Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  “It’ll be all right,” Shepherd told her, and God, she hated him for uttering those words—such a stupid, meaningless thing to say.

  Then she saw something in Cray’s hand. A black kit of some kind. The satchel?

  It had to be the satchel, he was carrying it in plain view of everybody, and in a spasm of excitement she nearly opened her mouth to alert Shepherd and the others—but no.

  No, it was a different sort of bag, not the one he’d carried into her motel room last night. A doctor’s bag, that’s all, and if she started yelling about it, she would only look that much more foolish and desperate and crazy.

  Cray strode into the outer ring of the two flashlights’ glow, his face lit from below, his eyes in deep wells of shadow. “Congratulations, Detective,” he said crisply. “Your plan appears to have proven an unqualified success.”

  Shepherd shrugged. “Not much of a plan. Just common sense. Either she would follow you—or she would stay behind and try to get inside the house. And she broke in through the garage window once before.”

  But I didn’t, Elizabeth almost said, but she knew her protest would be wasted. The broken window was part of Cray’s scheme, in some way she couldn’t quite understand. He had laid a trap for her, he and the police together.

  She said nothing, merely stood trembling, her wrists cuffed behind her, the garage wall hard against her shoulders, and Shepherd holding on to her left arm with a steady hand.

  “Well,” Cray said, inspecting her from a cautious distance, his gaze cold and sly, “she had to slip up eventually. In the acute phase of her illness, she’s not capable of thinking clearly.”

  This broke her silence. “You piece of shit,” she breathed.

  Cray ignored her. “She’ll do better once she’s on a program of medication and intensive therapy. She’ll get the best care here.”

  Here.

  She stiffened. They couldn’t leave her here ... with Cray.

  She opened her mouth to say so, but remarkably Shepherd said it first.

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, but it’s the only way, Detective. She needs psychiatric help. Surely you can see that.”

  “Under the circumstances, don’t you think some other doctor at a different institution—”

  One of the sheriff’s men, who seemed to outrank the others, cut Shepherd off. “Afraid there isn’t another institution in this county, Roy. Oh, I guess the county medical center handles a few psychiatric cases, but the ones that can’t be treated on an outpatient basis are always transferred here to Hawk Ridge.”

  Cray smiled, charming as a snake. “Undersheriff Wheelihan is entirely correct. We’re the only show in town.”

  Shepherd wouldn’t give in. “She could be remanded to a Pima County facility.”

  Elizabeth listened, aware that her fate would be decided by this conversation, this casual exchange among men free to go home to their beds and their wives tonight.

  The one identified as Wheelihan shook his head. “I doubt a judge would go for that idea, Roy. Not unless Dr. Cray were to testify it’s necessary.”

  “And I won’t,” Cray said. “Institutionalization at Hawk Ridge is the best thing for her. She needs to confront her fear, deal with it. Only by seeing that I pose no threat will she begin to recover from this paranoid delusion.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Elizabeth whispered in a voice so low that only Shepherd could hear.

  “Really, Detective,” Cray said, “there’s no other option.”

  “Don’t listen ...” Elizabeth’s voice dropped to a hiss of breath, inaudible even to her.

  There was a pause, a stillness, everything suspended, and then very softly Detective Shepherd said, “I suppose you’re right.”

  She’d lost.

  Cray had her.

  She was his patient again, his prisoner.

  No escape this time.

  His prisoner forever.

  A wave of fear broke over her, and she was screaming.

  Shepherd grabbed her, said something, more words that didn’t matter, more protestations of helpfulness and compassion, but she wasn’t listening anymore, couldn’t hear him or hear anything except the ululant glissando of her own voice as she screamed and screamed and screamed, Shepherd and the deputy holding her fast, and Cray rummaging in his bag and now coming toward her, and in his hand, in his hand ...

  A syringe.

  Gleaming.

  She saw his lips move, his thin bloodless lips.

