Touching Evil by Kay Hooper Read Free Book Online

remember?"
    "Yeah, right."
    Beau smiled slightly, but it was sympathetic rather than humorous. "I wish I could do more."
    "Then do more, dammit."
    "The seer handbook, remember? We all have to play by the rules, Maggie. Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, testing the ground, feeling our way, studying the signs. So wary of doing something that might make things even worse. You've been doing that too. Otherwise you would have told them the truth a long time ago."
    "And how am I supposed to tell them the truth? Andy, the other cops? How will they ever understand? Hell—how will they even believe me?"
    "When you don't quite believe it yourself,' he murmured.
    "It isn't an easy thing to believe, to accept."
    "I know."
    "You could be wrong about it," she said, more of a question than a statement.
    "I really wish I was, Maggie. For your sake." He watched her for a moment in silence, then said, "Is Garrett here yet?"
    "Yes. He was at the station yesterday. Wanted to talk to me about Christina."
    "Did you tell him?"
    "The truth? No. I lied. I looked that man in the eye and lied to him about his sister's death."
    "Why?"
    "Because ... I don't know why. Because he wouldn't suffer less for knowing the truth. Because he'd blame himself for something he did, or failed to do. Because Christina wouldn't want him to know. Because he wouldn't believe me." She lifted her drink in a mocking salute. "Or maybe just because I'm a coward."
    "I don't think that was it."
    "Don't you? I'm beginning to wonder. I'm afraid, Beau. I'm scared to death."
    "Of the future?"
    "Of now. What if I'm not strong enough? Or smart enough, or quick enough? I wasn't before."
    "You will be this time."
    "Is that from the seer? Or just from you?"
    "From me."
    Maggie sighed. "That's what I thought." She brooded in silence for several minutes, then said abruptly, "Garrett. You're wrong about him."
    "Am I?"
    "Yes."
    "Well," Beau said affably, "I've been wrong before. Not often, mind you, but it has been known to happen. Time will tell, won't it, Maggie?"
    "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, time will tell."
    Andy Brenner had been a cop almost fifteen years. He loved the work, even though it had cost him his marriage—which wasn't exactly an unusual price for cops to pay. Half the guys in the department were either divorced or trying to make a second marriage work better than the first one had. And the female officers didn't seem to have it any easier.
    Like most of the spouses, Andy's had hated the long hours and lousy pay, the stress of knowing her husband waded in filth virtually every day and might not come home except in a flag-draped box. But, even more than that, Kathy had hated his commitment to his job.
    Well, Andy could hardly change that. Hell, he couldn't even apologize for it. A cop wasn't much good to anybody if he wasn't dedicated, was he?
    No.
    Which was why he was staying late yet again on this Friday night. Going over files he'd already studied so many times the information was practically embedded in his brain cells. Only now there was nobody waiting for him at home, pacing the floor or drinking too much wine after a supper alone.
    "Andy?"
    He looked up. "I thought you left hours ago, Scott."
    Scott Cowan shook his head. "No, Jenn and I were just in the back digging through some of the old files." He was holding a dingy gray folder in his hands.
    "What the hell for?"
    "Just following up on a hunch."
    "A hunch about what? The rapist?" Not, Andy thought, that there was much chance it was about anything else; the case possessed all of them these days.
    "Well, yeah."
    "So? Let's hear it."
    Scott hadn't been a detective long enough to have a lot of faith in his hunches, and he reddened a bit under Andy's gaze. "Well, I know we fed all the information we've got on this rapist through the computer to look for similar crimes, but Jenn and me were talking today and we started wondering about the old files. Some of those files go back fifty years and more, and none