“You felt that because they did?”
“Yes.”
“When you interviewed them? When they relived those memories?”
She nodded.
“Did you go to the places the other women had been abducted from?”
“Only one of them. Laura Hughes was abducted from her high-security apartment building, so I was able to do a walk-through there. But the others were grabbed either in very public places or places where there had been far too many people around later. It would have . . . muddied the impressions.”
“Impressions?”
Dryly, she said, “What do you expect me to call them—psychic vibes?”
“You flatly denied being psychic just the other day.”
“Yeah, well, that’s always the safe thing to do—at least until I get to know whoever’s asking.”
He shot her a quick look. “Is that why you’re finally being honest with me?”
“Well, I thought it might avoid a game of twenty questions. Obviously, I was wrong.”
That surprised a laugh out of him. “Okay, point taken. It’s just that I really do want to understand, Maggie.”
“And believe?”
He barely hesitated. “And believe. It’s just so far outside my experience that I know virtually nothing about it.”
“You don’t like not knowing, do you?”
“No, I don’t. So I ask questions.”
Maggie waited until he turned the car into the police lot where she’d left her own to say, “I really don’t mind questions, John. But my brain isn’t working too clearly at the moment, and I’d rather postpone them, if it’s all the same to you.”
He pulled into the slot beside her car. “Will you come to the hotel later? I still think we should sit down and go over everything with Quentin and his partner, come up with some kind of game plan from here on out.”
“Partner?”
John swore under his breath, wondering if Maggie’s apparent psychic abilities included being able to make him say things he had no intention of saying. “Yes, his partner.”
“He’s a cop, isn’t he?” Maggie had one hand on the door handle but was waiting, brows slightly raised. “Quentin’s a cop.”
“He’s here unofficially, Maggie.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of cop?”
“Federal,” John answered reluctantly. “FBI.”
“Oh, lovely. And if Drummond finds out?”
“Then everything hits the fan. But I’m hoping he won’t find out—at least until we have something to help his people put this bastard behind bars for the rest of his miserable life.”
Maggie shook her head. “You do like to live dangerously.”
“Maybe. Will you come to the hotel later?”
She didn’t think there was a maybe about it but was too tired to worry much about it at the moment. “Look, I’ll see how I feel in a couple of hours and let you know, okay? I still have your cell number.”
He nodded but turned the car off and got out when she did, saying, “I want to talk to Andy for a few minutes.”
Maggie unlocked her car door and said calmly, “Do you want me to write down the stuff I told you at the Mitchell house so Andy can try to verify it for you?”
John stood on the walkway a few feet away, staring at her. “Shit. Was I that obvious?”
“Let’s just say I’m beginning to understand the way you think.”
He smiled slightly. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I’ll let you know.”
He half laughed. “Fair enough. No, you don’t have to write anything down. As it happens, I have a very good memory.”
“Now, that doesn’t surprise me at all. See you later, John.” She got into her car and closed the door. She started the engine, watching him walk toward the station, and muttered under her breath, “FBI. Great. Just great.”
Andy hung up the phone and frowned across his desk at John. “Okay, I checked. And, as you heard, an understandably bewildered Thomas Mitchell confirmed. He and his wife did have an argument in their den about a parrot last week, his wife did cut herself on a hand mirror in the breakfast room the week before that, and he and his father-in-law did have a rather loud ‘discussion’ about business in his study just the other day. Now I’ve left the poor bastard wondering if somebody’s got him bugged. I’m wondering too.”
John tried to head him off. “I’ve got to know more about the parrot. Why’d they fight about that?”
“Samantha Mitchell wanted one as a pet,” Andy answered impatiently. “John—”
“Who won the fight?”
“She did. The bird’s on order. John, how the hell did you know about this stuff?”
He hesitated, but only briefly. There really wasn’t another explanation and, besides, John had a hunch that if any one of these cops could accept Maggie totally no matter how bizarre her talents seemed to be, it would be Andy.
“I know,” he answered finally, “because Maggie told me. While she was walking through the Mitchell house.”
Andy didn’t even blink. “So she is psychic, huh? Well, I always thought so.”
“I’m still not a hundred percent convinced,” John said, “but I have to admit she’s been pretty damned impressive. I was just a step behind her when she walked into the Mitchells’ game room, and I’ll swear whatever she was experiencing nearly knocked her to her knees. She says the attacker felt a certain way, his arms, his body behind her. And she claims to have felt those same physical traits when the victims she interviewed relived their attacks.”