  This will calm her, he was saying. This will make her sleep.

  She didn’t want to sleep. Sleep meant darkness, and she was afraid of the dark.

  Her screams became speech, a last plea thrown at the uncaring men around her and the vast night beyond.

  “Don’t let him do this, please don’t let him, he’ll kill me, he’ll kill me—”

  Cray reaching for her, the needle rising, huge and shiny and as terrifying as the gun he’d trained on her in the Lexus last night.

  “He’ll kill me!”

  Flash of pain in her neck, the needle biting deep, and at once all strength left her, and where there had been screams, there was silence.

  Silence and the onrushing dark.

  Silence and falling, a steep plunge, nothing at the bottom.

  “She’ll be fine now.” Cray’s voice, so far away, a voice from the shadows that swam around her and inside her, everywhere. “We’ll look after her, I assure you. We’ll give poor Kaylie the very finest care.”

  Kaylie.

  Not my name, she wanted to say.

  But of course it was. It had always been her name, and though she had imagined she could run from it, in the end it had caught up with her, as it must.

  Elizabeth Palmer was dead. Paula Neilson, Ellen Pendleton—the other people she’d been—they were all dead. Only Kaylie was left.

  It’s who I am, she thought as shadows folded over her. Can’t fight it. Not anymore.

  I’m Kaylie ... again.

  PART TWO

  GOOD THINGS OF DAY

  43

  On Tuesday afternoon, one week after the arrest of Kaylie McMillan, a burial service was held on the grounds of the Hawk Ridge Institute.

  John Cray stood in a gathering of mourners at the small cemetery near his house. Ordinarily such a ceremony would attract only a handful of staff members, but today’s occasion had brought out nearly everyone who worked at the institute, whether on duty or not.

  Even the press had come. A reporter from the local newspaper stood at the back of the crowd, jotting notes in a steno pad. Before the ceremony he had asked Cray for his thoughts.

  “It’s always difficult to lose a patient,” Cray had said, his tone cool and steady, “but in this instance it’s especially hard.”

  He thought the words would look good in print. He hoped the reporter remembered to identify him as the author of The Mask of Self, and not merely as the institute’s director.

  At the head of the grave, the minister of a local church stood with a leather-bound Bible open in his hands, reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. “None of us lives to himself,” he said in his calm, clear voice, “and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord ...”

  The day was cloudless and bright, but for the first time there was a taste of autumn in the air. Cray wore a greatcoat over a somber suit. He kept his face expressionless, careful to betray nothing.

  Everything had gone so well up to this point. It would be a shame to spoil it all by laughing aloud.

  His greatest worry had been the autopsy. The county coroner routinely investigated any death at an institution that received state funding. A cursory examination posed no dangers, but there had been the possibility of toxicology tests.

  Luckily no tests had been done. Death by natural causes had been the ruling.

  And now all evidence to the contrary had been sealed in a mahogany cask
et, hanging in a sling over a newly dug grave.

  “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the dead and of the living.”

  The Bible clapped shut, and a portable winch operated by one of the groundskeepers hummed into action.

  Cray and the others watched as the sling was lowered, the casket committed to the earth.

  There was a soft thump as the casket touched bottom. The minister poured sand from a bottle into his open palm, then ritually spilled it into the grave.

  “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  Cray hadn’t cared much for St. Paul’s effusiveness, but he liked this older sentiment. It was the hard, honest dogma of a desert people. What was a person, after all, except earth and dust? What was a life, in the end, except ashes scattered in the uncaring wind? No romanticism here. No illusions. Man was clay.

  When the ceremony was over, Cray lingered awhile, watching the groundskeepers remove the sling and fill in the hole with shoveled dirt. One of the men misinterpreted his continued presence as a sign of grief.

  “Don’t feel too bad, Dr. Cray,” the man said kindly. “It’s just one of those things, you know?”

  There was wisdom in this, too—the unstudied fatalism that got most human beings through the pointless maze of their lives.

