Stealing Faces (29 page)

49

The director’s residence at the Hawk Ridge Institute predated the rest of the complex. It had been a farmhouse once, surrounded by fields of barley. The orchard beside the house had provided oranges and lemons, which the farmer’s wife had put up as preserves in a small, tidy fruit cellar.

It was in this cellar that Cray now kept his trophies.

The stone walls were crowded with faces, all of them female, all beautiful in their various ways, and all embedded in rectangles of solid plastic, protected from decomposition.

Cray had developed the method of preservation himself, inspired by the phenomenon of insects in amber. He purchased thermosetting polyester resin—liquid plastic—from a biological supply outfit on the East Coast. When blended with a peroxide catalyst, the resin would gel into a hard, transparent mass.

He kept each victim’s face preserved in a jar of formalin, like any wet specimen, until he was ready to make a permanent mount. A ceramic mold, lightly lubricated with kerosene, was used to contain the plastic. Cray put down a bottom layer of liquid resin and let it harden, then cleaned the face under running water, dried it, and centered it carefully in the mold. Then he filled the mold with plastic, pouring it on like syrup until the face was entirely covered.

Over a week’s time, the plastic would polymerize at room temperature, sealing the face inside. Decay could not touch it. Its beauty was saved forever.

Finally the mold was removed—an easy task owing to the lubricant he’d applied and the slight, natural shrinkage of the resin as it set—and his prize was ready for display.

A woman’s face, afloat in a crystalline block of plastic, a thing of eerie loveliness.

Cray had become an expert in this technique over the years, as his collection grew. There were fourteen faces now. Every one of them, even those harvested a decade earlier, remained as fresh and vibrant as young life.

Cray stood admiring them now, in the sharp light of a ceiling bulb. He was still in his business suit, having descended to the cellar immediately upon arriving home from the office. There would be time to change clothes soon enough. First he needed a few moments with his trove of lovelies.

“Sweet,” Cray whispered, scanning the eyeless faces, the smooth skin and parted lips. “Sweet.”

He had known each victim’s name when he acquired her, but such details were quick to fade from his memory. Now only Sharon Andrews remained real to him as a distinct person, and even her identity was gradually losing its sharp outlines in his mind. Soon he would know her only as the latest one, the blonde. He would recall nothing of her name or place of business. Already he had all but forgotten the news accounts that told of a young son she’d left behind.

But the hunt itself he would remember. His liberation from the ordinary, his mad steeplechase under the moon.

Those memories would not fade. Not ever. The first hunt, twelve years ago, remained as vivid in his thoughts as the most recent.

But on the first hunt, he had not hunted alone.

Justin had been with him. Leading him.

His guide. His mentor, in some ways. Most of all, his partner and soul mate, the only human being who had ever understood Cray, and the only human being Cray had loved.

Justin had loved him too. They had shared something—no, it was not sexual—something of the spirit, or if that word was too anachronistic for a new millennium, then something instinctual, a common inheritance in the blood.

Whatever satisfaction Justin had found in his brief marriage to Kaylie, it could not compare with what he and Cray had known together, on the one night when they ran free as wolves, chasing their prey through the
 
White Mountains
 
until they brought her down.

They had made a perfect team. Justin was a natural hunter, cruel and patient and starved for blood. A natural sociopath as well—Cray knew the type. The combination of an outdoorsman’s skills and a killer’s instincts had made Justin McMillan the ideal partner for John Cray—Cray, who had never killed anything other than the schnauzer, Shoe, which he’d strangled and secretly buried in the woods.

Except for that one incident, Cray’s nearest encounter with death had been the dissection of corpses in medical school. But he had come to realize that he would have to widen his horizons if he were ever to grasp the full reality of his essential nature. Observation and analysis were useful within limits, but some things must be experienced firsthand.

Aware of the need to take this next step in his evolution, he had sought out Justin, befriended him, and persuaded the younger man that they could do great things together.

And so one night they’d gone cruising, venturing miles
 
afield
, until Cray spotted a female hitchhiker on a dark highway.

There’s one.

Cray still remembered the tremor of exhilaration in his voice, and how he’d leaned forward in the passenger seat of Justin’s pickup truck to point to the girl on the shoulder of the road. A girl disheveled, forlorn in the night, and utterly alone.

Justin had slowed the truck.
 
You’re sure?
 
he asked, the question coming slowly but without the least quaver of fear.

Cray nodded.
 
She’s perfect. She’ll never be missed.

The girl, still a teenager, had been wary of the two men who’d stopped for her. But preferring their company to the nocturnal desolation of the highway, she’d accepted the ride.

Later, when she realized her mistake, she had put up a fight, scratching and pummeling until Cray subdued her with an ampoule of sedative.

She awoke in the
 
White Mountains, beyond the reach of help. The moon was high and nearly full, the ridgeline shiny in the light.

Cray hadn’t made any sort of speech to her. On later occasions it would become his practice to inform the victim fully of the lethal sport that was about to be played, but on that first night he and Justin had exchanged no words with the girl, had not even acknowledged her confused questions and pleas.

They had merely shoved her out of the truck and watched her land sprawling in the brush, and then Justin had raised his rifle and fired a single shot into the air.

The rifle dipped, targeting the girl. No speeches were necessary. She understood.

And she ran.

