But she had to do it. This was her responsibility, and hers alone. The whole city was afraid of the man who’d murdered Sharon Andrews, but only Elizabeth might know his name.
The path was lit by small lanterns at ground level, glowing like the luminaria set out at Christmas in many local neighborhoods. The ambient light blended with the pale radiance of the moon. She could see Cray easily, fifty feet ahead.
He passed between two buildings. Someone sat on a second-floor balcony smoking a cigarette. Through a ground-floor window a TV was visible, casting a blue flicker on a large bed with an ornate headboard.
Elizabeth thought of the motel where she was staying. The bed sagged, the TV didn’t work, the toilet had a funny smell. In the afternoons she heard noises of frantic passion through the walls; the adjacent rooms seemed to be booked by the hour. For this opulence she was paying nineteen dollars a night.
She wondered what it cost to stay at this resort for just one day. As much as she could earn in a week, probably—if she had a job. Which, at the moment, she did not.
Cray seemed to know where he was going. Elizabeth kept her distance as he crossed from one path to another, skirting a second swimming pool, smaller and less busy than the first.
On the prowl. He hadn’t found what he wanted in downtown Tucson’s crowded streets, so he was looking here. Hunting prey.
She couldn’t imagine how he meant to handle the abduction, but he would find a way. He had experience in such things.
Or perhaps he was just a lonely man taking a nighttime stroll on the landscaped grounds of a resort. Perhaps he had no sinister purpose.
She wanted to believe this. She wanted to leave Tucson and resume the life she’d led, and to feel no pang of conscience on sleepless nights.
Ahead, Cray went down a short flight of steps and disappeared amid the mesquite trees and weedy underbrush. A sign read FITNESS TRAIL.
Elizabeth hesitated at the top of the staircase. The trail seemed empty and dark. A good place for an ambush. Suppose he had seen her in the bar, after all. Suppose he was deliberately leading her here, to the edge of the resort, away from more public places.
Well, she was ready for that.
She opened her purse and reached inside for the Colt .22 she’d bought at a pawnshop after arriving in Tucson. It was a small gun, lightweight but fully loaded, and she knew how to use it.
She had used a gun once before.
The thought made her tremble, and for a moment she worried that she couldn’t go forward, that the old memories might swamp and capsize her, as they sometimes did.
Not tonight. Tonight she had to be strong.
There might be a life at stake, the life of some woman who was a guest at this hotel, a woman who would be kidnapped and killed and buried in the wilderness, like Sharon Andrews.
She slung the purse over her shoulder to free her hands. Holding the Colt down at her side, out of sight, she descended the staircase and advanced along the trail.
Immediately she spotted him. He was not lying in wait for her. He was moving quickly, at a brisk walk, perhaps working off the effects of the two drinks. She followed, taking care not to make a sound.
Foliage hemmed in the trail on both sides. Moonlight glistened on cactus needles, pale as ice. A saguaro, its thick arms outspread against the sky, loomed like a monument in the night.
Cray increased his pace, almost jogging.
She hurried to catch up, but she couldn’t run without being overheard.
The trail curved. Cray shrank and vanished, lost to sight behind stands of prickly-pear cactus and palo verde trees.
She risked a short sprint, hoping to close part of the distance between them, and then she rounded the curve and stopped.
Dead end.
The trail finished here.
And she was alone.
But she couldn’t be. Cray had to be somewhere nearby.
Unless he’d left the trail and continued through the brush, and why would he do that?
He must be hiding.
This was an ambush. Had to be. He’d led her to this desolate spot, and he meant to strike.
Her gun came up, gripped in both hands, and she spun in a full circle, then back again, daring the darkness to attack her.
There was only silence and the strange, pensive stillness of the desert in moonlight.
If Cray was here, watching her, he had not chosen to show himself. Maybe the gun had scared him. Or did he have a gun of his own, a silenced pistol, and even now was he drawing a bead on her, ready to take her down with one shot ... ?
She had to get away, get away now.
The gun was shaking in her hands. He must be laughing at her. Enjoying her stupid panic even as he lined her up in his sights.
She took a backward step, then turned to confront him if he was behind her, but he wasn’t, and she ran three yards down the trail and turned again, certain she had heard him or heard something, but there was no noise, no movement, and finally she couldn’t take it any longer and she broke into a reckless run, gasping as she retraced her route along the trail in a blur of moonlight.
Once or maybe twice she blundered off the path, and sharp teeth bit her, teeth that were cactus spines or the pointed tips of agave leaves. Pain surprised her but did not slow her down.
She was out of breath and shaking all over when she reached the staircase and climbed back to the path.
Amid the lights of buildings and pathways she remembered the gun in her hand. Clumsily she stuffed it in her purse, leaving the clasp unfastened so she could grab the .22 instantly if she needed it.
Voices floated to her—a family walking back to their room. The same family she’d seen earlier, the kids in the swimming pool and the parents drinking at a poolside table.
As they passed her, the father looked at her strangely, and the younger child, giggling, was shushed by his mom. Elizabeth didn’t understand until she stopped at a fountain and caught her reflection in the water.