  “I know, Jake.” Cray smiled. “Still, I wish I could have done more.”

  “Nothing you could do. Just happened, is all.”

  “I feel it’s my fault, in a way. If I hadn’t agreed to cooperate with the police—”

  “You can’t think of it like that. You did what was right. Anyway, you couldn’t have her running around loose.”

  “No. No, that wouldn’t have been good ... for anyone.

  “The McMillan girl’s better off now,” the man said.

  “I suppose she is.”

  “And as for Walter ...” The groundskeeper cast a glance at the grave half-filled with dark, damp soil. “Well, maybe he’s better off, too.”

  This was the fellow’s first concession to sentiment, and it disappointed Cray. “Maybe so,” he said curtly, and then he left the two men to their work.

  Walter was not better off. Walter was dead, and Cray saw no honor in death, no cheer to be found there.

  Certainly Walter had not wanted to die. He would have pleaded for his life, if he’d had the wits to do so, on the night Cray killed him.

  Cray had waited three days to carry out this necessary task. If Walter had expired immediately after Kaylie’s arrest, questions might have been raised. By Friday, Cray had felt safe enough to act.

  He’d made his preparations in the evening. Come midnight, he had visited Walter in his room. At that hour the administration building had been largely empty, and no one had seen him enter.

  Even so, he had carefully shut the door behind him, and had kept his voice low....

  * * *

  “Hello, Walter,” Cray said.

  Walter, still awake with a single lamp lit, was sulking on the edge of his fold-out sofa. He looked up with a guilty start when Cray entered.

  “Hi, Dr. Cray,” he answered softly, a fearful flutter in his voice.

  “You didn’t come to work today, or for the past two days. You hardly even leave this room anymore.”

  Walter was silent.

  “I hear you’ve been skipping meals at the commissary.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Is that it? Or is it that you’ve been afraid to come out and face me?”

  No answer.

  “You did cause an awful lot of trouble Tuesday night.”

  “I know it, Dr. Cray,” Walter agreed morosely. Then, as a plaintive afterthought: “I was just trying to help.”

  “Of course you were. But don’t you see, Walter, that you can’t help anybody by thinking for yourself? Your brain is all muddled. What comes out of it is so much goop, of no value to anyone.”

  “Kaylie’s dangerous,” Walter muttered. “She could hurt you. I didn’t want you getting hurt.”

  “Yes, well, you needn’t worry about Kaylie anymore.”

  Walter lifted his head in surprise, showing his first, faintly hopeful smile. “Is she ... dead?”

  “Why, no. She’s our guest. Hadn’t you heard?”

  “I haven’t been talking to anybody.”

  “I see.” Cray had suspected as much, but he was pleased to obtain confirmation of this fact. “Well, Kaylie is staying with us now, locked up tight.”

  “So you’re helping her get better?”

  “Oh, I’m helping her, all right. But we’re not through talking about you, Walter.”

  “I won’t do it again, Dr. Cray.”

  “Won’t do what again? Try to kill Kaylie? Follow me when I go out for a drive? Say too much to the wrong people, as you almost did on Tuesday night?”

  Walter was confused by the fusillade of questions. “I—I won’t do any of it anymore.”

  “But you will. Oh, not right away. You’re too badly cowed at the moment, too humiliated even to emerge from your room for more than one meal a day. But eventually your shame will ebb. You’ll be back to your old self again, won’t you? But not quite your old self. You’ll be different. You’ll have changed.”

  “I ... I haven’t ... I didn’t...”

  “Oh, yes. You’ve changed, whether you know it or not. You’ve acquired a taste of independence. You know how it feels to act on your own initiative. After all these years of doing what you’re told, running errands on command, eating at assigned times—after all that, you’ve finally discovered your glorious ego.”

  “I have?”

