Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  “ Tucson?” McMillan digested this. “You helped arrest her, didn’t you?”

  Shepherd almost asked how he knew, then recalled that the local paper had given the story extensive coverage. Though he had not granted any interviews, his name had been mentioned.

  “I did,” he answered. “Now I’ve come to talk with you about her.”

  McMillan let the ax fall. He wiped his hands on a flap of his denim shirt. “What for?” he asked.

  “Undersheriff Wheelihan tells me you’re concerned about Kaylie. I’d like to know why.”

  “It’s a long way to come, just to chat about a girl who’s already locked up. You city cops must have a lot of time on your hands.”

  Shepherd took this with a smile. “Could be. It looks like you’re putting your time to good use, anyway. Laying up firewood for the winter?”

  “Hell, no.” McMillan surprised him by looking at the cut logs in disgust. “I hardly ever start a fire. Got good electric heat. I’m doing this”—his shoulders slumped—“just because I need to work it off somehow.”

  “Work what off?”

  “The frustration. My damn lawyer says it’ll be a couple of days before he gets me in to see her. A couple of days ... Somehow I think that might be too long.”

  “Too long for what?”

  “I’m not even sure. It’s just a feeling I have. A bad feeling. And dammit, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “There’s one thing.”

  “Yeah. I can talk to you. Right?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’ve said it all before. Years ago. Said it to the sheriff and to every friend I’ve got and to any soul who’ll listen.”

  “But you haven’t said it to me.”

  McMillan squinted at him, taking Shepherd’s measure. Slowly he nodded.

  “Okay, Detective. Let’s go sit on the porch and watch the sunset like a couple of old ladies, shall we? And I’ll tell it all again. I’ll explain to you why I care so much about the woman who shot my boy.”

  * * *

  The porch was up high, offering a good view of the desert around the McMillan house—a ranch house with adobe walls, resting on an acre of unincorporated county land west of Safford.

  Shepherd had obtained the address from a phone book—as he’d expected, there was only one Anson McMillan in Graham County—and had tracked down the one-lane rural route after only a few wrong turns.

  On the porch McMillan offered him a root beer, which Shepherd accepted out of politeness, though he hated the beverage. He sipped a little, swallowed it without a grimace, and set down the bottle on a hardwood table that had been hewed by hand.

  Anson’s hand, surely. The man’s thick fingers were callused and misshapen from a lifetime of serious labor.

  “So,” Shepherd said, letting silence complete the question.

  McMillan stared at the sun now kissing the rim of the mountain range, its harsh theatrical light ruddy on his face.

  “To understand Kaylie,” he began finally, “you first have to know about Justin. And about the guns.”

  “Guns?”

  “That’s what did it, I think. Or at least, what brought it out in him.”

  “I don’t follow you, Mr. McMillan.”

  “Hell, call me Anson.”

  “And I’m Roy”

  “Okay, Roy. That root beer cold enough, by the way?”

  “Perfect,” Shepherd said. He hadn’t touched the bottle after his first reluctant sip.

  “I love a good root beer. Takes me back. Well, anyhow, the guns. Thing is, my wife, Regina—may she rest in peace—never permitted a single gun in this house. That was her ironclad rule, and I went along with it, which marked me as unusual among fellows in these parts. Most of them would sooner die than give up their guns, or at least that’s what their bumper stickers say. Me, though—well, I just never cared for the damn things.”

  Shepherd, who had seen what a gun could do in the hands of a drunk or a gangbanger or a child, nodded slowly.

  “So Justin grew up playing softball and washing the neighbors’ cars for pocket money, and he never had a rifle to his name. Never went hunting. None of that.”

  Hunting. The word stirred a small, furtive anxiety in the back of Shepherd’s mind.

  He hunts them, Kaylie had said to the 911 operator. It’s a sport for him. He lets them go, and he tracks them, hunts them down like animals.

  “Now, I don’t want to mislead you, Roy. When I speak of Justin’s boyhood, I don’t want you to think he was any sort of angel. Guns or not, he did get into trouble. He hot-wired cars, for one thing. Got himself a rap sheet by the age of fourteen for joyriding around.”

