Текст книги "Touching evil"
Автор книги: Kay Hooper
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“Looks like.”
She barely hesitated. “Are you hearing anything on the streets, Terry?” He was a patrolman, having failed the detective exam Jennifer had passed with flying colors; the blow to his ego hadn’t ended their relationship, but her transfer to another precinct nearly a year ago had.
He wrapped both hands around his coffee cup and hunched his shoulders in the thinking posture she recognized with a pang. “Not really.”
“Not really? So you did hear something-but aren’t sure it means anything?”
His smile twisted. “Still reading me like a book. Yeah, there was one thing. I was going to call you, but… hell, Jenn, it sounds so screwy.”
“In this case,” she told him dryly, “screwy is beginning to be the order of the day, Terry. What is it?”
“Well, we picked up a transient day before yesterday, got him for creating a disturbance outside a store. You know how it is. Anyway, the guy was mostly drunk and not making a whole lot of sense, but he did say something that caught my attention.”
“Which was?”
“Said he’d seen a ghost.”
“Oh, come on, Terry-he was drunk and babbling. Probably had the DTs.”
Terry nodded. “Yeah, I thought the same thing. But, see, there were a couple of odd things. For one, he didn’t sound as crazy as he should have, somehow. And it turns out this guy used to be some hotshot computer expert. Apparently, he had too many problems being bipolar to hold on to his job and ended up on the streets.”
“Sad,” she commented. “But sadly not so unusual.”
“No. But here’s the other odd thing. We found him about two blocks away from where that last rape victim was found-Hollis Templeton? And he was staring toward that building while he was babbling about having seen a ghost a few weeks before. So I wondered.”
Jennifer wondered too. “Terry… is he back on the streets?”
He grimaced. “Afraid so. But my guess is, he’ll still be in the area. There’s a mission near where we picked him up where guys like him can get a bed and a meal. You might try there. I don’t have much of a description to give you-he was so filthy it was hard to say what he looks like. White male, maybe forty, six feet, not more than a hundred sixty, brown and brown.” He pulled out his notebook and jotted down the name and address of the mission as well as the man’s name, then tore out the sheet and handed it to her.
She accepted it but didn’t get up right away. Instead, she said wryly, “You told the file clerk to suggest I just might find what I was looking for here, didn’t you, Terry?”
He smiled. “You know how fast word gets around, Jenn. Especially with Scott Cowan calling every station, too innocently asking about old files. So I figured one of you’d show up here sooner or later. I just asked Danny to hint we might have the files you wanted here.”
“And then let you know I was coming?”
“Like I said-I was going to call you about it. But I figured you might think I was just using it as an excuse and refuse to even take my call.”
“You might have told me all this before I spent so much time in your filthy storage room.”
“Yeah, I might have.”
She got to her feet, smiling. “So you weren’t using it as an excuse?”
“Well, not entirely.”
“I would have taken the call, Terry.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She saluted him casually and left the lounge. It wasn’t until she was in her car and looking at the note he’d given her that her smile faded. Another dead-end lead? Would she discover only a poor, damaged man with a damaged mind playing tricks on him?
Or something else?
Maggie wasn’t especially eager to walk through the home of the most recent missing woman, but she knew only too well that time mattered; the sooner they could determine with certainty whether Tara Jameson had been abducted by the Blindfold Rapist, the better. So when Andy suggested she and John go along and check out the apartment while he talked to the fiance who had reported her missing, she agreed.
“Another high-security place,” John noted as they stood before the apartment building.
“The bastard seems to like them,” Andy agreed sourly. “Our department shrink says it’s some kind of challenge, that maybe he goes out of his way to take the women from supposedly secure locations even though he could get them a lot more easily when they went out to grocery shop or something.”
“A challenge,” John mused.
“Yeah.”
“This is an older building, isn’t it? I remember it being here twenty years ago.”
“Yeah, but it’s been updated, at least as far as security goes.”
Maggie, who was silently marshaling her energy and trying to narrow her focus in order to retain at least some kind of detachment, only half listened until they entered the building, checked in at the security desk, and Andy asked her where she wanted to start.
“The fiance is waiting in her apartment with one of my people,” he added.
Maggie looked around the bright lobby. “This is awfully public. Is there a service elevator?”
