People were busy. Life went on.
Except, of course, for seven-year-old Todd Andrews, and Sharon’s parents and friends, and the police detectives and sheriffs’ deputies working the case in two counties, and Elizabeth Palmer herself.
Elizabeth’s life had not gone on. It had been stalled and frozen in a compulsive routine.
Every day she watched Cray’s residence. She followed him in the evenings. He had gone out a dozen times, with increasing frequency throughout the month.
She watched. She waited. She took no job, earned no money.
As her savings dwindled, she found it hard to make the weekly rent even on her barrio apartment. Last week she’d switched to a one-star motel on Miracle Mile. She’d stayed until even twenty-five dollars a night seemed a little steep.
Two days ago she had found this place by the interstate. Nineteen dollars a night. She could afford to stay here another three days. Then she would be sleeping in her car.
And if Cray was not, in fact, the man who’d murdered Sharon Andrews ...
Then all the expense and risk she had assumed by returning to Tucson would have been wasted. She would be broke and homeless and jobless, with nothing to show for it but a paranoid delusion.
Well, if so, she would go about rebuilding her life, that’s all. She had done it before.
And though she was tired now, she knew exhaustion would not last. There was something in her that pushed her forward even when the massed resistance of the world seemed to be driving her back. In her worst moments, in flophouses and alleyways, when all hope should have been gone, she’d felt it—some living power, an energy that seemed to renew itself even when she fought against it, preferring despair.
She would survive. But some other woman might not.
The thought made her weary, or more precisely, made her suddenly aware of how weary she already was.
She stretched out on the soiled bedspread and shut her eyes, but sleep would not come.
She knew what she needed. And though it was nearly two-thirty in the morning, she didn’t hesitate as she reached for the bedside phone and called her father-in-law.
She made it a collect call, charging it to his account, because her money was running low. He wouldn’t mind.
He answered on the second ring. The phone must have awakened him, but she heard no grogginess in his deep, slow voice.
“Anson McMillan.”
“It’s me,” she said.
“Figured as much.”
“I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Don’t bother yourself about that. How are you, darling?”
“Going along.”
“Any trouble?”
She wanted to say yes, all kinds of trouble. She wanted to tell him everything, but she couldn’t. The truth would be too hard for him. He was a strong man, but everyone’s strength had its limits.
“No,” she said lightly. “I was just feeling restless, that’s all.”
“Got a job?”
“Sure.” Another lie.
“Enough money? There are ways for me to get you money, you know.”
“I’m fine, Anson.”
“I’ll bet you don’t get enough to eat. You always were all skin and bones.”
“I’ve put on a few pounds.”
“I doubt that. Where are you now?”
She smiled at the clumsy way he tried to sneak that question in. “You know I won’t say. And you don’t want to be told.”
“I guess I don’t. Best not to know. You could come by sometime. For a visit.”
“I can’t chance it.”
“They’re not looking anymore. It’s been too long.”
“They’ll always be looking And people know me there. It’s too dangerous.”
“All right, that’s so, but there are other places you could go and settle down. You don’t need to stay on the move, not forever. You can’t live that way.”
“I’ve done okay so far.”
“If you call it doing okay, living from day to day.”
Don’t we all live that way? she wondered, but she didn’t ask this question.
Instead she made him tell her what he’d been up to, and he obliged, knowing why she wanted to hear it.
She curled up against the pillows and listened to him speak of the rusty porch door he’d replaced, and the new gun he’d added to his collection, and the food he put out for the rabbits every morning. She heard him light a cigarette as he went on talking.
“Went to the cemetery the other day,” he said. “Placed a new wreath on Regina’s grave. Nice day, warm and clear. No rain yet, and it’s still too early for snow, even in the high peaks of the range.”
He spoke more about the weather. Elizabeth noticed that he had said nothing of visiting Justin’s grave. She wondered if he’d laid a wreath there also. She doubted it.
After a long time she said, “I’d better let you get back to sleep.”
“You don’t have to. You know me. I can talk all night.”
“It’s okay, Anson. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Always a pleasure hearing yours. I wish ...”
He didn’t finish. She knew everything he meant to say but couldn’t.
“So do I,” she whispered. “But we play the hand we’re dealt. Isn’t that what you used to say?”
“I said it. Don’t know that it means much.”
“It does to me.”
They said their good-byes. She held the receiver to her ear long enough to hear him click off, and the sad silence after.
She cradled the phone, feeling calm again. Things were bad, but she would go on. If she had to sleep in her damn car, she would. She’d faced worse problems and endured.
And as for Cray ...
Tomorrow she would watch Cray again. Tonight there was nothing she could do.
At this very moment he might be lurking outside his next victim’s window, preparing an abduction and another kill.
If so, she couldn’t stop him.
She stretched out on the bed, hearing the creak of old mattress springs, and turned off the bedside lamp. The sudden darkness was heavy and hot, and she let herself fall into it, as into a deep hole. When she reached the bottom of the hole, she was asleep.
Her last half-waking thought was of Sharon Andrews.
