52
At seven o’clock, midway through her three-to-eleven shift, Nurse Dana Cunningham headed down the hallway of Ward B to give Kaylie McMillan her evening injection.
An orderly walked beside her. Cunningham never entered the room of any violent patient without backup. This was a lesson she’d learned years ago at a youth facility in Phoenix, when a kid had gouged her cheek with the pull-tab of a soda can. She still saw the small puckered scar every time she looked in a mirror.
She didn’t mind the scar. It was helpful. It was a reminder.
“McMillan’s a tiny little thing,” she told the orderly, “but she killed a guy once—her husband, I think. So watch her.”
The orderly just nodded. Not a talker.
Cunningham’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the tile floor, but otherwise the ward was quiet. Most of the patients—those who were permitted free run of the hospital’s common areas throughout waking hours—were still in the commissary finishing dinner, or in the day hall watching TV.
A few of the hard cases lingered in their rooms, but they were so heavily sedated as to be barely sentient. Well, at least she’d persuaded Cray to consider lightening McMillan’s dosage.
At the door to Kaylie McMillan’s room, she paused and, as a standard precaution, looked through the plate-glass window before entering.
Kaylie was there.
Hanging.
Hanging from the grille of the air vent, Jesus, hanging with a rubber bedsheet around her neck ...
After I’m dead, you’ll know he did it.
Kaylie’s words, less than an hour earlier. Not mere paranoia. A confused confession of suicidal intent.
Cunningham snapped a glance at the orderly, who was staring past her at the sight framed in the window. “Call security,” she said, not shouting, the words precise and calm. “Tell them we have a suicide attempt. Go.”
The orderly ran for the nurses’ station.
Cunningham found the latch button, depressed it with her fist, heard the release of the steel door’s pneumatic lock.
Then she was inside, pushing the plastic chair out of her way and running for Kaylie in the far corner, Kaylie who was suspended near the steel toilet she must have mounted to reach the ceiling, her body swinging slightly, blonde head lolling to one side, her back turned, left arm drooping, and Cunningham grabbed her....
Get her down, get her down. Still a chance to save her if her neck wasn’t broken—and if she hadn’t been hanging for too long ...
The noose was knotted under Kaylie’s chin. Cunningham turned Kaylie toward her, groping for the knot, and she had time to see that Kaylie’s right elbow was crooked close to her chest, her hand wedged under the rubber noose to prevent asphyxiation, and her eyes—blue eyes, pretty eyes—were open wide.
Ambush.
This one word bloomed in Cunningham’s mind, and then Kaylie’s two legs came up together, bending at the knees, and with two slippered feet she kicked the nurse squarely in the face.
Dana Cunningham was a large woman, horse-strong, but the double kick caught her off balance, and she went down in a swirl of vertigo.
Kaylie cast off the noose and dropped to the floor.
Cunningham snatched blindly at Kaylie’s ankle, seized hold, yanked the girl to one knee. Got her, she thought with a flash of triumph, before Kaylie spun sideways and hefted the plastic chair and slammed it down on Cunningham’s head.
Pain dazzled her. She forgot Kaylie, forgot everything except the orderly’s name. “Eddie!” she screamed as Kaylie scrambled past her, out the door.
The orderly was still on the phone with security when he heard a crash from the far end of the ward, then Cunningham’s cry, and he knew there was worse trouble than a suicide.
“Got a situation here,” he said into the phone. “Sounds like—oh, shit.”
He saw her sprinting along the hallway, straight at him—Kaylie McMillan in her blue cotton trousers and blouse.
Behind one of the locked doors, some other patient started a furious rant, roused to excitement by the activity in the hall.
The chief security officer was saying something over the phone, but Eddie didn’t care. He dropped the handset and sidestepped away from the desk into the middle of the corridor, blocking the exit.
“You’re not going anywhere, lady.”
