Stealing Faces (12 page)

19

Elizabeth
had eaten nothing in twenty hours. Her last meal had been a couple of granola bars consumed while she staked out Cray’s residence late on Monday afternoon.

She had not realized how utterly famished she was until she opened the menu at the coffee shop and read the list of selections. She wanted one of everything. She wanted breakfast, lunch, and dinner all at once.

The bored waitress drifted back to
Elizabeth
’s corner table after serving a tray of steaming dishes to a boisterous group of utility workers across the room. “Decided yet?” she said without interest.

Elizabeth, who had waited tables in a coffee shop not very different from this one, appraised the woman’s technique as poor. You got better tips with a cheery welcome and a smile.

She ordered two eggs, scrambled, with hash browns and sausage links and toast with jam and a large orange juice and coffee with cream and sugar and a cinnamon roll on the side.

“Did I remember to say hash browns?” she asked.

The waitress jotted down a few scribbles. “Sweetie, you remembered to say every darn thing on the menu. How do you keep your figure?”

“I run marathons.”

It was true, in a sense. She’d been running for twelve years, and that had to be some kind of record.

She shifted anxiously in the leatherette bench seat, awaiting the food’s arrival. Her hunger, now that she had permitted herself to notice it, was like a living thing inside her, a restless animal clawing and twisting in her belly. She felt weak and faint.

But it didn’t matter. The discomfort was only physical, and it couldn’t compete with the sheer elation lifting her like a concentrated adrenaline hit.

She’d done it.

Called the police.

Left the satchel.

The 911 operator hadn’t believed her, but so what? The package would prove her story.

She just hoped the patrol cops didn’t paw through the contents and smear any fingerprints Cray might have left.

Even now the satchel would be on the desk of some homicide detective at Tucson PD’s downtown headquarters. Or maybe it was in the
 
criminalistics
 
lab, its contents being photographed and measured by careful people with gloved hands. How long would it take before they realized this was the real thing? The knife would surely confirm it. Probably they could match the blade to nicks on Sharon Andrews’ skull.

Even if they weren’t absolutely convinced, they would have to delve deeper. Their next step would be to talk with Cray.

There were two possibilities. Either he had already
 
fled, hoping to lose himself across the border or in another state, or he was waiting for them, intending to brazen out their interrogation.

If he’d fled, his guilt would be established by that fact alone. If he tried to match wits with the investigators, he would be hard-pressed to explain the key to his Lexus in the satchel, or the damage to the vehicle itself.

He was finished, either way. The turnaround was so complete, so perfect, as to leave her almost disoriented. She felt as if she had been spun in circles.

By all rights she should have been Cray’s victim. She should be dead now, a body in the desert, perhaps buried, perhaps merely kicked into the mesquite brush, a meal for scavengers that would come in the night to tease apart her bones.

And her
 
face ...

Reflexively she touched the skin of her cheek, her forehead. She knew what Cray would have done with her face.

Instead, she’d beaten him. She’d put him on the defensive, boxed him in, and he would never escape.

The waitress returned with a high hill of food. “Dig in,” she said grumpily.

Eggs had never tasted so fine.
 
Elizabeth
 
ate them all in a sustained ravenous burst, then turned her attention to the side dishes and beverages.

She was halfway through the meal when chairs scraped the floor at the table next to her. Glancing up, she saw two men in blue uniforms seating themselves.

Cops.

Fear froze her. For a moment she lost the ability to breathe. All she could think
 
of was that they had seen her leave the pay phone, they had followed her, they had tracked her to the coffee shop, and now they were playing a game with her, a sadistic game.

No, that wasn’t what had happened, of course not.

They were just two patrol cops on a break. The coffee shop, not far from downtown, seemed to cater to city employees. The utility workers across the room, for instance.

The waitress said hello to the cops, her attitude improving noticeably around them. These guys were regulars. They called her by her first name, Lois. They made jokes about the menu.

So everything was okay, and
Elizabeth
could stop shaking.

Except she couldn’t.

Fear of cops was not a rational thing with her anymore. It was a habit of mind, a way of being. She had spent too many years avoiding blue uniforms and two-tone sedans with light bars. Even a businessman in a blue suit could spook her, or a car with a ski rack that looked, in silhouette, like a patrol unit’s dome light.

