Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  “This guy seems to know you, Doc,” Undersheriff Wheelihan said, disgust souring his voice.

  Cray hated being called Doc. He pushed his irritation away.

  “He’s a patient,” he said, trying to be calm, but afraid suddenly—terribly afraid of what Walter might say. “He lives at the institute. But he’s not confined there. He has a car, this car, and he runs errands.”

  “Runs ’em at night? With his lights off?”

  “That isn’t standard procedure, obviously. Let me speak with him.”

  “He’s all yours.”

  Cray hoped the undersheriff and his deputies would move away, afford him some privacy with Walter, but none of them moved.

  Gingerly he touched the big man’s arm. “Walter,” he began in his best professional tone, “why don’t you tell me what’s happened here.”

  “Got arrested,” Walter said, his eyes hollow with fear.

  “No, you’re not under arrest. There’s been a misunderstanding. A mistake. Now, why were you out driving around after dark?”

  A pendulous thread of mucus dangled from Walter’s left nostril. With an equine snort, he sniffed it back.

  “Following you,” he whispered.

  “I see. That’s why you had your headlights off. So I wouldn’t see you?”

  “That’s right, Dr. Cray”

  “Now, why was it so important to follow me?”

  “Because of Kaylie. I thought you’d go looking for her, like I—”

  “Yes, I understand now.” It was imperative to cut off this dangerous line of discussion. “You asked me earlier today why the police had come by, and I told you about Kaylie. You were worried that I’d try to find her somehow. You were hoping to protect me.”

  “Protect you.” Walter seized on these words, as Cray had hoped he would. “Yes, protect you, it’s all I wanted to do, just protect you, Dr. Cray.”

  “That’s fine, Walter.”

  “Because I know how dangerous she is.”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “She could hurt you. She tried to hurt—”

  “That’s enough, Walter. We all understand you. You’re not in any trouble. You haven’t broken any laws.”

  Wheelihan coughed. “Well, Doc, he was driving without his headlights.”

  Doc again. Cray was growing tired of this man. “Write up a ticket,” he snapped. “I’ll pay it for him.”

  Walter’s lip trembled in the prelude to another sob.

  The undersheriff looked at the big man, then at Cray, then shrugged. “Aw, to hell with it. I’m just pissed off, is all. I thought we had her. As it turns out, probably she was never even here.”

  “She was here. I—” I felt her, Cray almost said. I sensed her presence with the tips of my nerve endings. But he couldn’t say that. “I know her well enough to anticipate her behavior patterns. She came here tonight.”

  Wheelihan looked dubious. “Well, if so, she’s gone by now. All this commotion would’ve scared her off for sure.”

  “Unless she wasn’t on this road, because she never meant to follow me in the first place.”

  “The house, you mean?”

  Cray nodded. Of course. It would be the house. Now that he thought about it, the house was the only thing that really made sense.

  She hadn’t come here to kill him. She wasn’t a killer, not really, though neither Shepherd nor Wheelihan knew it. She had come for evidence—hard evidence, conclusive, impossible for the police to ignore.

  His trophies.

  That was what she was after, crafty Kaylie. The faces of his victims, the totems he had collected during twelve years of nocturnal sport, which she hoped to find in his residence while he was away.

  “Yes ...” he murmured, and then remembering he was surrounded by people, he added more loudly, “yes, she’ll try to break into my house.”

  41

  Security at the Hawk Ridge Institute was tight. The hospital compound was entirely fenced in, patrolled by a small but vigilant guard detail. The front gate was monitored by a guard in a gatehouse.

  But the gate across Cray’s private driveway was not monitored by anyone.

  Elizabeth had thought about that gate many times on the long nights when she watched Cray’s house. She thought of it again as she left her perch on the ridge and descended the foot trail to the fire road.

  Her car was parked on the road, but she wouldn’t need it. She paused only long enough to stow her binoculars inside. Then she jogged down the winding road toward flatter ground. Had to hurry. She needed to be in position near the gate by the time Cray left for the evening.

  When he departed, the gate would briefly swing wide, and for a few seconds the sealed perimeter of the institute would open just a bit.

  She reached the main road, a strip of washboard gravel with no streetlights, illuminated only by the stars and the faint glow of the hospital complex.

  At the roadside she paused. The director’s residence was directly across the way. She saw movement in a first-floor window. Cray, slipping past. Heading for the garage, it appeared. On his way out.

  She crossed the road at a run, then hunkered down in the bushes at the edge of the driveway, ten feet from the spear-pointed gate with its elaborate torsade of wrought-iron curlicues.

  There was nothing to do now but wait for Cray’s Lexus to emerge from the garage.

  The night was still, the air velvety and fine. She wished she could be somewhere else, in the arms of a lover, perhaps, or swinging on a hammock on a veranda, a cool drink in her hand.

  Instead she was crouching in the weeds like an animal, hunting the faces Cray collected like totems, like scalps.

  The idea had come to her as she sat on the bus-stop bench with the crumpled newspaper in her hands.

  The police had not believed her. Either the satchel had not persuaded them, or they had never received it. But suppose she found evidence they could not ignore. Evidence so compelling it could not be open to any possible doubt.

