Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  Touching nothing, he cast his gaze over the scattered items on the floor, focusing on two objects of interest: a spiral-bound book that looked like a photo album, and a manila envelope stuffed with paper.

  In his pocket he carried a pair of latex gloves. He put them on, then flipped through the photo album. Snapshots of parties and picnics riffled past. Most of the faces were different, but in nearly every photo there was a woman—sometimes blonde, sometimes dark-haired—but always the same.

  Hello, Kaylie, he thought with a tight, fierce smile.

  He could see why the waitress at the coffee shop had described her customer as looking young. Kaylie had a slightly round, almost childlike face that had not aged much in the past twelve years.

  An innocent face. Pretty, in fact.

  Shepherd thought of her voice on tape, the hushed urgency, the shyness. He had liked her voice. He had wanted to believe her.

  Studying the photos, he wished ... he almost wished that he ...

  The thought felt dangerous. He blinked it away.

  To feel anything for this woman was just stupid. Worse than stupid—disloyal. A betrayal of his wife, or of her memory. Kaylie McMillan was just another Timothy Fries, a psychopath, violent and unstable and obsessive, and sympathy for her was an affront to Ginnie.

  Shepherd tossed the photo album on the bed. His hand was shaking just a little.

  He picked up the manila envelope. Inside it was a sheaf of documentation establishing a series of false I.D.’s. Different names, birth dates, backgrounds, but all of them were Kaylie McMillan.

  She had been busy, these past twelve years.

  “Roy, what in Christ is going on?” That was Alvarez, at the door, Galston and Bane behind him.

  Shepherd looked up from the documents in his gloved hands, surveyed the wreckage in the room, and said simply, “She flew.”

  35

  A mile from the motel, Elizabeth pulled onto a side street and parked at the curb, then sat for a long moment, shaking all over as fear and relief and anger throbbed through her in a sequence of vivid aftershocks.

  Too much had happened in the past twenty-four hours. She couldn’t absorb it all, couldn’t make it real.

  Obstacles and threats everywhere. Danger, pursuit, the walls of her life closing in.

  If Cray or his henchmen didn’t get her, the police would. The police, who were there to protect and serve. Who were they protecting now? Cray? Who was served by that?

  She raised a trembling hand to her throat and felt the memory of Walter’s fingers tightening like a vise.

  Close call. Really close.

  She’d faced death twice since yesterday evening. She’d risked arrest when she made her 911 call, and again this afternoon.

  So far her luck had held, but she knew she could press it no further. Anyway, she couldn’t stay in Tucson. Everybody here was after her. She had to leave town. Leave Arizona entirely.

  It was time to go to Texas, as she’d thought of doing before all this bad business began. Dallas had been her original destination, but the city seemed too big, too complicated. She could try San Antonio, maybe. It was supposed to be nice there. They had a riverwalk. She would like to see that.

  In San Antonio she could obtain or forge a new I.D. Elizabeth Palmer would have to go. That was all right. Names didn’t matter. She’d had many names.

  As soon as possible, she would ditch the Chevette, obtain another car. She had no idea how she would manage this, with no money and no credit history and no collateral, but she would find a way.

  She had to. Because the police would search her things. They would find the documents that established her various false identities. They would run a motor-vehicles check on Elizabeth Palmer. The make and model and license plate number of her car would be known to them immediately. The information would go on a hot sheet, or whatever they called it, and she would be at perpetual risk of being spotted and pulled over.

  In the short term, she might be able to steal somebody’s license plate, put it on the Chevette, buy some time.

  All right. Get to Texas. Tonight.

  In the glove compartment she kept a map of the western U.S. She unfolded it and checked the route she’d have to take. Interstate 10 would get her all the way there. A fifteen-hour drive, no problem.

  She checked her purse, counting bills. Fifty-four dollars.

  Most of that would be spent on food and fuel. And she had no luggage, no change of clothes, not even a toothbrush. Nothing to fall back on, nothing to pawn or barter.

