Stealing Faces

by Michael Prescott

  Had she planned to conceal herself in the abandoned ward from the start? Or had she panicked after escaping, when she realized the guards would be called immediately and she would have no chance to find a way out of the hospital compound?

  The answer didn’t matter. In either case, she was in the old ward, hunkered down, a huddle of fear. Easy prey.

  Grinning fiercely, heart thumping with a familiar savage joy, Cray started running again.

  55

  The guard at the gatehouse took a long look at Shepherd’s badge before handing back his I.D. holder. “You here about the McMillan woman?” he asked.

  Shepherd leaned out the window of his idling sedan. “How’d you know?”

  The answer came with a shrug. “She’s the only escapee we’ve got at the moment.”

  It took Shepherd a moment to absorb this. “She escaped? Tonight?”

  Another shrug. “Thought you knew. You said you were here about her.”

  “I want to ask her some questions.”

  “Our guys’ll have to find her first. She busted out. Pretty hard case, that one—though you wouldn’t think it to look at her.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Ten minutes, is all.”

  If he couldn’t talk to Kaylie, he would do the next best thing. “Where’s Dr. Cray?”

  “That, I don’t know. In his residence, I’d guess. Want me to ring him up for you?”

  Shepherd preferred not to give Cray any advance notice of his arrival. “That’s all right. Can I drive to his house from here?”

  “Sure. Go straight to the parking lot, hook left on the maintenance road, and when you’re past the utility shed make a hard right.”

  “Thanks.”

  The gate opened, and Shepherd pulled through, then followed the directions, driving fast but not recklessly, his thoughts racing.

  During the drive from Anson McMillan’s house, he’d had time to piece together a possible scenario, still hypothetical, quite conceivably all wrong.

  But suppose ... just suppose ...

  Suppose Cray was a killer, as Kaylie believed. Killers might be born or made—Shepherd had no opinion about that—but however they got started, there was always one critical moment in their development, the moment of transition from fantasy and speculation and preparation to the deed itself.

  Now just suppose Cray had needed help with that step.

  Shepherd could picture him as he’d been twelve years ago, a much younger man, a man who’d passed his time in classrooms and seminars, a man with soft hands.

  A murderer in embryo. Evolving by degrees toward the final, fatal commitment.

  How had he started along that path? With a man like Cray, his progress would have begun as an intellectual proposition. At least this was how he would have rationalized and justified any strange new emotions that invaded the cool sanctuary of his self-control.

  We are animals at heart. The self is mere window dressing. A mask, a false front. We hear about “mind over matter.” It would be more true to say that the mind doesn’t matter.

  Cray had said that to Shepherd. The idea obsessed him. He’d written a book on it.

  Shepherd had slept through most of his mandatory Philosophy 101 course in college. He was no expert in the subject. But he knew that Cray’s viewpoint was grounded in a deep aversion to humanity, an aversion that could easily translate into contempt or hatred.

  What a man hated, he might wish to destroy. But being soft and cloistered, he would not know how.

  And then into his office comes Justin’s mother, telling him of this son of hers, with his guns and his blood lust and his sick obsessions and his skills at tracking game.

  The man Cray needs. The partner he has been seeking—seeking perhaps unconsciously, as the last missing piece of himself.

  So Cray goes to Justin McMillan, feels him out. There are ways for a clever, manipulative man to gain the trust of someone younger and inexperienced.

  He proposes an arrangement. They will hunt together. Justin will teach him to stalk and kill. And Cray—Cray will procure a more interesting quarry than any bobcat or mule deer.

  Cray has the intellect, the talent to plan a crime and execute it without leaving clues. Justin has the practical experience at killing. Each completes the other.

  And so they hunt. Twelve years ago ...

  In his investigation of the White Mountains case. Shepherd had compiled a list of possible abductees and other missing persons throughout southeastern Arizona over the past fifteen years. There had been no fewer than four disappearances in the early spring of 1987, the proper time frame.

