Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  Then she remembered where she’d encountered that tone before. It was the quiet, unstressed monotone a psychiatrist used when humoring a difficult patient.

  For a moment she froze up, old memories blasting her like a cold wind, and she couldn’t say anything.

  “Ma’am?” the 911 operator prompted.

  “John Cray,” she said again, just to kick her mind into gear. “He killed Sharon Andrews.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because he tried to kill me, too.”

  No, God, that had come out wrong. It sounded paranoid, delusional.

  “Tried to kill you?” the man asked with the faintest lilt of skepticism.

  “I’ve been watching him, following him.” Still all wrong. She could hear the desperate craziness in her words. “No, look, forget about that. It doesn’t matter how I know. All right? It doesn’t matter....”

  She was screwing up, blowing it. If she got this wrong, she might never have another chance. Cray would go on killing, and she couldn’t stop him, couldn’t do anything.

  There was too much at stake, and she was too scared. After what she’d been through last night, she wouldn’t have thought she could ever be scared again, but here she was, in a state of stupid panic over a phone call.

  Eyes shut, she fought for calm.

  “I’m sorry to sound so flustered,” she said softly. “This is hard for me.”

  “Of course it is.”

  There it was again, that psychiatrist’s voice of his. She hated that voice. It mocked her, and without thinking she snapped, “Damn it, I’m not crazy.”

  Shit.

  That was exactly the sort of thing a crazy person would say.

  She was messing up so badly. She’d had no idea she could be such a fool.

  “No one’s suggesting—” the man began, but she cut him off.

  “Cray drives a black Lexus sport-utility vehicle. If you look at it, you’ll see it’s pretty banged up. I drove it through the desert to escape from him.”

  “You were in the desert?”

  “Yes, he took me there. He always takes his victims into the wilderness. Mountains, desert—he hunts them. It’s a sport for him. He lets them go, and he tracks them, hunts them down like animals. It’s what he was going to do to me, but ... but I got away.”

  This sounded rather unlikely even to her.

  “I have proof,” she added.

  “What sort of proof?” The voice sounded almost bored now.

  Had he already dismissed her as a nut? Maybe she shouldn’t have called 911. Maybe it would have been smarter to try talking to one of the detectives. Or a desk officer. Maybe ...

  “A bag,” she said. “A satchel. Cray’s satchel—I took it from him. It’s got all his stuff, the stuff he uses to break into places and kidnap women. There’s some ammunition in it, and a knife. The knife he used on Sharon Andrews and the others. And the ignition key to the Lexus. It’s all in here, the proof you need, and all you have to do is come and get it.”

  “Perhaps you could bring it in.”

  “I’m leaving it for you. Here, at this phone. You already know where I’m calling from. You do an instant trace on nine-one-one calls.”

  “Actually, our trace equipment is malfunctioning at the moment. If you could tell me your location ...”

  This had to be a lie, and why would he lie to her, if not to buy time?

  The squad car had already been dispatched. It was coming.

  Coming right now.

  “Ma’am?”

  Elizabeth slammed down the handset, and then she was running to her car.

  * * *

  Cray was cruising west on Grant Road in heavy traffic, scanning the roadside for a parked Chevette, when the call came over the transceiver.

  “Mary Twelve”—the dispatcher was calling for a patrol unit—“requesting a ten-twenty.”

  “Uh, we’re at Oracle and Prince,” the unit answered.

  “Okay, we need you to make contact with a female RP at a pay phone. Circle K store. Grant and Fifteenth Avenue. This is a code two incident, code two.”

  “Ten-four.”

  An RP was a reporting person.

  It was Kaylie. Had to be.

  Cray locked in that channel on the radio, then accelerated, weaving between two cars into a clear stretch of road. Fifteenth Avenue was twenty blocks away. Near the interstate.

  She was calling from a phone at a convenience store, and she meant to make a quick escape and leave the satchel for the cops to find.

  The plan might work. He wasn’t sure he could beat the squad car to the scene.