  In San Antonio she would need a job immediately. Well, she had waitressing experience, clerical skills. She could find something.

  This was bad, so bad. She’d been down-and-out at other times during her twelve years on the run, but never had she felt so completely beaten, so lost.

  Could be worse, though.

  She could be in handcuffs.

  She could be dead.

  The thought lifted her, just a little. She would get through this. And after all, she was not entirely alone. There was Anson. She could reach him, calling collect, at any hour and hear his grave, slow voice. And though she hated asking him for money, she had done it before, and he’d wired it to her without hesitation.

  Strange behavior for the father of the man she’d shot in the heart and left to die, but Anson had his reasons.

  She checked the map again, steadying herself in the study of its clean, logical lines. Everything made sense in maps, it was all laid out for you, and you always knew just where you were going.

  Driving the interstates was like that, too. A straight road, no surprises, the destination dead ahead.

  “Okay,” she said aloud, “so get going.”

  And forget about Cray.

  It was her only option at this point. The police had boxed her in. She couldn’t pursue her quarry any further.

  Anyway, damn it, she’d done all she could. She’d done everything that could have been asked of her.

  San Antonio.

  A fresh start.

  “Oh, hell,” Elizabeth said, and she crumpled the map and tossed it on the floor.

  She wasn’t going to Texas. She knew that.

  Whatever the risk, whatever the consequences, she had started this game of cat-and-mouse with Cray, and she would see it through.

  She put the Chevette into gear and pulled away from the curb, heading east to Safford and the Hawk Ridge Institute, where she would make her stand.

  36

  Alvarez and the two beat cops entered the room slowly, taking in the damage.

  “Looks like a goddamn tornado hit the place,” Leo Galston said.

  “More like a hurricane.” Shepherd shrugged. “Hurricane Kaylie.”

  “You think she’s cleared out for good?” Alvarez asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “But she left her stuff.”

  “She was in a hurry. She must’ve sprinted out of here. Left the door wide open.”

  “Why would she trash the place and run?”

  “Way I see it, she realized she’d made a lot of noise, and somebody might call the manager about it. She didn’t want a confrontation, so she panicked and fled.”

  Alvarez frowned. “That doesn’t explain why she made all this mess in the first place.”

  Shepherd didn’t answer. He was staring at an item he’d overlooked earlier, a crumpled newspaper on the floor near the bed.

  Carefully he picked it up in a gloved hand. It was today’s edition of the Tucson Citizen, open to the Tucson & Arizona section.

  The page had been partially shredded. It appeared Kaylie had made a furious effort to obliterate an offending article. But the headline, at least, was still intact.

  “Here’s your answer,” he told Alvarez. “About why she trashed the room. She’s still upset about the White Mountains case. She went nuts—more nuts than usual—when she read this story.”

  Galston asked, “What story?”

  “It’s got to be the retr
action of the false lead that went out over the radio. She must have heard there was a breakthrough as a result of a nine-one tip. She got all excited. She thought we’d bought her story, arrested Cray. That’s what she wants. She hates him. Then she reads this, finds out it was all a mistake, Cray’s not under arrest, there are no breaks, no suspects, nothing—and she loses it.”

  “And we lose her,” Galston said grimly.

  “Looks that way.”

  “How about her car?” Alvarez asked. “Did the manager see it?”

  “Not that I know, but we can run it down easily enough. It’s registered to Elizabeth Palmer.” He found the birth certificate in the sheaf of papers. “That’s one of her three fake I.D.’s—the current one, I think.”

  Bane, the rookie, asked how Shepherd knew it was current.

  “Because the documentation she kept on the other two includes her driver’s license and Social Security card. Those items are missing for the Elizabeth Palmer alias.” Bane still looked puzzled, so Shepherd spelled it out. “She’s carrying them in her purse.”

  “If we know what I.D. she’s using, and we know what she’s driving,” Alvarez said, “then she won’t get far.”

