Stealing Faces (27 page)

45

Shepherd was at his desk, eating a chicken taco with too much sour cream, when his phone rang.

“Homicide,” he said through a mouthful of shredded lettuce and cheese.

“
Roy
?”

He recognized
 
Undersheriff
 
Wheelihan’s
 
voice and took a swig of Diet Coke to clear his throat. “Chuck, what’s up?”

“Just wanted to tie a few loose ends into Boy Scout knots. We found Kaylie’s car, day before yesterday. It was parked on a fire road in the foothills near the hospital. Looks like she hiked to a ridge from there and scoped out Cray’s house. We found her shoe prints in the dirt, and a pair of cheap binoculars in the car.”

“What kind of car?” Shepherd asked, for no reason except curiosity.

“Chevy
 
Chevette
, real piece of crap, easily a couple hundred thousand miles on it. According to the registration, she bought it in
Flagstaff
two years ago. We would’ve found it sooner, but we thought she must have parked somewhere right off the road, so we had our guys going through the arroyos. Finally we had a chopper do a flyby, and the pilot spotted the car in the hills.”

“Anything in the car?”

“One thing that was interesting. Notebook in the glove compartment. She was following Cray for about a month, and she kept a record of all the places he went.” A chuckle came over the line like a dry cough. “Our man Cray gets around, it appears.”

“Does he? Where?”

“Well, if Kaylie’s notes can be believed, he visited a strip club on Miracle Mile. Maybe you know the place—strictly in your professional capacity, of course.”

There was only one club of that kind in that district. Shepherd nodded. “I know it. Where else?”

“Bikers’ bar in
South Tucson
, for one. I happen to have spent an evening there once, some years ago, definitely
 
not
 
in a professional capacity, and please don’t ask me for any details. Fairly rough clientele, as I recall. I was glad to get out of there with my privates intact.”

Shepherd’s lunch lay cooling on his desk, long forgotten. “Doesn’t sound like a place where a man like Cray would want to hang out.”

“You never can tell about people, though.”

“I guess not.”

“I mean, hell, look at Kaylie’s father-in-law.”

Shepherd frowned. “What about him?”

“Didn’t I tell you? He’s dropped by our office three times since we informed him of Kaylie’s arrest. You’d think he’d be happy she’s finally back under wraps, where she belongs.”

“But he isn’t?”

“Far from it. He seems mightily pissed off, don’t ask me why. First time he comes in, he asks how they can hold her in the institute without an arraignment. So I explain to him that she’s still under the original indictment, and she’s being kept for observation to determine her competency to stand trial. He goes away, but a couple days later he’s back.”

“Why?”

“Seems he went over to Hawk Ridge, tried to get in to see her. They wouldn’t let him. I think Cray personally nixed the idea. Said she was in no condition to receive visitors, and seeing Justin’s father would only upset her.”

“Makes sense,” Shepherd said.

“I thought so too. But not him. He’s red in the face, he’s so ticked off. Keeps saying they’re keeping Kaylie from him, and it’s not right. Weird, huh? So I ask him, why would you want to talk to that little bitch anyhow, after what she did to your boy?”

“And?”

“He doesn’t answer. He just asks me if I know any good lawyers. Which, as a matter of fact, I do. I told him about this attorney from
Scottsdale
who keeps a vacation home in Kimball, northwest of here.”

“You said there were three visits.”

“Yeah, he put on a repeat performance just this morning. Dropped by to thank me for recommending that attorney. Looks like he’s hired the guy to help him force his way into the institute. He’s obsessed with seeing Kaylie. Won’t let it go. But that wasn’t the weirdest thing.”

“Then what was?”

“How he looked. He had Justin late in life, and he’s maybe seventy now, but until this morning he could’ve passed for twenty years younger. Now it’s like—like he was up all night crying.”

“Crying?”

“Well, his eyes were red as hell. He said it was allergies. I don’t know. He said to me, Kaylie’s all alone in the world. She’s got no folks—they died when she was growing up. No relatives by blood. There’s only him.”
 
Wheelihan
 
exhaled a deep, thoughtful sigh. “I just hated seeing him that way. Anson’s always been a rock. Even when his kid died, he took it like a man. So why’s he all teary-eyed now?”

Anson, Shepherd thought, noting the name. Anson McMillan.

“Well,” he answered, “you said it yourself. You just never know about people.”

