy accepted the file and wished the younger cops a good night. They walked out together, talking, and he wasted a minute or so wondering if they were sleeping together. Not very surprising, if so, and they wouldn't be the first pairing in the department. But he hoped they were smarter than that.

When he was alone again, he stared at the sketch of a young woman long dead and gone. Hell, twice dead and gone, or at least that was how it looked. Pamela Hall, stabbed to death in 1934 after being brutally raped; Laura Hughes, brutally raped and beaten in 2001, blinded, dying days later of her injuries.

The two women didn't just resemble each other-they were virtually identical, right down to the little mole at the left corner of their mouths. But an artist had drawn this sketch with only the battered face of the victim as a guide, and Andy reminded himself that artists were hardly infallible.

Except for Maggie, anyway.

Andy combed through the file, but it held precious little information. From the sound of their notes, the investigating cops had been saddened by the murder of this young woman but not surprised; she had been found in the bad part of town, and it was clear they considered it her own fault that she had placed herself in the path of danger. Still, they had investigated methodically for a while-and then moved on to the next crime demanding their attention.

The postmortem notes were no more helpful. The victim had died of blood loss and shock; there was evidence of forcible sexual activity, and she was beaten and bruised. It was the opinion of the doctor that she had fought her attacker, evidenced by the injuries to her arms and hands, but her strength had, clearly, been no match for his.

Andy went back to studying the sketch. Were Scott and Jennifer right in their speculation? Was their modern-day serial rapist choosing his victims from old unsolved cases?

It was, of course, ridiculous to base an assumption such as that one on a single example, but Andy couldn't help doing a little speculating himself. So far, they hadn't been able to find any pattern in the means or reasoning their rapist had used to choose his victims. Since one of the women had been abducted from a crowded shopping mall and another from her high-security apartment building, they had ruled out simple ease of access, which meant he was picking his victims some other way and quite deliberately.

Could he be using old unsolved investigations? And if he was, had he found the information he sought in books? Or in the actual files themselves?

If he was, Andy hoped it was the former. He really hoped so. Because he was pretty sure that the only people who could have gained access to the old files without attracting notice were cops.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Maggie wasn't terribly surprised to find John Garrett at the hospital when she arrived to talk to Hollis Templeton shortly after two o'clock. She also wasn't terribly happy about it.

"The interview will be private," she told him.

"I know that. I just thought we might be able to get a cup of coffee somewhere afterward. Talk."

She didn't bother to explain that interviews such as this one was likely to be usually left her feeling something less than sociable. "I doubt I'll have any new information," she warned him instead. "The first interview with a victim seldom produces anything we can use."

"I understand that. I'd still like to talk. And-there's someone I'd like you to meet."

Maggie was curious enough about that to nod and say fine, that she'd meet him at the waiting area near the elevators when she was finished with her interview. Then she went on to Hollis Templeton's room, braced herself as well as she could, and knocked quietly before going in.

"Miss Templeton?"

"Yes?" She was sitting by the window, her face turned toward it even though bandages covered her eyes. She was dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, much as Maggie was dressed herself-even to the comfortable running shoes. Her brown hair was short and styled for a casual look and ease of care, nothing at all fussy about it.

Maggie crossed the small room to stand by the empty chair apparently awaiting her. "I'm Maggie Barnes."

"I see." Her face turned toward Maggie, and lips that bore a healing cut moved in a smile. "Well, I don't, really. Have you ever stopped to think about how many things we say using words like see and look, when we don't actually mean to describe doing anything visual?"

Maggie slipped into the chair. "I've thought about it a lot lately," she answered.

Hollis smiled again, her face seemingly unmarked except for the healing cut-and those bandaged eyes. "Yes, I imagine in speaking to blinded victims you find verbal minefields all over the place. I'm Hollis, by the way. A ridiculous family name. My father tried to shorten it to Holly when I was small, but I hated that even more."

Maggie had talked to too many victims of violent crime to find the conversation in any way strange; some victims had to discuss irrelevant things first, partly to delay reliving the pain of what had happened to them and partly to at least attempt to establish a feeling of normalcy. So she was able to respond easily and without impatience.

"Most people think Maggie is short for Margaret, but it isn't. I've always been Maggie."

"It's a good name. It means pearl, did you know?"

"Yes."

"Hollis means lives by the holly trees. What kind of name is that for a grown woman?" She shook her head, adding abruptly, "Dumb subject. And trivial. Sorry, I don't mean to waste your time."

"You aren't, Hollis. I'm glad you called us."

"Us." She nodded as though a private thought had been confirmed. "So you do consider yourself one of the cops, huh?"