He was sure he could take her. She was only, like, five foot four, hundred pounds, and the drugs she was on ought to make her sluggish, dopey.
Then he saw her face, and there was fever in her eyes, something feral and inhuman.
She ran straight at him. He tensed for a collision. He wished he wore glasses. If she went for his eyes—
At the last instant his nerve faltered just slightly, and he stepped to the side and tried to tackle her as she blew past. He got both arms around her waist, spinning her around, slamming her against a wall, then felt a hot blast of her breath on his face, and he was fumbling for her wrists, fighting to control her hands before she found a way to hurt him.
Worried about his eyes, he forgot his groin, until she reminded him with a sharp knee thrust that bent him double.
“Fuck,” he coughed. “Fuck ... bitch ...”
He took a swipe at her face, catching her cheek, and suddenly her fist came at him, and with a grunt of rage she shattered Eddie’s nose in a rush of bloody mucus.
Pain dropped him to his knees. He clutched his face, amazed at all the blood, humiliated and angry and too dazed to do anything about it.
Distantly he heard her mumbling a low, repetitive chant, urgent and monotonous.
“Time to go. Time to go. Time to go ...”
When he looked up, he saw her retrieve something from the desk—the keys, damn—she needed the keys to unlock the ward door, which was key-operated on both sides.
As she tried each key on the ring, he lurched to his feet.
She spun, wielding the keys as weapons, their sharp teeth protruding from between her knuckles.
He thought of his eyes. “You win,” he whispered, backing off.
The next key she tested was the right one. The ward door opened, and she ran outside, slamming it behind her.
Somewhere the distressed patient was still shouting, his cries ululant and surreal.
“Eddie ... ?”
That was Nurse Cunningham, emerging from Kaylie’s room far down the hall, a glaze of red on her forehead.
“She’s gone,” Eddie said, finding it hard to talk while breathing through his mouth.
“Well, chase her.”
“She took the keys.”
Without the passkey he and Cunningham were locked in, and to be honest, Eddie was just as glad about that. He didn’t want to tangle with the McMillan woman again. She’d been pumped up, more than just crazy. It was like—hell, like she was on speed or something.
Cunningham registered his statement, then slumped against a wall. “Call them.”
Eddie still didn’t react, until the nurse fairly screamed the order.
“Call security, you idiot!”
Security. Damn. He still had the chief officer on the phone.
Eddie stumbled to the desk, found the handset dangling from its cord, and spoke four words into the mouthpiece:
“There’s been an escape.”
53
Cray pulled on his black slacks and shirt, then smiled at himself in the bedroom mirror.
Black. His favorite color. Camouflage for a predator.
Camouflage that was unnecessary tonight, of course—but he felt the need to clothe himself in darkness.
It had been months since he’d taken Sharon Andrews from the parking lot outside the auto dealership. The deepest part of him, the elemental self that announced its presence only in the dark, was restless for blood sport.
What he’d done to Walter had sated his urges not at all. He needed a worthy victim. Kaylie. That was the prey his blood required. And he would have her. In mere minutes, she would trouble him no more, ever
.
He checked his shirt pocket for the cigarettes, the lighter. The only other item he would need was a syringe filled with sedative. Then he would be ready for this special kill.
With his hair combed back, his heart beating fast and steady, he descended the stairs to the living room. Mozart played on the stereo system wired throughout the ground floor of his house. He found the music relaxing, and he preferred to be relaxed before the start of a nocturnal outing.
The piece now playing was the Requiem. It had been composed as a tribute to things spiritual—the majesty of God, the highest aspirations of the human heart. In Mozart’s era, so long ago, such notions had not yet been rendered laughable and quaint. People had believed, back then. They had yearned.