  Shepherd sighed. “Sure she will, Hector. It’s a big country. Plenty of places to hide. And she’s been on the run for years. She’s damn good at it. She can run and hide ... if she wants to.”

  “But you don’t think she does.”

  “No.”

  “What else would she do?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s gone over the edge, that’s for sure. Cray said psychotics go through cycles, phases. He said Kaylie was in the acute phase now. Maybe it’s been building for the last twelve years. Like a volcano—more and more pressure—then bang. Eruption.”

  “You sound worried,” Alvarez said.

  “I am.”

  Galston tried to shrug it off. “She was just a little bit of a thing. She didn’t look so dangerous.”

  “Tim Fries didn’t look so dangerous, either,” Shepherd snapped, not quite realizing the words were spoken aloud until he heard their echo in the room.

  Bane asked who Tim Fries was. Alvarez and Galston both knew, and they both shushed him, Galston with a clamp on his arm, Alvarez with a look.

  Then there was silence. Shepherd was thinking.

  “She’ll go after Cray,” he said.

  Alvarez said she already had. But that wasn’t what Shepherd meant.

  “I’m not saying she’ll stalk him or wreck his car. She’ll go after him personally.”

  “Try to take him out, you think?”

  Shepherd’s shoulders lifted. “She shot her husband. Why not Cray? She seems to think he’s a serial killer. In her mind, she’ll be performing a public service.”

  “Graham County Sheriff’s will have to handle it,” Alvarez said. “Patrol the area near the hospital. Get Cray to lie low for a few days. Maybe he’ll even leave town.”

  “I doubt it. He’s stubborn.”

  “Well, it’s their problem, not ours.”

  Shepherd didn’t respond directly. He scanned the mess in the room—the scatter of clothes, the broken TV, the shards of glass in the bathroom, the blood spots on the floor. He thought of the frantic voice on the 911 tape, accusing Cray of murder, saying he entrapped his victims and hunted them like animals in the moonlit wilderness.

  He couldn’t walk away from this. Ginnie’s ghost would never forgive him.

  “So,” Alvarez said, “you’re gonna call Graham County. Right?”

  Slowly Shepherd nodded. “I’ll call that guy Kroft knows—Chuck Wheelihan—the one who was promoted to undersheriff.”

  “I don’t think you need to talk to the undersheriff.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Shepherd smiled, a secret smile that puzzled the two patrol cops and worried Alvarez. “Yeah, I think I do. But first I need to get in touch with somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “Cray.”

  The phone in the room might have Kaylie’s prints on it, so Shepherd used his cell phone instead. He stood outside for a clearer transmission and found the number he needed in his memo pad.

  There were four rings at the other end of the line, and then a receptionist—no doubt the woman in the lobby who’d been bent over her computer keyboard, the woman who’d reminded him briefly of Ginnie at her desk—answered. “Hawk Ridge Institute.”

  He identified himself. His call was transferred to Cray’s secretary, then to Cray himself.

  “Yes, Detective?” The man sounded harried and tired. “How may I help you?”

  “We just had a close encounter with your former patient.”

  “With Kaylie?” Instantly the weariness was gone from Cray’s voice. “Is she under arrest?”

  “I’m afraid not. She eluded us, but just barely. Before she left, she did a lot of damage to her motel room.”

  “Damage?”

  Cray seemed surprised by the news. Distantly Shepherd found this odd. The man knew what Kaylie had done to his Lexus, after all.

  “She messed up the place pretty badly,” he said. “Apparently she’s still in a violent frame of mind.”

  “I see.” Peculiar hesitation there. “Well, I suppose you intend to warn me again that I need to watch out for her. I do appreciate your concern—”

  “Actually, I’m calling for a slightly different reason.” It was Shepherd’s turn to hesitate. “I want to ask you for help.”

  “Help?”

  “In apprehending this woman. Tonight.”

  “You want my assistance ... in catching her. I see.”

  There was something new in Cray’s tone, something Shepherd could not quite define. Under other circumstances, he might have thought it was a note of sly amusement. But the cell phone’s reception was muddy, and he was sure he’d misinterpreted what he heard.

