Stealing Faces (23 page)

37

Chuck
 
Wheelihan
,
 
undersheriff
 
of
Graham
County
, stood by the side of his Chevy Caprice cruiser in the desert night.

Three deputies loitered nearby. They wore tan short-sleeve shirts, open at the collar, and brown trousers encircled by gun belts, and they had yellow-bordered patches on their shoulders and silver badges on their chests. They were young. Damnably young,
 
Wheelihan
 
thought.

One was smoking a cigarette, another had just returned from taking a whiz in a creosote patch, and the third was drumming his fingers restlessly on the hood of
 
Wheelihan’s
 
car.

“So, Chuck,” the drummer said, “what do you think the odds are of this working?”

Wheelihan
 
took a moment to think it over. The great quiet of the desert loomed around him, and above the high peaks of the
 
Pinaleno
 
range the stars dazzled.

“One in three,” he answered at length.

“That guy from
Tucson
 
seems to think our chances are a good deal
 
better’n
 
that.”

“That’s because he thinks the girl is watching Cray’s house.”

“And you don’t?”

“Way I see it, she ran to the border or to another state. Or she’s
 
layin
’ low.”

“If she’s sensible, sure. But she’s crazy, they say.”

There was eagerness in the young man’s voice. He wanted to go up against somebody crazy, somebody dangerous, even if it was only a woman.

Not much action here in
Graham
County
.
 
The militia types stirred up a fuss from time to time, setting off explosives in the desert or scaring folks with their silly war games, and there was that local man who’d taken a tire iron to his girlfriend’s skull one drunken night, but that was about it, as far as excitement went.

So Chuck couldn’t blame the boy for straining at his harness. Still, he preferred to keep things low-key, which was why he took his time in making his reply.

“Sure she’s crazy. I know that. I’m one of the ones that nabbed her, way back when. I was part of the search-and-rescue team. We came across the gal, out in the desert about twenty miles from here, and you should’ve seen her, all dirty and crying, and she wouldn’t say nothing. She was just kneeling there, kneeling like she was at her prayers. Her eyes were empty. Nobody home. You know what I mean?”

The boy didn’t. “I guess.”

“She’s a psycho, all right, like all the other nutcases they got there in the loony bin. But she’s not stupid, see? She escaped from the nuthouse, didn’t she? She’s stayed on the lam for twelve years. Am I right?”

“You’re right, Chuck.”

“She’s not so dumb. Some of these fruitcake types, they can be pretty damned shrewd. So I’m saying, she’s nowhere near this spot, is my guess. She’s off in
Sonora
, maybe, or cruising up to
Salt
Lake
. Or she’s gone to ground like the scared bunny rabbit she is. Whatever. Point is, she’s not
 
gonna
 
risk coming anywhere near Dr. John Cray.”

The smoker, who’d been listening to this, tossed his cigarette away with an impatient flick of his wrist. “So
 
why’re
 
we here, earning overtime,” he asked, “when some of us would rather be at home getting a hot meal?”

Wheelihan
 
shrugged. “Because I could be wrong, Mel. I have been before. And I know the sheriff would dearly like to close the book on the McMillan case. He comes up for reelection next year, you know.”

“Sheriff don’t have to explain to my wife why he missed her pot roast,” the smoker groused.

“Pot roast makes good leftovers,” commented the man who’d relieved himself, contributing this thought for no particular reason.

“Just get comfortable, boys.”
 
Wheelihan
 
smiled at the high canopy of the sky. “It’s a nice night, and we’re getting paid to do this, and who knows? We just might get lucky. Like I said, it’s one in three. She might be on the run. She might be hunkered down. But if she’s here—if she’s staking out the place like this man Shepherd thinks—then we’ll get her.”

He surveyed the gravel road visible through the scrim of mesquite trees that concealed the three department vehicles, the road that John Cray soon would travel in his Lexus sport-utility, the road Kaylie McMillan would have to take if she meant to follow Cray from his house. He nodded.

“Heck, yeah,” Chuck
 
Wheelihan
 
said. “We’ll get the crazy little bitch.”

38

On her belly, hidden on a ridge of the
 
Pinaleno
 
foothills,
Elizabeth
watched Cray’s house.

