Stealing Faces (5 page)

7

The room was quiet, at least.
 
Elizabeth
 
was grateful for that. She had spent much of the afternoon trying to block out the pornographic sounds from the adjacent units.

The motel, if she could judge by the scarcity of cars in the parking lot, was largely empty now. Apparently it did most of its business during the day.

Many times in the past twelve years she had been holed up in a place like this. Sometimes it was a motel just off the interstate, and sometimes an apartment house that rented single rooms by the week, with a common bathroom down the hall.

There had been a nice cottage in
 
Santa Fe
, which she’d rented for nearly a year while doing clerical work at an accounting firm. Trellises of climbing roses had garlanded the patio; she would sit outside in the soft springtime air.

That had been one of the good times.
 
Colorado Springs
 
had been good also. She’d spent six months there, in a two-bedroom apartment with modern appliances and quiet, respectable neighbors. She had been tempted to buy a cat and settle in, but then things had gone wrong and she’d had to clear out fast, loading up her
 
Chevette
 
in the night.

So much running, twelve years of it, crossing state lines, moving from the desert to the mountains, from cities to small towns.

A month ago—had it been only a month?—she’d been living at the edge of a Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area, where the sculpted buttes took great jagged bites out of the turquoise sky. She had been a waitress in a truck-stop diner, a job that always seemed strangely glamorous in the movies. Her feet were sore every night, and in her sleep she would dream of balancing stacks of dishes.

She’d run and run, and now here she was in southern
 
Arizona, not fifty miles from where her zigzag trek had started.

Elizabeth
 
kicked off her shoes, tossed her jacket on the armchair by the standing lamp. It was a nylon jacket, red with silver and white trim, bearing the insignia of the
 
University
 
of
 
New Mexico Lobos. She’d bought it in
 
Albuquerque, on an excursion from
 
Santa Fe—just one of many things she’d picked up in her wanderings.

Barefoot, she paced the floor. A window air conditioner rattled and hummed, stirring a lukewarm breeze. The spotty beige drapes shivered in the current of air.

She ought to sleep, but worry had her in its clutch and wouldn’t let go.

Worry ... and guilt.

“Shouldn’t feel guilty,” she murmured. “Not your fault.”

She’d done her best. She had methodically revisited every one of Cray’s hangouts from his previous outings. A wasted effort, and an exhausting one, but at least she had tried.

Still, trying wasn’t good enough when a woman might be in danger, somewhere in this city or its outskirts.

“Well, maybe he won’t do it tonight. Maybe he went straight home.”

She hoped this was true. But if it wasn’t—if Cray was a killer and tonight was his night to strike—then she wouldn’t be there to stop him when it mattered.

She wondered how many he had killed. She knew of only two. One case was recent, and the other was from many years ago. But there had to be more.

The recent case was the murder of Sharon Andrews. The corpse swept downriver in a flash flood. A corpse without a face.

The story of the body’s discovery, sufficiently gruesome to make the news wires, had appeared in the August 18 edition of
 
The
 
Dallas
 
Morning News.

On the nineteenth of August a trucker left the paper at the diner where
 
Elizabeth
 
worked. She kept it.
 
Dallas
 
might be a place to go, when she had to run again. She wanted to check the classified ads, get a feel for the job situation.

She didn’t get around to looking at the paper until the evening of August twenty-first. As she flipped through the coffee-stained pages, an AP story datelined
 
Apache County,
 
Arizona, caught her eye.

She read it.

And she knew.

That night she left for
 
Tucson. She drove south on two state highways, then on Interstate 17, stopping only once, at
 
7 A.M., to call the diner and quit her job.

It was best to leave no loose ends. She didn’t want her boss to file a missing-persons report.

When she arrived in town, taking a furnished apartment on the south side,
 
Tucson’s morning and afternoon papers ran daily stories on the Sharon Andrews case, and the TV news led with the story for a week. But no progress was made, and the fear and excitement subsided.
 
Tucson
 
was not quite a metropolis, but it had grown a lot since 1987, when she had last seen it. The metro area population—city and suburbs and unincorporated county land—was pushing one million.

People were busy. Life went on.

Except, of course, for seven-year-old Todd Andrews, and
 
Sharon’s parents and friends, and the police detectives and sheriffs’ deputies working the case in two counties, and Elizabeth Palmer herself.

Elizabeth’s life had not gone on. It had been stalled and frozen in a compulsive routine.

Every day she watched Cray’s residence. She followed him in the evenings. He had gone out a dozen times, with increasing frequency throughout the month.

She watched. She waited. She took no job, earned no money.

As her savings dwindled, she found it hard to make the weekly rent even on her barrio apartment. Last week she’d switched to a one-star motel on Miracle Mile. She’d stayed until even twenty-five dollars a night seemed a little steep.

Two days ago she had found this place by the interstate. Nineteen dollars a night. She could afford to stay here another three days. Then she would be sleeping in her car.

And if Cray was not, in fact, the man who’d murdered Sharon Andrews ...

