Stealing Faces (17 page)

25

Cray lived in a house at the rear of the hospital property, screened by hedges and served by a private drive. The director’s mansion, it was called, although it was actually no more than a modest two-story home in the Southwestern style.

Shepherd followed Cray down a winding path to the house, past a small well-tended cemetery where two dozen patients—“the unclaimed ones,” Cray explained offhandedly—were interred. The air was warm and still, and there was birdsong in the high branches of the trees.

At the side of the house was a two-car garage with a single window at shoulder height. The pane had been smashed.

“One of our groundskeepers reported this to me about two hours ago. The break-in must have occurred last night.”

“When you were home?”

“Yes. But my bedroom is upstairs, on the other side of the house. I never heard the sound of breaking glass. Or any other sound.” Cray shrugged. “Perhaps that’s just as well. It wouldn’t have been advisable to directly confront Kaylie—not in her present condition.”

He unlocked the side door and flipped a light switch. Two bare bulbs in the ceiling of the garage snapped on, casting a pale yellow glow over Cray’s Lexus.

Shepherd circled the vehicle. It had been savagely abused. Someone had slashed all four tires and grooved deep scratches in the black finish. The front window on the driver’s side had been shattered; Shepherd saw a large, jagged rock on the bucket seat. The seat cushions were sliced in tatters, and the lid of the glove compartment hung open, the contents strewn. Shepherd saw a scatter of CD cases on the floor. Symphonies, operas. Every disk had been defaced.

“Did she make any attempt to enter the house itself?” he asked.

“No. But of course all the doors were locked, even the door from the garage.”

“Is there a burglar alarm?”

“I’ve never thought it necessary to install one. Not in a gated compound patrolled by armed guards.”

“How about the Lexus? Doesn’t it have a security system?”

“An antitheft system is standard. But I’m afraid I had it disabled soon after I bought the vehicle.”

“Why?”

“Too many false alarms. The system was overly sensitive to vibrations or casual contact. The horn was constantly blaring. I just got tired of it.”

“But Kaylie wouldn’t have known the system was turned off.”

“I doubt she would have thought about it at all. In the throes of her obsession, she would not be functioning rationally.” Cray waved a hand at the vehicle. “As you can see.”

“Did she take anything from the car or the garage?”

“Yes. A spare medical kit I kept in the vehicle.”

“A kit?” Shepherd remembered the 911 tape. “Like a satchel?”

“I suppose one could describe it that way. I think of it as my black bag. Occasionally I’m called out to see a released patient on an emergency basis. Why do you ask?”

“The caller said she had a satchel of yours, which contained
 
your ...
 
instruments of murder.”

“A delusion. What else did she say?”

Shepherd saw no reason to hold anything back at this point. “She claimed that you kidnap women and hunt them. Like animals.”

Cray shrugged. “Unsurprising, really. Most paranoids develop elaborate fantasies that have some basis in their personal experience. Kaylie associates me with the authorities—the police, I mean—who have indeed been hunting her for the past twelve years. You see how her mind might expand the truth of her situation into an imaginative metaphorical construct?”

“She also said we’d find your Lexus in bad shape, because she had to drive it through the desert to escape from you.”

Cray chuckled. The sound echoed off the corners of the garage. “No doubt she believes as much. Of course, if she had taken my vehicle, it would hardly be here in my garage.”

“She expected you to have it, though. She told us to check it out.”

“The inconsistency would never occur to her. You
 
have to
 
understand a person like Kaylie, Detective Shepherd. She’s fundamentally out of contact with reality. She can break in here, vandalize my property, and an hour later she’ll be fully convinced that I’m the villain. She rewrites history from moment to moment.”

“Yet she’s evaded the law for more than a decade.”

“I’m not claiming she’s been this severely irrational throughout that entire time period. She must experience intervals of near-lucidity. Perhaps such intervals persist for months, even years. But always there will be a relapse. Stress or a hormonal change or some neurotic obsession will trigger a crisis, and she’ll regress to acute psychosis. She will decompensate, as we doctors like to say.”

Shepherd surveyed the ruined Lexus. “Looks like she’s
 
decompensated
 
now.”

“I’d have to concur in your diagnosis.”

Cray locked up the garage and walked with Shepherd to the parking lot. Strange laughter rained down from a second-floor window in the administration building. Shepherd wondered if it was the young man who’d set fire to a
 
toolshed
 
because the TV had told him to, or if it was somebody else.

At his car, he stopped, facing Cray in the bright daylight.

