“How the hell do you know that, Maggie? With all the evidence pointing the other way, how do you know Christina didn’t kill herself ?”
“I told you we had a connection, a bond.” Maggie turned her gaze to the windshield, still working on holding her voice level and calm. “The night she died, I woke up . . . hearing her scream in my mind. Feeling her pain. It was just a flashing instant, but clear. So clear I’ll never forget it. And what she was screaming was terror—and protest. She didn’t want to die. The gun in her hand, pressed to her temple, wasn’t under her control.”
Jennifer was alone in the conference room, looking over the arrest report she’d requested from the Central precinct on David Robson, when Andy came in, looking harried and tired.
“Sanctuary,” he muttered. “My kingdom for an hour or two of sanctuary.”
“I’d grant it if I could,” she said sympathetically. “But you know the minute the switchboard doesn’t find you at your desk, the phones in here will start ringing.”
“Yeah, I know.” He sat down with a sigh. “You should be gone. How many hours have you put in today?”
“I’m off the clock.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Jennifer shrugged. “Look, I didn’t want to go home and figured I might as well be busy.”
“Doing what?”
She tapped the report with a finger. “Following a very unlikely lead, trying to track down a transient who might have seen something helpful.”
Andy grunted. “Where’s Scott?”
“Gone for a pizza. We were hungry and he wanted some fresh air.” She watched him, worried by the circles under his eyes and the tense line of his jaw. “I guess you haven’t heard anything from Maggie? I mean, about her talking to Hollis Templeton?”
“No, nothing yet. And whatever she’s got to say might not be relevant anyway.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Hell, no.”
“Yeah. Our entire world does seem to have narrowed down just to this investigation, doesn’t it?”
“You’d think.” He sighed again. “The M.E. has promised to work on Samantha Mitchell ASAP, but neither one of us thinks he’ll find anything new. One glance told him what it told the rest of us: She was alive when her throat was cut, and died from blood loss.”
“Then that with the baby was done . . . after?”
Andy’s jaw tightened even more. “A minute or two after, the M.E. thinks. The baby was probably still alive.”
Jennifer hadn’t expected that—or the jolt she felt hearing it. “Christ.”
“Needless to say, we’re going to try to keep that fact out of the media’s hands.”
“Does Mitchell know?”
“No, and if I have my way he never will.”
She stared down at the arrest report. “Andy, is there something we’re missing? Something we should have done and didn’t?”
“Nothing I can think of. Don’t beat yourself up about it, Jenn. We’ve had virtually no evidence, no witnesses able to give us a description, and no predictable pattern to the attacks—so far, at least. The closest we’ve come to a lead of any kind is thanks to you and Scott.”
“Some lead,” she said, sounding as discouraged as she felt. “We have a few sketches and photos of victims from a string of murders in 1934, and maybe our guy somehow got access to them, but so far the only thing we can be reasonably sure of is that he’s going after look-alikes.”
Before Andy could respond, the phone rang, and he picked up the receiver with a resigned grimace.
“Yeah?” He listened for a minute, absently watching Jennifer continue going through the file in front of her, then said, “Okay. Tell him I’m on my way.”
When he hung up the phone, Jennifer said, “Our Luke again?”
Andy used the table for leverage to push himself to his feet. “Yeah, dammit.”
“He’s still refusing to ask the FBI for help?”
“He’d refuse to yell help if his pants were on fire, Jenn, you know that.” He sighed. “But I think we need to bring John’s friends in, and I mean officially. I’m about a breath away from calling the chief directly myself.”
She shook her head. “Don’t do that. We both know Drummond would never forgive or forget, and he could do your career a lot of damage.”
“And maybe I don’t give a shit.”
This time, Jennifer smiled. “Yes, you do. And so do the rest of us, in case you didn’t know that. We need you right where you are, Andy. But I agree it’s time something drastic was done. I don’t have to hear a shrink explain it to know that now that he’s started killing his victims outright, this bastard is only going to get more vicious with every day that passes. We have to stop him, and we have to stop him soon. Is there another way around Drummond? A way to bring pressure to bear on him without any of us sticking our necks out?”
“Maybe. I hate not being able to handle this ourselves, though.”
“Um . . . isn’t that sort of the way our Luke is thinking?”
He stared at her. “Christ, you’re right. You’d think I’d have learned by now to yell for help when I need it.”
“John could help, I’ll bet,” she suggested. “I think Maggie could as well, the way the chief feels about her. And you know both of them would in a heartbeat if it means we’d have a better chance of stopping this monster. I’ll bet neither one has yet only because they don’t want to step on your toes.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“I don’t know if these agents can help us,” Jennifer said steadily. “But from all John said, they have a hell of a lot of experience in tracking monsters, and both of them are profilers. They may be able to tell us something we’d never come up with ourselves. I think we need to hear whatever they’ve got to say.”
“I think you’re right.” Andy nodded and turned away from the conference table, adding, “I might try Maggie first, mostly because I think both the chief and Drummond would take that a bit better. But we’ll see.”