  “Mary Twelve, we got some additional information on that RP. She’s not expecting to be contacted. Nine-one’s holding her on the line. It’s a—sounds like it could be a disturbed individual.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Disturbed individual. Cray smiled at that diagnosis as he maneuvered from lane to lane, blowing past slower traffic.

  Ahead, the stoplight at First Avenue cycled to red, stopping a logjam of cars. He couldn’t afford to be stuck at the light. With a spin of the wheel, he whipped into the right lane and cut north on First, then veered west on the first side street.

  He sped through a residential neighborhood, past rows of one-story homes with dirt yards and RVs in the driveways.

  “ETA, Mary Twelve?” the dispatcher asked.

  “ETA in two minutes.”

  Two minutes.

  It would be close.

  The next major street was Stone Avenue. Traffic was running north and south, but he skidded into a gap, southbound, and immediately hooked onto Grant again, racing west.

  “Mary Twelve, we got a nine-one hang-up on that RP.”

  She’d fled.

  “ETA one minute,” the patrol unit responded.

  They were still hoping to catch her.

  Probably they wouldn’t succeed, but they would find the package she had left for them—unless Cray found it first.

  He looked ahead. Coming up was Oracle Road, the six-lane highway he’d taken last night when he followed the Chevette south from the foothills.

  A red light at that intersection would last a good two minutes, and he would have no chance.

  The light was green as he approached, but the DON’T WALK sign was solid red, and he knew a change was coming.

  Yellow.

  He floored the gas, and his tachometer buzzed into the danger zone.

  The car in front of him was stopping, damn it, and the lane to his left was jammed.

  On the shoulder, then.

  He swung the wheel, and the Lexus bounded around the slowing traffic and streaked through the intersection under a red light. Somewhere a horn blared.

  Close now. Fifteenth Avenue was within sight.

  The Circle K appeared in waves of shimmering heat, a mirage of hope.

  Patrol car? He didn’t see one. Not yet.

  Then he saw a flash of red shoot away from the curb a block past the Circle K, and he knew it was the hatchback with Kaylie McMillan at the wheel.

  For an insane moment all he wanted to do was follow the little car, yes, follow it at a distance, unseen, follow until Kaylie thought she was safe, and when she pulled over—

  Grab her. Take her away. Kill her slowly. And at the climax, lift her face from her skull, his greatest prize.

  But he couldn’t do that.

  The satchel was what mattered.

  She must have left it by the phone.

  The Chevette disappeared down the road, streaking toward the freeway, and Cray let it go.

  Cutting speed, he hauled the Lexus into the Circle K’s parking lot and killed the engine.

  Then he was out and looking around desperately for a pay phone. None was in sight. But there had to be one here. At the side of the building, perhaps. He checked one side—nothing. Ran to the other.

  Two phone kiosks, neither in use.

  The satchel, where was the satchel?

 
; There. On the ground beneath the nearer phone.

  He seized it, then looked outside and saw a Tucson PD Crown Victoria roll into the lot.

  They were here.

  And he was trapped at the side of the building with the evidence in his hands.

  The store’s brick wall loomed on his left. A hurricane fence, too high to climb, faced him to his right.

  Directly ahead of him, the two cops were getting out of the car.

  He could ambush them, kill them both.

  Except he couldn’t. He’d left his Glock in the Lexus.

  Anyway, the bitch would have mentioned his name over the phone. Killing these two errand boys would serve no purpose except to confirm her story.

  Run, then.

  He turned and sprinted toward the rear of the store, the satchel thudding against his hip. Between the back wall and the fence protecting the adjacent vacant lot, there was a narrow gap, barely wide enough to squeeze through.

  Cray eased into the gap and came up against a clutter of planks and cinder blocks, the remnants of some minor construction job, thrown back here and forgotten. The mess was high enough to block his path. He couldn’t advance.

  Breathing hard, he hugged the wall and listened as the cops came around to the phones.

  “—said there was some kind of bag she left,” one of them was saying.