“Yeah, down that hallway there, and it’s the only one goes to the basement. It was checked out, even though the security videotapes for both here and the basement access door don’t show anyone the guards didn’t okay in the areas, and nothing at all suspicious.” He nodded toward the security desk and the two guards who were watching them warily.
“Still, it’s the most likely way for him to get her out of the building, right?” “I’d say so.”
“Then I want to start there. Go up to her floor in that elevator.”
“I’ll go with you,” John said.
Maggie didn’t object, just nodded.
“Eighth floor,” Andy told them. “Apartment 804. I’ll be there with her fiance.” He headed off toward the regular elevators.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” John asked her abruptly.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Maggie, you were upset when you got to the hotel this morning, and you’re still upset. When you went home last night, you were more tired than anything else. So I can’t help wondering what happened later.”
She was only a little surprised; either his perception was sharpening where she was concerned, or else she wasn’t hiding her tension very well. “It was… a nightmare, that’s all. I didn’t sleep well.”
John had the feeling she had evaded the subject and yet hadn’t really lied to him, which made him all the more curious to find out the whole truth. But all he said was “You don’t have your sketch pad today. It’s the first time.”
“So? I don’t always carry it.”
“I think you usually do, especially during an ongoing investigation.”
Maggie shrugged. “Usually-not always.”
“So why not today?”
“Maybe I forgot it.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Well, then?”
She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head. “Never mind. The only thing I’m thinking about right now is whether Tara Jameson is or isn’t the sixth victim.”
John followed as she moved toward the service elevator. “You know, you could just try saying it’s none of my business,” he commented mildly.
“I guess I could,” she murmured.
He decided to take a chance and push just a little bit. “Unless maybe it is. I think you’re too honest to lie about that. So is it my business, Maggie? Is there something you’re not quite sure you should tell me?”
She glanced at him, then drew a breath and said calmly, “Several things, actually. But not here and not now. Okay?”
Bearing in mind Quentin’s warning, John got a grip on his curiosity and nodded. “Okay.”
A flicker of gratitude crossed her face, which made him glad he’d agreed. It also made him wonder even more what could have upset her so much; clearly, she wasn’t looking forward to telling him about it.
Maggie paused in the hallway a few feet from the service elevator and visibly braced herself.
John was hardly given to premonitions, but a sudden uneasy impulse made him say, “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”
She looked at him gravely. “Why not? Because I might imagine something terrible? But my own imagination can’t hurt me, can it, John?”
He chose his words carefully. “After what I saw in the Mitchell house, I know it’s more than imagination, Maggie. I just… I don’t want to see you hurt like that again.”
Maggie almost reached out and touched him, wanting to reassure him, needing to, but stopped herself with an effort she hoped didn’t show. Steadily, she said, “If Tara Jameson is the sixth victim, she’s the one hurting right now. Whatever I feel is… temporary.”
“That doesn’t mean it hurts any less.”
Instead of denying that, she merely said, “I’ll be fine.” She didn’t give him a chance to protest again but went to the service elevator and pushed the button.
The doors opened almost immediately, and before she stepped inside, Maggie cautiously allowed her inner senses to reach in and probe the innocent-looking cubicle.
The elevator was well used, and at first all she got was a jumble of images and flashes of emotion, mostly irritation and low-level anxiety. Not unusual, she knew, for a building in which often harried, stressed people lived and visited.
Then, on the extreme edges of her awareness, she felt something… alien.
Dark. Hungry. Cold. So cold…
It grew stronger, pressing in on Maggie until she found it difficult to breathe. The darkness was black, viscous, slimy like an oil slick, and it wrapped around the hunger that was cold and grotesque in its twisted urgency.
“Maggie?”
She blinked and looked at John, at his hand gripping her arm, and wondered vaguely what her face looked like to make him feel so much concern. As if a door had closed-or opened-all she could sense right now was him, his worry about her, and other, less defined but no less powerful emotions. “I’m fine,” she murmured.
“Are you? Then why did you say that?”
“Say what?” She didn’t remember saying anything aloud.
“You said, ‘deliver us from evil.’ Almost as if you were reciting the prayer.”
After a moment, Maggie pulled her arm gently from his grasp. “Funny. I’m not even religious.” She tried to focus again, recapture that cold, dark presence, but all she could feel right now was John, even without the physical contact. As if that door that had opened refused now to be closed. And a very large part of her wanted to burrow in and surround herself with him, luxuriate in the warmth and strength that was more familiar and yet more tantalizing than anything she could remember feeling before.
