Maggie couldn’t really blame him.
“And what about your connection to it all? If you can’t see the future, and your psychic ability is . . . limited . . . to feelings, then how can you be so certain this bastard we’re after is some kind of eternal evil? Because you feel it?”
“Yes. And because I’ve felt it before.”
“When?”
She hesitated, wondering if there was any chance at all he could accept this. “In 1934.”
After a long moment of silence, John said, “I really wish you had something stronger than coffee in the house.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
He drew a breath and let it out slowly. “You’re saying you lived then? That you were another person— living another life?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“And you knew this . . . eternal evil then?”
“He was attacking women then the way he is now, I know that. When Andy and the others showed us those pictures of women killed back then, I knew it was him. Not a copycat killer borrowing somebody else’s rituals, but him.”
“Because you felt it.”
She nodded. “I don’t know anything that could help the investigation, nothing that could help us find him, catch him. I don’t know what he looks like, what his name is. I don’t even know why he’s picking women who look like the ones he killed back then. All I know is that the evil inside him has been alive a long, long time. And I know it’s my fault.”
“What?”
“Balance, remember? A positive force intended to oppose a negative one? Somehow, I was supposed to stop him. Back in the beginning, before his evil grew too strong, I was somehow in a position to change whatever happened then. To stop him, destroy him. Or maybe just turn him in a different direction. I don’t know for sure. I don’t remember. I just feel.”
“And if what you feel is wrong?”
“It isn’t.”
“How can you be so damned sure? Maggie, what you’re talking about is . . . incredible. To say the least. You failed to stop a killer a lifetime ago, and because of that he became some kind of unstoppable evil?”
“He isn’t unstoppable. He just hasn’t been stopped—up to now.”
“And you have to stop him—now?”
She nodded. “I have to stop him. Because I didn’t before. I can’t . . . move on until I do what I’m supposed to do. And I have a very strong feeling this is my last chance to correct that mistake. Maybe we only get so many chances, I don’t know. Maybe if I fail this time, someone else gets a shot at restoring the balance and I get sent back to learn the lesson a different way. I just . . . I just know that it’s my responsibility this time around. I have to stop him.”
“Karma.”
“If it makes more sense to you to put it that way. Fate. Destiny. We’re connected, he and I. Tied together by a mistake. If there’s anything I know, anything I’m absolutely certain of, it’s that once you’ve touched evil— I mean really touched it—you’re forever changed. In a way, you are bound to it, tied to it, so that it becomes a part of you.”
“There’s nothing evil in you,” he said immediately.
“Oh, but there is. It’s not my evil, but I carry it inside me. That painting proves it. His evil. I carry his evil in my own soul . . . and I have for a long, long time.”
Suddenly, John understood. “That’s why you do it. That’s why you surround yourself with victims, suffer right along with them. It’s atonement, isn’t it, Maggie?”
For the first time, she avoided his steady gaze. “Consciously? No. Not at first. But I’ve always been drawn to people in pain. Always felt a kind of relief if I could help them in some way. Gradually, over the years, I realized there was . . . something I was trying to fix, some mistake I wanted to correct. I didn’t know what it was, not then. It wasn’t until Laura Hughes was attacked that I began to understand the truth.”
“Truth?” Unable to be still any longer, John rose and began wandering around the room, not quite pacing. “Christ.”
“I know it all sounds unbelievable.”
“You could say that, yeah.”
“It is the truth, John. I wish it wasn’t. I wish this was all about one evil man doing evil things in a single lifetime, something we could both accept, even if not understand. But that isn’t what it’s about. That’s never been what it’s about.”
“Jesus, Maggie.”
“I’m sorry. But you had to know the truth about it.”
He swung around to stare at her. “So is this where you also tell me the truth about Christina?”
Maggie was honestly startled. “How did you—”
“I don’t have to be psychic to know there’s more to her death than what you’ve told me. Why do you think I kept after you about it? What do you know about her death, Maggie?”
His cell phone rang before she could formulate an answer, but Maggie didn’t feel much of a sense of reprieve; from the determination on his face, she doubted he would accept anything less than the truth this time.
“Yeah, hello.” He listened for a moment, then went to a notepad Maggie kept by her living-room phone and quickly jotted something down. “Okay. Yeah, I’ve got it. I’ll call Andy and tell him. You won’t do anything stupid, will you?” He listened a minute longer, then said, “Well, listen to Kendra and stay put, okay? Let Andy and his people take care of it. Yeah, I will.”
When he ended the call, Maggie said, “I take it Quentin and Kendra found whoever sent that ransom note?”
“They have a name and an address.” He called Andy’s cell phone and repeated the information, adding, “Quentin says the information is solid, and he’s pretty sure this Brady Oliver either knows where Samantha Mitchell is or knows someone who does. No information on whether she’s alive or dead. Yeah. No, I’m at Maggie’s. For a while probably; call me on my cell in case I’m in transit, okay?” He listened a moment longer, then said, “Yeah, I’ll tell her.” He closed the phone.