The evening was balmy, with a light breeze. The dry air had a velvet texture, soothing on her skin. There were no clouds anywhere, and the stars were sharp and brilliant, and in the far distance a coyote sang its lonely refrain, to be answered by echoes from deep canyons.

Strangely, she liked this spot, her special hiding place. She knew it well. It was home to her, really—more like home than any motel room she could remember. She’d spent a great deal of time here on this ridge, under the open sky.

On every evening of the past twenty-seven days, she’d come here, steering her
 
Chevette
 
partway up a twisting fire road, then leaving the car to traverse a trail on foot. By
five o’clock
she was always settled near the rim, lying on a blanket she carried in her car, waiting to see what Cray would do.

Sometimes he would go out, and she would follow in her
 
Chevette
. On other occasions he would stay home, but even then she would keep her vigil until after
midnight
, returning to her motel only when she was certain Cray would not prowl the streets.

His house lay at the rear of the hospital compound, served by a private, gated driveway. The foothills, all scrub and stunted trees and windblown confusions of cactus, rose up instantly beyond the road.

Elizabeth
’s perch on the slanted ridge placed her at eye level with the upper story of Cray’s home, about two hundred feet away.

The curtains of his bedroom windows were rarely closed. With the aid of binoculars—one of the few possessions she had left, and only because she had forgotten to remove them from the
 
Chevette’s
 
glove compartment—Elizabeth could see him clearly whenever he entered the room.

He was there right now.

She watched him in the wobbly oval of the binoculars’ field of view. He was removing his suit jacket, his shoes.

Normally he arrived home earlier than this. Tonight some business at the hospital must have delayed him. She hadn’t seen any lights in the windows of the house until twilight was settling over the mountains.

Although he was late, he appeared to be following his usual routine in other respects. Invariably he changed out of his business attire after a day’s work.

If he meant to stay in, he would don a charcoal dressing gown and slippers, then pass the night reading or perhaps jotting notes in a pad while music, faintly audible even at this distance, would spill from the window of his downstairs study.

But if he meant to go
 
out ...

Then it was always the same outfit, the black pants and shirt, nighttime camouflage for a creature of the shadows, a creature on the hunt.

She waited, holding Cray fixed in the twin lenses of the binoculars.

He was naked now. She had seen him this way many times. It scared her, repulsed her, to be voyeuristically acquainted with his body.

He stretched, and she saw the play of his muscles, the rippling strength in his long, corded arms and crosshatched abdomen. Like a yawning tiger he seemed to luxuriate in his own boundless vitality.

She thought of Sharon Andrews, numb and dead, and she hated him so much.

Abruptly Cray turned away from the window, disappearing into another part of the bedroom. From prior observations, she knew he had gone to his closet to select his outfit for the evening.

She waited.

When she saw him again, he was all dressed in black, sleek as a panther.

Going out.

She wasn’t really surprised. After all, she was still on the loose, and she doubted he could rest until he found her. He had sent poor Walter to hunt her down, but Walter hadn’t finished the job, and now Cray meant to do it himself.

How he expected to find her, she couldn’t imagine. Perhaps he would search aimlessly. Perhaps he had some better plan.

Or perhaps he wouldn’t look for her at all. He might go in quest of some new victim, fresh prey. Another Sharon Andrews to abduct at random and chase in the cold moonlight.

She gritted her teeth against a new wave of anger. Trembling, she stood.

He would leave shortly. She knew what she had to do.

Moving fast,
Elizabeth
scrambled off the ridge and headed down the trail toward the fire road, where her
 
Chevette
 
was parked.

39

Cray knew she was watching him.

Naked in his bedroom window, he had sensed the pressure of her gaze. It had required all his willpower not to turn and stare into the night, seeking some sign of her.

She must have watched him on many previous evenings, but he had not been attuned to her presence. Now he was, and her proximity to him was as real and immediate as an electric shock.

Kaylie had come. Brave girl.

He’d never needed to send Walter after her. He could have waited, secure in his home, until she arrived, drawn to him like a mouse to a baited trap.

Smiling, Cray picked up his medical bag and looked inside to ascertain that its contents included two vials of sedative and several syringes. He might need the sedative to restrain Kaylie, if she became hysterical—or if she threatened to say too much.

