Stealing Faces (31 page)

“So Kaylie saw it? Not you?”

“She saw it, right. And she saw other things too. She told me. Sometimes she cried when she talked about it. Justin had put up gun racks in the garage, and he’d hide away in there, seated in a folding chair, polishing the goddamned things, babying them like they were living creatures, while all around him were relics of the animals he’d killed—antlers of a mule deer, skull of a bobcat, hide of a
 
javelina
. He had this tape of Indian chants, which he played on a cassette player, the volume so high it would make your ears bleed, Kaylie said. And sometimes at night he would sit there stark naked, with candles lit, and take blood he’d saved from the hunt, blood in jars, and smear it on himself like war paint....”

A shudder moved through him and escaped his body as a sigh. He looked toward the bruised patch of sky where the sun had been, moisture bright in the corners of his eyes.

Shepherd shifted in his chair. “Did anyone else see all this? You or
Regina
or anybody at all?”

“No. No one else.” Anson sighed. “I know what you’re driving at,
Roy
.”

Shepherd said it anyway. “It’s possible Kaylie hallucinated these incidents, if her mind was already unbalanced.”

“Sure. That’s what the sheriff and his boys told me too, after Kaylie shot Justin and got arrested for it. They said it must be all in her mind, and to prove it they went into the house and searched the garage.”

“And?”

“They found Justin’s guns and trophies, but nothing more. No jars of blood, no cassette tapes of Indian chants, not even any candles.”

“That seems to undermine Kaylie’s story, doesn’t it?”

“They thought so. I don’t. The stuff disappeared, I don’t know how. But if Kaylie saw it, then it was real. I can’t explain its absence. Well, I can’t explain why owls hoot, or what makes the desert smell of wood smoke after a summer rain. There’s plenty I can’t explain, but I know what I know. The problem was never with Kaylie. It was Justin, always.”

“If you knew all this, why didn’t you get help for him?”

“Psychiatric help? Personally, I’ve never bought into that
 
headshrinking
 
stuff, and I still don’t. But
Regina
had a different view of things. She talked to a doctor, for all the good it did. You’ve met the gentleman. Dr. John Cray.”

Shepherd sat very still.

“Cray?” he said quietly.

“The Hawk Ridge Institute is the only psychiatric hospital in the area. It was the logical place to go. Cray was the director even then.
Regina
had a meeting with him. She told him everything about Justin—the car theft, the fires, the shoplifting, and now this new strangeness in his life, the hunting. She hoped Justin could be treated as an outpatient, but she was prepared”—Anson hesitated, the words painful to utter—“she was prepared to have him committed.”

“Did Kaylie know about that meeting?”

“No. We never told her. She had enough to deal with as it was. Anyway, nothing came of it. Cray promised he’d consider the case. But he never called us, and when
Regina
telephoned him, he was always out, or so his secretary said.”

“Why would he give you the runaround?”

A shrug. “I always figured it was because Justin didn’t have any insurance. Goddamned institute needs to maintain its profit margin, after all.”

“You could have tried somewhere else. There must be a few psychiatrists in private practice around here, or a psychiatric ward in a local hospital....”

“
Regina
talked about it. I believe she would have found somebody, in time. But there wasn’t time. Justin died too soon. Less than two months after
Regina
’s meeting with the good Dr. Cray, our boy was dead.”

Twilight had passed by now. The sun was long gone, and even the mountains had vanished. There was only darkness.

“Do you know why Kaylie shot him?” Shepherd asked.

“I can only make a surmise. Way I figure, Justin got crazy and violent, and Kaylie had to kill him in self-defense. She ran away for no good reason—she was in shock, not thinking straight—a scared girl, nineteen years old, out of her mind with panic. The cops caught her, and after that she was the one at Hawk Ridge.”

“Under Cray’s care.”

“Yes.”

“He treated her personally.”

“So I was told.” Anson looked at him. “You find some significance in that?”

Shepherd didn’t answer. He studied the dark.

“
Roy
?” Anson pressed. “Just what are you thinking?”

Shepherd thought for a moment longer, then asked, “Do you know how we arrested Kaylie?”