Then all the expense and risk she had assumed by returning to
 
Tucson
 
would have been wasted. She would be broke and homeless and jobless, with nothing to show for it but a paranoid delusion.

Well, if so, she would go about rebuilding her life, that’s all. She had done it before.

And though she was tired now, she knew exhaustion would not last. There was something in her that pushed her forward even when the massed resistance of the world seemed to be driving her back. In her worst moments, in flophouses and alleyways, when all hope should have been gone, she’d felt it—some living power, an energy that seemed to renew itself even when she fought against it, preferring despair.

She would survive. But some other woman might not.

The thought made her weary, or more precisely, made her suddenly aware of how weary she already was.

She stretched out on the soiled bedspread and shut her eyes, but sleep would not come.

She knew what she needed. And though it was nearly two-thirty in the morning, she didn’t hesitate as she reached for the bedside phone and called her father-in-law.

She made it a collect call, charging it to his account, because her money was running low. He wouldn’t mind.

He answered on the second ring. The phone must have awakened him, but she heard no grogginess in his deep, slow voice.

“Anson McMillan.”

“It’s me,” she said.

“Figured as much.”

“I’m sorry to call so late.”

“Don’t bother yourself about that. How are you, darling?”

“Going along.”

“Any trouble?”

She wanted to say yes, all kinds of trouble. She wanted to tell him everything, but she couldn’t. The truth would be too hard for him. He was a strong man, but everyone’s strength had its limits.

“No,” she said lightly. “I was just feeling restless, that’s all.”

“Got a job?”

“Sure.” Another lie.

“Enough money? There are ways for me to get you money, you know.”

“I’m fine, Anson.”

“I’ll bet you don’t get enough to eat. You always were all skin and bones.”

“I’ve put on a few pounds.”

“I doubt that. Where are you now?”

She smiled at the clumsy way he tried to sneak that question in. “You know I won’t say. And you don’t want to be told.”

“I guess I don’t. Best not to know. You could come by sometime. For a visit.”

“I can’t chance it.”

“They’re not looking anymore. It’s been too long.”

“They’ll always be looking And people know me there. It’s too dangerous.”

“All right, that’s so, but there are other places you could go and settle down. You don’t need to stay on the move, not forever. You can’t live that way.”

“I’ve done okay so far.”

“If you call it doing okay, living from day to day.”

Don’t we all live that way? she wondered, but she didn’t ask this question.

Instead she made him tell her what he’d been up to, and he obliged, knowing why she wanted to hear it.

She curled up against the pillows and listened to him speak of the rusty porch door he’d replaced, and the new gun he’d added to his collection, and the food he put out for the rabbits every morning. She heard him light a cigarette as he went on talking.

“Went to the cemetery the other day,” he said. “Placed a new wreath on
 
Regina’s grave. Nice day, warm and clear. No rain yet, and it’s still too early for snow, even in the high peaks of the range.”

He spoke more about the weather.
 
Elizabeth
 
noticed that he had said nothing of visiting Justin’s grave. She wondered if he’d laid a wreath there also. She doubted it.

After a long time she said, “I’d better let you get back to sleep.”

“You don’t have to. You know me. I can talk all night.”

“It’s okay, Anson. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Always a pleasure hearing yours. I wish ...”

He didn’t finish. She knew everything he meant to say but couldn’t.

“So do I,” she whispered. “But we play the hand we’re dealt. Isn’t that what you used to say?”

“I said it. Don’t know that it means much.”

“It does to me.”

They said their good-byes. She held the receiver to her ear long enough to hear him click off, and the sad silence after.

She cradled the phone, feeling calm again. Things were bad, but she would go on. If she had to sleep in her damn car, she would. She’d faced worse problems and endured.

And as for Cray ...

Tomorrow she would watch Cray again. Tonight there was nothing she could do.

At this very moment he might be lurking outside his next victim’s window, preparing an abduction and another kill.

If so, she couldn’t stop him.

She stretched out on the bed, hearing the creak of old mattress springs, and turned off the bedside lamp. The sudden darkness was heavy and hot, and she let herself fall into it, as into a deep hole. When she reached the bottom of the hole, she was asleep.

Her last half-waking thought was of Sharon Andrews.

Who’s next? a voice asked, a voice that might have been
 
Elizabeth’s own.

But she heard no answer.

8

Cray waited an additional half hour after the motel room’s window went dark, giving Elizabeth Palmer sufficient time to fall asleep.

Then he pulled on black leather gloves and removed his Glock 9mm from the rear storage compartment of the Lexus.

Cray never handled the Glock bare-handed. There were no prints on the gun or on any of the seventeen rounds loaded in the magazine. The gun itself was unregistered and untraceable. It could never be linked to him.

Also in the storage compartment was a canvas satchel—black, of course—with a drawstring clasp. His little black bag. Cray smiled.

Time to make a house call.

Slowly he drove into the motel parking lot and found a vacant space near Elizabeth Palmer’s room. He switched off his lights and engine, then sat for another long moment, allowing his eyes to readjust to the dark.

