Touching Evil (6 page)

"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.