Who’s next? a voice asked, a voice that might have been Elizabeth’s own.
But she heard no answer.
8
Cray waited an additional half hour after the motel room’s window went dark, giving Elizabeth Palmer sufficient time to fall asleep.
Then he pulled on black leather gloves and removed his Glock 9mm from the rear storage compartment of the Lexus.
Cray never handled the Glock bare-handed. There were no prints on the gun or on any of the seventeen rounds loaded in the magazine. The gun itself was unregistered and untraceable. It could never be linked to him.
Also in the storage compartment was a canvas satchel—black, of course—with a drawstring clasp. His little black bag. Cray smiled.
Time to make a house call.
Slowly he drove into the motel parking lot and found a vacant space near Elizabeth Palmer’s room. He switched off his lights and engine, then sat for another long moment, allowing his eyes to readjust to the dark.
He had excellent night vision. Though the moon had long since set, he could see every detail around him. He could even read the unilluminated dial of his watch without strain.
The time was 3:30 when Cray got out of the Lexus.
He stood with his satchel in hand, breathing the warm, dusty air. The parking lot was a flat stretch of asphalt amid a flat stretch of desert under a huge sky dizzy with wheeling stars. Cray felt the immensity of the world and his smallness in it. He felt lonely and almost afraid.
It was always this way for him, at these moments. At heart a human being was only a small, scared animal in the night. When death was a safe abstraction, this fundamental dread could be ev
aded.
There was no evasion now.
* * *
Elizabeth was in an unfamiliar apartment, a place she’d never been before. Yet strangely she felt certain it was her place; she lived here, and parts of it were known to her.
The tiny efficiency kitchen with the compact fridge under the stove—it was like the kitchen of her studio apartment in Taos.
The living room opened onto a patio very similar to the one she’d loved in Santa Fe.
The bathroom with the dripping faucet was straight out of Salt Lake City, where she’d spent three cold months.
I guess this is all the places I’ve lived, Elizabeth thought. A composite of my life.
She wandered from room to room, the view through the windows constantly changing, then found an open door that led to a one-car garage, the type that came attached to a modest house.
The garage was part of her life too, but she couldn’t recall quite how. There was no car parked in it, and she explained this to herself by saying aloud, “He’s out.”
But she didn’t know who he was.
Didn’t know—yet part of her did, or almost did, and suddenly she was sure she didn’t want to be in the garage.
And she wasn’t. She was in a park, someplace green and hot, under a tree, just sitting, and this was much better, except there were ants, so many of them, a flood tide of crawling red.
She jumped up and brushed them off her bare legs, and her hands came away red and sticky, glazed with some viscid awfulness that smelled like copper pennies.
She turned away and smelled the ocean breeze as she walked along the seashore, her hands clean again, cool water lapping her bare feet. The sea surged, pulling in sheets of seaweed.
One green clump, bobbing in the foam, caught her attention. She bent to retrieve it, lifting it in both hands, a flat, limp oval. As she raised it to the sun, she saw that it wasn’t seaweed at all.
It was a woman’s face.
* * *
Cray approached the door of Elizabeth Palmer’s room and studied the lock. As he had expected, it was a dead bolt, key-operated. He knew the type. The bolt had a one-inch throw and no beveled edge, and it was not spring-loaded. Even with one of his locksmith tools, he would find the lock almost impossible to pick.
He could break a window or force the lock, but either way he would make noise, perhaps enough noise to be audible above the rattle and hum of the air conditioner.
There might be a better approach.
At the rear of the building, near a stairwell where a soda machine cast its lurid glow on an intaglio of obscene graffiti, Cray found a door to what was evidently the custodial storeroom, secured with a Yale padlock.
He opened the satchel and took out a stainless steel canister, the approximate size and shape of a thermos but with a spray nozzle and trigger. He had purchased it from a chemical company specializing in hospital supplies. The canister held two liters of liquid nitrogen pressurized at 135 p.s.i., with a temperature of minus 320 degrees.
Cray positioned the nozzle against the padlock and released a jet of mist. The air crystallized in a cloud of fairy-dust sparkles, and through his gloves he felt a stab of sheer cold, arctic and unreal, in his fingers and wrists.
When he withdrew the canister, the padlock was shiny with ice.
There was a hammer in the satchel. Cray tapped the padlock once. Chilled and brittle, it shattered magically. The pavement at his feet glistened with a shower of bright metal shards.
Inside the storeroom, amid mops and slop buckets and other filth, he found a set of master keys.
Every room in the motel was now open to him. But he had an interest in only one.
* * *
A woman’s face.
Elizabeth saw it, and the shock was fresh and vivid, and for a moment she was startled half-awake. Dimly she knew she was in bed somewhere, a room, one of the countless way stations she had visited.
The ocean was gone, and the foam, the seaweed, the mask that had drooped in her hands.
But she saw that mask still. She had seen it for years, in dreams and in memories.
It was the face of a woman she had never known, a woman whose name was a mystery. A young woman, probably, and pretty, or so it seemed.