“The newspaper said she was on the grounds of the institute. I don’t know why she would go there. It’s one of the things I wanted to ask her, but they won’t let me in to talk with her.”

“She was stalking Cray.”

“Stalking him?”

“Following him around. Trying to break into his house.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that?”

“She seemed to think he was guilty of a crime. She wanted to prove it.”

“What crime?”

“Murder. A whole series of murders.”

“She never said—I mean, she ...”

“I know what you mean, Anson. She never told you anything about it, in all the years you kept in touch with her.”

“You know I can’t admit to that,
Roy
. Aiding and abetting, they call it.” He looked away. “But if she’d had any suspicion of such a thing, she’d have told me.”

“Not necessarily.” Shepherd hesitated. “Not if she thought it would hurt you.”

“Hurt me? How could anything Cray had done ... ? Oh. I see. It’s not Cray alone you’re thinking of. It’s Justin.”

“Possibly.”

“You think Cray got hooked up with Justin somehow? You think after he met with
Regina
, he sought out Justin on his own and struck up some kind of unholy partnership?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“It doesn’t add up,
Roy
. Whatever else you think of him, Cray’s smart. He wouldn’t need Justin’s help for anything. If he meant to kill somebody, he could do it all alone. What could Justin tell him?”

“How to hunt,” Shepherd said, the idea taking shape in his mind in the moment he uttered it aloud.

There was silence between them, just silence and the dark.

“Yes,” Anson allowed at last. “Yes, my boy could’ve taught him that.”

Shepherd rose from his chair. “What’s the fastest way from here to Hawk Ridge?”

“
Take High Creek Road east
and hook up with Highway Two-sixty-six. That’ll take you to One-ninety-one.”

“I’ll get going, then. Thanks for the root beer.”

Shepherd headed for the porch steps. Anson’s voice stopped him.

“
Roy
. You going to talk to Cray? Is that it?”

“Not Cray. Kaylie. She has a lot to tell me, I think. She tried more than once already. I’m afraid I didn’t listen.” Shepherd took the steps two at a time. “This time I will.”

52

At
seven o’clock
, midway through her three-to-eleven shift, Nurse Dana Cunningham headed down the hallway of Ward B to give Kaylie McMillan her evening injection.

An orderly walked beside her. Cunningham never entered the room of any violent patient without backup. This was a lesson she’d learned years ago at a youth facility in
Phoenix
, when a kid had gouged her cheek with the pull-tab of a soda can. She still saw the small puckered scar every time she looked in a mirror.

She didn’t mind the scar. It was helpful. It was a reminder.

“McMillan’s a tiny little thing,” she told the orderly, “but she killed a guy once—her husband, I think. So watch her.”

The orderly just nodded. Not a talker.

Cunningham’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the tile floor, but otherwise the ward was quiet. Most of the patients—those who were permitted free run of the hospital’s common areas throughout waking hours—were still in the commissary finishing dinner, or in the day hall watching TV.

A few of the hard cases lingered in their rooms, but they were so heavily sedated as to be barely sentient. Well, at least she’d persuaded Cray to consider lightening McMillan’s dosage.

At the door to Kaylie McMillan’s room, she paused and, as a standard precaution, looked through the plate-glass window before entering.

Kaylie was there.

Hanging.

Hanging from the grille of the air vent, Jesus, hanging with a rubber
 
bedsheet
 
around her neck ...

After I’m dead, you’ll know he did it.

Kaylie’s words, less than an hour earlier. Not mere paranoia. A confused confession of suicidal intent.

Cunningham snapped a glance at the orderly, who was staring past her at the sight framed in the window. “Call security,” she said, not shouting, the words precise and calm. “Tell them we have a suicide attempt. Go.”

The orderly ran for the nurses’ station.

Cunningham found the latch button, depressed it with her fist, heard the release of the steel door’s pneumatic lock.

Then she was inside, pushing the plastic chair out of her way and running for Kaylie in the far corner, Kaylie who was suspended near the steel toilet she must have mounted to reach the ceiling, her body swinging slightly, blonde head lolling to one side, her back turned, left arm drooping, and Cunningham grabbed her....

Get her down, get her down. Still a chance to save her if her neck wasn’t broken—and if she hadn’t been hanging for too long ...

