"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."

"What other similarities are there?"

It was Kendra who replied. "He goes to extraordinary lengths to make certain these women can never identify him, yet it's clear he watches them for at least a period of time before he grabs them. He has very specific reasons for taking the women he takes, and it has nothing to do with how easily he can get his hands on them. He's varied his methods of blinding, becoming arguably more adept and skilled at it, which indicates it's a fairly recent part of his ritual. He may well have begun by simply blindfolding his victims or knocking them unconscious before raping them: a possibility that must be noted. The fact that he blinds them now could be a natural evolution and escalation of his ritual-or it could be because at least one victim in his past saw him and was able to identify him."

After a moment, John said, "You mean this bastard might have been caught at some point? Jailed?"

"Possibly."

"And-what? Escaped?"

"Maybe. Or maybe served his time. I'm estimating he's between thirty and forty now, so he certainly could have served time in prison at some point."

"Do you believe he did?"

Kendra paused in her typing long enough to turn to a new page in the report she was studying, then replied, "No, somehow I don't think he's seen the inside of a jail. I think he moves around, changing location after some specific period of time or specific event or point of transition in his ritual."

"So," Quentin said, "we'll run all the information- and educated guesswork and skilled speculation-we can muster and compare it to the Bureau files drawn from police departments all over the country. If we're very lucky, we just might find enough to be able to build a history on this bastard. And with a history we can study, there's a better chance of figuring him out, of knowing where and how to look for him."

Kendra said, "Once the database is set up, it'll probably take a day or two to run the comparison, at least with the information we've got, and that may only give us a long list of possibles we'll have to narrow down."

John looked at Quentin. "How does she do that? Type and talk at the same time?"

"Her uniquely flexible mind," Quentin murmured.

"It's a little scary," John noted.

"Yeah. I think she does it just to unnerve me." Kendra smiled but didn't look up from the file. "It would also probably be wise to check in with the police and find out if they have anything new."

"That's why I asked Maggie to meet me at the station," John said. "Not that I expect them to have anything new, but Andy would sure as hell start to wonder if I didn't keep turning up there to ask every day or two." He was looking at Kendra, but when she stopped typing suddenly and looked at Quentin, he followed her gaze and felt an odd little chill.

Quentin didn't seem to be looking at anything in particular, except perhaps something only he could see. His eyes were unfocused yet curiously fixed, unblinking, and he was very, very still.

"Quentin?" Kendra's voice was quiet. "What is it?" He didn't answer immediately; it was a full minute of silence before he stirred and looked at them, saw them. His expression hadn't changed, but there was something bleak in the depths of his eyes. Slowly, he said, "The police will have something new, John. Any minute now."

Hollis knew that Maggie was relaxed; she could hear that in the other woman's casual tone. It was an interesting voice, oddly compelling for something so soft and pleasant, and as deceptively benign as the surface calm of a deep pool. But what lay beneath the surface? Something always did.