“Isn’t that the damn truth. Hey, I’d better let you get back to your lunch. I could hear I interrupted you.”

The taco was cold by now. Shepherd figured he’d throw it out. “Okay, Chuck,” he said. “Thanks for the update.”

“Hey, thank
 
you.
 
After all the local coverage this case has gotten, the sheriff thinks he’s a shoo-in for reelection. And since you’re not around, he’s showering his gratitude on me.”
 
Wheelihan
 
laughed. “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”

Shepherd cradled the phone, then stared at the cold taco in its nest of wax paper, not quite seeing it, not seeing anything around him.

Cray had gone to a strip club, a barrio bar. No crime in that, but it seemed out of character, or perhaps Shepherd simply didn’t know Cray’s true character.

And there was Anson McMillan, showing a solicitous concern for the woman who’d shot his son in the heart.

Unusual name. There couldn’t be more than one Anson McMillan in
Graham
County
. Easy to find him. Easy, maybe, to get him to talk ...

“It’s not your case,
Roy
.”

The voice belonged to Hector Alvarez, who’d appeared at the desk without so much as an audible footstep or a snap of chewing gum to warn of his approach.

Shepherd blinked, wondering if Alvarez was psychic. “What?”

“Kaylie McMillan.” Alvarez grinned. “I overheard you say good-bye to
 
Wheelihan
. And now I see the expression on your face.”

“What expression?”

“That lost-in-thought, grim-determination, unfinished-business look. Last time I saw it, you were getting ready to run the sting that nabbed Kaylie. If you recall, I said to you at the time ...”

“It’s not my case.”

“Right.”

“Sound advice.”

“But you didn’t take it.”

“Well, I’m stubborn that way.” Shepherd rose and picked up the half-eaten taco. “You ought to know that by now. Hector.”

“
Roy
.” The smile was gone from Alvarez’s face. “Just let it go, huh? The girl’s guilty. She’s a nut. She’s in the crazy house, where she belongs. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. And you got a full caseload.”

Shepherd almost argued, but hell, Alvarez had a point. Didn’t he?

“You hear me, Roy?”

“I hear you.” Shepherd wadded up the wax paper and pitched his lunch into the trash. “And you’re right. Really.” He meant it, too.

At least he was almost sure he did.

46

Ward B of the Hawk Ridge Institute for Psychiatric Care—the back ward, as it was called—was reserved for the chronically ill, the violent, and those patients known as forensic cases.

The latter cohort consisted of patients held for observation in advance of a criminal proceeding. Wally Cortland had been sequestered here in 1996 after he slit his mother’s throat with a letter opener and blamed it on the Devil. In 1992, shortly after the old forensic ward—Ward C—had been permanently closed, Sylvia
 
Farentino
 
had made an appearance, on charges of poisoning her boyfriend with a cup of lye in the pancake batter.

There had been others, generally less colorful. Drifters arrested for vagrancy, whose thought processes were too disorganized to be called normal. Drug addicts whose brains had been perhaps permanently scrambled by PCP or crack. Petty criminals with IQs so low that it was impossible to determine if they were competent to assist in their own defense.

And now there was Kaylie McMillan. Murderess, fugitive, and the only patient ever to escape from Hawk Ridge.

She’d been away for quite some time. Now she was back. But this time her visit would be briefer than before, and she would leave in a zippered bag.

Cray smiled at the thought as he used his passkey to open Ward B’s exterior door. The door was steel, and like all ward doors it was key-operated on both sides. A turn of the passkey was required both to enter and to exit. This precaution ensured that no patient could slip past an inattentive nurse or orderly and simply walk away.

It meant also that any staff member who mislaid the passkey would be imprisoned in the ward until help arrived. Cray had no problem with this. A certain measure of fear kept the staff alert. And he was pleased to note that in the past ten years not a single key had been lost by any institute employee.

Antiseptic smells, common throughout the hospital, greeted him as he let the door swing shut. The floor and walls of each ward were scrubbed daily. Antibacterial sprays were applied to desktops and door handles. Every metal and tile surface gleamed.

He moved forward, past the alcove that led to the
 
O.R
., where
 
nonpharmaceutical
 
methods were occasionally employed on especially recalcitrant patients. Beyond the alcove was the nurses’ station—a desk and a couple of folding chairs, a few file cabinets, and a closed-circuit television monitor that switched between two grainy black-and-white images of the ward’s two intersecting halls.

