Stealing Faces (4 page)

5

Elizabeth Palmer.

Cray repeated the name silently in the confines of his Lexus, over the low hum of the engine.

Elizabeth Palmer.

A reasonably mellifluous name. One he was likely to remember, if he had ever heard it before.

He tried it aloud: “Elizabeth Palmer.”

The taste of the words in his mouth was sweet and subtle and forbidden. He liked it.

He was driving down
Oracle Road
, the highway that descended from the outskirts of the Catalina foothills into
Tucson
’s downtown. Traffic had worsened in the city throughout the past decade, and tonight, at nearly
 
eleven o’clock
, his SUV was part of an endless flow of cars and pickup trucks, while the northbound lanes to his left were a thick mass of headlights.

Ordinarily he disliked city traffic. It made him grateful to live far from town, thirty miles to the east, where the roads at night were dark and quiet under the undimmed stars.

But tonight the congested streets were helpful to him. He would have found it difficult to follow Elizabeth Palmer on an empty road. She might have seen his headlights, as he’d seen the glint of her chrome.

She would never notice him now. He could follow her as far along Oracle as he pleased, keeping her red hatchback just within sight.

No doubt she was heading home—wherever home might be. He was curious about that. He would be able to tell a good deal about her simply from her residence. And once he had subdued her, he could search the place, comb through any file cabinets or desk drawers, learn who she was and what she was after.

His desire to see where she lived was one reason he had chosen not to attack her at the resort. The other was simple prudence. Though he might have surprised her on the fitness trail and rendered her unconscious, he would have had difficulty removing her from the hotel grounds without being seen.

And to kill her at the hotel and leave her there would be too great a risk. Someone might remember that she had left the bar soon after he had, that she had walked in the same direction he had taken.

No, it was better to abduct her from her home, interrogate her in solitude, and when the night’s sport was done, leave her body in the desert for the turkey vultures to find.

After losing her on the fitness trail, he had quickly doubled back to the parking lot. Since obviously she had followed him, it seemed safe to surmise that her car was parked near his own.

He’d moved his Lexus to another part of the complex, and from a hill he had watched the lot until the woman returned, hatless now, and wary. She must have spent two hours looking for him. Good. He wanted her tired, frustrated, not thinking clearly.

She got into a Chevrolet
 
Chevette
, the oldest and most unprepossessing vehicle in the parking area. Irrationally he was disappointed. He’d expected her to drive something better.

Before she left, he trained a pair of collapsible binoculars on the car, and in the light of a sodium-vapor lamp, he read her license plate. An
 
Arizona
 
plate, battered and soiled like the car itself.

He departed from the resort when she did, and followed her at a safe distance, listening to a handheld radio he kept in his glove compartment. The cheap speaker crackled with police codes.

Cray had purchased the radio from a black-market dealer who advertised on the Internet. Commercially available scanners only received police frequencies, but this radio was a transceiver; it transmitted on police bands. Cray could talk to the police.

As the hatchback pulled onto Oracle, Cray had heard a Tucson PD traffic unit call in a ten-seven. The officer was going on a break. Cray had waited a minute or two, to be sure the cop was out of his car and safely preoccupied. Then he pushed the transmit button.

“Traffic five-six,” he said in a neutral voice. “Can you, uh, ten-twenty-eight a stoplight?”

“Go ahead, five-six,” the dispatcher said.

Cray recited the hatchback’s license number. There was silence as the request was processed.

He was sure the dispatcher suspected nothing. His only worry was that the traffic cop might still be monitoring the frequency. If so, he would have heard his unit number, Traffic 5-6, and would alert Dispatch to the scam.

Most likely, however, the cop was using a public rest room or ordering a Big Mac and fries, or engaged in some equivalent proletarian distraction, and paying no attention to his radio at all.

“Traffic five-six,” the dispatcher said.

Cray smiled. “Five-six, go.”

“Twenty-eight returning. December ninety-nine, Chevrolet
 
Chevette
, to Elizabeth Palmer.”

They all talked that way, in shorthand. Cray knew the codes and phrases. The dispatcher meant that the requested information had come up on the computer: the vehicle registration was valid through December, the car was a
 
Chevette
, and it was registered in the name of Elizabeth Palmer.

Cray had repeated the last name in a questioning tone, and the dispatcher had spelled it in code: “Paul Adam Lincoln Mary Edward Robert.”