“Maggie, what is it? What did you sense?”
She wondered if he was even aware of the term he had used, but didn’t ask. She stepped into the elevator and watched him follow, watched her own finger push the button for the eighth floor. Only when the doors closed did she ask a question of her own. “Have you ever wondered about the nature of evil?”
He was frowning at her, still disturbed. “I don’t know that I have. Why? Is that what you felt-evil?”
Maggie nodded. “Evil. Him. He was here. In the elevator. It’s… the first time I’ve been able to feel him like that.” And she didn’t even try to explain how horribly unnerving that was.
“How can you be sure it was him?”
“His… desire… wasn’t normal. The hunger he was feeling.”
“Christ,” John muttered.
“I’m sorry, but you asked.”
His mouth tightened. “What do you sense now?”
“Nothing, really.” You. “It was just a flash, maybe what he was feeling right before he left the elevator.”
“Did he have her with him?”
Maggie frowned, only then realizing. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think he had her here in the elevator. But I’m certain he’d taken her, because he was… anticipating… what he would do with her.”
“But he didn’t take her down in the elevator?”
“No.”
As the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor, John was saying, “Then how the hell did he get her out of the building?”
“I don’t know.”
They both looked around as they moved down the hall toward Apartment 804, John silently gesturing toward the security camera positioned to get a clear view of the entire hallway. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have carried an unconscious woman from any of the apartments without being observed-and taped-by security.
“Somehow, he must have tampered with the system,” John said. “But that still doesn’t explain how he got her out of the building.”
Maggie stopped suddenly, getting another flash of that darkness, as well as a sense of determination, of effort. “It was… difficult,” she murmured. “It took more strength than he expected.”
“What did?” John asked quietly.
“Getting her out of here.”
“How did he do that, Maggie?”
Her head turned slowly as she scanned the hallway. Other apartment doors. A few tall green plants and occasional tables and framed prints and mirrors providing pleasant decoration. Fire extinguishers and glassed-in fire hoses placed strategically here and there.
… nearly rusted shut…
Her gaze fixed on a large, gilded mirror halfway between the elevator and Tara Jameson’s apartment, and she walked toward it slowly. She was disconcerted when she saw her own reflection, wondering idly why she was so pale and why her eyes looked so peculiar, the pupils enormous. Then John came up behind her, and she stared at his reflection, briefly confused by what she saw.
No, that wasn’t right. He was-
… nearly rusted shut…
“Maggie?”
“It’s behind the mirror,” she said.
He moved her gently aside and used his handkerchief to avoid leaving fingerprints as he carefully pulled the heavy mirror far enough away from the wall so he could look behind it.
“Son of a bitch. An old laundry chute. A big one.”
“It was almost rusted shut,” Maggie said. “But he got it open.”
John eased the mirror back into place, his face grim. “So that’s how he did it. Dropped her in this, probably with some kind of cart waiting underneath the chute opening in the basement to catch her. Then took her out.”
“That’s how he did it. Though I still don’t know how the cameras missed him.” She swayed slightly and felt John’s hand grip her arm. “Sorry. I seem to be a little tired.”
“I’m taking you home,’ he said.
“But I should-”
“Maggie, do you have any doubt that Tara Jameson is the sixth victim?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t need to go into that apartment.”
“Yes, I do. John, what if I can sense more of him in there? What if I can get something that could tell us who he is?”
“You haven’t been able to before.”
“No-not until the elevator. Not until now. So I have to try.”
John muttered a curse under his breath but didn’t try to stop her when she moved toward the apartment. He also didn’t let go of her arm.
Expecting them, Andy had left the apartment door ajar, and as soon as they crossed the threshold they could hear him just beyond the foyer, talking to Tara Jameson’s fiance.
Maggie eased her arm free of John’s grasp and took a step away from him, trying to concentrate, to focus. And this time it was with an almost brutal suddenness that knocked the breath out of her that she felt the wave of terror, the iron arms holding her from behind, the bite of chloroform. And something else.
That cold, dark, twisted hunger. And… familiarity.
“Maggie?”
She found herself once more supported by John, his touch bringing her out of it and wrapping her in warmth and worry. Through a throat that felt strangely constricted, Maggie said, “He knows her, John. He knows her.”
Hollis?