“Tell me what?”
“He said he just called in to check for messages and found one from Hollis Templeton. She wants to see you as soon as possible.”
“He doesn’t know why?”
“No, just that she needs to talk to you.”
Maggie looked at her watch. “Visiting hours will be over for the night by the time I can get there.”
“Andy said he’s cleared it with the hospital if you want to go tonight. But if you’re too tired, tomorrow is probably soon enough.”
Maggie wasn’t so sure. “Hollis wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important. I’d better go now.”
“I’ll drive,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It didn’t take Scott and Jennifer more than half an hour to find Brady Oliver at the address provided and bring him in for questioning. He turned out to be a small-time crook with delusions of grandeur and crumbled almost before Andy could even begin to get hard-nosed about the probable legal consequences of passing oneself off as a kidnapper.
“I never took her, I swear! I just found her is all, and why shouldn’t I try to make a few bucks on a lucky chance? Her old man would never miss it, and she don’t care no more, right?”
Andy stared at him, thinking once again that it was a helluva world they lived in. And feeling a chill. From the sound of it, Samantha Mitchell was already dead. “Where is she, Brady?”
Bloodshot eyes shifted nervously. “First, we gotta talk about this kidnapping rap. ’Cause I never took her, I just found her.”
Andy leaned toward him and said gently, “Well, I’ll tell you what, Brady. What say I invite Samantha Mitchell’s husband in here to meet you? And you can explain it all to him.”
“Oh, hell, no, don’t do that!”
“Where is she?”
“I just wanted to—”
“Where is she?”
“Alls I’m asking is—”
Andy rose to his feet.
“Okay, okay! There’s a dump not t
oo far from my place, an old abandoned building. City wants to tear it down, but there’s no money to rebuild, something like that. I go there sometimes and look for stuff I can sell.” He rattled off the address, looking acutely unhappy. “First floor, back room.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she, Brady?”
“I didn’t do her, I swear!”
Andy felt very tired. He said, “My people are going to go check out the address. You’ll wait right here.”
“I want a lawyer,” Brady whined.
“You haven’t been charged with anything. Yet.”
“Oh. Well, then, I want a Coke.”
Andy left the interview room without responding and before he gave in to the temptation to rid the human gene pool of one extremely stupid and vicious little possible breeder.
As soon as he shut the door behind him, Jennifer came out of the observation room and said, “We heard, Andy. Scott’s rounding up the rest and putting forensics on alert. Do you think that piece of scum in there really just found her?”
Nodding, Andy said, “If Brady had killed her, he would have been hiding in the deepest hole he could find and wouldn’t have opened his trap, except to ask for a lawyer. Since he just found her, he figures he’s safe. Stupid bastard.”
“So she’s dead?”
“Yeah, she’s dead. Come on—let’s go. You and Scott can ride with me.”
They collected the others from the bullpen and went out to their cars. On the point of getting into his own car, Andy noticed Jennifer still on the sidewalk; she was looking around with a frown, obviously disturbed.
“What?” he asked.
“Did you hear something?”
“I heard a lot. Traffic, voices, a horn blowing a couple of blocks away.”
She shook her head, moving toward the passenger side finally but still frowning. “No, something else.”
Scott said, “I didn’t hear anything weird, Jenn. What’d it sound like?”
“Just . . . I could have sworn somebody said my name, that’s all. My imagination, I guess.” She shivered visibly and got into the car.
Andy paused a moment to look around carefully, but he didn’t see or hear anything unusual. Even so, he didn’t dismiss Jennifer’s uneasiness, especially added to the fact that someone had apparently gotten into her locked car not so long ago.
He looked around a final time, then got into the car, making a mental note to do something about security around the station. But that resolution was pushed to the back of his mind by the time they reached the address Brady Oliver had given them.
Loath to disturb any evidence, Andy stationed most of his people around the building with instructions to tape off the entire thing for forensics, while he went in with only Scott and Jennifer as backup.
Their flashlights showed them a dirty, ramshackle place that had long ago been stripped to its bare bones. The floor creaked underfoot, and as they entered they could all hear faint scratchy whisperings and scurryings.
“What the hell’s that?” Scott demanded, jumpy and not apologetic about it.
“Rats,” Andy told him. “You two stay behind me. We’ll check out the room Brady said he found her in first.”
With sudden realization, Scott said, “Rats . . . If the lady’s here and she’s been dead very long—”
“Don’t think about it,” Jennifer urged him, her own voice a bit thickened.
Andy hesitated, wondering if he should have left the two of them outside. Both had witnessed scenes of homicide before, but he knew they were very involved in this case and that their emotions were heightened because of that. Still, even that was part of being a cop. He moved on, slow and careful.
