Touching Evil by Kay Hooper Read Free Book Online Page A

of the info is in the system."
    Patiently, Andy said, "I doubt our rapist was attacking women fifty years ago, Scott. That'd make him—what?—seventy-five or eighty now? Not even a little blue pill could help a geezer like that get it up."
    "No, that's not the way we're thinking. Something the shrink said at the meeting yesterday. She said this rapist seemed to have his rituals well established, as if he'd been at this much longer than the six months we know he's been active. So we thought he might have found himself some ready-made rituals, copying a much older string of crimes."
    "Taking the information right out of our old files?"
    "Not necessarily. Jenn checked, and some of this stuff has been written up in books over the years, especially the unsolved crimes. It's a popular subject, Andy, you know that. And it's at least a possibility that our guy could be following somebody else's game plan, isn't it?"
    "Anything's possible." Andy pursed his lips for a moment as he considered the idea. "Not bad, Scott. It's an angle we haven't considered. Find anything yet?"
    "We're not sure."
    "Something else interesting?"
    "Something peculiar. At least we thought so. Maybe you can say different." He opened the file and extracted a yellowed sheet of paper, which he handed across the desk. "Just for the hell of it, we started with the really old files, those from more than fifty years ago. Specifically from 1934. Jenn found this in one of them, among some case notes of a murder investigation."
    Andy stared down at the sketch and felt a sensation he'd never felt before, as though a cold finger had trailed slowly up his spine. The heart-shaped face and delicate features, the long dark hair . . . "Who is this? I mean—who was she?"
    "She was the victim, Andy. A young teacher, stabbed to death in an alley. Apparently she was pretty beat up, so much so that they used an artist to sketch her the way they figured she looked uninjured, just so they'd have something to show around while they tried to   identify her. They found   out who she was, all right, but. . . the case was never solved."
    "It must be a coincidence," Andy muttered. "The artist got it wrong, guessed wrong about how she really looked. Or some kind of family tie. What was her name?"
    Scott opened the folder again. "Her name was . . . Pamela Hall. Spinster, twenty-two. No family in Seattle, at least not that the cops could discover."
    "Was she raped?"
    "Yeah, she was. In those days, though, rape was seldom reported and never investigated, at least as far as I can tell. It was just mentioned by the doctor in his postmortem notes; the cops treated it like a murder, pure and simple. They weren't looking for a sexual predator."
    Jennifer Seaton joined them at Andy's desk in time to hear that, and said, "I don't think that term even existed then." She shook her head, more in weariness than anger. "They still thought rape was a forceful act of sex—and nothing more."
    "Have you found any other attacks around the same time?" Andy asked.
    Jennifer shook her head again. "Not yet. But this one happened early that year, and there are more files we can go through. We just thought we should check with you before we go any further. It wasn't the attack itself that caught my attention—lots of women were killed in Seattle around that time. It was the sketch I couldn't get past."
    Andy drew a breath. "I see what you mean. Shit. If this sketch is accurate, she was the image of our first victim, Laura Hughes."
    "That's what we thought."
    Andy propped the sketch against his phone and stared at it. Probably just coincidence. Hell, it had to be. Still . . . "Look, it's late, you two should go home. But when you come back on duty, you might want to keep digging in those files, see if you turn up anything else."
    Scott nodded, eager to participate more fully in an investigation where, so far, he'd been more of a glorified gofer than anything else. "Sure, I can do that. Jenn?"
    "Gladly. Beats the