She came awake abruptly, riding out the usual first moment of panic, of wondering why it was dark and what the weight across her eyes was. Then she was awake, aware. Napping in her chair in front of the window.
Hollis.
“Yes, I’m awake. Why am I awake?”
Hollis, we’re running out of time. I’ve tried, but I can’t-she won’t let me in.
“Who? Who’re you talking about?”
Hollis, listen to me. And trust me, you have to trust me.
“I don’t even know your name.”
Is that important?
“Well, yes, I think so. If I keep on calling you figment, somebody’s going to hear me talking to you and lock me away. At least with a proper name, I can claim you’re my imaginary friend. That’s probably what you are anyway.”
All right, Hollis. I’m-my name is Annie.
“Annie. That’s a nice name. Okay, Annie-now, why should I trust you?”
Because you’re the only one I’ve been able to clearly reach. And because you have to help me.
“Help you do what?”
Help me to save her. And there isn’t much time. He’s seen her now. He’s seen her, and he wants her too.
Hollis felt a chill crawl up her spine. “Do you-do you mean the man who attacked me?”
Yes. We have to try to save her, Hollis. I can’t reach her. But you can. You have to warn her.
Hollis sat there for a moment longer, her fingers gripping the arms of her chair tightly. But then she swallowed and said, “I’m a blind woman, Annie. What can I do?”
Will you help me?
“Just… tell me what you want me to do.”
It took hardly more than fifteen minutes to drive to Maggie’s small house in a quiet suburb of the city. Since it was dark by the time they arrived, John didn’t bother trying to form an impression of the house, just followed her inside.
Almost as soon as they crossed the threshold, he saw her shoulders shift slightly, as though throwing off a burden, and he thought, Quentin was right again. This place is her sanctuary.
The living room they stepped into was very much Maggie, he thought. Nothing fancy but obviously good quality, the furniture was comfortable and casual, and the slight clutter of books and magazines combined with the riotous growth of numerous green plants gave the room a cozy, lived-in feeling. There were several framed paintings on the walls and one impressionist-style work propped on the fireplace mantel that struck a vague cord of familiarity in him.
“Nice place,” he commented.
“Thanks.” Maggie shrugged out of her flannel shirt and tossed it over a chair, and the close-fitting black sweater she wore underneath was a startling reminder to him of just how slender she was.
All that hair and the layers of clothing she invariably wore were both deceptive, he decided. And he had a shrewd hunch she used the camouflage quite deliberately.
“I could use some coffee,” she said, pushing her hair back away from her face with both hands in an absent gesture. She was still too pale and obviously tired.
“You? I’d offer something stronger, but since I don’t drink I usually don’t have anything on hand.”
“Coffee’s fine.” John knew he should leave her alone to rest, but he was reluctant to leave her at all.
“Coming up. Make yourself at home.” She headed off toward the kitchen.
John followed, saying, “Mind if I keep you company?”
“No, not at all.” She gestured toward the three comfortably wide and strong-looking stools on one side of the big center work island and moved toward the sink on the other side. “Have a seat. When I moved in here, I remodeled and commandeered what used to be the dining room for part of my studio. A studio I needed; a dining room was wasted space.”
“Your guests probably end up in here anyway,” he said, shrugging out of his leather jacket and hanging it over the back of one of the stools as he looked around at the bright, spacious French Country kitchen.
“Usually,” she agreed.
He sat down. “I’m not surprised. This is a wonderful room.
She eyed him while measuring what looked like freshly ground coffee into an honest-to-God percolator. “I would have figured you for a different style. More classical, maybe.”
He was only a little surprised; she was an artist, after all, and undoubtedly given to summing up personal style fairly quickly. “Generally speaking, that is more my style. But I like a lot of what’s popular now. Like this room-French Country, but more French than Country.”
Maggie smiled. “I’m not overly fond of roosters or sunflowers, to say nothing of chintz. This works for me.”
John watched her more intently than he realized, wanting to take advantage of this time to gain a better understanding of Maggie. It was becoming more important to him, and he didn’t bother to ask himself why.
With the coffee started, she got milk from the refrigerator and put it on the work island, then went to get two cups from the cabinet, saying abruptly, “Back at the station, when you were singing the praises of Quentin and Kendra, I notice you didn’t mention their psychic abilities.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Still an unbeliever?” she asked, half mocking and half not.