She might have had a lover, a family, sad moods, secret fears. But all Elizabeth knew of her was the wrinkled remnant she had held so briefly under the flicker of a sixty-watt bulb.
The woman, whoever she was, had meant nothing to Elizabeth, and yet, in a different way, she had meant everything. She had changed Elizabeth’s life, made her an outcast, taught her fear. She was the reason for all the peril and suffering of the last twelve years. Elizabeth ought to hate her for that, and for the nightmares she brought.
But it was wrong to hate her, of course. She was only another victim.
The first victim. Far from the last.
The dream receded, and Elizabeth yielded to a new and better sleep, a sleep without nightmares.
9
Cray tested three keys on the chain before finding the one that opened the motel room’s door. He eased the door an inch ajar before a security chain stopped him.
Such chains were useless. Any hard impact—a shove or a kick—could snap the chain at its weakest link or pull the anchor bolts out of the door frame. But the noise might wake the woman inside.
Eager to proceed, he was almost willing to take this risk, and then the air conditioner clicked off.
Silence.
He couldn’t break the chain now. She was sure to hear it.
Well, there was another option.
Rummaging in his satchel, Cray produced a bent wire hook. Carefully he inserted the hook in the opening, then snagged the chain and lifted it free of its frame.
No more obstacles.
In his pocket he kept a vial of chloroform, purchased from the same medical-supply house that had sold him the liquid nitrogen. He unscrewed the lid and moistened a washcloth.
With the cloth wadded in one fist, Cray pushed gently on the door and slipped inside. He stood for a moment just inside the doorway, a shadow amid shadows, scanning the layout of the room.
A suitcase rested on a folding stand. A television set, glass panel gleaming in the faint ambient glow, was bolted to a counter. Some sort of cheap artwork hung slightly askew on one wall.
All of this was on his left. To his right was the bed, flanked by nightstands with matching lamps, their conical shades dark. Elizabeth Palmer had not bothered to unmake the bed, even to turn down the rumpled spread. She lay across it, supine, her head on a pillow.
Fast asleep. Cray heard her breathing, the sound low and regular.
She did not snore. That was good. He disliked women who snored.
The air conditioner switched on again, the thermostat registering the warmer air flowing in through the open door.
Elizabeth stirred, half-awakened by the machine’s rattle and roar, then settled into sleep again. He heard her low groan, and he knew she was dreaming, and that the dream was unpleasant.
A dream of him, perhaps.
Gently, Cray shut the door.
Like a lover he approached her. He thought of myths. Of Cupid coupling with Psyche in the dark. Of the incubus that hovered wraithlike over its beloved to take her while she slept.
At her bedside he stopped. He stood looking down at her.
She intrigued him. She was a mystery.
He studied her face. Her blonde hair, formerly tied in a ponytail, was loose now, fanning over the pillow. She had a high forehead and soft, gently rounded features. Her mouth was small, the lips pursed in sleep. He saw her eyelids twitch and knew she was dreaming. Of what? he wondered.
Her skin was pale. He saw freckles. A dusting of them on her nose and cheeks and forehead.
And then he knew.
She had changed her hair. It used to be red, worn in a pageboy cut.
And she had grown up, of course. Twelve years was a long time. She had been a teenager then. Must b
e thirty now. No, thirty-one.
She was slimmer than she’d been—the baby fat was gone—and in its place he saw lean muscles in her arms and in the curve of her neck.
From a girl, she’d become a woman. Nearly everything about her had been altered, but she still had her freckles, and they gave her away.
Cray released a shudder of breath. He was shaking.
He had been calm until this moment. He had been focused. But abruptly there was something tearing at him, some blind confusion, a howling turmoil, and he needed a moment to understand that it was rage.
He thrust his arm down, clapping the wet cloth on her face, pressing it to her nose and mouth, and her eyes flashed open.
In the dark he couldn’t see their color, but he knew they were blue.
From her throat, a strangled noise of panic, good to hear.
Her arms thrashed. He held her down, not even straining. He was far stronger than she was. She had never been any match for him. It had been sheer suicide for her to go up against him on her own. With a shiver of surrender, she went limp. Her eyes closed slowly. Cray held the cloth in place until he was certain she was unconscious.
“I have you, Kaylie,” he whispered. “After all these years, I have you at last.”
10
Whiteout.
The world was erased behind a brilliant screen of pure white, no depth or texture anywhere, only the perfect whiteness of snow on snow.
Elizabeth struggled to understand it, and then she knew it was a dust storm, like the one that had caught her by surprise on Interstate 10 on her way from Las Cruces to Lordsburg five years ago.
She’d been driving the rattletrap Dodge she owned back then, a car that had never been very reliable, when without warning the highway had disappeared in a sheet of windblown sand, even the hood of her car wiped from sight, and for a few terrifying seconds she had coasted at sixty miles an hour, seeing no road and no traffic, praying she would not be part of a chain collision that would leave her mangled in the wreckage.
Stealing Faces Page 5