“All right, Doctor. It seems clear that this woman is harassing you, and that she made a false report. The case, though, belongs primarily to the jurisdiction of the local sheriff. Breaking and entering, vandalizing your vehicle, theft of your medical bag—all those crimes were committed here in
Graham
County
, not in
Tucson
. The only aspect of the case that’s properly within my purview is the phone call to the nine-one-one line. And we get lots of phony tips. We could never prosecute them all.”

“I understand. As I said, I called the sheriff’s office. I’m sure a deputy will be along shortly to take my statement.”

“Relay any information that might be helpful. Pay particular attention to the changes in Kaylie’s appearance. You said she’s blonde now, and more slender. Any other details you can remember will be helpful.”

“I’ll try. But I got only a glimpse.”

“Do your best. And please, could you have the deputies fax the report to me at Tucson PD?”

“I thought it wasn’t your case.”

“I’d like to stay up to speed anyway.” Shepherd handed Cray a card. “Here’s the fax number where they can reach me. Ask them to dig up the file on Kaylie McMillan and fax that too. Okay? Now, there’s one other thing.”

“My safety,” Cray said.

“It could be an issue.”

“In my line of work, Detective, it always is.” Cray smiled. “I suppose we both know something about that.”

“Even so, you need to take precautions.”

“I intend to be vigilant, believe me.”

“Do you have any experience with firearms?”

“None, and I don’t plan to acquire any. Guns scare me.”

“All the more reason to carry one. If she shows up armed, you need to be able to defend yourself. There are classes in firearms safety—”

“Out of the question. I won’t become a lone gunman, toting a six-gun like some character out of the Wild West. Besides, I could never harm Kaylie. She was my patient, you see. She was entrusted to my care.”

Shepherd gave up. There was nothing he could say to that.

“As you wish, Doctor.” He shook Cray’s hand. “Thanks for your time.”

Cray was walking away when Shepherd remembered one more question to ask.

“That book you wrote—
The Mask of Self.
 
What was it about?”

Cray turned back, then thought for a moment. “Icebergs,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Have you seen an illustration of an iceberg, Detective? The tip is just one-tenth of the whole, yet it’s all we see above the surface. I think that what we call the personality, the ego, the self, is the iceberg’s tip. The remaining nine-tenths of human nature, the enormous submerged mass, is our great store of inherited drives and instinctual,
 
automatized
 
responses. It is these which really move us. 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 the mind doesn’t matter.”

“Kind of an unusual position for a psychiatrist to take.”

“Not really. It’s my job to delve beneath appearances. To ignore the surface and dive deep.”

“How did the book sell?”

“It’s in its fourth printing.”

“Congratulations. Do you think Kaylie’s read it?”

Cray’s face darkened, and Shepherd knew this was one question the man had not thought to ask himself.

“I can’t say,” Cray answered slowly. “I doubt she would. Is it important?”

“Something set her off. Maybe she took offense. Maybe she didn’t like her own doctor saying that his patients are animals at heart.”

“I wasn’t referring to her, specifically.”

“But you do think of her that way?”

“I think of us all in that way, Detective. You and me and any poor bastard screaming in his isolation cell. Saints and sinners, heroes and knaves—we are, all of us, actors in our own dream, playing roles our minds script for us, while our bodies go their own way, following their innate will.”

“Sounds like a quotation.”

“
The Mask of Self,
 
Chapter Three, page thirty-nine.” Cray at least had the grace to smile.

“So long, Doctor. And take care.”

Shepherd got in his car and drove away, watching Dr. John Bainbridge Cray in the rearview mirror, a tall, neat man in a brown suit, lord of this small, sad fiefdom.

A lonely man. Proud. Not easy to like.

But a killer?

No.

It was Kaylie McMillan who was the killer, and she was on the loose, and violent, and perhaps capable of killing again.

26

Elizabeth
 
woke in a strange room, a room that was hot and musty and limned in a strange half-light that fell through windows veiled in translucent drapes.

It took her a moment to understand that she was in a motel, yes, another motel in
Tucson
, her third in the past ten days. She had left the first motel because it was too expensive, and she had left the second because of Cray.

The memory surprised her into full alertness. She sat up too quickly, then spent a moment recovering from a tug of dizziness.

She remembered everything now. She’d had breakfast at a coffee shop, where some cops had frightened her, and then she’d heard the news—the wonderful, impossibly good news about Cray.

He was in custody. They had him. They must have picked him up immediately after examining the contents of the satchel. The damaged Lexus had confirmed her story.