“I don’t even think that was it. Maybe I just wanted to keep everything… grounded.”
“Grounded in reality?”
“No. Just grounded in the ordinary. The expected. Andy is pretty open-minded, didn’t even blink when he found out about you, but I wasn’t sure about Scott and Jennifer.”
Maggie did understand. Despite his desire to keep “things” grounded, what she sensed in him was doubt and uncertainty… and the dawning, reluctant seeds of belief. She had caught a bit of that earlier, which was why she’d decided to talk to him, at least about some of it. Maybe show him the painting…
Slowly, she said, “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You say you want this investigation to be… grounded. Grounded in the ordinary, the expected. Only that isn’t where it is. That isn’t where it is at all.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Maggie-”
“Think about it. An ordinary investigation? The best lead we have to date as to how this animal is choosing his victims is found in police files nearly seventy years old. Is that the ordinary, the expected?”
“No,” he admitted. “
“You yourself brought in an avowed psychic-two, actually-because you knew they could help. And even before that, you wanted my help. Not the help of a police sketch artist. The help of someone with a… knack. A paranormal knack.” Again, her smile was wry. “Hell, John, you’ve known from the beginning there was nothing in the least ordinary or expected about any of this.”
He thought about that while she stepped away to pour the coffee and had to admit, somewhat ruefully, that she was right. He himself had always had an instinctive knack for choosing the right people for the right task; it was one of the reasons he’d gone so far and achieved so much in business. Why wouldn’t it apply to this situation as much as any other?
“Okay, point taken,” he said as she pushed his coffee cup across the island to him.
“But are you willing to go beyond the point? To accept the extraordinary and look for the unexpected?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted honestly. “I’m ready to try, if that means anything.”
Maggie had already made up her mind to do this, but she still had to be careful, very careful. She sipped her coffee, watching as he added milk to his, then said, “I guess it’ll have to be enough, won’t it?”
“I hope so.”
She nodded, then drew a breath. “I have a brother. Half brother, really; we had the same mother. But he’s a seer, like Quentin, and he’s helped me to make sense of some things in my life. Certain… instincts. Dreams. The things I feel, and the images burned into my soul.”
“What kind of images?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “That’s-I’ll get to that later. Anyway, my brother and I both inherited Mother’s artistic tendencies, to differing degrees. Beau got the genius; I got… just enough for what I needed to be able to do.”
“Which is?”
“Draw the face of evil.”
John looked at her searchingly. “Andy says you could be any kind of artist you wanted to be, that you have talent to spare. Judging from the sketch of Christina, I agree.”
“I probably could have been pretty good if I’d worked at it.” She shrugged, dismissing something obviously unimportant to her. “But what I needed to do required less skill than… intuition.”
“You mean your empathic ability?”
“Yes.”
John frowned, remembering the terror, pain, and shock he had seen her endure. “You had to suffer to draw the face of evil?”
She hesitated, then said, “I don’t think I could draw it otherwise. I don’t think anyone could. For some things, knowledge isn’t enough. Imagination isn’t enough. You have to feel to understand.”
“Only evil?”
“Particularly evil.”
“Then… you’ve drawn the face of evil?”
Maggie laughed without humor. “Again and again. But there are degrees of evil, just like anything else. The lesser face of evil is… the man who kills a bank guard in cold blood to get the money. The man who rapes his own wife every single night because he thinks he has the right to. The woman who poisons her child because she craves the sympathy and attention it brings to her. The minister who molests the boys who come trustingly to him. The nurse who murders her patients because she thinks the resources being used to care for them could better be used somewhere else.”
“Christ,” John muttered. “Lesser evil? Maggie, are all those examples of past investigations?” Yes.
“Investigations you were involved in?”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t even imagine what she must have gone through, and even as that realization crossed his mind, he suddenly understood what she meant about experiencing evil. Even with the skills of an artist, he couldn’t have drawn it. Not even a knowledgeable and imaginative mind could wrap itself around some things enough to understand them, simply because they were beyond all knowledge and comprehension, beyond even the imagination’s ability to transcend understanding.
Some things literally did have to be felt to be understood.
He gazed across the width of the island at her calm face with its haunting eyes and finally understood why compassion and perception were literally stamped into her regular, not quite beautiful features. Because she suffered. Because she understood the worst men and women could do to themselves and each other and their children in a way that he would never, could never, comprehend.
