At dawn his heart stopped. Supine on the sofa, his mouth open, head lolling, the big man shivered all over like a wet dog and lay still.
Watching him, Cray reflected that he was indeed like God, in at least one way.
He could take a life.
* * *
He remembered that stray thought now, as he crossed the grounds of the institute under the clean blue sky and the crisp peaks of the Pinaleno range.
He felt whole. He felt strong. He felt—
“Dr. Cray!”
Cray stopped.
He knew that voice.
Damn.
He looked down the long driveway toward the front gate, where a guard had detained a burly, bearded man of seventy.
“Dr. Cray, I demand to speak with you!”
The man’s voice carried easily. Several patients were staring in his direction. An orderly pushing a woman in a wheelchair had stopped on the greensward, his gaze swinging between the unwelcome visitor and Cray himself.
“I know you can hear me!”
“Oh, hell,” Cray muttered.
He would have to acknowledge this man, much as he hated to. Straightening his shoulders, he marched along the driveway toward the gate, where Anson McMillan, Kaylie’s father-in-law, waited by his pickup truck, glaring at Cray through the wrought-iron bars.
McMillan had gray hair and a gray beard. He was all squares and rectangles—hard, blocky face, squat frame, wide shoulders. In his denim shirt and corduroy pants he looked like an aging cowhand, lacking only a lasso and a wide-brimmed hat.
Cray had expected him to return eventually, but not so soon. McMillan had visited the hospital only last week, immediately after Kaylie’s arrest.
“Dr. Cray,” McMillan said again, with dangerous courtesy, as Cray drew close.
“Good afternoon, Mr. McMillan.” Cray kept his voice even. “What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem is that this glorified night watchman”—McMillan threw a contemptuous glance at the guard, who stiffened under the insult—“won’t let me pass.”
“Don’t denigrate my employees, please,” Cray said, reaching the gate at last and coming face to face with McMillan across the iron barricade. “Officer Jansen here is doing his job.”
“His job is to keep me out?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Why?” McMillan barked the word, baring his teeth in a threat display. Cray thought he looked like an ape in a cage.
“Surely, Mr. McMillan, you don’t need it explained to you. It’s my policy to deny access to any visitor who might be reasonably expected to disrupt this hospital.”
“I’m not here to disrupt anything.”
“Your behavior last time suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s slipped your mind that you had to be escorted off the premises by several members of the institute’s security detail.”
“Slipped my mind—hell.” McMillan chewed the words and spat them out. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a senile old fool.”
Cray kept his expression blankly formal. “I’m merely explaining why Officer Jansen is under orders not to allow you readmittance to this facility.”
“Damn it, I wouldn’t have raised a ruckus if you’d acted sensible about things.”
“Mr. McMillan, I know what’s best for the patients treated here—”
“And visitors aren’t what’s best? Family?”
“You’re not a blood relation.” Cray spread his hands. “Frankly, given the circumstances, I’m surprised you care to see her at all.”
“Well, I do.” McMillan hesitated, then added in a gentler voice, “She needs to talk to someone.”
“She talks to me every day. I see her for therapy. And there are nurses and orderlies to chat with, if she lacks company.”
“That’s not what I mean. She needs somebody who’ll listen to her. Who ... who believes in her.”
“No, Mr. McMillan. That’s precisely what she does not need. A sympathetic listener would only encourage the persistence of her delusions. What’s necessary for her right now is a structured, supervised, carefully controlled environment.” Cray found a smile, cool and calm, and unsheathed it like a blade. “I only want what’s best for her, you know.”
McMillan was not charmed. He took a step closer to the gate, and Cray could see his eyes, coal black, strikingly intense.
“What’s best for her,” McMillan whispered, “is a shoulder to lean on. That’s what she’s always used me for. We’re close, her and me. She’s like a ... like my daughter.”
“A daughter? She murdered your son.”
McMillan was unfazed. “There were reasons.”
“An odd thing for a bereaved father to say. What would possibly induce you to forgive Kaylie for what she did?”
McMillan brushed this question aside. “I didn’t come here to be psychoanalyzed. I came to talk with her. You’re going to let me.”
“No.” Cray shrugged. “I’m not.”
McMillan’s hands were large and callused, and when they squeezed into fists, they became blunt instruments packed with force, meaty hammers that could have opened Cray’s skull in a cascade of blows, if not for the dual barriers of the iron gate and McMillan’s precarious self-restraint.
A moment passed, and then the hands relaxed, weapons no more, and McMillan asked softly, “How long do you intend to keep me away from her?”
“Until she’s ready to face her past.”
“How long?”
“It could take weeks. Months. An indefinite period of time. There’s no way to predict the length or efficacy of a course of treatment.”
McMillan absorbed this, then rejected it with a shake of his shaggy head. “No, sir. Not weeks, months. I’ll see her sooner than that. She’s my daughter-in-law. She’s family. I have an interest. I can force the issue.”
“It would not be advisable—”
McMillan cut him off. “Screw what’s advisable. I’ve been talking to a lawyer. He’s the one who told me to come on over here and give you a second chance to be reasonable. Seeing as how you won’t cooperate, we’ll just have to go over your head.”