“Ten-four,” Cray had said, switching the radio off.

Now, as the
 
Chevette
 
passed
Grant Road
, approaching downtown
 
Tucson
, Cray tried out the name one last time:

“Elizabeth Palmer.”

He didn’t know it. The name was new to him.

So this woman, this Elizabeth Palmer, was not someone from his past, not a piece of his life.

She was a stranger.

Very odd.

He would have many questions for her.

And she would answer them all. He would see to that.

Idly he wondered what she was thinking and feeling right now. Most likely she had not eaten dinner. Perhaps she was thinking of a meal she could fix for herself. Her last meal, but she wouldn’t know it.

Or possibly her thoughts had wandered to some current or former boyfriend in whose arms she had experienced the intimacy that passed for passion in this debased age.

She might be musing on love, or her future, or some pretty memory.

He enjoyed this game of speculation. It made her real to him, a person with a life.

Though not for long.

Traffic thinned as Oracle curved into the dark grid of downtown streets. Cray fell farther back.

She must live here. Not a good neighborhood.

He expected her to veer off toward one of the residential districts, but instead she kept going into the heart of downtown, where the street fair had been held on Saturday night. Oracle Road was called
Main Street
here. At the corner of Main and Sixth, Elizabeth Palmer parked her car.

Cray cut down a side street, then circled around to
 
Main
, a block south of the parked car, and found a spot at the curb. He was in time to see Elizabeth Palmer emerge from the
 
Chevette
 
and jaywalk across the street.

There were no apartments nearby, no motels, only a bar with a neon sign.

He knew that bar. He’d stopped there last Saturday and tossed back two fingers of dark
 
Caribbean
 
rum before prowling the crowded streets.

And now Elizabeth Palmer was here, for only one imaginable reason.

She had not headed straight home, as he’d assumed. She was still hoping to find him, the persistent little bitch.

Having seen him in the bar two nights ago, she was revisiting it on the chance that he had returned.

Cray watched her hurry to the front door and step inside. She’d thrown on a jacket, he observed, some sort of cheap zippered thing that looked too big for her. Master of disguise, he thought with a slow shake of his head.

By the end of the night, all her disguises would be stripped away, even that most personal and intimate disguise known as the self.

Then she would not be Elizabeth Palmer at all. She would be the primal essence of the human animal—the bundled nerve cells of the brain stem, the autonomic functions of the body.

She would be pure, liberated, and absolutely honest for the first and only time since infancy.

It was a wondrous transformation. He’d written about it in his book. Not everything, of course. He’d omitted the more dangerous ideas. Still it was remarkable, the things a person could write from behind the cloak of disinterested scholarship.

Imagine if he were to approach a stranger and tell him that his life was worthless and meaningless, his most cherished virtues a lie, his aspirations and convictions a stupid joke. Cray would be lucky to escape a fistfight.

But write it in a book, and the world turned upside down. Tell people, as he had, that their personalities were an illusion, their every conscious thought only an irrelevant by-product of biological processes, and that they were apes, or lower than apes—automatons, robots—and they shook his hand, requesting his autograph and wanting more.

He spat in their faces, and they licked it up like candy. He had expected angry denials, defensive ridicule—anything but what he’d received.

Money.

Acclaim.

The Mask of Self
 
was
 
in its fourth printing. There was a trade paperback edition in the works, with a new foreword by the author. His book had not quite achieved bestseller status, but he had earned enough to pay for the Lexus and to fund a comfortable portfolio of diversified investments.

Yet in retrospect he saw that his amazement was misplaced. He had spoken the truth, and it had filtered through the layers of deception people wove around themselves. He should not have been surprised. In their instinctive, visceral responses—in the bodily wisdom that the ancient Greeks called
 
thumos
—people knew what they essentially were. They knew and, hating the disease of consciousness, they instinctively sought a cure.

The door of the bar opened, and Elizabeth Palmer emerged. She’d spent only a couple of minutes inside, enough time for a quick look around, perhaps a question asked of the bartender—Have you seen a man
 
in
 
here, all dressed in black? She hurried to her car, her steps nimble and fast.

When the
 
Chevette
 
pulled away, Cray followed.

She would keep looking, of course. Though she must be tired and hungry and scared, she would not give up.

That was all right. Cray had time. He had all night.

And, like her, he could be persistent in the chase.

