Touching Evil (18 page)

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.

The truth was, the room had never been used for anything more than an occasional hand of poker when the late shift got bored. Until now, anyway.

Andy decided it was high time the conference room was actually used for something remotely resembling police work, and since both the usual investigatory methods and Scott and Jennifer's work were beginning to pile up paper they needed to keep handy and in some kind of order, it seemed logical to use that space. So Andy commandeered the room and within a couple of hours that morning had efficiently shifted the bulk of the files and other paperwork on the investigation from various desks in the bullpen to the conference room.

The room had at least been set up to facilitate such a move, so it was a simple task to have the switchboard reroute relevant calls to the multiline phones in there, and Andy pretty much rerouted himself to the room on a semipermanent basis.

"We also have a bit more privacy in here," he told
Scott and Jennifer when they gathered there shortly before lunchtime. "I won't declare this room off limits to those not actively involved in the investigation, but I will make it known that anything in here is to be considered confidential."

Jennifer shifted a cinnamon toothpick to the other side of her mouth and said, "And by doing so we can hope that they won't think we're nuts or, if they do, that they won't talk about how nuts we are."

Andy shook his head. "I doubt anybody's going to think we're completely nuts, not with this." He nodded toward the bulletin board they had just finished setting up. "We have sketches, photos, or descriptions of four victims in 1934 closely matching four of our victims. That has to be more than coincidence, and it has to mean something."

"Yeah, but what?" Scott wondered.

"That's what we have to determine. Which means we'll use every source we can until we figure it out."

"Does that mean you're telling Garrett about this?" Jennifer asked.

"Yeah. Drummond insisted we keep some of the crime-scene and victim details confidential, but he didn't say a damned thing about our speculation and lines of research. Garrett's smart, and he has sources we can use. So I'm telling him. Maggie too. I'll try to get them both in here this afternoon."

Jennifer tapped the folded newspaper lying on the table before her. "Well, since Garrett got his picture in the paper today and the reporters are hotly speculating that he's
assisting
the police because of his sister being a victim, I imagine you'll be hearing from an unhappy Luke any time now."

Andy sighed. "Yeah, I know. What the hell was I doing letting a civilian into the Mitchell house when our forensics team was still working there, for Christ's sake. I know what he'll say. And if he doesn't like the way I'm running this investigation, he can run it himself."

Jennifer grinned. "Aw, he won't want to do that. Might ruin his nice manicure or get blood on his shoes. If you lean on your acting talents and make like you want to dump it all in his lap, he'll probably make himself scarce for at least the rest of the week."

"It's a thought," Andy said, brightening.

Scott laughed, but said, "Well, we should have plenty to keep us busy. Even running into dead ends takes time."

"No sign of the rest of the files from 1934?" Andy asked.

"Nope. But I haven't stopped looking. If the damned things exist, I'll find them."

"In the meantime," Jennifer said, looking at Andy, "anything new in the search for Samantha Mitchell? Since we've been in here trying to get organized this morning, I hadn't heard."

"No, nothing new. I've got teams out canvassing the neighborhood and every patrol in the city keeping their eyes peeled for that lady. It's like she dropped off the face of the earth."

"What about Maggie's hunch? Did forensics get anything from the Mitchell's game room?"

"A couple of things, yeah. They picked up chemical traces of chloroform on one spot in the carpet not too far from the door, as well as a few strands of Mrs. Mitchell's hair. And there are some very faint signs that he got into that room through a window. There was a short in the security net that the system didn't pick up for some reason."

"A short he caused?" Scott wondered.

"Could be. The really interesting thing is that Mitchell insists his wife never—but never—stayed alone in the house without having the system on. So if the attacker knocked her out with chloroform—"

"Then who deactivated the system at the front door?" Jennifer finished.

Andy nodded. "Exactly. It
was
deactivated at the control panel by the front door, so he either knew or was somehow able to obtain the security code. And it wasn't one even a hacker could figure out just by using the predictable numbers—phone numbers, anniversaries or birthdays, and so on. Our resident electronics wizard says our guy is either very, very good or very, very lucky."

Jennifer said, "And since we already know he beat a top-notch system in order to snatch Laura Hughes, we can assume he's very, very good."

"That would probably be a safe assumption."

Scott said, "How come Maggie tumbled to it being the game room Samantha Mitchell was abducted from? I mean, how come our guys missed it the first time through?"

"I asked them that," Andy said. "They had lots of reasons, but what it all boiled down to is that they concentrated on the expected points of entry like the front and back doors. Needless to say, they won't make that mistake again."

Jennifer smiled slightly. "I'll bet. You can tear the bark off a tree with that temper of yours when you're really pissed, Andy."

"I was really pissed."

"I'm not surprised."

Scott said plaintively, "But how did Maggie know?"

"Instinct," Andy answered promptly. "And she's got enough sense to check the unexpected as well as the expected. Just like you two. Keep it up, will you?"

Scott nodded, faint puzzlement still lingering on his face.

Andy decided he'd make a lousy poker player.

Jennifer said, "The other victims were found within forty-eight hours of being abducted, so if it is our guy, we should know something by tomorrow."

"Yeah," Andy said. "Question is, will Samantha Mitchell be a living victim or a dead one?"

To say Maggie hadn't slept well was an understatement, and she was feeling unusually raw and edgy when she went to Beau's house on Tuesday morning. She let herself in and made her way to the studio, calling out hello as she went.