“I run this institute,” Cray said sharply.
“But you don’t own it. One of these big health-services companies in Phoenix has got title. You’re their hired hand, is all. And they don’t like bad publicity, do they? I’ve been reading up on this place. Patient got beaten here last month, state government’s investigating. Another patient, Walter somebody, died just three days ago.”
Cray said nothing.
“That’s not the kind of track record your bosses probably want to see. And now here I come—me and my lawyer—demanding action. You think they’ll side with you? If they do, I’ll go to the papers. I’ll get a court order. I’ll make a stink.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“No, I’m sure I won’t—because it’ll never get that far. They’ll overrule you and let me in, pronto, just you wait and see.”
“You’re a determined fellow, Mr. McMillan.”
“Damn straight I am, where Kaylie’s concerned. Now one more time I’m asking: do I get in to see her?”
“I think not,” Cray answered mildly.
“Then we’ll do it the hard way. I’ll be back.”
“No doubt.”
“Soon. Maybe tomorrow, if my lawyer can open the door to the corporate boardroom quick enough, and I’m betting he can. Good day, Doctor.”
Cray watched Anson McMillan walk to his truck and swing open the door on the driver’s side.
“Why are you doing this?” Cray asked suddenly, the question coming as a surprise even to him.
McMillan paused, half-inside the truck, looking at
Cray over the door frame. “Because she’s not crazy,” McMillan said. “She never was.”
Cray was silent. He stood motionless as McMillan slammed the door and started the engine. Even when the pickup reversed out of the entryway and vanished down the road, he did not mov
e.
“Some kind of nut, huh?” Officer Jansen said finally, for no reason other than to break the long silence.
Cray nodded. “Yes.”
“Think he was serious about all that lawyer business?”
“Yes.”
“So ... what are we gonna do?”
“We’ll handle it.” Cray took a step back from the gate and repeated the words. “We’ll handle it.”
He turned and headed back toward the administration building. His mind processed the dilemma, evaluating options, ordering priorities, weighing risks.
McMillan could not be allowed any contact with Kaylie. She knew too much. She would tell him everything. And given what McMillan must know or guess about his son Justin’s past, he might very well put the whole story together, then persuade the sheriff to take a fresh look at the case.
“Dangerous,” Cray murmured, mounting the staircase of the administration building.
Yes. Much too dangerous.
Cray had not avoided arrest this long by taking chances. His survival instinct was finely honed. To save himself, he would do whatever was necessary.
There was only one way to defuse this latest threat. It was a course of action he disliked, one that carried risks and smelled of desperation.
He would dare it, though. He had to. And quickly, before McMillan returned.
Pausing at the front door, he nodded slowly, in silent endorsement of his decision.
Kaylie must die.
Tonight.
A shame, really. He enjoyed having her as his prisoner. He looked forward to their daily sessions, the intricate mind games he played with her. And he would have relished the opportunity to watch her for just a few weeks longer.
To watch her—as she finished going insane.
44
Kaylie, alone.
That was who she was. She was Kaylie now. She had always been Kaylie, and the rest of it was all lies.
Her head was buzzing again. Wasps in there. A hive between her ears.
Craziness.
She shuddered, hating the disorder of her thoughts. Was insanity a germ? Could you inhale it, like the flu bug, from an infected atmosphere?
She had not been crazy on the night of her arrest. She was sure of that.
But now ...
No longer could she seem to keep her thinking straight. She had periods of sharp clarity, when she knew what day it was and how she’d gotten here, but there were other times—more and more frequently—when she was adrift on a raft of strangeness, in a calm yet angry sea.
Losing her mind.
Like last time.
Fear rose in her, a peculiar disembodied fear that clutched at her sense of self and made her small and helpless and not a person, somehow.
The fear was what she hated most of all.
The fear ... and Cray.
Cray, yes. Hold on to that. Cling to the certainty of evil. Evil was something hard and real, and she could not lose herself wholly as long as there was one real thing in her world.
She blinked the fear away, and looked around her at the room where she had spent her incarceration. An isolation cell, they called it. Nicer, newer, than the one she’d had last time.
Back then, twelve years ago, they’d kept her in the oldest wing of the hospital, Ward C, and the rooms were poorly heated at night and the cement walls sweated during the day, and there were bugs, brown and shiny like scurrying pennies.
This room was better. It was clean. It had no bad smells. Its furnishings, though meager, were not the stuff of dungeons.
An improvement, yes.
But a cell nonetheless.
The room was small. She had paced it today—or last night? She didn’t know. Time had blurred, melted. Hours were minutes were days.
But the room ... Stay focused. Look at the room.
Small. Three paces by four,
A bed—just a cot with rubber sheets—rubber so that if she should wet herself, the sheets could be hosed clean.
Steel toilet in a corner, not hidden, no privacy, and any nurse or orderly who wished to look through the plate-glass window in the door might catch her squatting there. Cray himself might see her.
A shiver hurried through her body like a fever chill.
