Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  Then the dust storm blew past her, and she was in a motel room in Tucson, slumped in an armchair.

  And Cray was there.

  “Hello, Kaylie,” he said.

  She blinked, focusing on the tall man in black, his gloved hands, the shiny pistol aimed at her. The room was very bright. He’d turned on every lamp.

  “Your first instinct will be to fight or flee.” Cray’s voice was low, nearly inaudible over the buzzing drone of the air conditioner. “Resist the impulse to do either. I don’t want to shoot you here, but I will, if you make it necessary.”

  She shifted in the armchair and heard the creak of old wood. Her bare toes curled into the carpet’s short nap.

  Cray hadn’t tied her to the chair, but he had dressed her in her red Lobos jacket, zipping up the front, knotting the long nylon sleeves to trap her hands across her midsection.

  Like a straitjacket. Yes. He would have been amused by that.

  “Do you intend to be sensible?” Cray pressed, impatience seeping through his cool smile. “Well, do you?”

  Slowly she nodded. It was the only way for her to answer. Her mouth was gagged with what felt like a washcloth, tied in place at the back of her head.

  “Good. Then just sit tight. We’ll be leaving soon.”

  He wedged the gun in the beltless waistband of his slacks, then turned away. She saw that her suitcase lay open on the folding stand where she’d left it.

  He was rummaging through her things.

  She became aware of the need to breathe. But she couldn’t breathe with the towel clogging her mouth. For an awful moment she was sure she would suffocate or choke to death.

  No, wrong, she could breathe, and to prove it she inhaled slowly through her nostrils, feeding her lungs.

  When she was calm again, or almost calm, as calm as she could be under the circumstances, facing death at the hands of the man who was her worst enemy—when she was able to think, she tried to reconstruct what had happened.

  She’d talked to Anson, then gone to sleep. Bad dreams ...

  Then Cray must have broken in, sedated her somehow.

  She remembered an instant of alertness, of disorienting terror, and after that, a long stomach-wrenching fall.

  And now ...

  She was his prisoner.

  Again.

  In the suitcase Cray found the clipping from the Dallas newspaper. She saw him study it in the lamplight. His lips formed a circle. “So.” The clipping, neatly folded, went into his pants pocket. He resumed searching.

  Her gaze traveled around the room and settled on the bed. The bedspread was a rumpled mess, the pillows strewn. Amid the disorder she saw a canvas satchel, something of his, which he’d tossed there.

  Just behind it, on the nightstand where she’d left it, lay her purse.

  In one lunge she could reach the purse, grab the gun inside. But first she had to free her hands. She tugged at the knotted sleeves. Cray had tied them tight.

  She couldn’t break free, and so the gun would do her no good, and she had no hope and no chance at all.

  “I intend to dispose of your luggage, of course.” Cray said it casually, merely for the sake of conversation. “I’ll put your suitcases in your car and drive into a bad neighborhood, then leave the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. The car and its contents will disappear quickly enough.”

  He was foraging in the bottom of the suitcase. She watched his hands, gloved in black, slip like twin snakes among her undergarments and toiletries.

  “But just in case your personal effects are somehow recovered by the police, I need to ascertain that they include nothing that links you to me.”

  Finished with the first suitcase, he closed the canvas lid, then walked to the closet and removed the second one.

  “You know the sort of item I mean. A diary or journal, a torn-out page of a phone book with my name circled. Perhaps I’m being paranoid. But even paranoids have enemies. Isn’t that right, Kaylie?”

  The second suitcase was large and heavy—she’d never unpacked—but with one arm Cray hefted it easily onto the counter. His strength dismayed her. She had forgotten how powerful he was.

  Still, she saw a weakness. Cray looked very much like a man in cool control, but it was an act. His hands were not as steady as they should have been, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

  He was fighting for composure. Fighting against an emotion so strong it threatened to overmaster him.

  Hatred. Hatred of her.

  She’d hurt him deeply, and now it was his turn to inflict pain.

  Cray unzipped the suitcase and rummaged in it. At the bottom he found a thick manila envelope.

  “Well, well. What have we here?”

  My life, she wanted to say. That’s what you have.

  He opened the envelope and tamped a clutter of papers and laminated cards onto the countertop.

  “Let’s see. A New Mexico driver’s license issued to one Ellen Pendleton. Miss Pendleton looks rather like you, Kaylie, except for the brown hair and the rather mousy librarian’s glasses.” He flipped the card aside. “An obvious fake. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”

  She hadn’t. It was the first false I.D. she’d obtained after going on the run. A man with a camera had stood her up against a life-size posterboard display of a driver’s license form, the details filled out by hand in large block letters that looked almost like type. He’d taken her picture, then simply laminated the photo.

  The results had been terrible, but for fifty dollars she couldn’t complain. Later she’d done better.