By silent agreement Cray and Justin lingered near the truck for fifteen minutes, allowing the girl a head start. Then Justin said,
 
Let’s go.

Simple words. But packed tight with meaning, as richly crammed with all the potentialities of an unknown future as a bridegroom’s utterance of
 
I do.

What had followed was the greatest experience of Cray’s life. He had always been staid, aloof, safely cerebral in his habits and predispositions. Even murder had come to him largely as an act of intellectual daring, the last link in a chain of propositions carried to their logical terminus.

But that night with Justin, the two of them racing in pursuit of the girl, Justin advancing with practiced confidence, Cray slower and less sure, stumbling on loose rocks, snagging his trouser legs on thorny brush, gasping to keep up—that night, when he and Justin hunted in tandem, a team of human predators, hot for blood, hungry for the kill—that night was Cray’s awakening.

He remembered the chase as a dream of fury and need, and high-pitched animal howling that was around him and above and below and inside him too, howling that was his own, because in his extremity of excitement he could not contain the instinctive impulse to bay the moon.

Later, Cray marveled at the changes that had come over him, the inexplicable madness that had consumed and redefined him. He could not understand it, but he knew it was real, and he knew there was no going back.

He had unleashed something in himself that would not be caged or killed. From his Apollonian torpor he had emerged into a
 
Dionysiac
 
frenzy, shedding inhibition, yielding to instinct, mad as a
 
Bacchal
reveler in the high hills of ancient
 
Macedonia
, wild as a lion. He returned from the hunt like
 
Zarathustra
 
descending from the mountaintop, like Rousseau’s unspoiled savage. The mummy wrappings of intellect and culture had been peeled away, and there was only the predatory ape, living for the thrill of hot flesh and crunched bone.

When the time had come to kill the girl, Justin had let Cray do it.
 
Go ahead, Doc,
 
he’d said in his calm way.
 
She’s yours.

Cray had never heard an offer so tender. And then Justin had handed over his knife, and Cray, his hand trembling only slightly, had cut the girl’s pale throat.

He had not meant to take her face. His first trophy was a product of pure accident. In cutting his victim’s throat, he loosened the flap of skin over her skull, and remembering an autopsy he had witnessed, he had simply lifted the skin flap, peeling the face from its substructure of bone.

Justin had laughed in rare delight.
 
Man, that’s a beauty,
 
he’d said.
 
You could hang that on the damn wall next to a four-point buck.

Cray had given Justin this prize. It was only right that the younger man should keep the trophy, after Cray had been honored with the kill.

A generous gesture, but in retrospect—calamitous. Had Cray kept the trophy, Kaylie never would have found it. Justin need not have died by her hand.

And Cray need not have mourned the man who meant most to him, the one man who had mattered.

Well, there was no point in pondering such things. The past was fixed and final. Justin was gone, but Cray, alone, had continued their work. And he used Justin’s knife—the sharp knife in its leather sheath—a knife for hunting, and better still for flaying the quarry when caught.

If events had worked out differently, he would have used that knife on Kaylie. Now that option was foreclosed. Her face would not be added to his wall.

A disappointment, surely. But he could live without that particular trophy. It was her life he wanted most, and her life he meant to take.

He patted the vest pocket of his jacket, reassuring himself that its secret contents were still in place.

On his way back to the office after his session with Kaylie, Cray had stopped in the hospital’s storeroom, a repository for all varieties of contraband collected from the patients. Amid the haphazard assemblage of junk, he had found an unopened pack of Marlboros and a
 
Bic
 
lighter.

Tonight he would have need of them.

Tonight—less than two hours from now—he would toss a lighted cigarette into the shrubbery outside the main door of Ward B.

There had been no rain since August. The brush was tinder-dry, easily ignited.

Once the blaze was roaring, he would barge into the ward, feigning alarm. Nurse Cunningham and the orderly on duty would fetch fire extinguishers and put out the fire.

Meanwhile, he would check on the patients upset by the commotion. But only one patient concerned him, of course.

He would enter Kaylie’s room at
 
7:30
, roughly half an hour after her last scheduled injection, when the
 
methyl amphetamine
 
would have peaked in her bloodstream, rendering her most vulnerable to attack.

Agitated and confused, she would be easy to overpower. All he need do was pin her down, then slide a needle into her arm and pump in four milligrams of
 
lorazepam
.

A strong sedative, used on patients undergoing surgery. It would put Kaylie to sleep instantly.

No more resistance after that.

He would lash one end of the
 
bedsheet
 
to Kaylie’s neck, hoist her up, then run the other end through the grilled vent cover and tie it tight....

And let her dangle as breath was choked off by the sliding knot.

A peaceful death, really. Quicker and easier than Walter’s. She would be unconscious for the worst of it. She would know only a moment of struggle against Cray’s superior strength, then the stab of the needle and a numbing plunge of vertigo, then nothing, ever again.

He wished he could make it harder on her. He wished he could see her suffer.

But the important thing was that she would be dead, and when Anson McMillan showed up with authorization to see his darling Kaylie, he would cast his eyes on nothing but a corpse.

McMillan might well suspect foul play, but his accusations would be dismissed as an old man’s dementia. To the rest of the world it would be obvious that Kaylie had hanged herself in her cell. And because it was obvious, no detailed autopsy would be required and no toxicology tests would be done.