It was a long moment before he could speak, but finally he said, “If all that is… lesser evil, then what in God’s name is greater evil?”
“Evil that doesn’t die.”
John shook his head. “I don’t understand. Everything dies, eventually.”
Maggie hesitated for a minute, obviously struggling, though whether for words or the decision to go into this with him he couldn’t have said. “If the universe is… balance… then evil is the negative force, always opposed by a positive force, always kept in check, at least to some extent. But what if a particular positive force in a particular place and a particular moment doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, what it’s intended, designed to do. There’s a… glitch somewhere, a hesitation, a mistake. And that evil isn’t balanced, isn’t negated by anything positive. Nothing stops it from growing, and growing more powerful, more sure of itself.”
“Until?”
“Until not even the death of the flesh can destroy it.”
“The body dies-but the negative force within it survives? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes. It survives. Finds itself another vessel so that it’s reborn in the flesh. And destroys again. It becomes an eternal evil. So the universe fights to restore the balance, because balance is its natural state. The positive force meant to negate that evil is reborn as well, sent once again to do what it was meant to do the first time around.”
“You’re talking about reincarnation.”
She shrugged very slightly, her eyes never leaving his. “I’m talking about balance. A negative force has to be opposed by a positive force in order to maintain-or restore-that balance. We see it in science all the time. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
John nodded. “I remember that much. And it makes sense. But we were talking about evil.”
“Yes. We were.”
“Eternal evil. That’s the greater evil you have to draw? An evil that won’t die?” John really hoped disbelief didn’t echo in his voice, but he was very much afraid it did. This was just a bit more than he had bargained for.
Hell, who was he kidding? It was a lot more than he had bargained for.
Maggie looked at him for a long moment, then set her cup down on the island. “I can’t show you the face of that evil, because I can’t see it yet. But I can show you… what it sees. What it does.”
This, he realized, was what Maggie had brought him here to see. “Okay.”
She came around the island and gestured for him to follow as she led the way to her studio. It was a very large room, obviously though skillfully added to the original house, and it looked the way most artists’ studios looked, with a big worktable holding supplies, and shelves on one wall containing various props and bolts of material. There were bins holding canvases of various sizes, a number of completed paintings leaning against the walls but angled so that they weren’t clearly visible to him-and one on an easel in the center of the room.
She didn’t warn him. And the shock he felt when he looked at that painting was cold, overwhelming, visceral.
“Jesus Christ,” he heard himself say hoarsely.
“I wish I could destroy it.” Leaning back against the worktable, arms folded tightly as if she were cold, Maggie stared at the painting with a fixed intensity that was almost painful. “I want to destroy it. But the ironic thing is, it’s the best work I’ve ever done. I seem to be too much an artist to destroy my best work. No matter how horrible it is.”
He tore his gaze from the painting to look at her for a moment, then moved closer to the easel and forced himself to study it as calmly as possible.
Maggie was right, it was horrible. But she was also right in saying the work was technically superb, with an extraordinary, savage power he’d never seen equaled. It was almost impossible to believe such force had come from Maggie, had emerged from that slender body, from a spirit so sensitive it could literally feel the pain of others.
Trying to get past that, he concentrated on studying the dead woman, barely able to ignore his nausea at what had been done to her.
Maggie said, “This is how I knew she was dead, John. You wondered about that, didn’t you? This is how I knew. Because I painted this. Last night, I painted this.”
He looked at her quickly. “Who is this, Maggie?”
“Samantha Mitchell. And I’ve never seen her, so how could I have painted her if this wasn’t real?”
John studied the painting again, this time more carefully, then turned and went to Maggie. “It isn’t her.”
“What?”
“I saw the photograph of Samantha Mitchell, remember? In the case file. Maggie, she looks completely different from this woman. She has short reddish hair and freckles, an upturned nose.”
Maggie stared at him. “Not-Then who is she?”
“I don’t know. But I think we’d better find out.”
It was already dark by the time Jennifer got to the Fellowship Rescue Mission, and since the night promised to be a wet and chilly one, half the available beds had already been claimed by people in need. She only glanced into the two large dormitory-style rooms downstairs, one for men and one for women, where cots were lined in neat rows literally wall-to-wall; with the poor description of the man she was looking for, she doubted her ability to recognize him by sight and so went in search of somebody in charge.