  “Here we go,” Cray said. “This looks more professional. You were Paula Neilson for a while.” He studied the Colorado driver’s license, the Social Security card, the birth certificate, credit cards, even a voter-registration card, all in Paula Neilson’s name. “These documents are genuine. You got her name from a death roll, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  Knowing that the Ellen Pendleton I.D. would never hold up to scrutiny, she had stopped at a cemetery outside Colorado Springs and found a young woman’s grave. It had been easy to obtain the deceased’s birth certificate from the local department of records; she’d handled the transaction by mail.

  With the birth certificate in hand, she had applied for a driver’s license, then obtained a Social Security card and the other items. As Cray had said, all the documents were authentic. For six years she had been Paula Neilson.

  “And one more document. Elizabeth Palmer’s birth certificate. Another return from the dead?”

  He didn’t want an answer. If he had, and if she could have spoken, she would have told him that Elizabeth Palmer was a name she had made up, and the documents establishing her reality had been created with the aid of a desktop computer, a scanner, and a color printer.

  She had done the job herself, during the period in Santa Fe when she did clerical work and had access to the proper equipment. She’d been wary of retaining any one identity for too long.

  Later, upon returning to Arizona, she had exchanged her fake New Mexico driver’s license for a genuine one, issued by the Motor Vehicles Division. From that moment forward, she had been Elizabeth Palmer. It was who she was now. It was her real identity, as far as she was concerned.

  She had created Elizabeth, and she had become Elizabeth, and she never—never—had been anything else.

  Cray would not see it that way, of course. He knew her only from her former life.

  He was studying the birth certificate, generated with a desktop publishing program. “Elizabeth was born on October third, 1967. Her birthday is coming up. She’ll be thirty-two. I’ll have to remember to send a gift. The other items under Miss Palmer’s name are in your wallet, I suppose.”

  She stiffened. She didn’t want him to look in her purse.

  He didn’t. He merely shrugged. “Well, you’ve been a busy girl, I’ll give you that.”

  Cray dumped the assorted cards and papers back into
the envelope, then put the envelope in his satchel.

  “I’ll take these with me. Nobody will find them. They would raise too many questions. I don’t intend to have people looking into your disappearance very closely, if at all.”

  Rapidly he worked his way toward the bottom of the suitcase, speaking in a low, informal tone.

  “I’ve already replaced the set of master keys I stole from the storage closet. The damage to the closet’s lock will be attributed to vandalism. Since nothing was taken, probably the management won’t even bother to file a report.”

  He found a favorite book of hers, Watership Down, the one about the rabbits, which she’d bought at a junk sale in Las Cruces and carried with her ever since. Indifferently he riffled the pages, looking for marginal notes or hidden messages. There were none.

  “As for your disappearance, I doubt any questions will be raised. In an establishment of this kind, the guests must frequently check out at odd hours. I’ll leave the door unlocked, the room key on the counter with a two-dollar tip. They’ll think you left in a hurry. And they’ll forget you immediately.”

  He reached the bottom of the suitcase and took out her photo album. It was a slim spiral-bound volume, only half-filled.

  She disliked having her picture taken, for obvious reasons, but at a few parties and picnics over the years she’d been caught on film.

  Cray flipped through the sheets of photos, his face unchanging. She wondered what the pictures looked like to him—the silly poses struck by her friends, the sliced watermelon and paper airplanes and big, goofy smiles.

  “As long as your car isn’t found in one piece,” he was saying, “no one will have any reason to look for you at all. You’ll have vanished, and no one will even know it.”

  The photo album went into his satchel also. He shut the second suitcase. He was done.

  “It’s what you’ve wanted, Kaylie. Isn’t it? To disappear completely? Never to be sought, and never found? Why, it’s a dream come true.”

  The smile he showed her was so bright with malice, she actually shrank back into the chair.

  “Now,” he went on casually, “we’d better be going. I’ll return later for your car and luggage. There’s no hurry about that. Right now I want to get you out the door and on your merry way. But first ...”

  From his pocket he withdrew a long strip of black fabric.

  A blindfold.

  “First I need to be sure you won’t run. I’ve been awaiting our reunion for a long time, Kaylie. I would hate to see it cut short.”

  He took a step forward, and she knew this was her last chance. Once her eyes were covered, she would be helpless, and Cray could do anything. Anything.

  In that moment she remembered how much she hated this man, hated him more than he could possibly hate her, and a flash of raw fury jolted her out of the chair and straight at him with no thought, no plan of action, only the senseless need to attack.

  Lightly, with one hand, he shoved her backward. She fell across the bed, and before she could lash out with a kick, he was on top of her, smiling, God damn him.

  “There’s that fight-or-flight instinct I warned you of,” Cray said.

  Her hands thrashed inside the jacket’s nylon sleeves, and behind the gag she was screaming, but the screams were only stifled sounds that nobody would hear.

  The blindfold came down, her sight blotted out in a fall of darkness, and Cray slapped her, the leather glove stinging her cheek.

  “No more of your nonsense now,” he said sternly. “If you struggle, if you give me any trouble at all, I’ll hurt you. You’ll win yourself nothing but pain.”

  He pulled her off the bed. The darkness tilted around her. She swayed, her knees liquefying, and then Cray’s arm was supporting her, and he was hustling her across the room.