The cops were wearing their portable radios, the volume dialed low. She heard the soft crackle of police codes. She hated that sound. She would rather hear the whine of a dentist’s drill, the yowl of an alley cat, anything but the cross talk of prowl cars on the hunt.

Stop this.

She had lost her appetite. Half her meal remained before her, uneaten. She had to finish it. To leave now, so soon after the police had appeared, would look suspicious.

She drank her orange juice. The pulp felt slimy in her mouth, and when she swallowed, she experienced a momentary thrust of nausea.

The room was hot. She had trouble holding her silverware. The problem was the damn Formica tabletop; it was too shiny; it reflected the glow of the overhead fluorescents.

And there were ceiling fans, the blades lazily rotating; they flickered.

It was the flicker and shine that were getting to her, and the noise—a cascade of laughter from the utility workers, a clatter of cutlery somewhere from the rear of the coffee shop—noise and brightness and the sultry heat, the bubbling indigestion in her gut, all of it.

The cops were talking about last night’s football game. Panthers and Saints: “What the hell were they thinking of when they went for it on fourth down ... shit, I
 
woulda
 
kicked it away, pinned ’
em
 
deep ..

Come on,
Elizabeth
.
 
They aren’t paying any attention to you. Just ignore them. They’re no threat. You’re okay.

She wasn’t sure who was saying these reassuring words. The voice was familiar, a deep, slow, male voice. Anson’s voice? Could be.

But Anson just didn’t know. He didn’t understand how it was to be a hunted rabbit every day and every night for twelve years, hiding behind false names and false documents, waiting for the fatal slip or the trick of fate that would leave you helpless before the hounds.

They were six feet from her. Closer, maybe.

She reached for the coffee, wanting something hot in her belly, and her trembling hand knocked over the ceramic cup.

The cup didn’t break, but it rang like a bell as it struck the tabletop, spewing a flood of coffee over the Formica.

And people were looking.

Everyone was looking.

The two cops—looking.

One of them turning in his chair, offering a paper napkin, saying something, his face polite, nice smile, kind eyes, but still he was the enemy and he was
 
seeing
 
her.

“That’s okay,” she managed, using her own napkin to swab up the mess. “I’ve got it. Thanks.”

Then the waitress was there with a sponge, and the rest of the spill disappeared under the quick circling motion of her hand.

“Want a refill on that?” the waitress, Lois, asked.

“No, just ... just the check, please.”

God, listen to her, she sounded so damn scared.

She risked a glance at the cops again. One of them, the one who’d volunteered his napkin, was still watching her. “Happens all the time,” he said kindly. “Don’t fret about it.”

She had to say something, anything. “I’m just clumsy today,” she tried.

“No big deal,” the other cop said. “Clumsiness is only a misdemeanor in this town.”

It was a joke, and she laughed, but even the word
 
misdemeanor,
 
with its connotations of arrest and punishment, prodded her into a new spasm of panic.

The waitress came back with the bill, and
 
 
Elizabeth
 
paid in cash, overpaying somewhat, not caring.

“Keep the change. I’m sorry about the—you know.”

“Not a problem. Don’t you want that cinnamon roll?”

“Guess my eyes were bigger than my stomach.” The cliché came from nowhere, rescuing her from a self-conscious silence. She got up, grabbing her purse, trying not to look at the cops, feeling like such a fool.

After twelve years she was still this afraid. After last night. After the phone call an hour ago. After all she had done, all she’d been through—still the fear was with her, clinging like a shadow.

She left the coffee shop. Outside, she glanced through the window, and for a moment she was sure she saw one of the cops, the one who’d made the misdemeanor joke, watching her.

But maybe not.

It could have been her imagination.

She hated this life. Running, hiding. Hated it, and she was tired of it, too, just tired, worn out.

Her
 
Chevette
 
was parked on a side street, away from the main thoroughfare. She slipped behind the wheel and sat for a long moment, breathing harshly through her mouth, letting the fear subside.

