"Yeah," Andy said. "So?"
"So when he was in here today, your suspect was really worried you'd find out about the storage building he rents under his brother's name."
Scott said, "Jesus. I want to run tell Mike Harrison, but I'm afraid I'll miss something."
"Tell him later," Andy ordered. He eyed Maggie. "Any other little tidbits you want to pass on?"
"Well, that elderly woman you suspect of killing her husband didn't."
"No?"
"No. But she did dispose of his body. Buried him in the woods behind her house."
"Christ," Andy said. "Why, if she didn't kill him?"
"He wasn't insured, and she needs the Social Security checks to keep coming. So she tried to pretend he was still alive."
Into the silence, Quentin said, "Sometimes I really hate working for the government."
Scott drew a breath and said, "Well, I say we hire Maggie to sit by the front door all day."
She smiled at him. "So I can get bits of info you guys would have found out on your own anyway?"
"I'm not so sure about that," Andy said. "But even assuming you were willing, we'd have to figure out some way of making your… impressions… sound like legitimate leads, and I have a hunch that wouldn't be easy."
"Take it from me," Quentin said, "it wouldn't be. And if what you were doing became public knowledge-"
"There'd be privacy issues," Maggie finished. "At the very least. With the possible exception of cops with difficult cases to crack, nobody would be at all happy to think there was someone reading them like a book every time they walked through the door and so invading their privacy without permission or legal justification."
She shrugged. "Anyway, that's how I know that the rapist knows Tara Jameson. There was a strong sense of familiarity when he grabbed her, much more than there would have been if his only knowledge of her came from watching her."
Andy looked at the others, then nodded. "That's good enough for me. I know it's late, but I say we start pulling together everything we know about Tara Jameson's life. Family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. We all know the drill. Wake people up if you have to. If there's any chance at all we might be able to find her before this bastard can play his twisted games, I say we pull out all the stops and go for it."
Nobody disagreed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It wasn't at all unusual for Beau to be working in his studio after midnight, but it was rare for him to be working with his eyes closed.
It was also something he wasn't happy about and wouldn't have willingly been doing except by urgent request. The last time he'd tried it, the resulting painting had given him nightmares for weeks. And it was the only example of his work he had ever destroyed.
"It's not just spatters, is it?" he asked, less hopeful than resigned.
"No. Not just spatters."
"I wish it was."
"I know."
"You know too damned much."
"One thing I don't know is how you're able to use the artistic version of automatic writing and talk coherently at the same time."
"I don't know that either, and it freaks me out to think too much about it. Reminds me of that old horror movie about the pianist who got himself a new pair of hands. Someone else's."
"Now you're freaking me out."
"I'd like to think I could. But you've seen too much to be bothered by anything I can do."
"Don't be so sure of that."
Beau half turned his head, eyes still closed and paintbrush still moving skillfully, and frowned. "Am I going to want to look at this thing when I'm done?"
"No."
"Oh, Christ. Can I stop now?"
"I don't know. Can you?"
"No. Dammit. There's still something…" Beau gritted his teeth and kept painting. He hated this. It was infinitely preferable to have a vision, even if it made his head ache for an hour afterward. Preferable to have bits and pieces of knowledge or information just pop into his head, unbidden. Either of those he could deal with.
But this… this was major-league creepy. He'd wondered more than once if it was really his own mind, his own skills, guiding his hands when he painted this way. Considering the finished products, that was a scary thought. But even scarier was the possibility he wasn't in control in any sense, that someone else was "speaking" through his skills, using them to get a message out.
Out of hell, he sometimes thought.
"Am I the only one you know who can do this?" he demanded. "Is that why you come to me?"
"You're the best I've found. Artistic expertise matched by psychic ability. But in this case, it wasn't either skill that brought me here, you know that."
"Then why ask me to do this?"
"I use every tool I can get my hands on, you also know that."
"And to hell with the cost to me, huh?"
"You can pay the bill."
"You're a bastard, Galen-do you know that?"
"As a matter of fact, I do."
Beau was silent for several minutes, then said, "Maggie's just beginning to find out what she can do."
"Yes. I saw the painting."
"So you've been breaking into her house too, huh?"
"You should both invest in a little security."
"Obviously." Beau painted for several more minutes before the brush finally wavered and his hand fell. He turned his back to the easel before opening his eyes and walking to the worktable where Galen leaned to clean the brush and his palette.
"It's almost over, Beau."
"If you're trying to make me feel better, that won't do it."
"Sorry. Best I can do."
"Yeah, right." Beau cleaned his hands on a rag, paying close attention to the task, then said, "I'm going to put the coffee on."
"Late for caffeine."
"Well, if you think I want to sleep tonight, you're crazy. Cover that thing when you're done looking at it, all right?" Without waiting for a response, and without so much as a glance at the painting, Beau left the studio.
Galen looked after him for a moment, then straightened and approached the easel almost warily. He stood back some distance from it, powerful arms crossed over his chest as he studied a painting so complex and skillfully done it was almost impossible to believe the artist's eyes had been closed the entire time.
Almost impossible to believe.
Far from Beau's usual and rather famous impressionist work, this painting didn't shimmer with light but rather with darkness. Bold strokes of black, deep shades of maroon and slate gray and brown made up an indistinct yet oddly unnerving background lightened only by the amorphous flesh-toned faces and forms in the foreground.
Galen considered one face in particular, one of the few that was clearly recognizable. It wore a twisted expression of pain, wide eyes already going empty as life left them. His own rather hard mouth twisted.
"Shit," he said very softly.
Maggie had never been a nervous woman, but by the time John dropped her off at her home very early in the morning, it took all her resolution not to ask him to come inside with her. She told herself it was lack of sleep, but that didn't help much except to remind her he needed rest as well-and did not need to be worrying about her safety.
Worrying never did any good, she knew that.