6

Cray stayed well behind the
 
Chevette
, keeping the hatchback just within sight, counting on Elizabeth Palmer not to check her rearview mirror too closely. He knew she wouldn’t. She was on the hunt, or so she thought. Her attention would be fixed on what lay ahead.

She led him to the seedy strip of trailer parks, cheap motels, and bars called, inevitably, Miracle Mile. The district was crowded even at this late hour. Young men in ponytails and buzz cuts stood in angry clusters under the streetlights. Tattooed and mini-skirted women walked past, eliciting the usual simian responses.

The area was a center of prostitution and drug use. Many of the motels were rented by the hour. An adult bookstore competed for business with a gospel mission. There was a great deal of neon everywhere, and there was darkness in the places where the bright lights didn’t reach.

It had been two weeks since Cray’s last visit to Miracle Mile. Had Elizabeth Palmer been tailing him even then? Had she shadowed him for that many nights before he became aware of her?

The establishment he’d patronized was a topless bar, not his usual sort of place, but he’d been in a restless mood, the first phase of his killing cycle.

He watched as the
 
Chevette
 
pulled behind the building and made a quick circuit of the parking lot. The persistent Miss Palmer was looking for his Lexus.

Failing to find it, she continued down the street. Cray cruised well behind her, past a department store that had shut its doors and was now a garish mausoleum of dead hopes, spray-painted with
 
taggers
’ signs, the parking lot a wasteland of asphalt inside a sagging security fence.

At a bowling alley the
 
Chevette
 
again performed a quick search of the perimeter. Cray, parked at a curb a block away, tried to fathom why she would look there. He was no bowler, for God’s sake. The activity was far too
 
declasse
 
for his tastes.

And yet ...

He
 
had
 
gone there, hadn’t he?

Cruising the strip, he’d seen a woman enter the bowling alley on a Friday night. She had a golden fall of hair, and a wide, laughing mouth that intrigued him. He’d parked and sought her out inside. But predictably she had proven to be of no interest whatsoever, merely a glorified barfly, chortling raucously at the coarse jokes of her companions, using foul language, embarrassing herself. After eavesdropping on her conversation long enough to determine her true character, Cray had left.

Yes. He’d done that. But not very recently. Perhaps as long as a month ago.

Elizabeth Palmer could not have tailed him for a month. She wasn’t good enough, slick enough. He would have spotted her long before tonight.

Or would he?

Making eye contact with her at the street fair had been pure accident. If it hadn’t been for that split second of awareness, the instant when he saw her and sensed she was watching him, would he even have noticed her in the resort bar?

She could have been after him for thirty days, thirty nights. Staking out his home, then following him whenever he left in the evening. Following remorselessly, tirelessly, night after night. Following and watching.

For a month. A month ...

It was only a little more than a month ago that Sharon Andrews’ body had been found.

The discovery had been Cray’s fault. For the first time in twelve years, he’d gotten careless.

Ordinarily he was meticulous in the disposal of his victim’s remains. But Sharon Andrews had led him on a long chase, and by the time he ran her down, night was ebbing. He had used a collapsible shovel to dig a shallow grave near the stream bank. Sealed inside an extra-large, heavy-duty trash bag to discourage scavengers, she was laid in the hole and covered over.

That should have been the last anyone saw of her, but Cray hadn’t counted on the summer flash flood season. In late August, torrential rains had fallen in the
 
White Mountains
. The stream had overflowed, the rush of water widening the banks, and Sharon Andrews had been dislodged from her grave and swept downriver.

He had buried her too close to the stream. A stupid error. Had he been less tired and more clearheaded, he would have moved her higher up the hillside. Or perhaps he should have simply left her in the open for the scavengers to find.

The trash bag, knotted shut, had kept her body dry. Without moisture, bacteria could not thrive. Some mummification had taken place, but little decay. And because the body was well preserved, no one could miss the obvious mutilation.

WOMAN’S FACELESS CORPSE FOUND IN
 
WHITE MOUNTAINS
.

That had been the headline in the Tucson
 
Citizen
 
on the day after the storm, when, at a campground three miles from the site of the kill, Sharon Andrews was found entangled in a floating deadfall, bobbing amid ribbons of shredded plastic. A pair of forest rangers fished her from the water.

Nothing about the corpse or the plastic bag could lead investigators to a suspect. The bag was a common type, available anywhere. The two bullets imbedded in Sharon Andrews’ leg and hip were 9mm semi-jacketed hollow points, untraceable.