After a while she slotted the key into the ignition cylinder and ran the battery, then turned on the radio. She dialed through the AM bands, wanting to hear a soothing voice, something to distract her. She found a news update. The time was exactly
nine o’clock
, and the ABC announcer was talking about a battle in Congress over Medicaid funding.

This was good. This was a safe topic, far removed from her life and her concerns. She listened, grateful for the illusion of escape.

There were more news headlines, then a spate of ads, then the stock market numbers at this hour, and after the ABC sign-off, the local news came on.

“The top local story, a possible break in the White Mountains Killer case ...”

Elizabeth
 
sat upright, her fear forgotten.

This soon? Word had gotten out already?

It seemed impossible, too much even to hope for.

But ...

“Police sources say they may have apprehended the man who killed single mom Sharon Andrews in the
White Mountains
wilderness last April. There is, as yet, no official word ...”

They had him.

Somehow, only an hour after she’d left the satchel,
 
they had arrested Cray.

“... a man believed to be in custody and linked to the crime that shocked southern
Arizona
. Reports are still sketchy, but it appears that a telephone tip to nine-one-one earlier this morning may have been instrumental in identifying the suspect....”

Her call.

There was no doubt, then.

It was incredible that they had moved so fast, but somehow they had.

The report ended with a request to stay tuned for further details as they developed, and then a political talk show came on, and
 
 
Elizabeth
 
switched off the radio.

She felt immensely better. She felt fine. She wished she could march right back into the coffee shop and finish that cinnamon roll she’d left uneaten.

Cray was in custody.

In custody.

Words that had haunted her, frightened her, for the past twelve years—but not this time.

“I won,” she told John Bainbridge Cray. “I beat you, you evil son of a bitch.
 
I beat you.”

20

At
9:30 A.M.
a meeting of the White Mountains Killer task force convened in an interrogation room at Tucson PD’s downtown headquarters. Captain Paul Brookings, commander of the Homicide Division, presided. He looked unhappy, but he always did.

“Got a shit storm coming,” he said by way of opening the conclave.

His gaze panned over the seven men seated around the long mahogany table and lounging on the metal bench against one wall. The bench was fitted with steel rings, suitable for securing handcuffed prisoners when the room was used for its primary purpose.

“So what else is new?” a detective named Rivera sighed.

Marty
 
Kroft
 
tossed a Styrofoam coffee cup at a wastebasket and missed.

The task force was decidedly informal in both its organization and its membership. A core group of four homicide detectives had stayed with the case since the discovery of Sharon Andrews’ remains last August, but other investigators drifted in and out of the task force as their caseloads dictated.

Roy Shepherd had been there from the start. He had investigated
Sharon
’s disappearance even before she turned up dead. He’d met her boy, Todd, the seven-year-old now being raised by his maternal grandparents in
Sierra Vista
. He’d gone to
Apache
County
to share notes with the sheriff’s department there and to see the creek where the body had been found.

The killing belonged to him, really, not to Brookings, not to anyone else. Other cops had worked it to varying degrees, but he had lived it. And he wanted the case cleared. More than anything in his sixteen-year career in law enforcement, he wanted to find the man who had peeled off that woman’s face and taken it with him as a souvenir.

“Don’t hold back, Captain,” he said from the far end of the table. “Share the bad news.”

Brookings found a smile at the corners of his mouth. “You telling me you don’t already know?
 
Shep
, I’m surprised at you.”

Shepherd permitted few people to call him
 
Shep
, a nickname he detested, but Paul Brookings could get away with it.

“I admit it’s a lapse in my customary omniscience,” he answered mildly. “But Hector and Janice and I were all tied up with that freak who said he stole people’s faces.”

Janice
 
Hirst
 
wasn’t part of the task force, but Hector Alvarez had been on the case almost as long as Shepherd. Alvarez nodded. “We thought we had something, maybe.”

Marty
 
Kroft
 
looked puzzled. “Guess I’m not so, uh,
 
omniscious
 
either. What’s this all about?”

“False alarm.” Shepherd explained about the magazine photos, the warehouse that had become a gallery.

Steve Call snorted. “Sounds like a man who could use some serious downtime.”

