Maggie sipped her coffee to give herself a moment to think, then said, “I’m pretty sure Luke Drummond would balk at having one more civilian officially involved in the investigation.”

“I’m positive he would. Which is why Quentin can only be involved unofficially.”

“Which means access to the investigation is going to be a problem. Is that why you’re telling me? Do you expect me to get him access to the victims?”

John immediately shook his head. “I wouldn’t put you in that position or ask those women to talk to yet another stranger, especially a strange man. No, I’m telling you because from everything Andy’s said about you, my hunch is that you’re going to be at the center of this investigation for the duration-and I don’t mean sitting in an interview room downtown.”

“What do you mean?”

“Andy says you’ve walked the areas where the first three victims were found. True?”

She nodded slowly.

“Why?”

Maggie couldn’t think of a simple answer and finally shrugged. “To gather impressions, I suppose. I told you, a lot of what I do is intuition.”

“According to Andy, you always immerse yourself in an investigation. You don’t just interview victims and witnesses or just study the crime scenes. You read all the reports, talk to the cops, comb through files, even hit the streets following up on your hunches. You talk to family and friends of the victims and construct your own diagrams of crime scenes. Andy swears he believes you have a filing cabinet tucked away somewhere at home with your own personal files of the investigations you’ve participated in.”

Maggie only just stopped herself from flinching. “Andy talks too much.”

“Maybe so, but did he lie?”

She laced her fingers together around her cup and stared down at it for a long moment before finally meeting his gaze again. “Okay so I get involved. What does that have to do with you and your friend? I won’t share confidential details of the investigation.”

“I don’t expect you to. Look, I can get most of the information on the formal investigation myself as least as much as Andy can give me. What I’m asking you to do is to work separately-independently of the official investigation-with Quentin and me.”

Maggie frowned at him. “You’re planning to run an independent investigation?”

“Why not? I have resources the police can’t begin to match. I can go places they can’t go, ask questions they’d be damned for asking.”

Steadily, she said, “As the brother of a victim?”

His jaw tightened, but John nodded and replied calmly, “As the brother of a victim. Nobody will be much surprised that I’m trying to find answers on my own, and most people will be sympathetic. We can use that if we have to.”

“Ruthless,” she noted.

“Practical,” he disagreed. “There’s nothing coldblooded about this, remember. That bastard destroyed Christina. He murdered her as surely as if he killed her with his own hands. I intend to see to it that he pays.”

“I don’t think much of vigilante justice.”

“That isn’t what I have in mind. If we get even a whiff of a viable suspect, we’ll hand the information over to the police immediately. I don’t want to do their job, Maggie, I promise you that. But I do believe the investigation needs a fresh start, a new slant. It’s been six months since the first victim was attacked; do you believe the police know much more today than they did then?”

Reluctantly, she said, “No, not much more.”

“Neither do I.”

“Okay, but what makes you think you-we-can accomplish any more working independently?”

“Call it a hunch.”

She shook her head. “For a man who denies belief in the paranormal, you’re putting a lot of faith in a hunch.”

He smiled. “No, I’m putting a lot of faith in Quentin. And in you. And… I can’t keep just waiting around twiddling my thumbs, Maggie. I have to at least try to find some way of putting this bastard behind bars before he attacks again.”

She understood that drive all too well, but his plans still made her uneasy. Stalling for time, she said, “Don’t you have a business empire to run?”

“What I need to do I can do by phone, fax, or modem. I’ve spent the past six weeks arranging things so I could take time off for this.”

“And you expect me to take time as well?”

“I expect you to go on doing exactly what you would have done anyway-but with sometime companions.” John leaned forward a bit. “Useful companions; I wasn’t kidding about having resources. But even more than that, we can help you with the legwork, case notes, research-whatever is needed. Quentin and I can share the load.”

… stop trying to carry all of the load yourself.

Maggie didn’t have to wonder if it was a coincidence that Beau had used the same phrasing; there were few coincidences anywhere in his orbit. She drew a breath. “And when Andy and the other cops find out I’m involved in a private parallel investigation? Just how long do you expect it to take for them to slam the door in all our faces?”

“They won’t do that-if we’ve made progress. And I expect us to make progress.”

She swore under her breath and stared down at her coffee again.

“You’re going to investigate on your own anyway, aren’t you?”

Not yet ready to admit that she’d already started, Maggie shrugged.

It was John’s turn to swear, just as softly as she had. “If I thought money motivated you, I’d ask your price. But it doesn’t. So what does motivate you, Maggie? What can I say to convince you to help me?”

She finished her coffee and set the cup down, meeting his gaze with a sense of inevitability. “You just said it.” And before he could question her apparently sudden capitulation, she added, “You’re right, I’d investigate on my own anyway. Might as well make it a team effort.”

He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “Thank you. You won’t regret it, I promise you.”

The physical contact caught her off guard, and for just that unprotected instant before she could shut it out, she felt his determination as well as his conviction that she could help him. And she felt something else, something warm and very male and disturbingly familiar.

She sat back, gently drawing her hand away under the pretext of pushing her coffee cup to one side. “What’s the game plan? I assume you have one.”

John frowned briefly, as if something he couldn’t quite define puzzled him. “The beginnings of one, anyway. Andy said you hadn’t yet walked over the area where Hollis Templeton was found.”

“No, not yet.”

“That’s as good a place as any to start. I’ve asked Quentin to meet us there.”

As much as she hated to admit it even to herself, Maggie had put off that chore because she dreaded what she knew awaited her there. What she wasn’t sure of was whether having companions on the visit would make it better-or worse.

Still… maybe it was time to show John Garrett a glimpse of her “magic.” Time for him to at least begin to understand.

“We don’t have much daylight left,” she said, keeping her tone brisk. “I’m ready if you are.”

“Well,” Jennifer said, “we definitely have something. But I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

“It’s gotta be coincidence,” Scott said. “It’s gotta be coincidence, right, Andy?”

Andy didn’t blame either of them for being bewildered. What they’d found, by mid-afternoon on Saturday, were three more files concerning murder investigations in 1934. All three victims were young women, all three had been brutally attacked, raped, and left for dead, and all three murders had gone unsolved.

In two of the three folders they had found something more than scanty case notes. They had found sketches of the victims, sketches the police had used in identifying the women, again because their faces had been so badly battered-obvious in the grainy crime-scene photos. One of the sketches was rather inexpertly done and had not, in fact, helped the police to identify the dead woman; she had gone nameless to a pauper’s grave.