The long hallway led to the back of the building, where there were half a dozen rooms, their doors long gone, and empty doorways with broken casings leaned drunkenly open. Andy wondered why the whole building hadn’t collapsed long ago. He paused, shining his light around, then moved suddenly toward the doorway to the room on the far left corner.
He could smell the blood.
There was no need to go more than a step into the room. His flashlight found her immediately.
“Oh, Christ,” Scott muttered.
Andy said nothing, but he heard Jennifer give a little sigh and didn’t have to ask to know what both of them were feeling. Because he felt the same. Horror. Revulsion. Pain. And an overwhelming sadness.
Samantha Mitchell lay spread-eagled on a blood-stained mattress in the far corner. Her naked body was bruised and battered. Her eyes were gone, and her throat was cut almost ear to ear. The rats had indeed gotten to her body.
Even more horribly, a deep slash opened the lower curve of her rounded belly.
And between her thighs lay the pitifully small, curled body of her dead child.
Still connected to her body by the umbilical cord.
“From the moment we met, there was an unusual bond between Christina and me,” Maggie said. “Maybe it was because she was the first of his victims to survive the attack, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, we both felt it, that closeness.”
“She mentioned your name a couple of times when I flew up to visit her,” John said, keeping his eyes on the road as he drove. “Didn’t say much, just that you were the police sketch artist and that you’d been kind to her. That’s one reason I asked Andy about you after she died. And I saw you at the funeral.”
Maggie was a little surprised by that; she had made a point of keeping back and being unobtrusive. “I didn’t know you saw me then.”
“I just caught a glimpse near the end. Didn’t know who you were until I recognized you last week in that interview room.” He didn’t add that something about her had stuck in his mind so that all these weeks later he had remembered her the instant he had seen her at the police station.
“I didn’t get to spend much time with Christina,” she said. “Just a couple of visits in the hospital, then three or four more after she went home. So much of her energy was just taken up with healing and with getting ready for all the surgeries she knew would follow.”
John glanced at Maggie quickly, but he couldn’t see her face clearly in the now-and-then glare of passing streetlights. “She talked about the plastic surgery?”
“Yes. She was realistic about it; she knew nothing would make her look the way she did before. But the acid had done so much damage, and she just wanted to look as normal as possible. She said . . . she didn’t want to frighten children when she went out in public.”
John was silent for a moment, then said, “That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so sure she didn’t kill herself. She wanted to live, Maggie, I know she did. She wanted to heal and go on with her life. She was strong.”
“Yes, she was. Stronger than you know.”
“What do you mean?”
Maggie drew a breath. “Once she got home, she had that elaborate computer system her husband had set up, and that new voice-recognition and reading program you arranged since she couldn’t see the screen.”
“Yes. I didn’t want her to feel cut off from everything even if she wasn’t ready to go out in public yet. Are you saying she used it for something else?”
“It probably shouldn’t surprise you,” Maggie said. “She was your sister, after all. She wanted answers, John.”
“Answers? Are you saying she tried to find the man who attacked her?”
“She had all the information she’d been able to find on Laura Hughes, and of course she knew her own situation and background better than anyone else. She was convinced there was a connection somewhere, that the rest of us had been—blinded—by so many of the details that we couldn’t see what was actually there.”
“And she believed she could? Blind and virtually alone in that apartment, she believed she could find something everyone else had missed?”
“She did have a unique perspective. And she’d spent hours on end thinking about it. There really wasn’t much else she could think about.” Maggie sighed. “Please bel
ieve me, if I’d had even the slightest suspicion that what she was doing could have put her in danger—”
John abruptly pulled the car to the curb and stopped. He turned in the seat to stare at her. “Are you saying it did? Maggie—did Christina kill herself ?”
“No.”
“No? Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before? Christ, tell somebody—”
“Because I can’t prove it, John.” She kept her voice level. “Every speck of evidence in that apartment proves that she did kill herself. Andy and his people went over it with a fine-tooth comb, you know that. They even went over it twice, because you asked them to. You yourself went through her computer files, according to Andy; did you find anything?”
“No,” he replied slowly. “At least, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing unexpected. There was nothing about the investigation, the other victim. No hint at all that she was trying to investigate on her own.”
“That’s what Andy said. He even had the department computer expert check it out when I asked him to, but there was nothing. If there was any evidence before she died, it was certainly gone afterward. Nobody found anything to point to an intruder or even a visitor. Security records for that night show no one entering the apartment, and even the fact that she’d given the nurse the day and night off seems to point toward suicide. The medical examiner was absolutely positive it was suicide, no reservations at all. I read his report. You read his report. According to everything they found, Christina wrote that suicide note on her computer, then put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
John drew a breath. “I hadn’t even known she had that gun until afterward.”
“Not surprising, since according to the registration, she’d bought it years ago, when she first lived alone in L.A., for protection. And since it hadn’t been registered here in Seattle, none of us knew about it beforehand. But if you’ve been blaming yourself for not knowing, don’t. If there hadn’t been a gun, he would have done it another way.”