“He’s on vacation in the psych ward now,” Alvarez said.

“These street people,” Don Rivera muttered, “man, they just get weirder....”

Then he fell silent, and for a moment so did everyone else, because they had remembered that Shepherd was in the room.

Brookings was first to speak. “Anyway, that’s the shit storm I referred to. Some idiot leaked the story. Major break in the
White Mountains
case, blah
blah
blah
. Local radio picked it up and ran with it. Story will be in the
 
Citizen
 
too, unless we squelch it fast.”

The Tucson
 
Citizen,
 
the city’s afternoon paper, was just now going to press.

“They give any details?”
 
Yanni
 
Stern asked. Stern worked vice. He’d been drafted by the task force to find out about any local perverts who had a yen for snuff films or an interest in mutilation beyond the body-piercing variety.

Brookings filled out the story. “You can see what happened here. Some jackass blabbed about crazy Mitch’s arrest.”

“Radio said it was a nine-one tip-off,” Rivera said. “What’s that all about?”

“Something different entirely. We’ll get to that part of it in a few minutes.” Brookings sighed. “Bottom line, it’s a royal mess.
Graves
has been on the phone ever since the story broke.”
Graves
was the sergeant who handled public relations. He knew every local reporter. “We’ll get a retraction, but hell, it still looks bad. People get all worked up, and then when they’re disappointed, look who takes the blame.”

Shepherd was bored. He tuned out Brookings and listened to the sounds of the station house. Phones rang in a shrill cacophony. Somewhere a woman was talking loudly in Spanish, her voice rising operatically. He made out enough words to know she was not making threats, just venting. She was upset. Most of the civilians who paid a visit to police headquarters were upset.

Brookings and the others were still hashing out the media strategy. Shepherd had never felt any interest in the media. To his way of thinking, reporters always got everything wrong, and anybody who listened to them was a fool.

His wife had found his attitude harsh. He smiled a little, thinking of Ginnie. She had believed in people. She had thought most folks, even reporters, tried honestly to do their best and deserved encouragement for it. There had been nothing cynical in her, nothing sour.

Maybe if she had been less trusting, less sure of the fundamental goodness in people, she would still be alive.

Brookings moved to the second item on the agenda, the latest in a series of jurisdictional squabbles between the Apache County Sheriff’s Department and
 
TPD
. The dual investigations were not always impeccably coordinated.

Another waste of time. Shepherd shifted in his chair, the metal legs scraping on bare tiles. The room had been carpeted once, but too many agitated prisoners had puked or peed on the floor. It was the innocent ones who got the most nervous. The guilty took arrest in stride.

The discussion was winding down when a community service officer, one of the civilian volunteers who relieved the department’s manpower shortage by doing clerical tasks, wheeled in a reel-to-reel tape player on a cart.

Brookings set the player on the table. “This brings us to that nine-one call our friends in the news media got so excited about.” He glanced at the service officer, an affable septuagenarian named Rudy. “All cued up?”

Shepherd knew Rudy. A week after his retirement from the insurance business, the man had simply shown up for
 
TPD’s
 
civilian training classes, explaining that seven days of inactivity had nearly brought on premature senility, and he could stand no more.

“Yes, sir, Captain.” Rudy nodded. “I matched it to the entry in the nine-one-one log.” All 911 calls were recorded, and the time of each call was marked by the operator in a duty log.

When Rudy was gone, Brookings explained what they were about to hear. “We got an anonymous tip this morning. RP was a woman. She gave us a name. Of course, this had nothing whatsoever to do with crazy—what’s his name?”

“Mitch,” Shepherd said.

“Right. Crazy Mitch. But the call and the arrest happened pretty much at the same time, and you know how things get put together even when they have no connection. Tip-off in the case, and then an arrest of a guy who says he steals faces—bingo, the killer’s in custody.”

Alvarez snapped his gum.

“Now we all get to hear what our anonymous source had to say.” Brookings smiled. “Pretty exciting, huh,
 
Shep
?”

“I’m thrilled,” Shepherd intoned with the required ironic frown as he pushed back his chair.

The truth was, he did feel a mild rush of adrenaline. So far the various tips that had come in by phone and mail had proven worthless, but somebody out there might know the killer’s identity.