He had excellent night vision. Though the moon had long since set, he could see every detail around him. He could even read the
 
unilluminated
 
dial of his watch without strain.

The time was
 
3:30
 
when Cray got out of the Lexus.

He stood with his satchel in hand, breathing the warm, dusty air. The parking lot was a flat stretch of asphalt amid a flat stretch of desert under a huge sky dizzy with wheeling stars. Cray felt the immensity of the world and his smallness in it. He felt lonely and almost afraid.

It was always this way for him, at these moments. At heart a human being was only a small, scared animal in the night. When death was a safe abstraction, this fundamental dread could be evaded.

There was no evasion now.

* * *

Elizabeth
 
was in an unfamiliar apartment, a place she’d never been before. Yet strangely she felt certain it was her place; she lived here, and parts of it were known to her.

The tiny efficiency kitchen with the compact fridge under the stove—it was like the kitchen of her studio apartment in
 
Taos.

The living room opened onto a patio very similar to the one she’d loved in
 
Santa Fe.

The bathroom with the dripping faucet was straight out of
 
Salt Lake City, where she’d spent three cold months.

I guess this is all the places I’ve lived,
 
Elizabeth
 
thought. A composite of my life.

She wandered from room to room, the view through the windows constantly changing, then found an open door that led to a one-car garage, the type that came attached to a modest house.

The garage was part of her life too, but she couldn’t recall quite how. There was no car parked in it, and she explained this to herself by saying aloud, “He’s out.”

But she didn’t know who
 
he
 
was.

Didn’t know—yet part of her did, or almost did, and suddenly she was sure she didn’t want to be in the garage.

And she wasn’t. She was in a park, someplace green and hot, under a tree, just sitting, and this was much better, except there were ants, so many of them, a flood tide of crawling red.

She jumped up and brushed them off her bare legs, and her hands came away red and sticky, glazed with some viscid awfulness that smelled like copper pennies.

She turned away and smelled the ocean breeze as she walked along the seashore, her hands clean again, cool water lapping her bare feet. The sea surged, pulling in sheets of seaweed.

One green clump, bobbing in the foam, caught her attention. She bent to retrieve it, lifting it in both hands, a flat, limp oval. As she raised it to the sun, she saw that it wasn’t seaweed at all.

It was a woman’s face.

* * *

Cray approached the door of Elizabeth Palmer’s room and studied the lock. As he had expected, it was a dead bolt, key-operated. He knew the type. The bolt had a one-inch throw and no beveled edge, and it was not spring-loaded. Even with one of his locksmith tools, he would find the lock almost impossible to pick.

He could break a window or force the lock, but either way he would make noise, perhaps enough noise to be audible above the rattle and hum of the air conditioner.

There might be a better approach.

At the rear of the building, near a stairwell where a soda machine cast its lurid glow on an intaglio of obscene graffiti, Cray found a door to what was evidently the custodial storeroom, secured with a Yale padlock.

He opened the satchel and took out a stainless steel canister, the approximate size and shape of a thermos but with a spray nozzle and trigger. He had purchased it from a chemical company specializing in hospital supplies. The canister held two liters of liquid nitrogen pressurized at 135
 
p.s.i
., with a temperature of minus 320 degrees.

Cray positioned the nozzle against the padlock and released a jet of mist. The air crystallized in a cloud of fairy-dust sparkles, and through his gloves he felt a stab of sheer cold, arctic and unreal, in his fingers and wrists.

When he withdrew the canister, the padlock was shiny with ice.

There was a hammer in the satchel. Cray tapped the padlock once. Chilled and brittle, it shattered magically. The pavement at his feet glistened with a shower of bright metal shards.

Inside the storeroom, amid mops and slop buckets and other filth, he found a set of master keys.

Every room in the motel was now open to him. But he had an interest in only one.

* * *

A woman’s face.

Elizabeth
 
saw it, and the shock was fresh and vivid, and for a moment she was startled half-awake. Dimly she knew she was in bed somewhere, a room, one of the countless way stations she had visited.

The ocean was gone, and the foam, the seaweed, the mask that had drooped in her hands.

But she saw that mask still. She had seen it for years, in dreams and in memories.

It was the face of a woman she had never known, a woman whose name was a mystery. A young woman, probably, and pretty, or so it seemed.

She might have had a lover, a family, sad moods, secret fears. But all
 
Elizabeth
 
knew of her was the wrinkled remnant she had held so briefly under the flicker of a sixty-watt bulb.

The woman, whoever she was, had meant nothing to
 
Elizabeth
, and yet, in a different way, she had meant everything. She had changed
 
Elizabeth
’s life, made her an outcast, taught her fear. She was the reason for all the peril and suffering of the last twelve years.
 
Elizabeth
 
ought to hate her for that, and for the nightmares she brought.

But it was wrong to hate her, of course. She was only another victim.

The first victim. Far from the last.

The dream receded, and
 
Elizabeth
 
yielded to a new and better sleep, a sleep without nightmares.