  “What are we, UPS, picking up parcels?”

  “I’m just telling you what it said on the MDT.”

  Mobile Data Terminal. The squad car’s computer. A fuller explanation must have been transmitted electronically, and the cop riding shotgun had read it while his partner drove.

  “Well,” the driver said, “I don’t see any damn bag.”

  “She was probably a mental case anyway.”

  “Did they say what kind of bag?”

  “Nah.”

  “Like a shopping bag? Or a suitcase?”

  “They just said bag. What difference does it make? Nothing’s here.”

  There was a pause, long enough to let Cray think they had gone away, and then the driver said, “Think she could’ve taken off around back?”

  “We can check it out.”

  Cray stiffened.

  They would come back here and find him boxed in by a wall and a fence and a mound of discarded refuse.

  He untied the satchel’s drawstring. Reaching in, he touched the leather sheath of his knife. He could kill one of them, at least, before the other opened fire.

  It was better to go out that way than to be carted off to prison, a freak and a laughingstock.

  “Ah, fuck it.” That was the driver. “I’m getting too old for this shit. Let’s get out of here.”

  “We can ask in the store if they saw anything.”

  “Let’s just go,” the driver said, then added in his radio voice, “Mary Twelve.”

  He was on his portable, calling in. Cray heard a soft sizzle of static, then the driver again, his words fainter as the two cops walked away.

  “The RP is GOA." Gone on arrival. “Negative on the ten-thirty-one.... Yeah, she didn’t leave anything behind.... We’re code four here.”

  Cray did not move until he heard the double slam of the squad car’s doors. Then he stepped out from behind the wall. Hidden in shadow at the rear of the alley, he watched the car pull out of the parking lot into the traffic stream on Grant Road. Finally he exhaled a slow breath and lowered his head.

  He saw the knife in his hand. It was unsheathed, and his fingers were curled tightly over the handle, holding the weapon poised for a lethal thrust.

  He hadn’t even known he’d removed the sheath. The act had been carried out unconsciously, by instinct.

  Well, he of all people could hardly be surprised by the limitations of the conscious mind.

  Cray sheathed the knife and replaced it in the satchel, then left the alley. Before driving off, he bought a thermos of coffee at the Circle K.

  It had been a long night, and if Kaylie had indeed given his name to the 911 operator, then he could expect an equally long day.

  18

  “You already told us that. But you haven’t said why. Hey, Mitch? Mitchell? You hear me? Tell us why.”

  The raggedy man named Mitch didn’t answer. He had zoned out again, his drawn face going blank, his pale, rheumy eyes losing focus. He stared out the window of the moving car at a blur of strip malls and burrito stands, a trickle of saliva on his chin.

  Roy Shepherd sighed. This wasn’t the guy. He was sure of it.

  Almost sure.

  He didn’t put a great deal of faith in psychological profiles. They were mostly guesswork, and often not very good guesswork at that. He’d worked the streets long enough, first as a patrol cop and now as a plainclothes detective, to know that human nature was too complicated, too multifaceted, to be reduced to a series of simple formulas.

  Still, the profiles were reliable in some respects. If the killer was careful and methodical, leaving few clues or none at all, covering his tracks, defying capture, then he almost certainly was not schizophrenic.

  The schizos could be violent—oh, yes, Shepherd knew about that—but their violence was apt to be spontaneous, frenzied, splashy. They weren’t organized in their thinking. They were inept at concealment.

  Whoever had killed Sharon Andrews in the White Mountains five months ago—killed her and cut off her face and taken it as a grisly souvenir—was surely crazy, a psycho, but not a schizophrenic like glassy-eyed Mitch.

  Mitch might have killed somebody, though. He seemed to think he had.

  Shepherd settled back in the rear seat of the unmarked car. Two other detectives, Janice Hirst and Hector Alvarez, sat up front. Hirst was driving. Alvarez was rather noisily chewing gum. He always had a stick of Juicy Fruit in his mouth. Shepherd had never seen the man actually eat anything.