The noose was knotted under Kaylie’s chin. Cunningham turned Kaylie toward her, groping for the knot, and she had time to see that Kaylie’s right elbow was crooked close to her chest, her hand wedged under the rubber noose to prevent asphyxiation, and her eyes—blue eyes, pretty eyes—were open wide.

Ambush.

This one word bloomed in Cunningham’s mind, and then Kaylie’s two legs came up together, bending at the knees, and with two
 
slippered
 
feet she kicked the nurse squarely in the face.

Dana Cunningham was a large woman, horse-strong, but the double kick caught her off balance, and she went down in a swirl of vertigo.

Kaylie cast off the noose and dropped to the floor.

Cunningham snatched blindly at Kaylie’s ankle, seized hold, yanked the girl to one knee. Got her, she thought with a flash of triumph, before Kaylie spun sideways and hefted the plastic chair and slammed it down on Cunningham’s head.

Pain dazzled her. She forgot Kaylie, forgot everything except the orderly’s name.
 
“Eddie!”
 
she screamed as Kaylie scrambled past her, out the door.

The orderly was still on the phone with security when he heard a crash from the far end of the ward, then Cunningham’s cry, and he knew there was worse trouble than a suicide.

“Got a situation here,” he said into the phone. “Sounds like—oh,
 
shit.”

He saw her sprinting along the hallway, straight at him—Kaylie McMillan in her blue cotton trousers and blouse.

Behind one of the locked doors, some other patient started a furious rant, roused to excitement by the activity in the hall.

The chief security officer was saying something over the phone, but Eddie didn’t care. He dropped the handset and sidestepped away from the desk into the middle of the corridor, blocking the exit.

“You’re not going anywhere, lady.”

He was sure he could take her. She was only, like, five foot four, hundred pounds, and the drugs she was on ought to make her sluggish, dopey.

Then he saw her face, and there was fever in her eyes, something feral and inhuman.

She ran straight at him. He tensed for a collision. He wished he wore glasses. If she went for his eyes—

At the last instant his nerve faltered just slightly, and he stepped to the side and tried to tackle her as she blew past. He got both arms around her waist, spinning her around, slamming her against a wall, then felt a hot blast of her breath on his face, and he was fumbling for her wrists, fighting to control her hands before she found a way to hurt him.

Worried about his eyes, he forgot his groin, until she reminded him with a sharp knee thrust that bent him double.

“Fuck,” he coughed. “Fuck ... bitch ...”

He took a swipe at her face, catching her cheek, and suddenly her fist came at him, and with a grunt of rage she shattered Eddie’s nose in a rush of bloody mucus.

Pain dropped him to his knees. He clutched his face, amazed at all the blood, humiliated and angry and too dazed to do anything about it.

Distantly he heard her mumbling a low, repetitive chant, urgent and monotonous.

“Time to go. Time to go. Time to go ...”

When he looked up, he saw her retrieve something from the desk—the keys, damn—she needed the keys to unlock the ward door, which was key-operated on both sides.

As she tried each key on the ring, he lurched to his feet.

She spun, wielding the keys as weapons, their sharp teeth protruding from between her knuckles.

He thought of his eyes. “You win,” he whispered, backing off.

The next key she tested was the right one. The ward door opened, and she ran outside, slamming it behind her.

Somewhere the distressed patient was still shouting, his cries ululant and surreal.

“Eddie ... ?”

That was Nurse Cunningham, emerging from Kaylie’s room far down the hall, a glaze of red on her forehead.

“She’s gone,” Eddie said, finding it hard to talk while breathing through his mouth.

“Well, chase her.”

“She took the keys.”

Without the passkey he and Cunningham were locked in, and to be honest, Eddie was just as glad about that. He didn’t want to tangle with the McMillan woman again. She’d been pumped up, more than just crazy. It was like—hell, like she was on speed or something.

Cunningham registered his statement, then slumped against a wall. “Call them.”

Eddie still didn’t react, until the nurse fairly screamed the order.

“Call security, you idiot!”

Security. Damn. He still had the chief officer on the phone.

Eddie stumbled to the desk, found the handset dangling from its cord, and spoke four words into the mouthpiece:

“There’s been an escape.”