His equipment in order, he descended the stairs to his living room, then paused before a mirror for a final check of his appearance.

He was again a man in black, just as she would expect him to be.

Throughout the day he had been fatigued. Coffee and a handful of amphetamines pilfered from the hospital supply room had kept him alert enough, but an undertow of exhaustion had threatened continually to drag him away.

Now his lethargy was gone. He was exhilarated.

The snare had been laid, the quarry was in sight, and the best part of it all was that the plan was not even his. He had Detective Shepherd to thank for it.

Shepherd—perfect name, a palatable irony. He was a poor shepherd indeed, to lead the choicest member of his flock straight into the wolf’s ravenous embrace.

Cray had met with Shepherd this evening, at the hospital. The conference had lasted thirty minutes. Shepherd had told Cray what was expected of him, the performance he was to deliver. What was particularly important, Shepherd had said, was that Cray must not leave the house until after dark.

It was dark now. Night, Cray’s friend, had visited him again.

He found it amusing that both he and the police needed the darkness. And poor Kaylie—she needed it as well, didn’t she? She needed the shadows, the concealment of the night.

Nocturnal animals, all of them. By day they hid in their burrows—Kaylie in her cheap motel, Cray in his office, the police in squad rooms and courthouses. They did safe, meaningless things. But at night they came alive.

At night the heart quickened. Danger, a night-blooming flower, opened its petals and released its subtle, enticing perfume. Risks were taken. Hunters stalked.

“ ‘Come,
 
seeling
 
night,’ ” Cray quoted in a whisper, “ ‘scarf up the tender eye of pitiful
 
day....’ ”

Macbeth.
 
A reference, as Cray recalled, to the Elizabethan sport of falconry; the bird’s eyelids were sewn shut—
scarfed
 
up—while it was in training. By metaphorical extension, day was the time for seeing and being seen, and night,, blinding night, was when the unseen ruled.

Shakespeare must have loved the night. All poets did, and all killers too.

At the end of their meeting. Shepherd had given Cray a portable radio preset to a frequency used by the Graham County Sheriff’s Department. The radio was now clipped to Cray’s slacks, its dark shape nearly invisible against his clothes.

He glanced at it. The power LED was lit, but the radio was silent.

He hoped it would not be silent for long.

With his medical bag in hand, he crossed the kitchen swiftly, his black shoes clacking on
Saltillo
tile, and reached the door to the garage. Before opening it, he tossed a curt glance out a side window, into the small arbor that bordered his property.

What he saw pleased him, but he deferred a smile.

His Lexus waited for him in the garage. What he’d done to the vehicle had been painful—grooving deep scratches into the finish, slashing the upholstery and tires. Still, the task had been necessary, and most of the damage was superficial.

He surveyed the car in the light of the bare ceiling bulb. It was still a mess, of course, but at least it was drivable once again. After Shepherd’s phone call, Cray had sent for a mechanic, who had replaced all four tires, hammered out some minor damage to one of the wheel rims, and checked under the chassis and the hood.

The front seats remained a travesty, the leather hacked and torn, and the front window on the driver’s side was gone, leaving the vehicle’s interior open to the elements, but Cray didn’t mind.

Comfort was not a prime consideration. Tonight’s drive would be short. He expected to travel no farther than a mile or two.

Even so, he took a moment to find a relatively unscratched CD in the pile of discs on the floor of the passenger compartment. Puccini’s
 
Gianni
 
Schicchi
.
 
It would do.

He started the engine, then slid the disc into the player and let the rich strains of the opera’s overture fill up his world.

With the remote control, he opened the garage door. As it rose, he settled back in the tattered seat and prepared himself.

There was risk, naturally. Kaylie might be sufficiently frustrated—maddened, even—to try something desperate.

In their meeting Shepherd had raised this possibility. Of course, Shepherd believed Kaylie McMillan to be psychotic. He thought she had wrecked her motel room in a fit of rage, while Cray had already learned the truth of the matter from Walter
 
Luntz
, who had recounted the narrative in a low, shamed voice upon his return.

You weren’t supposed to attack her,
 
Cray had said, holding his anger in check.
 
I told you to find the car, that’s all.

Find the red car,
 
Walter said glumly.