  He glanced out the window. After fifteen years in Tucson, his whole professional life, he knew the town better than most cabbies. He didn’t even need to check the street signs to know that the unmarked car was crossing the intersection of 22nd Street and Park Avenue.

  The warehouse was two blocks away. If there were faces or any other body parts in Mitch’s possession. Shepherd and his colleagues would know soon enough.

  “I steal their faces,” Mitch mumbled in a sleepwalker’s voice, and a smile briefly animated his expression.

  He’d said the same thing to the patrol cops who arrested him for creating a public disturbance at 6:30 this morning, after Mitch was found directing traffic on Wilmot Road.

  I steal their faces.

  It had gotten the cops’ attention, at any rate.

  Shepherd had taken their report at 7:15. Possible confession in the White Mountains case. Street person saying he took people’s faces.

  He hadn’t believed it, and his skepticism had only deepened after a thirty-minute interrogation of the suspect. Mitch was indigent. He lived off handouts and soup-kitchen charity. He slept at shelters and in alleys. He had no driver’s license and no means of transportation.

  How was he supposed to have abducted Sharon Andrews and taken her to the White Mountains, roughly a hundred miles northeast of Tucson ?

  Mitch hadn’t answered that question or very many other questions. He had merely reiterated his mantra with tiresome regularity while his expression varied between epileptic twitches and utter blankness.

  The one bit of solid information Shepherd had coaxed from the man was the place where the faces could be found.

  CDS, Mitch had said.

  When pressed, he carefully repeated the acronym, enunciating each letter with exaggerated precision.

  CDS stood for Central District Supply. The company, now defunct, had operated a warehouse near South Tucson. The three letters, painted ten feet high, still adorned the side of the abandoned building.

  Looking ahead. Shepherd saw those letters now rising over the roof of a lower building at the end of a dead-end street south of 22nd. “That the place?” he asked Mit
ch.

  Mitch nodded. “CDS.”

  “The faces are in there?”

  Another nod. “I steal their faces.”

  Shepherd looked away. “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  Hirst parked in a vacant lot alongside the looming bulk of the warehouse. She and Alvarez climbed out of the unmarked Crown Victoria, then helped Mitch to exit.

  He stood vacantly, swaying and humming, his wrists handcuffed behind him. Shepherd had insisted on the handcuffs. He knew you couldn’t take any chances with these people.

  Shepherd himself got out last, unfolding himself from the close confines of the sedan’s rear compartment. He was tall and slim, and at thirty-eight he kept himself in shape by rising at 5:30 every day to play vigorous handball at Fort Lowell Park. This morning, after his game, he had driven directly to Tucson police headquarters and showered there. Somehow he had misplaced his comb, and he’d had to smooth and part his close-cropped brown hair with his fingers, a procedure that had left him slightly unkempt.

  As he stood by the car, a dusty breeze kicked up and made mischief with his hair, and he knew that if Ginnie were here, he would catch gentle hell from her for the state of his appearance. Ginnie had been the one who’d always straightened his tie, exclaimed over loose threads in his slacks, and made tut-tutting noises when he came down to breakfast in a week-old, unwashed sweatshirt and Jockey briefs.

  He smiled, thinking of his wife, but the smile turned to sadness as the wind blew harder. He had not been able to think of Ginnie without sorrow for a long time now. There was a hurt in him, deep and raw, and even an hour of pounding the handball until his palms were numb could not assuage it.

  “Show us how to get in,” he told Mitch, hoping the man was sufficiently lucid to comprehend the order.

  With a nod, Mitch led the three cops through knee-high weeds and swirls of windblown dust toward the tall chicken-wire fence surrounding the warehouse. He took long, stiff, clumsy strides. He hummed louder.

  At the rear there was a gap in the fence, professionally cut. Mitch hadn’t done that. The work was too clean, too competent.

  The four of them slipped through the gap and came to the back of the building, where Mitch pointed at a door that had been chained shut.

  The chain links had been severed—again, a neat, professional job.