"Jesus," Andy murmured. "If she felt that… then she must have felt the rest. All that pain and fear. I knew she was strong, but I had no idea just how strong."

John studied him. "You don't doubt that, do you? That she really feels what she says she does."

"No, I don't doubt it." Andy drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. "About two years ago, we had what looked like a simple case of a runaway teenager. Normally, I wouldn't even have been involved, but the parents were political players in the city, and the chief wanted his best people looking for their fifteen-year-old daughter.

"So we interviewed dozens of her friends, trying to establish when and how she might have run away. Maggie sat in on the interviews because the chief asked her to, but she never asked a question, just listened. When we were done, none of us had a clue where that girl might be, but everything-and I mean everything-pointed to her having simply packed up some things and left home. Even the shrink agreed."

"So what happened?"

"We'd spent the better part of two days interviewing the friends, and afterward Maggie asked if she could walk around the girl's house and the yard. Well, we'd been all through the house, forensics had been over it, and I didn't hold out much hope Maggie could find something all of us had missed. I think they call that hubris, don't they?"

John smiled slightly. "She found something?"

"You could say that. I knew by then, of course, that she preferred to walk a scene alone, so I was keeping my distance. I was standing out near the garage and hadn't realized she'd come back outside until I saw her near the patio. She was walking very slowly, apparently not looking at anything in particular. When she got to the edge of the yard, she just stood there for the longest time. I didn't realize at first that she was crying, but it eventually dawned on me.

"I figured she was just upset about the missing girl, and I didn't want to embarrass her by calling attention to it, so I went to the car and waited. She came back a few minutes later, and except for a little red around her eyes, she looked the same as always. I asked if she'd found anything and she said no. Then, about halfway back to the station, she started talking about the interviews. She said something about one of the older boys bothered her. Nothing she could put her finger on, mind you, just a hunch. Wondered if I'd mind calling him back in for another talk, if maybe she could ask him a question or two.

"I wasn't looking forward to telling the chief we had squat for leads, so I said sure, why not. The boy wasn't a suspect, and since he was eighteen we didn't have to interview him in the presence of his parents, but we did tell him he could have a lawyer if he wanted one. He didn't. I asked him a few questions, then Maggie started talking to him. Just talking to him, quiet and gentle. About his school and his parents. About the girl."

When Andy fell silent, John said, "She got him to confess."

Andy nodded. "Took nearly an hour, and by the time he finally told the truth he was bawling his eyes out. The girl was supposed to meet him in the woods for what had become a regular session. Only that night she'd had a fight with her parents and decided to run away. To him. So she'd packed a bag, left a note for her parents, and there she was, expecting him to take care of her.

"He hadn't bargained on having a fifteen-year-old hung around his neck for life, and he panicked. They argued, and at some point he shoved her. When she fell, she hit her head on a rock. She didn't get back up. He had a shovel in his car. The gardeners had been doing landscaping around the yard and the ground was soft, covered with a dense layer of pine mulch. It was all too horribly easy, he said, to bury her and her little suitcase right there."

Andy sighed. "Right there-not ten feet away from where I watched Maggie stand and cry. She knew. She knew exactly what had happened to that girl. There wasn't a sign to be seen, a clue to be found. But she knew."

"You never told her what you'd seen?"

"No. Figured if she wanted me to know, she'd tell me. It seemed to me it was the sort of thing that would be difficult to live with, so I guessed she was used to coming up with… other explanations for the things she knew." Andy looked at the other man steadily. "It was fine by me. I'd learned to trust her by then, and to be perfectly honest I don't give a damn if she reads tea leaves or peers into a crystal ball. In five years and hundreds of tough cases, I've never known her to be wrong."

"Never?"

"Never. Oh, there've been times when she was no closer to an answer than we were, but whenever Maggie got one of her hunches I knew damned well the case was about to break."

John shook his head slightly. "I don't know what I believe, except that whatever Maggie experiences is obviously very real to her. So why does she do it? Why does she put herself through this kind of trauma, this kind of suffering?"

"You asked me that last week, more or less. I don't know the answer, John, but I'm willing to bet that if you ever find out what it is, you'll have the key to understanding Maggie Barnes."

Despite what she'd told John, Maggie hadn't intended to go back out on Monday evening, not after the day she'd had. But a couple of hours' rest, a hot bath, and hot soup all combined to make her feel much more like herself. And restless.

She was used to being alone, more or less. Her father had died before she was born, and Beau's father had departed the scene not long after his birth; Alaina Barnes Rafferty had not been an easy woman to be married to. Or to be the offspring of, come to that.

Neither Maggie nor Beau bore her any malice; she had loved them both, something they had never doubted. But her artistic gifts had caused her more pain than pleasure, demanding much of her time and energy and leaving little for her children. Which was probably why they were so close as adults: growing up they had only had each other.

Still, with differing careers, she and Beau sometimes went weeks without seeing each other, and since virtually all of Maggie's friends were cops who worked difficult hours, she found herself alone often enough to be accustomed to it. Usually, anyway. But not tonight.

She went into her studio, thinking it might help to work for a while, but since she didn't have a commission at the moment and didn't feel particularly inspired, instead found herself staring broodingly at the single canvas propped on her working easel-blank except for the vague outline of long hair and the indistinct shape of a face.

Unidentifiable.

"I'm losing it, that's the problem," she muttered.

The image was a virtual duplicate of the one in her sketch pad, a few uncertain lines too tentative to provide any sense at all of an individual. She didn't even know for sure that he had long hair, just guessed that he did because both Hollis and Ellen Randall had felt something like that brush against their skin.

Maggie had felt it too.

She shivered and turned on the small stereo system she kept in the studio, filling the silence with quiet, pleasant music. It was dark outside, but the lighting in the studio was excellent, and the music made the room feel warm and… safe.

At least for now.

Frowning, Maggie moved the canvas off the easel and put a clean blank one in its place. She went to her worktable and chose brushes and tubes of color, mixing the latter on her palette without really thinking about what she was doing.

When her tools were ready, she stood before the easel and gazed at the blank canvas for a moment, then took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Beau said she could do this if she tried, if she could trust in her own abilities enough to let go of her conscious control. It wasn't an easy thing to do, and so far Maggie had resisted every attempt.