  The faces.

  She was sure Cray kept them. She could even guess how they would be preserved.

  She could guess—because she had seen one, many years ago.

  That one must be in Cray’s possession now, along with the others he had collected since.

  How many victims? She couldn’t guess. Six or ten or more....

  A bevy of faces, skinned from their victims’ skulls, preserved like parchment, perhaps pressed like leaves between the pages of a book—or hanging from a wall, pasted under glass—or pinned on mounting boards, like prize butterflies.

  He had them.

  In his house, almost certainly. Where else would he keep his treasures?

  They would be hidden away, safe from accidental discovery by a housekeeper or a dinner guest. She would need time to find them. From experience she knew that Cray, when on the prowl, would be gone for hours.

  When he got back, his beauties would be gone.

  And then? The next step?

  She didn’t like to think about it. But there was only one thing she could do.

  No phone call this time. No frantic pleading with an anonymous officer on the 911 line, who would dismiss her as a crank.

  She would take her evidence directly to the police, take it in person. She would give herself up—Kaylie McMillan, wanted fugitive, desperado—surrender to the authorities, with the trophies as proof that she was not crazy and not a criminal.

  And she simply would have to trust in the representatives of law and order to hear her out, to believe her at last.

  Trust. A difficult idea to embrace, but she had no choice. She had gone nearly as far as she could on her own. She was tired. She was worn out. She needed to set down her burden, and she would.

  After tonight.

  At the far end of the driveway, the garage door rumbled open. Cray was leaving.

  Elizabeth peered through a veil of foliage and saw red taillights throwing dim cones of light through a haze of dust.

 
The Lexus backed out. She crouched lower.

  Faint music reached her. An opera. Pretty.

  Then the gracious notes were erased behind the low squeal of the gate, swinging wide in response to an electric eye within the grounds.

  The gate was hinged on one side only, the side farthest from her. It opened with ponderous majesty, the iron spikes catching the taillights’ glow, dripping blood.

  Still she didn’t move. She couldn’t risk Cray seeing her.

  She squeezed herself compactly against the shrubbery, trying to blend in, wishing she hadn’t lost her luggage, because she would have liked to change into darker clothes that melded with the night.

  The gate was wide open now, the Lexus easing through.

  She saw Cray at the wheel, his face in profile, the glow of the dashboard filling in the hollows of his cheeks.

  Was he thinking of her at this moment? Was he asking himself where she was hiding, where he might find her?

  The Lexus emerged fully onto the road, its headlights bright, their spill creeping close to her hiding place.

  If she was speared in the glare, would he see her? She thought he might. She bent lower, compressing herself into a tight, shivering huddle of fear.

  Then the headlights swung away as the Lexus pivoted toward the open road.

  She was safe.

  But the gate was closing.

  She uncoiled from her crouch and hurried forward, hugging the fence, staying low, still afraid Cray would glance back toward the driveway and glimpse a pale, moving shadow amid the bushes.

  The Lexus started forward, down the road. A wisp of an aria reached her through the open window on the driver’s side, then trailed off into silence as the big black vehicle receded.

  She was near the gate now, less than two yards away, but it was swinging shut too fast, and she didn’t think she could slip through in time.

  Only a narrow gap was left between the leading edge of the gate and the masonry gate post, a post also topped with spikes to discourage intruders.

  In a moment the gate would slip into place against the post, the latch fastening automatically, and she would be locked out.

  She dived headlong for the opening, aware that if she misjudged her jump she would be caught between metal and stone, with a crushed leg or snapped ribs as her reward—immobilized, stuck here to wait for Cray’s return.

  The ground came up fast and shocked her with its impact, and she heard iron squealing on its hinges on one side, felt cold stone on the other, and with a gasping effort she scrambled through, pulling both feet clear just before the gate clanged shut.

  Made it.

  She lay on the lawn near a flower bed, gulping air, wishing she were on the road to San Antonio right now. Then she raised herself to a half-crouch and carefully made her way down the driveway to the front of the house.

  She had no idea how to break in. The last time she’d trespassed on somebody’s property, she had been on the run after escaping from this hospital. She’d found a truck in a farmer’s barn and hot-wired it, a skill she’d learned from Justin, of course—Justin, who knew so many things he shouldn’t have known.

  Justin could have told her how to break into Cray’s house, if he were here, if he were alive, if she hadn’t shot him in the heart.

  But of course, had she not shot him, she wouldn’t be on the trail of John Cray’s secrets. Had she not shot him, she would still be Kaylie McMillan and not Elizabeth Palmer or Paula Neilson or whoever she was now.

  Anyway, there had to be some way in.

  She tested the front door, hoping absurdly that it was unlocked. No luck, naturally. The front windows, too, were locked. Cray was careful.

  Through the windows she could see his living room, part of the house that had not been visible from her vantage point on the ridge. She noted a fireplace, bookshelves, an overstuffed sofa and armchair, plush carpet, soft lighting, all the graces and amenities she had been denied in her long flight from what the world called justice.

  But somewhere in this house there was the evidence that would take Cray’s comforts away from him, put him in a cell with a steel toilet and bunk beds.

