Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  “Why?”

  “Seems he went over to Hawk Ridge, tried to get in to see her. They wouldn’t let him. I think Cray personally nixed the idea. Said she was in no condition to receive visitors, and seeing Justin’s father would only upset her.”

  “Makes sense,” Shepherd said.

  “I thought so too. But not him. He’s red in the face, he’s so ticked off. Keeps saying they’re keeping Kaylie from him, and it’s not right. Weird, huh? So I ask him, why would you want to talk to that little bitch anyhow, after what she did to your boy?”

  “And?”

  “He doesn’t answer. He just asks me if I know any good lawyers. Which, as a matter of fact, I do. I told him about this attorney from Scottsdale who keeps a vacation home in Kimball, northwest of here.”

  “You said there were three visits.”

  “Yeah, he put on a repeat performance just this morning. Dropped by to thank me for recommending that attorney. Looks like he’s hired the guy to help him force his way into the institute. He’s obsessed with seeing Kaylie. Won’t let it go. But that wasn’t the weirdest thing.”

  “Then what was?”

  “How he looked. He had Justin late in life, and he’s maybe seventy now, but until this morning he could’ve passed for twenty years younger. Now it’s like—like he was up all night crying.”

  “Crying?”

  “Well, his eyes were red as hell. He said it was allergies. I don’t know. He said to me, Kaylie’s all alone in the world. She’s got no folks—they died when she was growing up. No relatives by blood. There’s only him.” Wheelihan exhaled a deep, thoughtful sigh. “I just hated seeing him that way. Anson’s always been a rock. Even when his kid died, he took it like a man. So why’s he all teary-eyed now?”

  Anson, Shepherd thought, noting the name. Anson McMillan.

  “Well,” he answered, “you said it yourself. You just never know about people.”

  “Isn’t that the damn truth. Hey, I’d better let you get back to your lunch. I could hear I interrupted you.”

  The taco was cold by now. Shepherd figured he’d throw it out. “Okay, Chuck,” he said. “Thanks for the update.”

  “Hey, thank you. After all the local coverage this case has gotten, the sheriff thinks he’s a shoo-in for reelection. And since you’re not around, he’s showering his gratitude on me.” Wheelihan laughed. “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”

  Shepherd cradled the phone, then stared at the cold taco in its nest of wax paper, not quite seeing it, not seeing anything around him.

  Cray had gone to a strip club, a barrio bar. No crime in that, but it seemed out of character, or perhaps Shepherd simply didn’t know Cray’s true character.

  And there was Anson McMillan, showing a solicitous concern for the woman who’d shot his son in the heart.

  Unusual name. There couldn’t be more than one Anson McMillan in Graham County. Easy to find him. Easy, maybe, to get him to talk ...

  “It’s not your case, Roy.”

  The voice belonged to Hector Alvarez, who’d appeared at the desk without so much as an audible footstep or a snap of chewing gum to warn of his approach.

  Shepherd blinked, wondering if Alvarez was psychic. “What?”

  “Kaylie McMillan.” Alvarez grinned. “I overheard you say good-bye to Wheelihan. And now I see the expression on your face.”

  “What expression?”

  “That lost-in-thought, grim-determination, unfinished-business look. Last time I saw it, you were getting ready to run the sting that nabbed Kaylie. If you recall, I said to you at the time ...”

  “It’s not my case.”

  “Right.”

  “Sound advice.”

  “But you didn’t take it.”

  “Well, I’m stubborn that way.” Shepherd rose and picked up the half-eaten taco. “You ought to know that by now. Hector.”

  “Roy.” The smile was gone from Alvarez’s face. “Just let it go, huh? The girl’s guilty. She’s a nut. She’s in the crazy house, where she belongs. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. And you got a full caseload.”

  Shepherd almost argued, but hell, Alvarez had a point. Didn’t he?

  “You hear me, Roy?”

  “I hear you.” Shepherd wadded up the wax paper and pitched his lunch into the trash. “And you’re right. Really.” He meant it, too.

  At least he was almost sure he did.