She hugged herself, rocking on her haunches as she crouched on the linoleum floor.
The round hole in the door was the room’s only window. She had no view of the outside world. She never saw daylight. There was no clock, and they had taken her wristwatch. Morning was when the attendant came with a breakfast tray, noon was the lunch tray, evening the dinner tray.
A single chair rested in a corner. It was plastic, with wobbly legs and no armrests and no seat cushion. Cray used the chair when he came for their therapy sessions once a day.
And that was it. That was all there was for her—the bed and the commode and the chair where Cray sat, and the tile floor that was cold against her bare feet.
She had kicked off her slippers, but she still wore the blue cotton outfit they’d dressed her in, the uniform of the condemned.
For the first day—Wednesday, it must have been, the day after her arrest—she had been strapped facedown to the bed, and when the sedative wore off and she started screaming, they had wedged a rubber throttle in her mouth.
Then there had been nothing she could do except lie motionless on the waterproof sheets, hearing the howls from down the hall, waiting for the nurse to enter with the syringe.
Injections every day. Always in her left arm, now purple with bruises. Medicine, they told her. She wondered.
Cray had visited her on that first day also, Cray who had shown such solicitous concern while the nurse was present, but when the nurse was gone and he was alone with Kaylie ...
Then it had been like last time, no difference at all, and she had known for sure that she was Kaylie again, Kaylie the scared teenager, Kaylie in pain.
Later, she had been set free.
A nurse and some orderlies had unstrapped her from the bed, leaving her at liberty within the room’s close confines.
She believed it was three or four days ago that this modest emancipation had occurred. She wasn’t certain, though. It might have been yesterday—or tomorrow. It might have been next month or a million years in the future.
You’re in sad shape, girl, a voice said.
Anson’s voice.
She’d been hearing him a lot lately. At first she had welcomed him. But now an unmistakable hostility had seeped into his speech, and he frightened her.
Everything frightened her.
The small room and the rubber bedding and the nurses with their needles and the screams from the far end of the ward and Cray, of course, always Cray, never forget Cray.
You won’t be wriggling out of this, Anson said. You’re a wily one, sure, kept the bloodhounds at bay for twelve years, but you’re done for now.
“Done for,” Kaylie murmured.
Got what you deserved, you vicious little bitch. Serves you right for killing my boy.
“Don’t say that.”
You killed my boy, and now you expect comfort from me? Rot in hell, whore. Better yet—rot just where you are.
Eyes shut, she drew her knees up against her chin and huddled in the tight knot of her pain.
If even Anson had turned against her, then there was no hope left.
45
Shepherd was at his desk, eating a chicken taco with too much sour cream, when his phone rang.
“Homicide,” he said through a mouthful of shredded lettuce and cheese.
“Roy?”
He recognized Undersheriff Wheelihan’s voice and took a swig of Diet Coke to clear his throat. “Chuck, what’s up?”
“Just wanted to tie a few loose ends into Boy Scout knots. We found Kaylie’s car, day before yesterday. It was parked on a fire road in the foothills near the hospital. Looks like she hiked to a ridge from there and scoped out Cray’s house. We found her shoe prints in the dirt, and a pa
ir of cheap binoculars in the car.”
“What kind of car?” Shepherd asked, for no reason except curiosity.
“Chevy Chevette, real piece of crap, easily a couple hundred thousand miles on it. According to the registration, she bought it in Flagstaff two years ago. We would’ve found it sooner, but we thought she must have parked somewhere right off the road, so we had our guys going through the arroyos. Finally we had a chopper do a flyby, and the pilot spotted the car in the hills.”
“Anything in the car?”
“One thing that was interesting. Notebook in the glove compartment. She was following Cray for about a month, and she kept a record of all the places he went.” A chuckle came over the line like a dry cough. “Our man Cray gets around, it appears.”
“Does he? Where?”
“Well, if Kaylie’s notes can be believed, he visited a strip club on Miracle Mile. Maybe you know the place—strictly in your professional capacity, of course.”
There was only one club of that kind in that district. Shepherd nodded. “I know it. Where else?”
“Bikers’ bar in South Tucson, for one. I happen to have spent an evening there once, some years ago, definitely not in a professional capacity, and please don’t ask me for any details. Fairly rough clientele, as I recall. I was glad to get out of there with my privates intact.”
Shepherd’s lunch lay cooling on his desk, long forgotten. “Doesn’t sound like a place where a man like Cray would want to hang out.”
“You never can tell about people, though.”
“I guess not.”
“I mean, hell, look at Kaylie’s father-in-law.”
Shepherd frowned. “What about him?”
“Didn’t I tell you? He’s dropped by our office three times since we informed him of Kaylie’s arrest. You’d think he’d be happy she’s finally back under wraps, where she belongs.”
“But he isn’t?”
“Far from it. He seems mightily pissed off, don’t ask me why. First time he comes in, he asks how they can hold her in the institute without an arraignment. So I explain to him that she’s still under the original indictment, and she’s being kept for observation to determine her competency to stand trial. He goes away, but a couple days later he’s back.”
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