  The thought—the hope—buoyed her as she crept around the side of the residence, to the garage.

  Somewhere close, a mockingbird announced its presence, running through a litany of bird calls. A breeze stirred the leafy branches of an arbor looming on her right. She smelled fresh-cut grass, a rarity in the desert.

  Birds and trees and green lawns—she’d never imagined any of these things when she was imprisoned in this hospital, confined to a windowless isolation room in Ward C, the oldest ward, now abandoned to the deer mice and scorpions.

  For her, there had been only concrete and steel, loneliness and terror, and the gibbering complaints of other patients down the hall.

  The bird stopped singing. She heard a rustle of wings, and it was gone. Something had scared it off. A predator perhaps. The night was crowded with them.

  There was a side door to the garage. She tested it. Like the front door and front windows, it was locked. But nearby, almost at eye level, was a window.

  A broken window.

  Elizabeth stared at it, baffled. It was like an invitation to enter.

  And suddenly she knew something was wrong.

  She didn’t know what, precisely. She knew only that the window, open and welcoming, was a stroke of fortune too good to be believed.

  She had learned suspicion over the past twelve years. She had learned to trust the tingle at the back of her neck, warning her of danger.

  She felt that tingle now.

  Get away, she told herself. Get away now, run, hide—

  She turned from the window, and the lights came on.

  Two lights from the arbor where the mockingbird had sung, the mockingbird that had not been scared off by any predator, except the human kind, the kind that hunted her.

  Flashlights.

  A pair of them, beams wavering through a scrim of leaves, and from the shadows—a voice.

  “Don’t move, Kaylie. Just stay where you are.”

  42

  Past shock, past panic, she knew she’d heard that voice before, and she remembered where: at the motel this afternoon, while she hid in an alcove and a man entered the manager’s office, announcing himself as Detective Shepherd.

  He was here, and this was some kind of trap, and Cray—

  Cray was part of it, was in on it, was helping the police to catch ...

  “No,” she whispered, and she waved her arms at the lights in a frantic effort to make them disappear, make this stop happening. “No, you can’t, you can’t!”

  “Don’t move!”

  The flashlights swam toward her, two dark figures limned in their backsplash—Shepherd in his dark suit, and another man, a deputy, tan shirt and brown pants and a gun belt.

  Closing in.

  She had to run, her every instinct insisted that she run, but there was nowhere to go. She was cornered, her back against the garage wall and the two men drawing near, pinning her in the wavering circles of light.

  “No, please,” she said, speaking not to them but to whatever justice there might be in the universe. “Please, this isn’t right.”

  “Calm down, Kaylie.”

  That was Shepherd, Shepherd who was showing her a smooth, false smile, the smile she had seen on doctors’ faces, on Cray’s face, and why not? Cray and Shepherd—they were in league together, allies united against her, smiling killers working hand in hand.

  She felt the pressure of a scream welling in her throat.

  “Kaylie ...” Shepherd said again in his deceitful, soothing voice.

  “Not my name,” she whispered, and then the scream broke out of her in a rush of furious words: “That’s not my name, I’m not Kaylie, stop calling me that, stop calling me—”

  Abruptly they were all over her, their hands, their hot breath—too strong for her—the deputy and Shepherd overpowering her frenzied res
istance, twisting her around, then grabbing her arms, wrenching them behind her back, pain in her shoulders, metal on her wrists, handcuffs, they were cuffing her, and she was struggling, thrashing, refusing to surrender even as they pressed her face to the wall and wood splinters pricked her cheek.

  “Christ, she’s a fighter,” the deputy said.

  Shepherd answered, “Just hold her down.”

  She whipsawed wildly under their restraining hands, but she couldn’t break free, and what she had to do was talk to them, talk quietly, try to persuade them, maybe they would believe her, or at least pretend to believe....

  “Search his house,” she gasped. “Search his house.”

  “Cray’s house?” Shepherd was leaning close, his voice loud in her ear. “Why?”

  “You’ll find ... you’ll find their faces. The women. He kills them and ... Like Sharon Andrews.”

  “You need help, Kaylie.” He sounded so kind, but they always did.

  “Just search. He keeps them there. I know he does.”

  “Kaylie ...”

  “For God’s sake, wasn’t it enough—what I gave you? The satchel? The knife? How much more do you need?”

  Gently: “There wasn’t any satchel, Kaylie.”

  The words reverberated in some hollow part of her, nonsensical words.

  “I left it for you,” she said blankly. “At the phone.”

  “There wasn’t anything there.”

  This was impossible. “They didn’t look hard enough. Or they went to the wrong phone or ... or Cray ... he got there first and took it....”

  “How could he do that?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. But he’s the one you want. He’s the one who killed Sharon Andrews. He tried to kill me. I know it sounds crazy. I know you think I’m insane.”

  “We just want to help.”

  She was crying. “Well, don’t. Don’t help me. Just let me go. You’re no good at helping, any of you. You just make things worse. You never believe me and you never do anything, and now you’re working with him, with ...”

  Cray.

  Approaching out of the dark at a fast stride. Behind him, other deputies.

  She heard herself moan.