No real harm had been done. Even so, Cray hated having his work uncovered. He endured two weeks of media speculation on the twisted psychology of the killer.

The coverage enraged him. He felt violated.

Oddly, every expert assumed that the mutilation was postmortem. No one seemed able to conceive of the truth—that Sharon Andrews had been alive to witness her own final unmasking.

Pain had killed her almost at once, but not before Cray had shown her the trophy he’d taken. She had stared at her own face in his gloved hands, and it had stared back in eyeless mockery, the last thing she would ever see.

That was the whole point, and it was so very obvious, yet not one of them could see it. Not one.

Cray shook free of those thoughts and focused on recalling the exact date of the body’s discovery.

August 17. Five weeks ago.

Elizabeth Palmer had begun following him just afterward. Or so it would appear.

He pondered this sequence of events as he chased the little hatchback into
 
South Tucson
, a blighted barrio landscape of rusty low-riders and security-barred windows and brick walls tattooed by gang graffiti.

Brave
 
Elizabeth
 
risked a look into a bikers’ bar and then a noisy pool hall.

Cray had been to both places within the past month. He could not recall exactly when.

She couldn’t have followed him inside on every occasion. She would have attracted notice in the rougher places—the notice of the other patrons, certainly, if not of Cray himself. Perhaps she had sat outside, watching from her car as Cray entered and left.

If so, the tableau was reversed now. It was Cray who sat and watched, sunk deep in the Lexus’ leather seat.

She did not give up until Cray’s dashboard clock read
 
2 A.M.
 
The bars were closing. There was nowhere left to look.

Now she could only go home. She must be worn out, poor thing.

The
 
Chevette
 
headed north on
 
Park Avenue
, then west on
Silverlake
Road
, toward the interstate. Cray, staying far behind, watched the red rectangles of her taillights.

Elizabeth
 
drove steadily, never exceeding the speed limit. At every stop sign and red light she came to a full stop. She never ran the yellows. She used her turn signal even when no other vehicle was near.

Such caution seemed out of character for a huntress sniffing John Cray’s spoor.

Then abruptly she turned down a side street, the move so quick it had to be unpremeditated. Cray worried that she’d seen him behind her and was trying to shake him off.

No. There was a simpler explanation.

A few blocks ahead, the light bar of a Tucson PD patrol unit shimmered at the curb. A police car was making a traffic stop.

Cray did not take the side street. He continued past the police car and the motorcyclist who’d been pulled over, then waited at an intersection until he saw the
 
Chevette
 
reappear a quarter mile ahead.

Elizabeth Palmer had gone out of her way to avoid passing a police car.

And now Cray knew why she drove so timidly.

She was afraid of being stopped. Afraid of the police.

Now why would that be,
 
Elizabeth
? he wondered. What would a nice girl like you have to fear from an officer of the law?

He couldn’t guess, but he began to understand why she would follow him on her own. If the police were off limits for some reason, then she would have no choice but to handle things herself.

It seemed a heavy burden for such frail shoulders.

He would be glad to lift it from her, to give her peace.

He expected her to get on Interstate 10, but instead she passed beneath it, then pulled into a motel on the frontage road.

She was not even a local resident. And the motel, a ramshackle one-story building amid miles of desolation, looked as seedy as the car she drove. Whoever she was, she had no money.

She was nobody. Nobody at all. A stranger from out of town, alone, engaged in a secret quest. Who would miss her when she disappeared?

Cray parked on the frontage road, then retracted his side window and stared at the motel parking lot across a waste of weeds and flat, parched land. Trucks howled past on I-10, shaking the world.

He watched as Elizabeth Palmer got out of the car and headed toward the motel. Halfway there, she stopped, lifting her head to look around sharply.

“Do you know I’m here,
 
Elizabeth
?” Cray asked in a whisper. “Do you feel my gaze?”

With a dismissive shake of her head, she resumed walking. At the side of the building she fumbled in her purse for her keys, then unlocked the door of her room.

The door shut behind her, and a light came on behind closed drapes. There was a pause, and suddenly her shadow passed over the drapes, sweeping like a pendulum. Again. Again.

She was pacing. Upset.

“You’re tired, child,” Cray said. “You need your rest.”

She would fall asleep eventually. Cray could wait.

Another bevy of trucks roared past, and then in a stretch of sudden stillness, Cray heard the distant wail of a coyote somewhere on the flats, another predator like himself.