  It was unlikely that Cray and Justin were responsible for all four cases. But perhaps for one. Just one.

  And if Kaylie had found out? If she had learned that her husband had killed a woman, skinned her face as a trophy?

  If she tried to go to the police, and Justin attacked her, and she shot him, then went into shock afterward, mute, helpless, entrusted to a doctor’s care ...?

  Cray’s care.

  Only a scenario, a sketch of what might have happened. All of it could be wrong. But if it was true, then an unforgivable injustice had been done to Kaylie McMillan.

  And Shepherd, though unwitting, had played his own role in that injustice, and bore his own measure of guilt.

  Cray’s house appeared in the headlights. Shepherd braked the sedan and got out. At the front door he leaned his fist on the buzzer.

  “The doc’s not in.”

  Shepherd turned, saw a guard in khaki approaching from the shadowy foliage near the gate.

  “Hey,” the guard added, “I know you. You’re the cop from Tucson.”

  “Right.”

  “I saw you here the night you collared her. My name’s Collins. I always wanted to be a cop.”

  “Roy Shepherd.”

  “Yeah, I know. That was nice work, what you did.”

  We’ll see how nice it was, Shepherd thought grimly.

  “Any idea where Dr. Cray might be?” he asked Collins.

  “Oh, probably out helping to look for McMillan.” The guard shrugged. “I get stuck playing sentry at a goddamned driveway. Waste of time. She won’t come here.”

  “No?”

  “She’ll try to go over the fence, like she did last time. But she won’t make it. Security’s tighter than it was way back when. At least that’s what the older guys tell me.”

  Shepherd figured that he himself would qualify as an older guy in Collins’ estimation. The guard must be all of twenty-two. “So you’ve been standing post for the last few minutes?”

  “Yeah. No action. Maybe you can find Cray out in the yard. I can radio the boss and ask him about it.”

  Shepherd didn’t want to give Cray any warning. “That’s not necessary.” He turned back toward his car.

  “It’s no problem,” Collins said, eager to help. “I was going to do it anyway. I think Dr. Cray forgot something of his, which he might want.”

  Shepherd looked at him. “What did he forget?”

  “His black bag. His medical kit, you know. He left it on the sofa. He’ll need it if he has to subdue McMillan with a sedative.”

  “You were inside the house?”

  “No, saw it through the window. Shouldn’t have been peeking in, but ...”

  “Which window?”

  “Living room. Right there.”

  Shepherd stepped to the bay window near the front door and looked in.

  The sofa lay adjacent to the window, the black bag clearly visible. It had been left open, the drawstring clasp untied.

  He had seen Cray’s medical kit on the night of Kaylie’s arrest. This wasn’t it. This was ...

  A bag. Kaylie’s voice on tape came back to him. A satchel. It’s got all his stuff, the stuff he uses to break into places and kidnap women.

  Shepherd’s heart quickened. “You have a key to this house?”

  “Dr. Cray’s residence? No way. Nobody ever g
oes in there.”

  “Until now,” Shepherd said, and with a thrust of his elbow he punched through a three-foot pane of the bay window, then swept the glass shards clear of the frame with his jacket sleeve.

  “Hey, Roy—I mean, Detective—I mean ...” Panic jumped in the guard’s voice. “I mean, what the hell are you fucking doing?”

  “I’m taking a look at what’s inside that bag.”

  Shepherd climbed through the window, onto the couch, then grabbed the satchel and dumped its contents on a teakwood coffee table.

  Duct tape, glass cutter, suction cup, locksmith tools, Glock pistol with a spare magazine ...

  It was true, then—what Kaylie had said. All true.

  “Roy.” Collins, at the window. “I gotta radio my boss about this. I’ll lose my damn job—”

  “I thought you didn’t like this job. I thought you wanted to be a cop.”

  “Well ... yeah.”