Maybe this woman was the one.

Brookings played the tape. Shepherd listened, jotting notes on his memo pad, as the voices of the 911 operator and the nameless female caller trembled through the tape deck’s tinny speaker. He liked the woman’s voice. It was soft and breathless, suggestive of vulnerability. He wanted to believe her. But belief got harder as the tape played on.

“I’m not crazy,” she blurted out at one point.

Shepherd wrote down the words. The crazy ones were always quickest to assert their sanity. A normal person never imagined that anyone would doubt his basic rationality, but a person with a history of mental problems, a person accustomed to being prodded and poked by psychologists, learned to be defensive on that subject.

The call lasted less than three minutes. It ended with a click, and the 911 operator saying, “Ma’am? You there? Hell.”

Brookings shut off the machine. “So what do we think?” he inquired of the room.

Rivera looked bored. “Probably a squirrel.”

“That’s what the nine-one operator thought. It’s why he wanted her picked up, and Bentley concurred.” Bentley was the watch commander on the morning shift. “But she was
GOA
when the beat car got there.”

“And the satchel?” Call asked.

“
Nada.
 
She didn’t leave anything at the scene.”

Rivera grunted. “Squirrel,” he said again.

“I’m not so sure.”

Shepherd hadn’t known he was going to speak until the words were out of his mouth. Everyone looked at him.

“Maybe she did have the evidence,” he went on slowly, “but she got scared off before she could leave it for us.”

Brookings frowned. “Other than pure wishful thinking, is there any basis for that supposition?”

There must be, but Shepherd hadn’t worked it all out yet. He knew that he wanted the tip to pan out. He wanted proof that somebody named John Cray, who lived and worked near Safford, had sliced off Sharon Andrews’ face and taken it home with him. He wanted this case cleared, justice done. He wanted closure for
Sharon
’s young son and her grieving parents.

But none of this was a reason or an argument or a logical basis for anything at all.

To organize his thoughts, he glanced at the notes he’d scribbled in his pad. “She said this man Cray lives near Safford,” he began. “Safford is roughly halfway between
Tucson
and the
White Mountains
. It makes sense.”

“There are lots of places between
Tucson
and the
White Mountains
,” Stern said.

“And Safford is one of them. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just interesting—potentially interesting, at least. Then there’s this bit about hunting. You know how scratched up the Andrews woman was. Like she’d been on the run through the brush.”

Brookings shrugged. “She got away from the guy, and he went after her.”

“Or maybe he let her go and then followed. Made a game out of it.”

“Pretty far-fetched.”

Shepherd was undeterred. “She said Cray drives a Lexus SUV. That’s a pretty good all-terrain vehicle, and we’ve always known our guy has four-wheel drive. He didn’t kill Mrs. Andrews anywhere near a paved road.”

“Car’s all banged up, she claimed,” Alvarez added. “It’s something we can check out easy enough.”

Rivera, holding to his squirrel theory, grunted with heavy irony. “Yeah, she banged it up when she escaped from him in the desert. After he tried to hunt her, I guess. She’s a regular Indiana Jones, isn’t she?”

“People get away from bad guys sometimes,” Brookings said, though he seemed dubious.

“Sure.” Rivera shrugged. “And crazy people make up stories about bad guys. The bogeyman’s always after them, and they’re always just barely getting away.”

Stern nodded. “He’s right. This gal’s got nutcase written all over her. She says she’s been following Cray. Why? If she suspects him, why doesn’t she go to the cops right off?”

“She’s afraid of cops,” Call said. “Come on,
 
Yanni
, we see it all the time.”

Stern held his ground. “Not in cases like this. She’s delusional. Paranoid.”

Shepherd could see that Rivera and Stern had won over most of the group. But he was still unconvinced. He tried another tack.

“How about the rest of what she said?” In his memo pad he had jotted down
 
break-in, kidnap,
 
and
 
others.
 
“She claimed there were tools in this satchel for breaking and entering. But in the
White Mountains
case there was no break-in. Mrs. Andrews was snatched right outside the auto dealership, probably forced into the killer’s car.”