  “Did he?” Shepherd said softly.

  McMillan showed him a sly look. “Yes, sir. You’re thinking of Kaylie, aren’t you? The way she hot-wired a truck after she busted out of the institute twelve years ago?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  “She learned it from Justin. Must have. He was chock-full of these special talents.” The man sighed, releasing a great billow of breath. “I don’t mean to make light of it. Fact is, matters got pretty serious for a while. Justin set a fire in the high school gymnasium. Might’ve done some real damage if the gym teacher hadn’t smelled smoke and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher.”

  “Why did Justin do that?”

  A lift of McMillan’s shoulders. “Why does a cat play with a ball of string? For the sheer pleasure of it, I expect.”

  “Were there other fires?”

  “None that were linked to him. There were a few, though, that were never explained. The Gilfoyles lost their mobile home in one blaze. Justin swore he didn’t do it. Me and Regina—we wanted to believe him.”

  Shepherd had read up on the behavioral development of psychopaths. Fire starting was often one of the earliest warning signs.

  “This sort of thing went on for couple years,” McMillan said quietly. “Then a miracle. Justin straightened out. He quit the joyriding, the shoplifting—yes, there’d been some of that, too. But not anymore. He was a normal kid suddenly. Better than normal. Outstanding. Folks started saying that Justin McMillan, after a spate of hell-raising, had turned out all right.”

  “What happened? Why did he change?”

  “There was no reason. Certainly nothing we did for him. It appeared to be just what I said—a miracle.” Anson stared at the far mountains, their humped backs red with the ebbing glow of the sunset. “But maybe there are no miracles. Maybe he never really changed at all. Maybe he just pushed it down deep—that part of him—and it took a while to burrow its way back to the surface.”

  He took a long swig of his root beer, and Shepherd, out of courtesy, made a pretense of swallowing another sip.

  “Justin graduated from high school, moved out on his own. He got a good job clerking in the hardware store. He was going to night school to learn the computer trade. You know anything about computers, Roy?”

  “Not much. My wife was the expert.”

  “Was? You divorced?”

  “She died.”

  “Sorry to hear it. My Regina’s gone too. I visit her grave once a week and on holidays. Never miss her birthday. You visit your wife?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “We all lose what we love, don’t we? In the old country they have a saying about it. In the end, they say, the world will break your heart.”

  Shepherd watched the sunset’s afterglow. He was silent,

  “Anyway, Justin was learning all about computers. He had a future, or so we all thought. Then to top it off, he started dating Kaylie Henderson, who was, I believe, just about the prettiest girl in town. She was the quiet type, sort of aloof, and people got the idea she was stuck up. They were wrong. She was shy, that’s all, painfully shy. You couldn’t blame her, after the life she’d had.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know? She’d had it rough, Roy. Her mom and dad both died in a car wreck back w
hen she was ten years old. After that she was raised by an uncle who hardly gave her the time of day. She learned to keep to herself. She still does. She’s never told me—I mean, she never did tell me exactly what happened on the day Justin died.”

  Shepherd noted the slip. He was unsurprised. No doubt Anson McMillan had stayed in touch with Kaylie for years. After her escape from Hawk Ridge, she would have needed cash, a fair amount of cash, to obtain transportation and lodging and a false identity. Someone had to funnel the money to her. Since she had no family of her own to turn to, Anson and Regina would have been her only hope.

  “Anyway,” Anson went on, “Justin proposed to her after six months’ courting. They got married, both of them nineteen. Rented a house not far from here. We helped out with the rent money. Things were fine.”

  He paused, perhaps savoring the last good memories he had.

  Then quietly he added, “Not long after he wed Kaylie, Justin got some new friends. Guys he’d met at the hardware store. They persuaded him to buy a rifle and take up hunting.”

  “You and Regina didn’t object?”

