"His political aspirations?"

"Partly. And he's the competitive sort by nature."

"Well," Quentin said, "we can work around that. Hopefully. You do realize we're going to have to be very, very careful not to do anything to impede the official investigation?"

"I realize that."

"And that your Maggie is going to have to walk a very fine line while she works to help both us and the police?"

"After what happened here, I'm not at all sure she'll be willing to help us," John said.

"Willing," Quentin said, "has little to do with it. Unless I miss my guess, Maggie Barnes feels she has to help us. She simply doesn't have a choice."

"I don't like it," Andy said. He stared down at the scrap of paper now sealed in a clear plastic evidence envelope, feeling as grim as he looked. "Jenn, you're sure this wasn't in your car when you got back from lunch today?"

"Positive. So somebody put it in there while my car-my locked car-was parked in a police lot. Lousy security around here, Andy."

He looked across his desk at Jennifer, not misled by the flippant tone. And he didn't blame her for being shaken. He was pretty damned unnerved himself. "Assuming this is useful information and not just a couple of random numbers, and assuming it's even connected to this particular case, I suppose somebody might have been trying to help us. Or it could have been some enterprising member of the press, maybe trying to get a reaction out of us," he speculated. "It's at least conceivable that one of them might have stumbled onto the 1934 murders."

Scott, sitting across from Jennifer in Andy's other visitor's chair, said reluctantly, "Isn't that a bit of a stretch? I mean, even supposing a reporter dug up the similar murders, why tell us-and anonymously? Why not just run with the story?"

"Yeah, it's a stretch," Andy admitted. "The truth is, I can't think of a reason why anybody'd do this. Except for our perp, that is."

Having given the matter a lot of thought, Jennifer shook her head. "I don't see that. He's gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to hide from us-why step out into the open and do this? If he wanted to taunt us, I figure he'd do it another way. Maybe leave something on the victim or change his M.O. suddenly. But notes left in a cop's car? No, I don't think it's him."

"Then who?" Scott demanded. "You and I stumbled into this just tossing around ideas because we were frustrated there wasn't more we could do. How likely is it that somebody else took the same turns and reached the same possibility?"

"Not very," she admitted. "Besides which, if this note was intended to be helpful, then why give it to us anonymously and make damned sure there were no prints on it? Why not come forward and explain themselves?"

Slowly, Andy said, "Unless whoever it is knows there's a connection because he-or she-knows or suspects who the rapist is. It wouldn't be the first time a family member or suspicious wife or girlfriend knew just enough to worry about it but was too afraid or ashamed of their suspicions to come forward openly."

"A good possibility. But why the hell did they have to pick my car? And how'd they unlock and then re-lock the doors without leaving signs, dammit?"

"Maybe it was a locksmith," Scott offered, only half joking.

Andy shrugged. "Hell, maybe it was just somebody who knows cars well enough to be able to get into yours, Jenn. Or had an electronic key that worked. In these days of glorified electronics, it's getting easier rather than harder to jack cars, so why not? Anyway, until we find out who left the note, there's no way of knowing."

"I really hate not knowing," Jennifer said gloomily.

Andy picked up the scrap of paper and studied it more closely. "Do any of those books of yours have murders listed for 1894?"

"Nothing like what we have here, or at least I don't think so. I might be able to find other books, but when I found these they seemed to be all the ones available on local unsolved crimes."

"That means we'll have to depend on our own police files. And we'll have to look all the way back to 1894."

Scott groaned. "Shit. I can already tell you that either we do the legwork ourselves, going into the basements and storage rooms of the other buildings to dig into the files, or else somebody's going to have to make it a priority request to get us some more willing hands. Andy, I've been pretty cagy about asking so far-I haven't wanted to say what case it is, not when all this is so…"

"Iffy?" Jennifer supplied dryly.

"Weird," Scott corrected. "Call a spade a spade. Anyway, without something more solid to go on, I didn't really want to tell file clerks in the other divisions why I was interested in the old files. And I sure as hell wouldn't want to talk to the detectives about it-at least not until we're sure there's a connection."

"Not even then,' Andy ordered after only a moment's thought. "We keep this among ourselves for the time being. If our guy is a copycat and we've managed to find his playbook, I sure as hell don't want to show our hand. The last thing we need is anybody outside the team discovering what we've found and broadcasting the info."

"That means we do the legwork." Jennifer didn't appear to be nearly as daunted as Scott was. Her eyes were very bright and she was smiling a little. "We'll need some kind of excuse, Andy, if we don't want the other cops to start wondering what we're up to. I mean, how often do we need to dig up files over a hundred years old?"

Andy pursed his lips as he considered that, his mind turning over various possibilities. Then he smiled. "I've got it. Everybody knows Drummond is ambitious as hell and always coming up with this theory or that plan to improve police efficiency so the political powers that be will take notice. So we tell anybody who asks that he's got a new bee in his bonnet and has us hunting down records of past crimes in order to do a comparative study. As long as it's one of you asking and not me, I don't see anybody tying it to a current investigation, and most especially not this one."

"Because we're glorified gofers," Scott said, sighing.

"No," Andy corrected, "because I've had TV cameras shoved in my face as the lead detective on this investigation; the rest of our team is thankfully invisible to the public-and to most cops outside this division.

Just keep your requests casual and try to sound completely bored with the whole thing."

"Are you going to tell Drummond about this?" Jennifer asked.

"Not yet. Not unless and until we have some very solid connections between past victims and present ones."

Voicing a reluctant thought, Jennifer said, "What if we do all this work and still end up with information that doesn't help us stop this creep? Knowing how many women he plans to attack won't help us identify possible victims before he gets them. Records this old, we're lucky to get sketches and reasonably accurate descriptions of the victims, and we can only connect those to crimes he's already committed."

"So what good will it do us to find all the files?" Scott echoed.

"It might do us a lot of good," Andy said. "Think about it. If this bastard is copying past crimes, he has to have a source for his information. And if we're lucky, it'll either be books like those Jenn found-or our files. Either way, we may be able to find something-a name on a library card or notation by a police file clerk that a certain file was checked out for research purposes by whoever. Anything that might point us in his direction."

"Would he have been that careless?" Jennifer wondered.

Andy smiled. "Careless? What possible fact or lead would have caused us to look a hundred years into the past for clues? The very idea is absurd."

Across town in his studio, Beau Rafferty worked on the painting that was his latest commission, using an exceptionally fine brush to get the most painstaking detail exactly right. He was a perfectionist. Always had been.