She was a mess. She’d lost her straw hat somewhere on the trail, and her hair was windblown and tangled and studded with broken bits of leaves, and her face was inflamed with a wild-eyed, panicky stare that almost scared her.
She looked like a street person or a drug addict—or perhaps just a girl who’d had a good roll in the hay.
The thought coaxed a smile from her. She relaxed a little, then stiffened again, superstitiously afraid that by lowering her guard she had invited an attack.
But there was nothing.
“Stop it,” she whispered to herself. “You’re driving yourself crazy.”
These were not the right words to use. She regretted them as soon as they were spoken. They touched a part of her that was still tender, still too easily liable to be hurt.
She sat on the rim of the fountain and combed out her hair, allowing herself to be soothed by the simple, repetitive chore.
Then she set off once more, searching the hotel grounds.
Cray was here. Somewhere.
She would find him.
4
But she didn’t.
She wandered up and down the network of paths for more than two hours, the purse clutched tight, the little Colt within instant reach. She found the tennis courts, lit up but deserted. She climbed the stairs to an observation deck and found it empty as well.
Cray was not loitering near any of the three swimming pools, he was not in the restaurant or in the bar, and the gift shop and the wellness center were closed.
She even dared to try the fitness trail again, venturing along its entire length. Cray was not there either.
At the trail’s dead end, where she had panicked before, she forced herself to probe the brush. With a pocket flashlight she swept a cone of amber light over cholla cactus and wild purple sage. She found no shoe prints, no sign of human passage.
It was as if Cray had vanished into air. As if he had never existed at all.
She didn’t like that thought.
Bris
kly she doubled back along the trail. She wasn’t sure quite where she was headed until she found herself approaching the lobby.
Then she knew that she meant to check out the parking lot.
She wanted to see Cray’s SUV, the fancy Lexus he drove, because the vehicle was something real and tangible, and it would prove that Cray was real also.
The Lexus was black, of course, like Cray’s ensemble. Somehow he kept it spotless even in the desert, where dust and rainstorms competed to dull any automobile’s finish. From the first time she’d seen it, she had thought the vehicle suited him. It suggested both civilized refinement and a dangerous addiction to thrills, and it seemed at home in the night.
And now it was gone.
A red Fiat was parked in the space the Lexus had formerly occupied.
Elizabeth looked at the Fiat, turned away, then looked again. A shiver ran through her, and for a dizzy moment she was sure she was losing her mind.
Cray wasn’t here.
He’d never been here.
She had been pursuing a phantom all night long. A delusion, something conjured by her brain, not part of external reality at all, and suddenly she felt it again—the disorienting awareness of a gap between her mind and her environment, between consciousness and reality, and as she stood unmoving, the gap widened and became a chasm, and into it she was falling, falling....
Head lowered, eyes squeezed shut, she forgot everything except the need for calm.
Time was suspended. She was not herself. She was only a stretch of blankness with no body, no mind.
Then finally the panic was gone, and she was all right, not crazy, and the world had not strayed from its orbit.
There was still no Lexus, only the red Fiat, but that was fine. Because, of course, there was an explanation. A very sensible explanation.
Cray had left.
That was all. So simple.
He had been here, she really had seen him and followed him, and he really had disappeared somehow in the dark, but there was nothing supernatural about it, nothing to upset the balance of her mind.
He had simply returned to the parking lot and driven away. He could be anywhere now. She would not find him again tonight.
And although she knew she ought to be sorry she had lost him, she was too tired to feel any regret. She wanted only to go back to her sordid little motel room and lie on the sagging bed and stare at the busted TV until sleep came.
Tomorrow night she would follow Cray again, from his home. Tomorrow, when she had the strength.
Nodding in assent to this plan, Elizabeth crossed the parking lot to the far corner, where she had left her car, a 1981 Chevrolet Chevette with 92,000 miles on an odometer that doubtless had passed the 100,000 mark at least twice. The four-cylinder engine was held together with spit and paper clips. Every part of the car rattled. The seat belts were broken and the ventilation ducts were clogged.
The hatchback had cost $350 when she bought it two years ago in a liquidation sale at a car lot in Flagstaff. The salesman had seemed ashamed to sell it to her, but she could afford nothing better. Remarkably, the Chevette had proven reliable enough.
She unlocked the door on the driver’s side and sank behind the wheel, then jerked upright with the sudden certainty that Cray was in the car with her, in the backseat, waiting to take her by surprise—
He was not in the backseat. He was nowhere.
“Oh, quit it,” she snapped, tired of herself. “Just cut it the hell out.”
She keyed the ignition, and instantly the car began to shake like a washing machine on the spin cycle. With an unsteady hand Elizabeth rolled down the window to get some air.
Pulling out of the lot, she cast another look at the red Fiat, which was still a Fiat, not a Lexus SUV.
Cray really was gone.
She’d done her best, but he had slipped away. There was nothing more she could do. Nothing.
Except, of course, there was.
5
Elizabeth Palmer.
Cray repeated the name silently in the confines of his Lexus, over the low hum of the engine.
Elizabeth Palmer.