I thought you were more reliable,
 
Cray chided softly.

Walter hung his head.
 
I’m sorry, Dr. Cray.

We’ll speak of this later. In the meantime, you are to tell no one what happened today. Do you understand me, Walter? No one at all.

Walter had said he understood, and Cray had let him leave, his shoulders hunched, head down, a large man diminished by disgrace.

So Kaylie, of course, had not trashed her room, any more than she had vandalized the Lexus. Still, she might well have been driven to the point of blind rage, even derangement, by all that had transpired in the past twenty-four hours.

She was unstable, after all. Cray had never doubted it. Psychotic? No. But hardly well adjusted, either.

If she was armed—if she had recovered her gun from the weeds where he’d thrown it, or had obtained a substitute firearm—then she might attempt an ambush. Might take a shot at him from outside the fence, or from the roadside.

Unlikely. Not impossible. A gamble. One he was willing to take.

The garage door had risen. Cocooned in Puccini, Cray backed slowly into the driveway, where Kaylie McMillan just might be waiting with a gun.

* * *

Wheelihan
 
got the message on his handheld radio and signaled to the deputies.

“He’s leaving. Get ready.”

The three men climbed into their patrol cars and started the engines, then waited, headlights off.

At the roadside
 
Wheelihan
 
knelt in the mesquite brush and tipped a night-vision scope to his eyes. He peered at the long strip of gravel.

Cray would be coming this way. Cray—and maybe someone in slow pursuit.

“Come on, Kaylie,”
 
Wheelihan
 
whispered, a cold crawl of sweat glazing his neck. “Don’t disappoint us now.”

* * *

The gate at the end of Cray’s driveway swung open in the red glow of his taillights. He eased the Lexus onto the road.

His heart rate was steady at sixty-eight beats per minute. His respiration was slow and deep. Puccini wavered over the speakers.

The road was empty in both directions.

Cray headed west, toward Highway 191.

A bullet might snap out of the darkness at any moment, but he felt no fear. He fiddled with the controls on the CD player, skipping a few damaged tracks before settling on the opera’s best aria, one of the peaks of Puccini’s art.

Then he settled back, listening as the soprano’s first notes trembled from the audio console in luxuriant stereo.

“O
 
mio
 
babbino
 
caro
 
...”

Cray let the rich waves of sound wash over him, a tidal flow of high emotion, of love and longing, passionate yet civilized.

There was dignity in this music, and sadness also. Puccini had composed
 
Gianni
 
Schicchi
 
at the end of World War I, when the naive optimism of the Romantic era was fading to ashes. The world never again would cherish the illusion of an immortal soul, a ghost in the machine. And things would change.

At rare times, upon waking in the dawn twilight, Cray would wish he’d been born earlier in history, when no one knew that a human being was only a basket of chemical compounds, a glorified ape disguising its basic
 
animality
 
behind layers of personae that could be all too easily stripped away.

He might have fit into that earlier era, had he been given the chance. He might have proved himself elegant and mannered and even dashing, like the gentlemen of that vanished world.

And not knowing any better, he might even have found a way to believe in something great, something higher than reflex and instinct, hormones and encoded instructions in the genes.

The mood always passed. Heartsickness was not for him. He was a realist. He took life as it was.

At his hip, the handheld radio squawked.

Cray grabbed it. “Yes?”

The rough masculine voice sizzling on the radio belonged to
 
Undersheriff
 
Wheelihan
. “I’ve spotted her. She’s a quarter mile behind you.”

Cray glanced at the rearview mirror. “I don’t see anything.”

“She’s got her headlights off. I’m using a night-vision scope. Maintain your speed till you’re past the checkpoint. We’ll take it from there.”

“I understand,” Cray said.

He set down the radio on the passenger seat next to his medical kit, feeling vaguely disappointed. It hardly seemed sporting of the law enforcement authorities to hunt poor Kaylie with a night-vision scope. Cray himself had never used such equipment when he chased down his prey.

He drove on. The aria reached its climax.
 
“Mi
 
struggo
 
e mi
 
tormento
,”
 
the soprano sang. Her suffering, her torment.

Kaylie had struggled so hard to evade capture, all these long years.

Soon her torment would be over.

But in another sense, it had only just begun.