Jennifer didn’t want to admit either to him or to herself how relieved she felt. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel herself or her coworkers capable of solving a string of brutal attacks, it was just that she was afraid that without help the solution might well come at a very high price.
And with six women attacked so far, three of them dead, the price was already too high.
Maggie knew she had no business talking to Hollis, not tonight. The previous day had been an emotional ordeal, and today had not been much better; discussing the unbelievable, even the unthinkable, with John had demanded such absolute mastery of her own emotions that the aftermath left her feeling drained and incredibly weary.
So she was feeling more than a little vulnerable when she knocked, pushed open Hollis’s door, and went into the hospital room where the other woman was sitting as usual in one of the two chairs near the window.
As soon as Maggie came in, Hollis said, “The nurses are pissed at me. They want me in bed, or at least ready to be there. Can’t understand why I won’t at least get undressed.”
“Why won’t you?” Maggie asked, sitting down and absently opening her sketch pad to a clean page.
“Because I don’t feel so defenseless, I suppose.” Her hands were gripping the arms of her chair, knuckles whitened tensely. “Or maybe just because I’m sick of that damned bed.”
“I can’t say I blame you for that. You must be sick of being here at all. Will your doctors let you go home after the bandages come off on Thursday?”
“They aren’t saying, but I gather it depends on how the operation turned out. If I can see, I’ll be ready to go home. If I can’t . . .”
Maggie didn’t need to hear the rest. If she remained blind, then Hollis would need further medical help to adjust to that fact, especially after having her hopes raised by the operation. She hesitated, then said, “I don’t know how you feel about the so-called paranormal—”
Hollis gave a peculiar lit
tle laugh. “Funny you should say that.”
“Why?”
“I’ll . . . explain later. I feel fairly open-minded about it, all things considered. Why?”
“Because someone I trust, someone who happens to have the ability to see the future, told me that whether you see again is entirely up to you.”
“That sounds fairly enigmatic.” Hollis didn’t sound either convinced or unconvinced, merely neutral.
“I know. I didn’t understand it myself, but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced he meant that while the operation could be an unqualified success, there’s a lot the mind has to accept before everything works as it should.”
“These borrowed eyes in my head, you mean?”
“Not borrowed. Gifted.”
“The eyes of a dead woman.”
“The eyes of a woman who wanted someone else to see if she couldn’t.”
Hollis drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah, I keep telling myself that. But I wonder what it’ll feel like if the eyes do work—and when I look into a mirror a stranger looks back at me.”
“Still your face. Still you.”
“But I’m not who I was the last time I looked into a mirror. I’ve changed—so much. With all that and someone else’s eyes as well, how will I even know me?”
Hearing and responding to the lost note of pain in the other woman’s voice, Maggie leaned forward and put her hand over Hollis’s tense one. “You’ll know who you are, Hollis. Your mind will look through those eyes.”
“Will it?”
“Yes.” Maggie almost withdrew her hand, but then something flashed into her own mind, a quick, sharp image that caused a strange jolt of pain and even an aching sadness. The image was gone before Maggie could identify it, but she was left with the odd and inexplicable feeling that there was someone else here in the room.
“I hope you’re right,” Hollis murmured.
Maggie looked around quickly, uneasy, then said, “Hollis, why did you want me to come here tonight?” She felt the hand beneath hers tense even more.
“What you said about the paranormal sort of touched a nerve,” Hollis said slowly. “I’ve been more open-minded about it lately because of something that’s been happening to me ever since the attack.”
“What?” Again, Maggie felt that flash of something, so vivid that it was almost as though for a split second she caught a glimpse of someone standing just behind Hollis. It was eerie and definitely not anything she had experienced before, yet somehow not really frightening.
“I thought it was my imagination at first.” Hollis laughed under her breath. “Hell, maybe it is. It started when I was—it started right after the attack. A voice in my mind urging me to keep trying to pull myself out of that building where he’d left me. It knew my name, that voice. It helped give me the will to live, might even have saved my life. They told me afterward that if I hadn’t pulled myself out of the building just then, it probably would have been hours before anyone found me. And I would have been dead.”
“That doesn’t sound like your imagination.”
“No. I don’t think I ever believed that, not really. She has such a distinctive voice, it’s easy to feel she’s a separate and distinct personality.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Her name is Annie. Annie Graham.”
It didn’t sound familiar to Maggie—and yet it did somehow. Again, she caught that flash of an image, a slight figure standing behind Hollis, and this time thought to herself, Dark hair, sad face. But then it was gone.
“Maggie?”
“Sorry. I was . . . thinking.”
“Thinking I’m out of my mind?”
“No—far from it. Do you know who she is, Hollis? Or—who she was?”
After a moment, Hollis said, “You figured it out more quickly than I did. I guess it’s not easy to accept the fact that a ghost is talking to you.”