  “Then get in here. I need you to find a phone and make a call.” Shepherd found Chuck Wheelihan’s name in his address book and read off the undersheriff’s home phone number. “Say I need some backup fast. All the patrol units they’ve got. But no lights and siren. They come in quietly. Okay?”

  “Shit, Detective, what is going on?”

  “Just do it.”

  Shepherd left the living room while Collins was still scrambling through the window.

  The house was large. He had no time to do a thorough inspection. But he had to check out the obvious places.

  Kaylie had told him to search the house, had insisted Cray kept his trophies inside. She’d been right about the rest of it. Maybe about this part too.

  He made a quick circuit of the ground floor—den, bathroom, kitchen. The freezer held no surprises.

  Garage? The Lexus was parked in there. He found some tools in a cabinet, cans of paint and other innocuous items on the shelves.

  He stepped back into the alcove that led to the garage, then noticed another door. He opened it. Stairs descended into the dark.

  A cellar.

  Shepherd knew then. He knew even before he found the wall switch just inside the doorway and switched on the single, unshaded ceiling bulb.

  I steal their faces.

  Mitch’s voice floated back to him, Mitch with his warehouse gallery of photo cutouts.

  Shepherd walked halfway down the cellar stairs, looking at the walls, concrete walls streaked with mildew, and on the walls a series of unframed plastic blocks, transparent and smooth.

  In each block, a woman’s face.

  Cray had preserved his trophies in plastic, sealed away from air and germs. Eyeless faces. Open mouths. Ragged edges where the blade had sliced through the tender flesh of their chins and foreheads.

  The blade ...

  There had been no knife in the satchel.

  Cray had taken it.

  He’d left the gun, because an unsilenced firearm was useless to him on the institute’s grounds. But the knife he had carried with him when he left the house.

  He needed it. He was hunting her.

  Shepherd had turned to climb the stairs when Collins appeared in the doorway. “I talked to him. You didn’t tell me I was calling the goddamned undersheriff. This better be—”

  Then he saw the things in the cellar, and he blinked.

  “They’re not real,” he whispered, “are they?”

  “Cray’s been busy.” Shepherd reached the top of the stairs. “He still is.”

  He guided Collins away from the cellar door and shook him gently to get his attention. “Here’s what you need to do now,” Shepherd said. “Find your boss, the chief security officer. What’s his name?”

  He didn’t care about the man’s name. He just wanted the kid to start thinking again, to unfreeze his mind.

  “Blysdale,” Collins said after a moment.

  “Good, Blysdale. Track him down. Tell him what’s going on.”

  “I can hail him on the radio.”

  Shepherd had already thought of this—and had remembered how the satchel Kaylie left for the police had vanished before the squad car got there.

  Cray had retrieved it. He could have found it only by monitoring police cross talk, beating the patrol unit to its destination.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t want you on the air. Cray may be listening in. We can’t afford to tip him off. Got it?”

  “Think so.” Collins nodded, then said more firmly, “Sure I do.”

  Shepherd patted his shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

  He moved away, toward the door at the rear of the kitchen, which led outside.

  “What about you?” Collins called after him. “What are you going to do?”

  Shepherd opened the door on the night, then looked back.

  “I’ll find Cray,” he said, “and make up for a bad mistake I made ... if I still can.”

  56

  Ward C, the abandoned ward of the Hawk Ridge Institute, was a one-story building in the shape of an L, with a brick exterior and a flat roof and not a single window, barred or otherwise. Access was afforded by doors on the north and east sides.

  When it had been in use, Ward C had been known variously as the barred ward, the violent ward, the forensic ward, the disturbed ward. The hard cases had been interred there. Kaylie McMillan, murderess, had been one of them.

  She was here again, not a prisoner now, only a hunted animal, crouching in a tight cluster of fear on the tile floor of the corridor, precisely at the midpoint of the building, the bend in the L.

  There was no light in the ward. She hugged herself in the utter dark.