  46

  Ward B of the Hawk Ridge Institute for Psychiatric Care—the back ward, as it was called—was reserved for the chronically ill, the violent, and those patients known as forensic cases.

  The latter cohort consisted of patients held for observation in advance of a criminal proceeding. Wally Cortland had been sequestered here in 1996 after he slit his mother’s throat with a letter opener and blamed it on the Devil. In 1992, shortly after the old forensic ward—Ward C—had been permanently closed, Sylvia Farentino had made an appearance, on charges of poisoning her boyfriend with a cup of lye in the pancake batter.

  There had been others, generally less colorful. Drifters arrested for vagrancy, whose thought processes were too disorganized to be called normal. Drug addicts whose brains had been perhaps permanently scrambled by PCP or crack. Petty criminals with IQs so low that it was impossible to determine if they were competent to assist in their own defense.

  And now there was Kaylie McMillan. Murderess, fugitive, and the only patient ever to escape from Hawk Ridge.

  She’d been away for quite some time. Now she was back. But this time her visit would be briefer than before, and she would leave in a zippered bag.

  Cray smiled at the thought as he used his passkey to open Ward B’s exterior door. The door was steel, and like all ward doors it was key-operated on both sides. A turn of the passkey was required both to enter and to exit. This precaution ensured that no patient could slip past an inattentive nurse or orderly and simply walk away.

  It meant also that any staff member who mislaid the passkey would be imprisoned in the ward until help arrived. Cray had no problem with this. A certain measure of fear kept the staff alert. And he was pleased to note that in the past ten years not a single key had been lost by any institute employee.

  Antiseptic smells, common throughout the hospital, greeted him as he let the door swing shut. The floor and walls of each ward were scrubbed daily. Antibacterial sprays were applied to desktops and door handles. Every metal and tile surface gleamed.

  He moved forward, past the alcove that led to the O.R., where nonpharmaceutical methods were occasionally employed on especially recalcitrant patients. Beyond the alcove was the nurses’ station—a desk and a couple of folding chairs, a few file cabinets, and a closed-circuit television monitor that switched between two grainy black-and-white images of the ward’s two intersecting halls.

  The nurse on duty was Dana Cunningham, just beginning her three-to-eleven shift. A tall, large-boned woman, she was capable of wrestling a two-hundred- pound patient to the floor. Cray had always thought she bore a certain resemblance to Walter, though he was tactful enough to avoid making the observation.

  He waved at her, passing the desk, and she stopped him by rising from her chair. “Doctor? May I speak with you a moment?”

  “Of course, Dana. What is it?”

  “It’s about Kaylie McMillan.”

  “I’m on my way to see her right now. Her daily therapy, you know.”

  “Usually you’re earlier.”

  “Well, there was Walter’s funeral. And an unwanted visitor who required my attention.”

  “I see. It’s just that I don’t often have the chance to consult with you about her. I’m getting concerned.”

  “In what way?’

  “The dosage she’s on—it’s really very high.”

  “Not extraordinarily so, for a loading dose.”

  “I’m seeing side effects. Tremors, agitation, restlessness ...”

  Cray waved off this objection with a
flutter of his elegant hand. “If we lowered the loading dose for every patient who exhibited those symptoms, we’d have a hospital full of unmedicated florid schizophrenics.”

  “But we may be overmedicating in this case. And the treatment program doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect. If anything, she’s become more agitated over the past week. I’m told she refused her breakfast this morning, and at lunchtime she threw the tray at the tech who brought it in. She hasn’t eaten anything all day. She’s clearly decompensating.”

  “Well, then the dose should be increased, not reduced.”

  “We’re already maxing her out. Doctor, what I was thinking was, maybe we should cut the chlorpromazine and trifluoperazine in half. That still ought to be high enough for a loading dose. If her condition continues to deteriorate, we could try a different strategy....”

  Cray was growing bored. “I’ll tell you what,” he said smoothly. “Why don’t we continue with the current dosage schedule today, and tomorrow we’ll look at a reduction?”