“I would imagine not. I’ve never had any mediumistic abilities, so I don’t know how it feels.” Except that she could feel it now. She could feel Hollis’s uneasiness and doubt, feel the slight chill of being touched by something inexplicable, the peculiar sensation of gazing into an open corridor linking the living and the dead.
“Mediumistic? The ability to talk to the dead, I suppose. Odd, somehow, that it has a name.” She barely paused before saying, “But you do have paranormal abilities, don’t you, Maggie?”
Maggie hesitated, then said, “They call what I can do an empathic sense.”
“Empathy. You feel the pain of others. And, sometimes, you blunt the edges of the hurt or even take some of it away, don’t you?”
“If I can.”
Hollis’s hand turned suddenly and gripped Maggie’s. “If I’d known that, I never would have talked to you. Never would have forced you to feel so much of what I felt.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“I’m sorry, Maggie.”
“Don’t be. You didn’t force me to feel anything. It’s what I do, Hollis. What I’m . . . meant to do.”
“Suffer?”
“Understand suffering.” Maggie sighed. “It’s all right, really. Right now I’m more interested in Annie and what she said to you. Is that why I’m here?”
“Yes. There are . . . things she wants me to tell you. She was the one who told me to ask for you in the first place. She didn’t say why, just that I needed to talk to you.”
“I had wondered how you knew my name. The police usually keep that quiet.”
“Annie told me. And a few hours ago she . . . she pleaded with me to help her.”
“Help her do what? Contact me?”
“Bring you here. Tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Tell you about the next victim.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
John waited for Maggie where he had before, at the doorway of the waiting room on the floor where Hollis Templeton’s room was. The area was as quiet as it always seemed to be, and no one disturbed his thoughts.
He almost wished someone would.
It should have been a relief to be told that his sister had not killed herself after all, that he’d been right about that much. It had been one thing he’d been determined to prove. But he still couldn’t prove it. And even if he believed Maggie—
Did he believe Maggie?
It all seemed so . . . incredible. And yet he had seen with his own eyes her intense physical and emotional reaction to places where violence had occurred. Had seen how she suffered right along with the victims she tried to help.
And he had seen a painting of a brutally murdered woman, a woman he was certain was Tara Jameson. Yet the missing woman had not yet been abducted when Maggie had painted her horribly mutilated image while in the grip of some frightening virtually unconscious nightmare state that chilled him to even imagine.
Maggie had not been pretending or performing, he was certain of that. Even if there had been a reason for her to feign such an incredible ability—and he couldn’t think of a single one—why would anyone go to the extremes Maggie so obviously suffered just to maintain an inexplicable pretense?
No, he was sure Maggie and her abilities were genuine. With every minute he spent with her, he was more and more convinced of her basic honesty and apparently karmic need to help people. And if she was telling the truth about everything else, why would she lie about Christina’s death?
He realized, after considering it carefully, that he believed she was telling the truth about that as well. Something in her voice, in her face, even in her reluctance to tell him all this time what she felt, what she knew, had convinced him. He believed she had on some level shared, even felt, the moment of his sister’s death.
And because he believed that, believed in Maggie’s abilities, he had to also finally admit to himself that he believed several other distinctly disturbing . . . facts:
Someone else, possibly the man who had attacked her, was responsible f
or Christina’s death and had, in fact, murdered her in cold blood.
Quentin really could “see” the future.
And this bastard they all wanted caught and caged, this man who preyed on women out of some obscene need no sane mind could understand, this evil beast with a human face—had lived before. And killed before.
Christ . . . what could a man do with that kind of knowledge?
His entire life, John had believed only in what he could see or touch or feel with his hands, what he absolutely knew to be real. Never a religious man, he had viewed faith as superstition and the so-called paranormal as nothing more than mysticism dressed up by wishful thinking and pseudoscience to look rational.
But faced with this—all this—he was beginning to appreciate just how little he genuinely understood the very nature of reality. Because if the world he lived in could produce seers and empaths and human monsters reborn to torment victims in life after life only because someone had failed to stop them when fate decreed, then all the certainties of his own life had been built upon shifting sands.
It was a sobering realization and yet . . . surprisingly exhilarating as well. He honestly hadn’t thought there were any mysteries left to be explored, not for him. With his business empire virtually running itself these days, his goals and ambitions long ago reached and even surpassed, his life had taken on a predictable and unexciting routine he had not quite defined as boring. But boring it undoubtedly was.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so alive, so caught up in a unique and challenging situation.
He also understood for the first time why Quentin had joined the FBI when he had. Not because he considered himself a traditional cop, a notion John had always found unbelievable given his friend’s brash, thoroughly independent, and often reckless nature—to say nothing of his occasionally cockeyed sense of humor. And not because he had a law degree he didn’t quite know what to do with.
No, he had joined because Noah Bishop had been quietly recruiting qualified people with paranormal abilities for a very specialized unit of investigators, and that had appealed both to Quentin’s innate curiosity and sense of justice and his need to make use of a unique talent the rest of the world found incomprehensible—and even frightening. If they believed in it at all.