Blinded by relief and joy, she had driven to the first motel she could find, a two-story structure a half mile from the coffee shop, with a red VACANCY sign and a nightly rate of thirty-seven dollars.

The place was an unmistakable improvement over her usual accommodations—a swimming pool, cable TV, definite luxuries—and the price was a bit steep for her diminishing reserve of cash, but she had been both too tired and too happy to argue.

Checking in so early, she’d had to wait for the maid to finish making up the room. For a few minutes she had stood in a corner, watching the young woman vacuum the carpet and replace the towels, thinking vaguely that there was something familiar about her —the dark complexion and round, serious face—her
 
face ...

And suddenly she had realized that the maid reminded her of that other woman whose name she didn’t know, the woman whose disembodied face haunted her dreams.

But there would be no more dreams. She was sure of it. Cray had been vanquished, and the last residue of his evil had been swept away.

Finally the maid left with a smiling good-bye, and
 
 
Elizabeth
 
was alone.

Sleep had taken her almost instantly. She closed the drapes, lay on the bed, and dropped away into the dark.

The dreamless dark. No nightmares. Never again.

That had been at ten in the morning. Now the plastic clock on the nightstand read
2:49
. She had slept for nearly five hours, cocooned in the cool hum of the air-conditioning and the smoothness of freshly laundered sheets.

Her first priority at this moment was a shower. Not having bothered to undress, she still wore the clothes she’d put on last night, wrinkled and sticky with a paste of sweat. Her hair felt dirty, matted, lumpy. She needed to be dean.

She undressed, then stood under a cone of spray in the tiled stall, inhaling steam.

Remarkably, shampoo was provided free of charge, an amenity she had not enjoyed in her previous lodgings. She squirted a dollop into her hand and worked the creamy foam into a lather, rubbing the suds deep into her hair, massaging her scalp until her exhaustion was gone.

It felt wonderful.

At
3:10
, when she was clean and dry and dressed in fresh clothes, she turned on the radio and traveled around the dial in search of a news station.

She wanted to hear Cray’s name. Her final doubt would be dispelled when the announcer said that it was John Bainbridge Cray, noted psychiatrist and author, who was under arrest.

That was how they would put it too. Noted psychiatrist and author.

She knew about Cray’s psychiatric methods. His talents as an author were more difficult for her to judge. Although she had seen magazine write-ups on his book, she had been unable to bring herself to actually read the damn thing.

It was hard enough just knowing that he was famous—well, moderately famous anyway—and successful.

She didn’t like to believe there was no justice in the universe. She had seen what such a belief did to people, the bitterness it bred, the cynicism and ugly despondency.

But when she thought of Cray writing about the human psyche and finding an audience for his views, she almost couldn’t stand it. There was a limit to the unfairness a person ought to be asked to accept.

She was unable to find a news station, only a lot of pop music and a couple of talk shows dealing with national affairs.

There would be local news updates at
four o’clock
, she supposed—nearly an hour from now.

Too long to wait. How about the TV? She turned it on and used the remote control to search through more than twenty channels. She found news, but again nothing local.

“Damn,” she muttered.

She switched off the TV and felt herself trembling with impatience and frustration and the desperate need to know.

She told herself to relax. It was over now. That was the thing to remember.

Cray had not won in the end. All his triumphs had been temporary. She had outsmarted him, and now he was in custody, in custody, in custody, where he belonged.

But she had to be sure.

Well, there might be a way.

Tucson
had two newspapers, and one of them, the
 
Citizen,
 
came out in the afternoon. It was just barely possible that the details of Cray’s arrest had been reported in time to make today’s edition.

She grabbed her purse and the room key, then left in a hurry.

The day was warm and bright. Blinking at the glare, she fished sunglasses from her purse, then headed east on
Speedway Boulevard
in search of a newspaper.

Traffic rushed past in an impatient stream. The street was wide, six lanes with a landscaped median, and lined on both sides with strip malls and family restaurants. Not a ritzy neighborhood, to be sure, but in comparison with the grime of Miracle Mile and the blighted desolation of the frontage road along the interstate, it seemed like Rodeo Drive.

She felt herself smiling. Things had worked out. Last night had been a close call, very close, but she had survived, and she had won.

Then she passed an auto dealership, and abruptly she remembered that Sharon Andrews had worked at a car lot somewhere on
Speedway Boulevard
.

This car lot?
 
Elizabeth
 
didn’t know, couldn’t recall.

But if not this one, then another just like it.