Cray knew better. He was a man of the new millennium. He believed in nothing but brute facts, measurable, reducible to numbers. He yearned for nothing high, great, or noble. He knew that Mozart’s gift had been no more than the excited firing of neurons, his moments of highest passion merely a surge of stress hormones—adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol—triggered by electrical overstimulation of the brain. Cray himself could duplicate this neurological phenomenon quite easily in the operating room adjacent to the anteroom of Ward B, where he sometimes performed electroconvulsive therapy on the most recalcitrant patients. By passing a hundred joules of voltage through a patient’s two cerebral hemispheres, he could produce a storm of excitation equal to anything Mozart had experienced.
But he could not produce the Requiem. This stray thought, irritatingly provocative, teased him as he went into the den and turned off the stereo.
The house was silent, Mozart’s hymn muted.
Cray was leaving the den when the phone rang.
“Yes?” he answered, hoping it was nothing important, impatient to get going.
“Sir, it’s Blysdale.” Bob Blysdale was the Institute’s chief security officer, and he sounded nervous. “Got a problem. The new patient, the forensic case—McMillan.”
Cray stiffened. Kaylie.
Was it possible she’d accepted his advice? Taken her own life? Part of him would be almost sorry if she had. Although it would simplify matters a great deal, he would prefer to take care of her personally.
“What about her?” Cray asked, proper concern in his voice.
“She broke out.”
Cray heard this, but it made no sense. It was some sort of unintelligible message in another language, or a joke, or insanity.
“What?” he breathed.
“She ambushed the RN and a tech. Got out into the yard. She’s on the loose right now.”
On the loose.
Kaylie, on the loose.
The only successful escapee in his tenure as director of Hawk Ridge, and now again she was out, she was uncaged—and his plan—the fire, the fake suicide—it was all spoiled now.
She’d cheated him, the bitch.
He held his voice steady. “When did this happen?”
“Couple minutes ago, is all.”
Then she hadn’t had time to go far.
She could be caught.
Cray’s anger vanished, replaced by a sudden warmth of good feeling. Every crisis, as the cliché had it, could be seen to represent an opportunity.
“I’ll meet you and your men outside the administration building,” Cray said coolly. “In five minutes.”
“Ten-four. And, sir? Should I call the sheriff?”
“Not yet. We’ll handle this on our own.”
“She’s a felon, sir. I think procedure—”
“On our own, Bob.”
He slammed down the phone, then ran to the foyer closet. With all the repair work that had been done on his Lexus in the last week, he had felt it prudent not to keep his satchel in the vehicle’s storage compartment. It was stowed in the back of the closet, behind an empty suitcase.
He hefted the satchel and swung it in one easy motion onto the sofa by the front window, then rummaged in it for his flashlight—a mini-flash with a red filter to preserve his night vision. He pocketed it, then searched further until he found his knife.
Justin’s knife, originally. But Cray’s, for the past twelve years.
The leather sheath, blood-spotted and worn with use, was as familiar to his touch as a lover’s hand.
He slipped the sheath inside his jacket. There was nothing else in the satchel he could use. His burglar’s tools were of no value in this situation, and his gun, the Glock 9mm, had no silencer. He couldn’t risk firing a shot. The noise would travel for miles in the stillness of the desert foothills.
That was all right. He wouldn’t need a bullet for Kaylie. Only the knife’s keen blade.
He left the house at a run. Crossing the hospital grounds, passing the cemetery where Walter had been laid to rest a few hours earlier, Cray reflected that Kaylie would have been better off had she committed suicide, as he’d suggested.
A slipknot, a short jump, an instant’s pain. Her death would have been quick that way.
Not now.
54
Bob Blysdale and four security officers in khaki uniforms were assembling before the entrance to the administration building when Cray arrived. He had sprinted the full distance from his house to the meeting place, four hundred yards, but he was not the least bit winded.
He was, in point of fact, invigorated.
“How did she get through the exterior door?” he asked Blysdale.
“Stole a set of keys.”
“Then she has access to every building on these grounds.”
“Sure. But you don’t think she’ll hang around, do you? I figure she’ll try to find a way out.”