  Cunningham didn’t like it, but she had sufficient sense not to argue. “Okay, Doctor.”

  Cray smiled. He had no concern about Kaylie’s treatment tomorrow. For her, there would be no tomorrow. He would see to that.

  “Fine, then,” he said, and headed briskly down the hall, glad to escape a discussion that was, after all, not only irrelevant but premised on an entirely faulty supposition. Kaylie McMillan was indeed becoming more agitated and disturbed, but not as a consequence of any antipsychotic drugs.

  She was not, in fact, receiving any antipsychotic drugs.

  The vials used by the nurses for Kaylie McMillan’s three daily intramuscular injections—vials Cray himself had mixed—contained no chlorpromazine, no trifluoperazine. They contained only methyl amphetamine, the most potent amphetamine available, in an extraordinarily concentrated dose.

  Speed, in street parlance. That was the medication dear Kaylie was on.

  She had been taking the drug for the past week, receiving more than three hundred milligrams of meth each time she was injected by the unwitting nurses. Three injections daily. Nearly one thousand milligrams in total, day after day after day.

  Methyl amphetamine’s psychotropic effects were gradual and cumulative. During the first two days Kaylie had been lucid. For that reason, Cray had kept her strapped down, with a bite block in her mouth. He didn’t want her saying too much, raising doubts among the staff.

  On the third day the drug had begun to take hold. By now it had taken nearly full control of her.

  The symptoms of amphetamine psychosis were almost identical to those of acute schizophrenia. Kaylie was hearing voices, harsh and accusatory. The close weave of her thought processes had unraveled. She was scared, scared all the time.

  Even the most experienced nurses and ward attendants would not be able to distinguish her behavior from that of a genuine psychopath. No one could doubt that she belonged here, in the ranks of the insane.

  Cray reached the end of the hall and turned down the intersecting corridor. Rows of numbered doors passed him on both sides. Not every door was locked, even in Ward B, and not every room was occupied. Many of the patients, including a few who had displayed violent tendencies, were allowed to mingle with the others in the day hall, and to return in the evening, just before the lights-out bell.

  The policy was humane and modern. Contemporary medical standards discouraged the practice of shutting a patient away in an isolation room. Cray accepted these standards. Hawk Ridge was not a prison, after all.

  Except in Kaylie’s case.

  The institute would be her prison for the rest of her life.

  Still, as matters had developed, she would not be a prisoner for long.

  47

  Kaylie heard him coming—the rapid clack of his hard-soled shoes on the corridor’s tile floor.

  A moan escaped her. She knelt on the bed, hugging her knees, waiting.

  There was a soft thunk as a pneumatic bolt released, and then the steel door opened, and Cray was there.

  “Hello, Kaylie.”

  That smile. How she hated that smile.

  “It’s so good to see you again,” he went on, stepping inside, carefully leaving the door ajar. “I really do look forward to our daily talks.” He came closer, studying her, then put on a sympathetic face. “I’m quite concerned about you.”

  This was too much to bear.

  “Just shut up,” she snapped, despising the childish petulance in her voice.

  Cray made a tsk-tsk noise. “That isn’t very nice.”

  Grinning, he sat in the chair, a yard away from her. She drew back slightly on the bed, wanting more distance between them.

  “I hear you’re not eating,” Cray said. “You should. No matter what our emotional travails, we should always maintain our bodies at optimal efficiency. Our bodies are the only part of us that matters, in the end. Mind, ego, personality, all these pretty layers of decorative embroidery that we knit around the primal essence of our being—all of it is an illusion, nothing more. A kind of mask.”

  “The mask of self,” Kaylie murmured, watching him with narrowed eyes.

  Cray registered surprise with a subtle lift of one eyebrow. “You’ve read my book? How delightful.”

  “Didn’t read it. I wouldn’t—I would never ...”

  She had to take a breath. It was hard to speak in complete sentences. Her thinking was all cloudy. Her head ached.

  “I’m disappointed to hear it. I’d hoped to include you among my readers.” Cray leaned back in the plastic chair, and his smile widened. “Now, of course, there’ll be no chance of that. No chance and no hope, Kaylie—no hope for you at all.”