Sharon
had
 
left at the end of her workday and had simply disappeared, and no one had known what became of her. Even after her body was found, nobody could say precisely how she had died. Even
 
Elizabeth
 
hadn’t been sure.

But now she knew. Cray had told her.

He had driven Sharon Andrews high into the White Mountains and set her loose on a desperate run, and in the starlight he had tracked her, remorseless as any predator on the hunt, and he’d shot her, and as she lay wounded, he had used his knife—the knife from his satchel, the knife in the leather sheath—to strip her face away.

Elizabeth
 
wasn’t smiling anymore. It felt wrong to be happy. Disloyal, somehow.

Disloyal to
Sharon
and to the other women, however many there might be—all of Cray’s victims, down through the years.

At the corner of
Speedway
and Wilmot, in a small shopping center, she found a row of newspaper vending machines.

The Tucson
 
Citizen
 
was displayed in the nearest one. She bent for a closer look, her heart pounding hard and fast in her ears.

Through the Plexiglas panel she read the headlines.

A road project was over budget and behind schedule. A senator was under investigation for campaign irregularities. A local software firm was hiring two hundred new employees.

Nothing else.

Maybe the news had come in too late to allow the front page to be redesigned. There still might be a story inside.

She found coins in her purse and fed them to the machine, then pulled open the bin. The paper in the display window was the last copy left. She slid it out of its bracket and tried to flip through the pages, but the wind kept crumpling the newsprint and she couldn’t see anything.

Calm down,
Elizabeth
.
 
Take it easy.

The soothing words came to her in a calm male baritone. It took her a moment to realize that it was Anson’s voice she had heard.

His advice was sound, as usual. She drew a deep, slow breath, then another.

When she was back in control, she found a bus-stop bench shaded by a kiosk and sat down with the paper. The kiosk sheltered her from the wind, and she was able to flip through the pages methodically, hunting for any reference to the Sharon Andrews case.

On the second page of the
 
Tucson & Arizona
 
section, she found it.

POLICE DENY BREAK IN
WHITE MOUNTAINS
CASE.

Deny.

She had to read the words three times before they made any sense.

A shudder rippled through her, and she felt a bulge of nausea at the base of her throat.

There had to be some mistake. But of course there wasn’t. Her hope had been only an illusion.

With effort she refocused her eyes on the trembling newsprint in her hands and read the article itself.

A Tucson Police Department spokesman was quick to dismiss reports of a major break in the ongoing
White Mountains
Killer investigation.

Earlier today, three Tucson-area radio stations reported that a suspect had been arrested and charged with the slaying of
Tucson
 
resident Sharon Andrews, whose mutilated remains were found by campers in the
 
White
 
Mountains
 
last August.

The department’s official spokesman, Sgt. Benjamin Graves, called the reports inaccurate.
 
Graves
 
speculated that the misunderstanding may have arisen after the arrest of a homeless man on unrelated charges.

A
 
homeless man. It was never Cray.

The story never had anything to do with Cray at all. She almost stopped reading, too tired to continue. But on the radio, they’d said it was a 911 call.
 
Her
 
call—it must have been.

Scanning the article, she saw
 
911
 
embedded in the text two paragraphs down.

The story may have been blown further out of proportion by a separate incident involving a 911 call.
 
Graves
 
confirmed that the department received a call early this morning from an anonymous tipster claiming to know the identity of the
White Mountains
 
Killer.

“Somebody’s wires got crossed,”
 
Graves
 
said. “It looks like the arrest and the phone call were both reported at around the same time, and the impression was left that there was some connection between the two. It’s an unfortunate example of the confusion that sometimes occurs in a high-profile case.”

Graves
 
said that the 911 tip was unlikely to represent a legitimate break in the investigation. “Without going into detail, all indications are that the call was one of many false leads we’ve received in connection with this matter. There is no evidence, absolutely none, that would give any credibility to this particular call.”

Graves
stressed that members of the public are encouraged to phone the department with any information that may be of value ...

Elizabeth
lowered her head.

For just one moment she wanted to toss aside the newspaper and walk away, leave town, hear nothing more about the
White Mountains
case, and never, ever know if the man who had killed Sharon Andrews had been brought to justice.

One of many false leads,
 
the cop had said.
 
No evidence. Absolutely none.

But she had given them all the evidence they could possibly need.

All they had to do, the damn fools, was look at the satchel, just
 
look
 
at it, for God’s sake—was that too much to ask? Was it unreasonable? Was she wrong to expect any help at all, from anyone, ever?