"I don't have a taste for luxury, I just enjoy being in a room that isn't a carbon copy of every other room in the place."
Pretending as always that she hadn't noticed him neatly evade the implied question about his past, Kendra said, "Well, while you're enjoying that, could you please hand me the forensics file? Once I get the last of that fed into our personal-investigation database here, we'll have everything the police say they have."
"You're as paranoid as John is," he told her, taking a file from the stack on the desk and handing it across the conference table to her.
"I resent that," John said, coming out of Quentin's bedroom, closing up his cell phone. His leather jacket was hanging over a chair in the sitting room, and he slid the phone into a pocket before joining them at the conference table.
"You should never resent the truth," Quentin said. "Did you get hold of Maggie?"
"I got her voicemail. Asked her to drop by here in the next couple of hours if possible or to meet me at the station at four." John gave Quentin a wry look. "I was very polite and low-key. No pressure, no demands, just a pleasant request."
Seriously, Quentin said, "There will come a time for demands, John, believe me."
"What do you mean?"
It was Kendra who answered, her gaze remaining on the files whose information she was feeding into the laptop's database; her fingers flew even as she spoke. "In this sort of investigation, the emotions of everyone involved tend to grow more powerful and erratic as time goes on. Naturally. Not just for the victims, but for the investigators as well. It'll be hard on all of us, but particularly on an empath. At some point, Maggie's natural instincts for self-preservation will demand that she distance herself from all the pain around her."
"And that's when we make demands?" John asked, watching Kendra in unconscious fascination. It was his first encounter with Quentin's usual partner, and so far he wasn't having much luck in figuring her out. A quiet, contained woman with rich brown hair and soft brown eyes, she was pretty without being in any way extraordinary-except that she obviously was.
"That's when we'll have to. Always assuming she's a help in the investigation and not a drawback."
"Why would she be a drawback?"
"Powerful emotions tend to cloud the mind and affect judgment, among other things. Worse for an em-path, naturally. Maybe she's learned to handle that, or maybe not. If not, feeling her own and everyone else's pain could drive her to do things she wouldn't ordinarily do."
"For instance?"
"She could get careless with her actions or incautious in sharing information. Get obsessed with a particular line of investigation to the exclusion of all else or, conversely, have increasing difficulty in even remembering things from one day to the next. She could strike out at those around her."
Quentin murmured, "That would be us."
Kendra nodded, but added, "She could also feel driven to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, whatever the cost to herself."
"You said her instincts for self-preservation would protect her," John objected.
"Eventually, yes. But from all we've been able to find out, Maggie's been doing this for some years, which means she has to be strongly motivated to see it through. But this is quite probably the worst investigation she's been involved in, given the depth and scale of the sheer human suffering. Rape is bad enough for any woman to just have to imagine; feeling that physical and emotional trauma even at second hand has got to be sheer hell. When you hurt badly enough, you'll do almost anything to stop the pain as quickly as possible."
"She could do that by walking away."
"Could she?" Kendra glanced up, her fingers pausing only an instant, then continued with her work and continued speaking calmly. "Whether or not you believe she's an empath, John, you can't deny that for anyone to deliberately expose themselves on a regular basis to the worst pain and trauma experienced by other people argues an incredible amount of resolution and dedication. She's driven to do this out of some deeply felt motivation, and whatever it is, it won't allow her to just walk away."
"So she'll stick it out as long as she can bear it," Quentin said. "Deliberately opening herself up to pain and emotions none of us would choose to feel-if we had a choice. Fighting herself and her own instincts harder than she'll ever have to fight anyone or anything else."
"In other words, she's a loaded gun," John said.
"More like nitroglycerin in a paper cup."
John sighed. "But she can help us?"
Quentin nodded. "Oh, yeah, you were right about that. She can help us. She might even be able to help herself, by the time this is over. But the duration is apt to be… painful for everyone concerned."
"I buried my sister a few months ago," John said steadily. "More painful than that?"
Quentin hesitated, traded a quick glance with Kendra, then said, "Could be, John. I know that's hard for you to believe, but the truth is that when new pain follows old pain, the weight of the whole tends to be a hell of a lot heavier than any individual wound."
Her eyes once again on the forensics file, Kendra said, "Four victims so far, and the rapist has left us virtually no hard evidence to consider. Nothing even remotely objective for us to concentrate on. That means our investigation is going to have to focus on the people involved. Victims, their backgrounds, friends and families. People in pain, all around us. Frightened, angry, grieving, hurting people."
John looked from one to the other of them with a frown. "Are you two trying to persuade me to leave Maggie out of this?"
"We never attempt the impossible," Quentin said.
"Almost never," Kendra corrected.
Quentin considered that, then shrugged and said to John, "Anyway, what we're trying to do is warn you that things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better, even for you."
"How could things get worse?"
Wincing, Quentin replied, "Never, never ask that question. Things can always get worse-and usually do. We've got a vicious madman roaming around out there, and he hasn't exactly left us a trail of bread crumbs to follow in order to stop him. We have four victims so far and no sign whatsoever that there won't be more. We don't know how he's choosing said victims, who appear to have virtually nothing in common except that they're female and white-which gives us about half the population of a major city to worry about. We have a police lieutenant with political aspirations in charge of a police department that seems to have just about reached the limits of its resources. We have a frightened city, an increasingly militant press- and we have to walk on eggshells while trying to investigate this because we're not supposed to be involved."
Quentin drew a breath, traded another glance with Kendra, then finished, "How could things get worse? Jesus, John-how could they not?"
"All right, point taken."
Quentin didn't press it. "When Kendra finishes our database, we'll run a comparison with everything the Bureau has on unsolved aggravated rape cases; even though most such seemingly isolated crimes aren't technically FBI territory, we've begun in recent years keeping track of as many as possible simply because sexual predators tend to grow more and more violent the longer they remain at large. And they usually have a history-if we can find it and track it."
"What do you mean?"
"He's been active here in Seattle for about six months, as near as the police can estimate. But his ritual is too well-established for him to be that new at it."
"I thought you weren't a profiler."
"I'm not the best at it. But I work with a few of the best, and I've picked up a thing or two. Kendra agrees with me on this. Our guy is no rookie."
"So he's been… active… somewhere else?"
"Probably."
"Wouldn't the police have checked for that?"
Quentin nodded. "Sure. According to the reports, they did. But in checking NCIC and VICAP and various other sources, it looks like they only listed the most obvious similarities between these attacks: that he blinds and maims his victims, never speaks to them, dumps them somewhere else in a fairly isolated place when he's finished with them. Not nearly enough specifics and similarities to provide for a thorough search of all the available files, in our experience."