A reasonably mellifluous name. One he was likely to remember, if he had ever heard it before.
He tried it aloud: “Elizabeth Palmer.”
The taste of the words in his mouth was sweet and subtle and forbidden. He liked it.
He was driving down Oracle Road, the highway that descended from the outskirts of the Catalina foothills into Tucson’s downtown. Traffic had worsened in the city throughout the past decade, and tonight, at nearly eleven o’clock, his SUV was part of an endless flow of cars and pickup trucks, while the northbound lanes to his left were a thick mass of headlights.
Ordinarily he disliked city traffic. It made him grateful to live far from town, thirty miles to the east, where the roads at night were dark and quiet under the undimmed stars.
But tonight the congested streets were helpful to him. He would have found it difficult to follow Elizabeth Palmer on an empty road. She might have seen his headlights, as he’d seen the glint of her chrome.
She would never notice him now. He could follow her as far along Oracle as he pleased, keeping her red hatchback just within sight.
No doubt she was heading home—wherever home might be. He was curious about that. He would be able to tell a good deal about her simply from her residence. And once he had subdued her, he could search the place, comb through any file cabinets or desk drawers, learn who she was and what she was after.
His desire to see where she lived was one reason he had chosen not to attack her at the resort. The other was simple prudence. Though he might have surprised her on the fitness trail and rendered her unconscious, he would have had difficulty removing her from the hotel grounds without being seen.
And to kill her at the hotel and leave her there would be too great a risk. Someone might remember that she had left the bar soon after he had, that she had walked in the same direction he had taken.
No, it was better to abduct her from her home, interrogate her in solitude, and when the night’s sport was done, leave her body in the desert for the turkey vultures to find.
After losing her on the fitness trail, he had quickly doubled back to the parking lot. Since obviously she had followed him, it seemed safe to surmise that her car was parked near his own.
He’d moved his Lexus to another part of the complex, and from a hill he had watched the lot until the woman returned, hatless now, and wary. She must have spent two hours looking for him. Good. He wanted her tired, frustrated, not thinking clearly.
She got into a Chevrolet Chevette, the oldest and most unprepossessing vehicle in the parking area. Irrationally he was disappointed. He’d expected her to drive something better.
Before she left, he trained a pair of collapsible binoculars on the car, and in the light of a sodium-vapor lamp, he read her license plate. An Arizona plate, battered and soiled like the car itself.
He departed from the resort when she did, and followed her at a safe distance, listening to a handheld radio he kept in his glove compartment. The cheap speaker crackled with police codes.
Cray had purchased the radio from a black-market dealer who advertised on the Internet. Commercially available scanners only received police frequencies, but this radio was a transceiver; it transmitted on police bands. Cray could talk to the police.
As the hatchback pulled onto Oracle, Cray had heard a Tucson PD traffic unit call in a ten-seven. The officer was going on a break. Cray had waited a minute or two, to be sure the cop was out of his car and safely preoccupied. Then he pushed the transmit button.
“Traffic five-six,” he said in a neutral voice. “Can you, uh, ten-twenty-eight a stoplight?”
“Go ahead, five-six,” the dispatcher said.
Cray recited the hatchback’s license number. There was silence as the request was processed.
He was sure the dispatcher suspected nothing. His only worry was that the t
raffic cop might still be monitoring the frequency. If so, he would have heard his unit number, Traffic 5-6, and would alert Dispatch to the scam.
Most likely, however, the cop was using a public rest room or ordering a Big Mac and fries, or engaged in some equivalent proletarian distraction, and paying no attention to his radio at all.
“Traffic five-six,” the dispatcher said.
Cray smiled. “Five-six, go.”
“Twenty-eight returning. December ninety-nine, Chevrolet Chevette, to Elizabeth Palmer.”
They all talked that way, in shorthand. Cray knew the codes and phrases. The dispatcher meant that the requested information had come up on the computer: the vehicle registration was valid through December, the car was a Chevette, and it was registered in the name of Elizabeth Palmer.
Cray had repeated the last name in a questioning tone, and the dispatcher had spelled it in code: “Paul Adam Lincoln Mary Edward Robert.”
“Ten-four,” Cray had said, switching the radio off.
Now, as the Chevette passed Grant Road, approaching downtown Tucson, Cray tried out the name one last time:
“Elizabeth Palmer.”
He didn’t know it. The name was new to him.
So this woman, this Elizabeth Palmer, was not someone from his past, not a piece of his life.
She was a stranger.
Very odd.
He would have many questions for her.
And she would answer them all. He would see to that.
Idly he wondered what she was thinking and feeling right now. Most likely she had not eaten dinner. Perhaps she was thinking of a meal she could fix for herself. Her last meal, but she wouldn’t know it.
Or possibly her thoughts had wandered to some current or former boyfriend in whose arms she had experienced the intimacy that passed for passion in this debased age.
She might be musing on love, or her future, or some pretty memory.
He enjoyed this game of speculation. It made her real to him, a person with a life.
Though not for long.
Traffic thinned as Oracle curved into the dark grid of downtown streets. Cray fell farther back.
Stealing Faces Page 3