  He paused once, apparently to collect something. She heard a rustle of fabric.

  The door opened. She felt the balmy night on her face.

  As Cray escorted her outside, the sudden sense of air and space was shocking, disorienting. She imagined herself a space traveler ejected from the safety of the capsule into the terrifying emptiness beyond.

  The walkway felt cool and smooth against the soles of her bare feet. She tried to count her steps, though she didn’t know why. It was something people did in the movies. They remembered every detail of their kidnapping, and later they could lead the police to the place where they’d been taken.

  Jingle of metal, a soft click, the sound of an automobile’s door swinging wide. Cray had brought her to his SUV.

  “In you go,” he said.

  She prayed someone was watching from one of the motel windows, some insomniac who would see a gagged, blindfolded woman being pushed into a Lexus sport-utility and would call 911.

  Cray lifted her in both hands, shoved her roughly into a passenger seat. The front seat, she was fairly sure. He pulled a lap belt tight across her waist, and she heard the snick of the buckle.

  Behind the gag, she made a very small sound, something like a moan.

  “No need to be scared yet,” Cray said, his voice close to her ear. “We’ve got a good half-hour ride ahead of us before things get interesting.”

  Half an hour was not nearly enough time to reach the White Mountains, where Sharon Andrews had been killed. Cray must be taking her someplace nearer to town.

  The desert, she guessed. The empty vastness, where he could do whatever he liked, and no one would see or hear.

  Something thumped on the floor of the passenger compartment. A second item, less heavy, followed it.

  Then the door banged shut, and for a moment she was alone in the Lexus while Cray circled around to the driver’s side.

  Her toes probed the floor and felt rumpled canvas. The satchel.

  And the other item?

  She felt worn fabric and a tangled strap. Her purse.

  No doubt he’d brought it for the same reason he’d wanted the envelope with her birth certificates and Social Security cards. The purse contained her identification, which he intended to destroy.

  It contained a gun also. A gun now less than three feet from her grasp, if she could only reach it.

  Savagely she pulled at the jacket’s knotted sleeves, fighting to rip the nylon and liberate her hands.

  No use.

  The driver’s door opened, and the Lexus shifted on its springs as Cray slid in beside her. “All ready for our little outing?” he asked cheerfully.

  He shut his door. The engine started, its hum low and ominous.

  “I know I am,” he added. “I’ve been ready for years.”

  There was motion, the Lexus reversing, and Elizabeth felt her last hope sliding inexorably away.

  11

  Cray was ten miles west of the motel, driving down a two-lane strip of blacktop through the flat, unforgiving desert, when he decided it was time for a real conversation.

  He reached over to the woman in the passenger seat who called herself Elizabeth Palmer, and loosened the washcloth that had stoppered her mouth.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he said.

  She coughed weakly and repeatedly, a typical reaction to the strain of being gagged. He waited for her to recover her composure, feeling no impatience.

  His rage had cooled. He had no reason to be angry now. She was going to die, and first she would know terror and then pain.

  It was all he could have asked for, all he had wanted throughout the past twelve years.

  When her spate of coughing was finished, she raised her head, turning her blindfolded face toward him, as if she could see through the opaque fabric.

  He thought she might start screaming, or plead for mercy, or thrash in her seat the way some of them did. But to her credit she seemed almost calm. He kept thinking of her as the teenager she had been, but she was older now, and the years had made her stronger.

  A long moment passed, filled with the hum of the engine and the beat of the tires on the rutted road.

  �
�Where are we going?” she asked finally.

  He was disappointed. The question was too obvious.

  “Is that the first thing you say to me,” he chided softly, “after all these years?”

  “What should I say?”

  “How much you’ve missed me. I’ve missed you. I’m so very glad to see you again. Really. You do believe that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Her voice was as he remembered it. A soft, girlish voice, strikingly innocent. He had spent many hours in conversation with her, in the days when they had been bound together so intimately, and he had always been intrigued by the childlike quality she projected. He hadn’t expected it to last.

  “Little Kaylie,” he breathed, “back from the dead. At least, I thought you might be dead. So much time had passed, and you had disappeared so utterly. As if you had vanished into some Bermuda Triangle, leaving no trace.”

  She made a ragged throat-clearing noise. “You thought I’d been killed?”

  “To be honest, I wondered if you’d killed yourself. You have definite suicidal tendencies.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why have you been following me?”

  She said nothing.

  Another desolate mile sped by. The dashboard’s glow lit his gloved hands on the wheel, her face in profile. The car’s interior was a bubble of light, and around it in all directions lay a great and brooding darkness.

  He wondered if Elizabeth Palmer, whose name when he had known her had been quite different, was thinking of that darkness and of the destiny that would soon make her part of it forever.

  “You didn’t answer me,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  “Not much farther.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a dirt road a few miles ahead. It dead-ends in the desert. Must have served a ranch once, or perhaps a ranch was planned for that site but never built. In any case, nothing’s there now. We’ll have privacy, you and I.”

  “Why not the White Mountains?”