  Such familiar words, an echo of her memories from twelve years ago.

  Back then he had been a younger man than the John Cray who sat in the room with her now, a John Cray with a goatee and bright mischievous eyes. He had come in for therapy three times a week, and in each session he had told her there was no cure for her illness, no hope of improvement, and no chance that he would ever let her go.

  And though she had been shell-shocked by trauma, though she had been numb inside and confused—even so, she had sensed the undistilled evil in him, and the hatred, raw and pungent. Only later had she thought to ask herself why he hated her, and why he was so desperate to keep her at Hawk Ridge, away from the outside world.

  “You’ve been our guest for one week,” Cray was saying quietly, hands folded in his lap. “Doesn’t it feel longer? How desperately you must yearn for your freedom. For escape, Kaylie. Escape—a sweet dream, isn’t it? Or perhaps not a dream after all.”

  This surprised her. It was not what she’d expected him to say.

  “Why not?” she whispered. “Why not ... a dream?”

  “Because there may be a way out.”

  She tried to draw a breath, but her throat was tight, and she managed only a cough.

  Cray rose abruptly from the chair. Smiling, he approached her. He reached out with one hand, and though she tried to retreat, he was too fast for her. With his long fingers he cupped her chin and tilted her head to face him.

  “That’s what you want, I’m sure. A way out. To flee all this, to be liberated. What’s the alternative? Only to linger in this sunless, airless room for months and years and decades. And you know what will happen in that case, don’t you?”

  He bent lower, his eyes locked on hers.

  “You’ll go insane.”

  A shudder ran through her, a spasm of the fear that seemed to come out of nowhere at times and harass her. Involuntarily she shook her head.

  Cray smiled. “No? You don’t think so? But it’s true, Kaylie. It will happen. It’s happening already. Isn’t it?”

  He released her chin and stepped back, but even now she could not look away from him, because he had named it just then—named her real terror.

  Not death. Death was nothing.

  Insanity.

  “You know I’m r
ight,” Cray said. “You’ve been hearing voices, haven’t you? Perhaps seeing things that can’t be real? You try to think, but your thoughts are all tangled. After so many years of telling yourself you’re not crazy, it turns out that you are.”

  I’m not! she wanted to scream, but she heard Anson’s low growl: Who are you kidding, girl?

  Anson, who’d deserted her. Anson, who was in her head, calling her names like bitch and whore.

  “You’re losing your mind,” Cray said, and Anson echoed him: Losing your mind, that’s for sure.

  “Not true,” she muttered, and finally she found the strength to break eye contact with Cray. “Not, not, not.”

  Cray paced before the bed, remorseless as a shark. “Of course it’s true. You’re sliding into the precipice, and who’ll save you?”

  She squirmed farther back on the bed, until she was pinned against the wall, Cray before her, roving, roving.

  “Will I?” Cray asked. “Will anyone? No one can save you, Kaylie.”

  At the foot of the bed, he stopped abruptly, his voice dropping to a hush.

  “Unless you save yourself.”

  She listened, rapt.

  It was so tempting to think that somehow she could save herself ... that she was not powerless ... that there was something, anything, she could do.

  Cray folded his arms. “You’re interested, I see. Good. Then let’s talk about your escape.”

  She won’t escape, Anson said cruelly. She’s right where she belongs.

  A new voice seconded the thought. That’s for damn sure.

  Justin’s voice.

  Oh, God, was he here too? Was he inside her?

  He couldn’t be. He was dead. She’d killed him. She’d shot him, watched him die....

  “You’re a clever girl, Kaylie. You’re good at getting out of a jam.”

  Which one was that? Anson? Justin?

  No, it was Cray. Live and in three dimensions, not a disembodied voice. She focused on him, because he was real.

  “Now you’re in the worst jam of your life,” he said, “and you’ll need all your cleverness to see your way clear. Last time, as we both know, you escaped via an air duct. An air duct similar to that one. See it?”