“Quite likely. But how?” Cray was thinking aloud. “Last time she just climbed the fence.”
She couldn’t do that now. After Kaylie’s escape twelve years ago, the perimeter fence had been topped with spear points and razor wire.
“She could try one of the gates,” an officer named Collins suggested.
“Main gate’s guarded,” Blysdale said, cocking a thumb at the gatehouse, where the silhouette of a guard was visible in a lighted rectangle of glass.
“But not the gate at my driveway,” Cray said. “It’s how she got in the other night. It may be how she tries to get out.”
“I’ll send a man there, have him stand post.”
“And the others should fan out, search the perimeter. She may be looking for gaps in the fence.” There weren’t any, but she wouldn’t know that.
“All right, Dr. Cray.” Blysdale sent Collins to watch the driveway, and then he and the rest of his men scattered to the four points of the compass.
Cray watched them go. The various assignments ought to keep them busy. But none of them would find Kaylie. That was his job, and his alone.
He was the hunter. She was his prey.
Running again, past the administration building, to the side door of Ward B, the exit Kaylie had taken.
He switched on the mini-flash, beaming a dim red cone of light at the ground. The grass had been trampled by too many shoes. Some of the guards must have rushed to this spot in the first frantic moments after the reported escape.
He moved farther from the door, into virgin ground. Here the grass was stiff and smooth. He detected no tracks, no spoor.
He drifted away from the building, not in a straight line but in a wide semicircle. Standard technique. When unable to pick up a trail, circle ahead in the hope of intercepting the tracks.
Cray walked in silence, his toes pointed forward to feel their way, each step taken with the ball of his foot only. He kept to a fast stride, arms swinging loosely, gaze sweeping the grass. Looking not for shoe prints alone, but for less obvious signs as well: scattered twigs, crushed leaves, clots of dirt kicked up by racing feet.
Justin had taught him all this. Justin had taught him so much in their brief partnership.
There.
A puddle of standing water, residue of the sprinkler system, which soaked the lawns each mo
rning in the predawn dark. At the edge of the puddle, the partial impression of a shoe heel.
But was it Kaylie’s? Or a false lead, a print left hours earlier by some wandering patient or groundskeeper?
Cray knelt, examined blades of grass flattened by the footstep. Bent but not broken, even now springing back. The track was recent.
It was hers.
Cray felt a twitch brush the corners of his mouth. He required an instant to identify it as a smile.
He stood. Looked ahead, following the direction of the print.
The wide expanse of the lawn was interrupted here and there by eucalyptus trees, some growing close together, others majestic in solitude. Small thickets of mesquite and purple sage glimmered in the starlight.
Cray let thought leave him, summoning instinct in its place.
A fleeing animal tends to take the easiest route, cutting through the widest spaces between the trees, avoiding thickets of underbrush that would impede progress. The hunter, seeing the lie of the land as his prey would see it, could sometimes deduce his quarry’s line of advance.
The most direct and least obstructed path would have taken Kaylie McMillan on a zigzag run between a ragged colonnade of trees, bypassing any snarls of ground cover.
Cray followed this route, running hard, not bothering to look for other tracks. He knew that a hunted animal would normally proceed as far as possible along its original avenue of escape.
He stopped only when he reached a denser thicket of ground cover bordering a duck pond. In the scatter of bird droppings along the muddy shore, he found more shoe prints.
She had turned here. Turned south.
That was odd. The nearest stretch of perimeter fencing lay to the east. He would have expected her to head for the fence in search of a way out.
Instead she had veered in a different direction—back toward the buildings of the institute.
The last place she would want to go, or so it seemed. The administration building and the two active wards were staffed twenty-four hours a day.
But the other building, Ward C, the abandoned ward ...
A person could hide in there. A person who had stolen a full set of keys, as Kaylie had. And she knew the building. It was where she been incarcerated during her first stay at Hawk Ridge.
Stealing Faces Page 29