  “ Regina did. I held my tongue. The sport’s not for me, it’s true. I can’t see what pleasure a man can take in blowing some dumb animal’s brains out. But there are those who like it, and I’ve known plenty of them, and mostly they’re fine. Mostly. There are a few, though, who maybe like it too much. Like it in an unhealthy way.”

  “Justin’s friends were like that?”

  “No, not at all. Far as I know, they were decent fellows. Couple of them were Justin’s age, and the others were older. They all were married, raising families, holding down honest jobs. They could go in for their weekend adventures and come back Sunday night ready for the next day’s nine-to-five.”

  “Then what was the problem?” Shepherd asked, already knowing the answer.

  McMillan tossed back another gulp of root beer, and then the answer rushed out of him in a spill of words.

  “Problem was Justin himself. He got a taste of hunting wild game, and it was like he was a starving man who’d gotten hold of a bone. The more he gnawed at it, hungrier he got, till he couldn’t ever get his fill. Justin took to hunting in a way that wasn’t natural, or maybe it would be fairer to say—wasn’t civilized. It was more than sport to him. It was something ugly, born of the same wildness that had made him start fires and heist the neighbors’ jalopies. He’d pushed it down, covered it over, tried to stamp it out, but some things you can’t hold down forever. They come out in a new disguise, and worse than before. Not wildness anymore. Sickness.”

  Shepherd let a moment pass. A fly traced lazy loops around his head, drawn by the root beer’s sugary scent. He brushed it away.

  “Sickness is a strong word, Anson,” he said quietly.

  “Then you tell me what to call it when a man starts drinking blood.”

  Shepherd blinked. “Say that again.”

  “He’d heard some hocus-pocus nonsense about how you could absorb the strength and courage of the animal you killed by drinking its blood. Heart blood, the richest kind. He came back from the woods one night with a gutted bobcat slung over his shoulder and his mouth stained bright red. Kaylie told me that one.”

  “So Kaylie saw it? Not you?”

  “She saw it, right. And she saw other things too. She told me. Sometimes she cried when she talked about it. Justin had put up gun racks in the garage, and he’d hide away in there, seated in a folding chair, polishing the goddamned things, babying them like they were living creatures, while all around him were relics of the animals he’d killed—antlers of a mule deer, skull of a bobcat, hide of a javelina. He had this tape of Indian chants, which he played on a cassette player, the volume so high it would make your ears bleed, Kaylie said. And sometimes at night he would sit there stark naked, with candles lit, and take blood he’d saved from the hunt, blood in jars, and smear it on himself like war paint....”

  A shudder moved through him and escaped his body as a sigh. He looked toward the bruised patch of sky where the sun had been, moisture bright in the corners of his eyes.

  Shepherd shifted in his chair. “Did anyone else see all this? You or Regina or anybody at all?”

  “No. No one else.” Anson sighed. “I know what you’re driving at, Roy.”

  Shepherd said it anyway. “It’s possible Kaylie hallucinated these incidents, if her mind was already unbalanced.”

  “Sure. That’s what the sheriff and his boys told me too, after Kaylie shot Justin and got arrested for it. They said it must be all in her mind, and to prove it they went into the house and searched the garage.”

  “And?”

  “They found Justin’s guns and trophies, but nothing more. No jars of blood, no cassette tapes of Indian chants, not even any candles.”

  “That seems to undermine Kaylie’s story, doesn’t it?”

  “They thought so. I don’t. The stuff disappeared, I don’t know how. But if Kaylie saw it, then it was real. I can’t explain its absence. Well, I can’t explain why owls hoot, or what makes the desert smell of wood smoke after a summer rain. There’s plenty I can’t explain, but I know what I know. The problem was never with Kaylie. It was Justin, always.”

  “If you knew all this, why didn’t you get help for him?”

  “Psychiatric help? Personally, I’ve never bought into that headshrinking stuff, and I still don’t. But Regina had a different view of things. She talked to a doctor, for all the good it did. You’ve met the gentleman. Dr. John Cray.”

  Shepherd sat very still.

  “Cray?” he said quietly.

