Read Touching Evil for Free Online Page B

watched him. "Not bored exactly. Restless. I'm supposed to go talk to the most recent victim tomorrow, and until then there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do. It's very wearing on the nerves, just sitting around waiting for the next attack."
    "I warned you," he murmured.
    "I know you did. But why didn't you also warn me that Hollis Templeton would ask for me by name?"
    He stopped working and looked at her steadily. "Nobody told her your name?"
    "No."
    "What do you know about her?"
    Maggie shrugged. "She's an artist, but she's new in Seattle and I think the work she did on the East Coast was mostly commercial stuff, so we wouldn't have heard of her. Late twenties, single. From the photo I saw, she was attractive before the attack. I don't know about now."
    "He took her eyes."
    "Yes. Removed them—very neatly, according to her doctors. No acid this time. He used a knife or scalpel and seems to have known what he was doing. Little damage to the optic nerve, to the eye socket and eyelids. Which is why they decided to try the transplant."
    "Was it successful?"
    "You tell me."
    He smiled slightly and turned back to his painting.
    "I hate it when you do that," Maggie told him.
    "Do what?" His tone was innocent.
    "Ignore a question. I start really dreading it when you don't want to answer."
    "Whether Hollis Templeton sees again is entirely up to her."
    "Well, that's cryptic enough. Did they teach you to talk like that at seer school?"
    "I didn't go to seer school."
    "Prognosticator's school, then."
    He chuckled. "That either."
    When it became clear he wasn't going to say anything else, at least for the time being, Maggie sighed and opened her sketch pad. For several moments she stared at the vague outline of a rapist's face, then swore beneath her breath and closed the pad again.
    "I really hate this, Beau," she said.
    "I know you do. I'm sorry."
    "But not sorry enough to be a little less cryptic."
    "Being sorry has nothing to do with it."
    "Free will."
    He nodded and stepped away from the easel to begin cleaning his brushes. "Free will. You have to make the decisions and choices facing you of your own free will."
    Maggie watched him broodingly. "And yet you know what those decisions and choices are going to be. Which argues that fate is set, my destiny planned—and there is no such thing as free will."
    "Then let's call it the illusion of free will."
    "You can be very maddening sometimes, you know that?"
    "You tell me so often enough." Beau disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes and returned with two canned soft drinks. "This stuff is very bad for us," he said vaguely. "I read it somewhere." He handed her a can and sat down across from her to pop the top of his own.
    Maggie followed suit. "You swear to me you can't tell me who the rapist is?"
    Beau frowned. "There's no sense of identity, and I can't see his face. That's something I would tell you if I could, Maggie, believe me. There's nothing in the seer's handbook about protecting monsters."
    "He is that, you know. Inhuman."
    "I know."
    "I have to stop him."
    "You mean you have to try."
    "Yes. Yes, of course that's what I mean."
    "You're helping, Maggie."
    "Am I? I don't have a sketch yet."
    "Maybe not, but you're helping those women. If they have any kind of a life when this is over, it'll be largely due to you."
    "Then why don't I feel better?"
    Quietly, he said, "Because you've let yourself get too close to them. You won't be able to do this much longer if you don't back away a bit. Try to stop feeling everything they feel."
    "Teach me how to do that and I'll give it a shot." She laughed, but the sound held no amusement. "We're running out of time. It's only going to get worse from here on out, Beau, we both know that."
    "Even so, stop trying to carry all of the load yourself. You can't do this alone, I've told you. You have to trust someone else to help you."
    "Someone other than you."
    "I'm . . . outside the loop. My job is to offer cryptic warnings,