  “It’s remarkable, really. On your own, you’ve retraced the course of human evolution over the past several thousand years. Have you read the Iliad, Walter? Oh, of course you haven’t. It hasn’t got Curious George in it, so how could you? But if you had read it, you’d know that the Greeks of that period possessed no concept of an integrated person. Limbs and breath and blood, yes—but not a person, a totality, moved by a single will. The arm tensed, or the breath came fast and shallow, or the blood pulsed quicker in the veins, but where was the unique, conscious personality, the mind and self that were the unifying principle of it all? There was no person, not in the modern sense. Imagine living with no notion of a self. But you don’t have to imagine it, do you?”

  Walter blinked, plain bewilderment showing on his face.

  “Then later,” Cray went on as if he’d heard an answer, “came the more sophisticated Greeks—Sappho the poetess, Archilochus the warrior. They discerned a will in themselves, a will to love or fight. What a find this was! They glorified their newfound will, and subsequent Greeks built avidly on this discovery, until you hear of an inscription on the Delphic oracle’s temple that read simply, Know thyself. A platitude now, but originally a new and dizzying insight. Ever since that day, poor humanity has been striving to know itself, to analyze and organize and prioritize its endlessly fascinating inner life. Today we have built a great, towering edifice of self, a skyscraper of Babel, and we worship at its cornerstones, while neglecting and forgetting and denying what animals we really are. Denying the primal truth for the sake of an ever more elaborate illusion, a game of words, abstractions, superficialities. We’ve cut ourselves off from our true nature, from the instincts that really move us. We deny the earth that made us, while striving after a divinity that doesn’t exist.”

  Cray allowed himself a smile, a kindly smile directed at the man who had been, in some way, his friend.

  “Now you’ve become one of us, Walter. You’ve become a person with a will and a mind and all the tormented conflict and narrow self-absorption attendant on such things. You’ve arrived, Walter. You’re a man of the modern world at last. Congratulations.”

  Walter, dazed under this onslaught, comprehending none of it, merely nodded in stupid gratitude. “Thank you, Dr. Cray.”

  Cray laughed. Poo
r Walter.

  “The point is,” Cray said softly, “you’re not what you once were. You’ve become unreliable, a random variable, capable of disrupting all the careful equations of my life.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Walter said with the perfect genuineness of a child.

  Cray sat on the couch, comfortingly close to the huge, stoop-shouldered man. “Will you take your medicine?”

  Walter blinked. “I always do.”

  “No, this is new medicine. It’s used only in very special cases, like yours.”

  “I’ll take it, Dr. Cray.”

  “You haven’t even asked me what it is.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Yes, of course you do.”

  “I trust you,” Walter said again, more softly. “I think ... I think you’re the greatest man in the world. I think you’re like ...” He turned away, bashful in this moment of absolute sincerity. When he finished his thought, he was blushing. “I think you’re like God.”

  Cray uncapped a vial and spilled a few small dark pills into his hand.

  “I always wanted to tell you,” Walter went on, his voice hushed with embarrassed reverence. “But I was afraid you’d say I was crazy. I mean ... more crazy than usual.”

  “We’re all crazy, Walter,” Cray said without emotion. “The mind itself is our disease. We seek a cure. Now take your medicine.”

  Humbly: “Yes, Dr. Cray.”

  With the practiced skill of a lifelong patient, Walter dry-swallowed the pills.

  “You’ll be feeling tired soon,” Cray said. “I’ll let you rest.”

  “Don’t go, Dr. Cray.”

  “No? Well, I suppose I can stay a little while.”

  As things turned out, Cray lingered in the room for hours, holding Walter’s hand and speaking soft, comforting, meaningless words, while Walter first blinked at his blurring vision, then clutched his belly in a spasm of pain. Finally Walter closed his eyes and slept.

  Even then Cray maintained his vigil. He monitored his patient’s pulse, observing the onset of bradycardia, the most common symptom of a digitalis overdose.

  Walter’s heart rate dropped below sixty beats per minute, then below forty, then became irregular.