  Her garments had been scratched and torn by brambles and cactus spines. She was dirty, rank with sweat. Her hair lay pasted to her scalp in a dense mat. Nausea bubbled in her gut. Her teeth chattered softly, though she was not cold.

  Perhaps she had intended to come to this place. Perhaps it had been her plan to hide here. Equally likely, she had come only because she sought shelter, temporary concealment, with no strategy, no longer range in view.

  Whatever she had done, she’d had no conscious reason for it. Her last instance of rational planning was the moment when she heard the squeak of rubber-soled shoes in the hallway outside her cell and knew the nurse was coming. Then she slipped her head into the noose she’d so carefully prepared, wedging her hand in also to relieve the deadly pressure on her throat.

  Everything that happened since had been instinct, reflex, the blind impulse to survive. No thoughts. No identity. Only terror, panic, the brutal slamming of her heart against her ribs.

  She had been a person once. A fugitive concocting aliases. Justin’s widow. Anson’s daughter-in-law. She had been someone real, an individual, all quirks and insecurities and self-doubts and loneliness and proud perseverance and determination.

  All of that was gone now, just gone. Where the woman named Kaylie McMillan had been, there was only this dirty, exhausted, tattered, desperate thing, kneeling on cold tiles, hunched with fear, drawing shallow breaths that could not feed her lungs.

  The voices, at least, had left her. Confusion and conflict had been banished. She had no alternatives to debate, no decisions to reach. She existed purely in and for the moment, without a yesterday or a tomorrow.

  She would stay here, crouched like this, waiting like this, for as long as she had to, an hour or a week or a lifetime. She would never move, ever, until her heart stopped racketing in her chest and she felt safe.

  From the end of the corridor, thirty yards from where she knelt, came a rasp of metal.

  She looked up, her eyes straining in darkness.

  There it was again—the noise—low but audible.

  She knew that noise.

  A sharper tremor passed through her, and a new squeeze of fear cramped her belly.

  Hinges.

  The rusty hinges of the exterior door, the north door, the door she’d unlocked with the ring of stolen keys.

  Hinges creaking now as that door opened for a
second time.

  Panic impelled her upright, and she retreated around the bend in the corridor, and then she was running to the door on the east side, the only other exit.

  A hard carom off a wall, and with a gasp she came up short against the steel door, yanking furiously at the handle before remembering that all the doors in the hospital wards were locked on both sides, and a key was required to enter or exit.

  She had keys, they were in her left hand, and she fumbled with them, jamming one after another into the keyhole until she found the key that fit, then twisting her wrist clockwise.

  The bolt, strangely loose, seemed to yield immediately, as if it had never been secured at all.

  She tugged the handle again, pulling the door inward. Still it would not open.

  Stuck.

  Somehow the door was stuck, wouldn’t open, and she was trapped in here, no way out.

  * * *

  Cray stepped out of the night into the north corridor of Ward C, then clicked on his flashlight. The red-filtered beam wavered over the tile floor and concrete walls, reaching halfway down the hall.

  She was not within sight. But her tracks were. The prints of muddy shoes, tracing an irregular, panicky path away from the door.

  He breathed in, out. There was a calmness in him, the strange calm before the gale.

  He had her. She could not escape.

  True, she had a passkey that would unlock the east door. But the bolt on that door had been broken years ago, and rather than bothering to replace it, Cray had merely ordered the door padlocked.

  Padlocked from outside.

  The door could not be opened from within, a fact Kaylie no doubt had discovered by now.

  She could double back and run straight into him. Or hide at the farthest end of the east corridor and wait for his arrival.

  Or she could scream. Scream for help.

  He would like that. He had never heard her scream.

  No one would answer her cries, if there were any. Screams were common on the grounds of the institute. The staff had long ago learned to ignore such distractions.

  Cray turned and shut the north door behind him, then carefully locked it with his passkey.