"I guess so."

"It can't be a fun job, listening to horrible stories about… man's inhumanity to man."

"No, that part of it isn't fun."

"Why do you do it?"

Maggie studied the other woman, noting the stiff posture, the hands still bearing faint scratches and fading bruises gripping the arms of the chair tensely. Slowly she said, "I… have a knack. I listen to disparate details and manage to put them together to form a picture. A face."

Hollis tilted her head slightly. "Yes, but why do you do it? Were you a victim once?"

"No."

"Somebody you cared about?"

Maggie almost shook her head, then remembered Hollis couldn't see her. It was an odd surprise; she could almost feel a gaze, feel attention fixed on her so completely that it was as if the other woman could see her. "No," she murmured, answering the question even as she wondered if what she felt was her imagination-or something more.

"Is it pity?"

If Hollis was expecting a swift denial, she didn't get it. Calmly Maggie said, "I imagine that's part of it. Pity, sympathy, whatever you want to call it."

Hollis smiled. "You're honest. Good."

"I try to be."

A little laugh escaped Hollis. "And truthful enough to know it isn't always possible to be completely honest with other people."

"A lesson sadly learned."

"Life is full of them." Abruptly, Hollis said, "I know I'm the fourth victim. I remember reading in the newspapers that the first two were dead."

"Yes."

"But he didn't leave them dead. They died later."

"Laura Hughes died of her injuries. Christina Walsh killed herself about a month after she was attacked."

"Did either of them have kids?"

"No."

"What about the third woman?"

"She has a little boy."

"I hadn't even decided if I wanted kids. Now it's a decision I don't have to worry about anymore."

Maggie didn't offer platitudes. Instead, she asked, "Is that the worst of it for you? That there won't be any children of your own?"

"I don't know." Her lips moved again in that small, brief smile. "I guess it might depend on whether the transplant was a success. The doctor's confident, but… I don't know what you learned in art school, but one of the things they taught us is that the eyes, like the spine, are hardwired into the brain. That's why there hasn't been a successful transplant before now. They can transplant corneas, of course, but not the eyeball-or at least that's conventional medical wisdom. My doctor intends to become a pioneer."

"You'll be one too," Maggie reminded her.

"I'm not so sure I want to be. But I do want to see again, so I signed the papers. Any chance is better than none, right?"

"I'd say so."

"Yeah. But nobody really knows what might happen. My body doesn't seem to be rejecting the eyes, but the odds against them working the way they're supposed to are pretty long. The funny thing is…"

"What?"

She drew a little breath. "They say when you lose a limb, you get phantom sensations-that you still feel the limb attached to you, moving. Hurting."

"I've heard that."

"I asked my doctor if it was the same way with eyes. I don't think he quite got what I meant until I asked him if I should be able to move them. Because that's the kind of sensations I feel, that the eyes are moving under the bandages, behind my eyelids. Like now, when I think about looking toward the door… I can feel them move."

"What did your doctor say?"

"That it was probably phantom sensations, there hadn't been time for the muscles and nerves to heal. That was just after the operation, so I guess he was right. But it still feels the same to me, those sensations."

"When will they take the bandages off?"

"Another week or so. Until then, all I can do is sit here… and wait. I never was very good at waiting."

"Is that why you called us?"

"Maybe. If I could do anything to help them catch that… monster… then I want to do it." She paused and swallowed hard. "At least, that was the plan. Now I'm not so sure I can talk about it yet. I'm sorry, but-"

"Hollis, it's all right. You have to do this in your own time and way. Look, why don't I come back tomorrow, and we'll talk again. We'll talk about anything you want for as long as you want. Until you're ready."

"If you don't mind."

"I don't. I'll see you tomorrow afternoon, okay?"

"Thank you, Maggie."

Hollis didn't move after the door closed behind her visitor. She turned her face back toward the window, thinking vaguely that if she'd been back in New England she might have felt the sunlight on her face even in November. But the nurses had told her it was a typical Seattle day, overcast and dreary, with no sunlight to be had. They hadn't understood why she'd wanted to sit by the window anyway.

You should have talked to her, Hollis.

"I did talk to her."

I told you that you could trust her.

She laughed under her breath. "I don't even know if I can trust you."

You know.

"All I know is that I'm creeping out the nursing staff by talking to someone who isn't there."

I'm here. And you know I'm real.

Hollis turned her head so that she faced the chair across from her own. "If I could see, would I see you?"

Perhaps.

"And perhaps not. I think I'll make up my own mind who to trust, if it's all the same to you, figment."

Make up your mind soon, Hollis. We're running out of time.