  “The Hawk Ridge Institute is the only psychiatric hospital in the area. It was the logical place to go. Cray was the director even then. Regina had a meeting with him. She told him everything about Justin—the car theft, the fires, the shoplifting, and now this new strangeness in his life, the hunting. She hoped Justin could be treated as an outpatient, but she was prepared”—Anson hesitated, the words painful to utter—“she was prepared to have him committed.”

  “Did Kaylie know about that meeting?”

  “No. We never told her. She had enough to deal with as it was. Anyway, nothing came of it. Cray promised he’d consider the case. But he never called us, and when Regina telephoned him, he was always out, or so his secretary said.”

  “Why would he give you the runaround?”

  A shrug. “I always figured it was because Justin didn’t have any insurance. Goddamned institute needs to maintain its profit margin, after all.”

  “You could have tried somewhere else. There must be a few psychiatrists in private practice around here, or a psychiatric ward in a local hospital....”

  “Regina talked about it. I believe she would have found somebody, in time. But there wasn’t time. Justin died too soon. Less than two months after Regina’s meeting with the good Dr. Cray, our boy was dead.”

  Twilight had passed by now. The sun was long gone, and even the mountains had vanished. There was only darkness.

  “Do you know why Kaylie shot him?” Shepherd asked.

  “I can only make a surmise. Way I figure, Justin got crazy and violent, and Kaylie had to kill him in self-defense. She ran away for no good reason—she was in shock, not thinking straight—a scared girl, nineteen years old, out of her mind with panic. The cops caught her, and after that she was the one at Hawk Ridge.”

  “Under Cray’s care.”

  “Yes.”

  “He treated her personally.”

  “So I was told.” Anson looked at him. “You find some significance in that?”

  Shepherd didn’t answer. He studied the dark.

  “Roy?” Anson pressed. “Just what are you thinking?”

  Shepherd thought for a moment longer, then asked, “Do you know how we arrested Kaylie?”

  “The newspaper said she was on the grounds of the institute. I don’t know why she would go there. It’s one of the things I wanted to ask her, but they won’t let me in to talk with h
er.”

  “She was stalking Cray.”

  “Stalking him?”

  “Following him around. Trying to break into his house.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that?”

  “She seemed to think he was guilty of a crime. She wanted to prove it.”

  “What crime?”

  “Murder. A whole series of murders.”

  “She never said—I mean, she ...”

  “I know what you mean, Anson. She never told you anything about it, in all the years you kept in touch with her.”

  “You know I can’t admit to that, Roy. Aiding and abetting, they call it.” He looked away. “But if she’d had any suspicion of such a thing, she’d have told me.”

  “Not necessarily.” Shepherd hesitated. “Not if she thought it would hurt you.”

  “Hurt me? How could anything Cray had done ... ? Oh. I see. It’s not Cray alone you’re thinking of. It’s Justin.”

  “Possibly.”

  “You think Cray got hooked up with Justin somehow? You think after he met with Regina, he sought out Justin on his own and struck up some kind of unholy partnership?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “It doesn’t add up, Roy. Whatever else you think of him, Cray’s smart. He wouldn’t need Justin’s help for anything. If he meant to kill somebody, he could do it all alone. What could Justin tell him?”

  “How to hunt,” Shepherd said, the idea taking shape in his mind in the moment he uttered it aloud.

  There was silence between them, just silence and the dark.

  “Yes,” Anson allowed at last. “Yes, my boy could’ve taught him that.”

  Shepherd rose from his chair. “What’s the fastest way from here to Hawk Ridge?”

  “Take High Creek Road east and hook up with Highway Two-sixty-six. That’ll take you to One-ninety-one.”

  “I’ll get going, then. Thanks for the root beer.”

  Shepherd headed for the porch steps. Anson’s voice stopped him.

  “Roy. You going to talk to Cray? Is that it?”

  “Not Cray. Kaylie. She has a lot to tell me, I think. She tried more than once already. I’m afraid I didn’t listen.” Shepherd took the steps two at a time. “This time I will.”