  “It may entail some risk,” Shepherd said, choosing his words with care. “And I haven’t contacted the sheriff’s department to work things out with them. But if I can get their cooperation, can I count on yours, as well?”

  He waited. On the other end of the line, Cray exhaled a long, slow breath.

  “Detective,” Cray said, “when it comes to putting Kaylie safely in custody where she belongs, I assure you I’ll do everything I can.”

  37

  Chuck Wheelihan, undersheriff of Graham County, stood by the side of his Chevy Caprice cruiser in the desert night.

  Three deputies loitered nearby. They wore tan short-sleeve shirts, open at the collar, and brown trousers encircled by gun belts, and they had yellow-bordered patches on their shoulders and silver badges on their chests. They were young. Damnably young, Wheelihan thought.

  One was smoking a cigarette, another had just returned from taking a whiz in a creosote patch, and the third was drumming his fingers restlessly on the hood of Wheelihan’s car.

  “So, Chuck,” the drummer said, “what do you think the odds are of this working?”

  Wheelihan took a moment to think it over. The great quiet of the desert loomed around him, and above the high peaks of the Pinaleno range the stars dazzled.

  “One in three,” he answered at length.

  “That guy from Tucson seems to think our chances are a good deal better’n that.”

  “That’s because he thinks the girl is watching Cray’s house.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Way I see it, she ran to the border or to another state. Or she’s layin’ low.”

  “If she’s sensible, sure. But she’s crazy, they say.”

  There was eagerness in the young man’s voice. He wanted to go up against somebody crazy, somebody dangerous, even if it was only a woman.

  Not much action here in Graham County. The militia types stirred up a fuss from time to time, setting off explosives in the desert or scaring folks with their silly war games, and there was that local man who’d taken a tire iron to his girlfriend’s skull one drunken night, but that was about it, as far as exc
itement went.

  So Chuck couldn’t blame the boy for straining at his harness. Still, he preferred to keep things low-key, which was why he took his time in making his reply.

  “Sure she’s crazy. I know that. I’m one of the ones that nabbed her, way back when. I was part of the search-and-rescue team. We came across the gal, out in the desert about twenty miles from here, and you should’ve seen her, all dirty and crying, and she wouldn’t say nothing. She was just kneeling there, kneeling like she was at her prayers. Her eyes were empty. Nobody home. You know what I mean?”

  The boy didn’t. “I guess.”

  “She’s a psycho, all right, like all the other nutcases they got there in the loony bin. But she’s not stupid, see? She escaped from the nuthouse, didn’t she? She’s stayed on the lam for twelve years. Am I right?”

  “You’re right, Chuck.”

  “She’s not so dumb. Some of these fruitcake types, they can be pretty damned shrewd. So I’m saying, she’s nowhere near this spot, is my guess. She’s off in Sonora, maybe, or cruising up to Salt Lake. Or she’s gone to ground like the scared bunny rabbit she is. Whatever. Point is, she’s not gonna risk coming anywhere near Dr. John Cray.”

  The smoker, who’d been listening to this, tossed his cigarette away with an impatient flick of his wrist. “So why’re we here, earning overtime,” he asked, “when some of us would rather be at home getting a hot meal?”

  Wheelihan shrugged. “Because I could be wrong, Mel. I have been before. And I know the sheriff would dearly like to close the book on the McMillan case. He comes up for reelection next year, you know.”

  “Sheriff don’t have to explain to my wife why he missed her pot roast,” the smoker groused.

  “Pot roast makes good leftovers,” commented the man who’d relieved himself, contributing this thought for no particular reason.

  “Just get comfortable, boys.” Wheelihan smiled at the high canopy of the sky. “It’s a nice night, and we’re getting paid to do this, and who knows? We just might get lucky. Like I said, it’s one in three. She might be on the run. She might be hunkered down. But if she’s here—if she’s staking out the place like this man Shepherd thinks—then we’ll get her.”