The nurse on duty was Dana Cunningham, just beginning her three-to-eleven shift. A tall, large-boned woman, she was capable of wrestling a two-hundred- pound patient to the floor. Cray had always thought she bore a certain resemblance to Walter, though he was tactful enough to avoid making the observation.

He waved at her, passing the desk, and she stopped him by rising from her chair. “Doctor? May I speak with you a moment?”

“Of course, Dana. What is it?”

“It’s about Kaylie McMillan.”

“I’m on my way to see her right now. Her daily therapy, you know.”

“Usually you’re earlier.”

“Well, there was Walter’s funeral. And an unwanted visitor who required my attention.”

“I see. It’s just that I don’t often have the chance to consult with you about her. I’m getting concerned.”

“In what way?’

“The dosage she’s on—it’s really very high.”

“Not extraordinarily so, for a loading dose.”

“I’m seeing side effects. Tremors, agitation, restlessness ...”

Cray waved off this objection with a flutter of his elegant hand. “If we lowered the loading dose for every patient who exhibited those symptoms, we’d have a hospital full of
 
unmedicated
 
florid schizophrenics.”

“But we may be
 
over
medicating in this case. And the treatment program doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect. If anything, she’s become more agitated over the past week. I’m told she refused her breakfast this morning, and at lunchtime she threw the tray at the tech who brought it in. She hasn’t eaten anything all day. She’s clearly
 
decompensating
.”

“Well, then the dose should be increased, not reduced.”

“We’re already maxing her out. Doctor, what I was thinking was, maybe we should cut the chlorpromazine and
 
trifluoperazine
 
in half. That still ought to be high enough for a loading dose. If her condition continues to deteriorate, we could try a different strategy....”

Cray was growing bored. “I’ll tell you what,” he said smoothly. “Why don’t we continue with the current dosage schedule today, and tomorrow we’ll look at a reduction?”

Cunningham didn’t like it, but she had sufficient sense not to argue. “Okay, Doctor.”

Cray smiled. He had no concern about Kaylie’s treatment tomorrow. For her, there would be no tomorrow. He would see to that.

“Fine, then,” he said, and headed briskly down the hall, glad to escape a discussion that was, after all, not only irrelevant but premised on an entirely faulty supposition. Kaylie McMillan was indeed becoming more agitated and disturbed, but not as a consequence of any antipsychotic drugs.

She was not, in fact, receiving any antipsychotic drugs.

The vials used by the nurses for Kaylie McMillan’s three daily intramuscular injections—vials Cray himself had mixed—contained no chlorpromazine, no
 
trifluoperazine
. They contained only
methyl amphetamine
, the most potent amphetamine available, in an extraordinarily concentrated dose.

Speed, in street parlance. That was the medication dear Kaylie was on.

She had been taking the drug for the past week, receiving more than three hundred milligrams of
 
meth
 
each time she was injected by the unwitting nurses. Three injections daily. Nearly one thousand milligrams in total, day after day after day.

Methyl amphetamine’s
 
psychotropic effects were gradual and cumulative. During the first two days Kaylie had been lucid. For that reason, Cray had kept her strapped down, with a bite block in her mouth. He didn’t want her saying too much, raising doubts among the staff.

On the third day the drug had begun to take hold. By now it had taken nearly full control of her.

The symptoms of amphetamine psychosis were almost identical to those of acute schizophrenia. Kaylie was hearing voices, harsh and accusatory. The close weave of her thought processes had unraveled. She was scared, scared all the time.

Even the most experienced nurses and ward attendants would not be able to distinguish her behavior from that of a genuine psychopath. No one could doubt that she belonged here, in the ranks of the insane.

Cray reached the end of the hall and turned down the intersecting corridor. Rows of numbered doors passed him on both sides. Not every door was locked, even in Ward B, and not every room was occupied. Many of the patients, including a few who had displayed violent tendencies, were allowed to mingle with the others in the day hall, and to return in the evening, just before the lights-out bell.

The policy was humane and modern. Contemporary medical standards discouraged the practice of shutting a patient away in an isolation room. Cray accepted these standards. Hawk Ridge was not a prison, after all.

Except in Kaylie’s case.

The institute would be her prison for the rest of her life.

Still, as matters had developed, she would not be a prisoner for long.