“Jesus,” Andy murmured. “If she felt that . . . then she must have felt the rest. All that pain and fear. I knew she was strong, but I had no idea just how strong.”
John studied him. “You don’t doubt that, do you? That she really feels what she says she does.”
“No, I don’t doubt it.” Andy drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “About two years ago, we had what looked like a simple case of a runaway teenager. Normally, I wouldn’t even have been involved, but the parents were political players in the city, and the chief wanted his best people looking for their fifteen-year-old daughter.
“So we interviewed dozens of her friends, trying to establish when and how she might have run away. Maggie sat in on the interviews because the chief asked her to, but she never asked a question, just listened. When we were done, none of us had a clue where that girl might be, but everything—and I mean everything—pointed to her having simply packed up some things and left home. Even the shrink agreed.”
“So what happened?”
“We’d spent the better part of two days interviewing the friends, and afterward Maggie asked if she could walk around the girl’s house and the yard. Well, we’d been all through the house, forensics had been over it, and I didn’t hold out much hope Maggie could find something all of us had missed. I think they call that hubris, don’t they?”
John smiled slightly. “She found something?”
“You could say that. I knew by then, of course, that she preferred to walk a scene alone, so I was keeping my distance. I was standing out near the garage and hadn’t realized she’d come back outside until I saw her near the patio. She was walking very slowly, apparently not looking at anything in particular. When she got to the edge of the yard, she just stood there for the longest time. I didn’t realize at first that she was crying, but it eventually dawned on me.
“I figured she was just upset about the missing girl, and I didn’t want to embarrass her by calling attention to it, so I went to the car and waited. She came back a few minutes later, and except for a little red around her eyes, she looked the same as always. I asked if she’d found anything and she said no. Then, about halfway back to the station, she started talking about the interviews. She said something about one of the older boys bothered her. Nothing she could put her finger on, mind you, just a hunch. Wondered if I’d mind calling him back in for another talk, if maybe she could ask him a qu
estion or two.
“I wasn’t looking forward to telling the chief we had squat for leads, so I said sure, why not. The boy wasn’t a suspect, and since he was eighteen we didn’t have to interview him in the presence of his parents, but we did tell him he could have a lawyer if he wanted one. He didn’t. I asked him a few questions, then Maggie started talking to him. Just talking to him, quiet and gentle. About his school and his parents. About the girl.”
When Andy fell silent, John said, “She got him to confess.”
Andy nodded. “Took nearly an hour, and by the time he finally told the truth he was bawling his eyes out. The girl was supposed to meet him in the woods for what had become a regular session. Only that night she’d had a fight with her parents and decided to run away. To him. So she’d packed a bag, left a note for her parents, and there she was, expecting him to take care of her.
“He hadn’t bargained on having a fifteen-year-old hung around his neck for life, and he panicked. They argued, and at some point he shoved her. When she fell, she hit her head on a rock. She didn’t get back up. He had a shovel in his car. The gardeners had been doing landscaping around the yard and the ground was soft, covered with a dense layer of pine mulch. It was all too horribly easy, he said, to bury her and her little suitcase right there.”
Andy sighed. “Right there—not ten feet away from where I watched Maggie stand and cry. She knew. She knew exactly what had happened to that girl. There wasn’t a sign to be seen, a clue to be found. But she knew.”
“You never told her what you’d seen?”
“No. Figured if she wanted me to know, she’d tell me. It seemed to me it was the sort of thing that would be difficult to live with, so I guessed she was used to coming up with . . . other explanations for the things she knew.” Andy looked at the other man steadily. “It was fine by me. I’d learned to trust her by then, and to be perfectly honest I don’t give a damn if she reads tea leaves or peers into a crystal ball. In five years and hundreds of tough cases, I’ve never known her to be wrong.”
“Never?”
“Never. Oh, there’ve been times when she was no closer to an answer than we were, but whenever Maggie got one of her hunches I knew damned well the case was about to break.”
John shook his head slightly. “I don’t know what I believe, except that whatever Maggie experiences is obviously very real to her. So why does she do it? Why does she put herself through this kind of trauma, this kind of suffering?”
“You asked me that last week, more or less. I don’t know the answer, John, but I’m willing to bet that if you ever find out what it is, you’ll have the key to understanding Maggie Barnes.”
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.