Stealing Faces (6 page)

9

Cray tested three keys on the chain before finding the one that opened the motel room’s door. He eased the door an inch ajar before a security chain stopped him.

Such chains were useless. Any hard impact—a shove or a kick—could snap the chain at its weakest link or pull the anchor bolts out of the door frame. But the noise might wake the woman inside.

Eager to proceed, he was almost willing to take this risk, and then the air conditioner clicked off.

Silence.

He couldn’t break the chain now. She was sure to hear it.

Well, there was another option.

Rummaging in his satchel, Cray produced a bent wire hook. Carefully he inserted the hook in the opening, then snagged the chain and lifted it free of its frame.

No more obstacles.

In his pocket he kept a vial of chloroform, purchased from the same medical-supply house that had sold him the liquid nitrogen. He unscrewed the lid and moistened a washcloth.

With the cloth wadded in one fist, Cray pushed gently on the door and slipped inside. He stood for a moment just inside the doorway, a shadow amid shadows, scanning the layout of the room.

A suitcase rested on a folding stand. A television set, glass panel gleaming in the faint ambient glow, was bolted to a counter. Some sort of cheap artwork hung slightly askew on one wall.

All of this was on his left. To his right was the bed, flanked by nightstands with matching lamps, their conical shades dark. Elizabeth Palmer had not bothered to unmake the bed, even to turn down the rumpled spread. She lay across it, supine, her head on a pillow.

Fast asleep. Cray heard her breathing, the sound low and regular.

She did not snore. That was good. He disliked women who snored.

The air conditioner switched on again, the thermostat registering the warmer air flowing in through the open door.

Elizabeth
 
stirred, half-awakened by the machine’s rattle and roar, then settled into sleep again. He heard her low groan, and he knew she was dreaming, and that the dream was unpleasant.

A dream of him, perhaps.

Gently, Cray shut the door.

Like a lover he approached her. He thought of myths. Of Cupid coupling with Psyche in the dark. Of the incubus that hovered wraithlike over its beloved to take her while she slept.

At her bedside he stopped. He stood looking down at her.

She intrigued him. She was a mystery.

He studied her face. Her blonde hair, formerly tied in a ponytail, was loose now, fanning over the pillow. She had a high forehead and soft, gently rounded features. Her mouth was small, the lips pursed in sleep. He saw her eyelids twitch and knew she was dreaming. Of what? he wondered.

Her skin was pale. He saw freckles. A dusting of them on her nose and cheeks and forehead.

And then he knew.

She had changed her hair. It used to be red, worn in a pageboy cut.

And she had grown up, of course. Twelve years was a long time. She had been a teenager then. Must be thirty now. No, thirty-one.

She was slimmer than she’d been—the baby fat was gone—and in its place he saw lean muscles in her arms and in the curve of her neck.

From a girl, she’d become a woman. Nearly everything about her had been altered, but she still had her freckles, and they gave her away.

Cray released a shudder of breath. He was shaking.

He had been calm until this moment. He had been focused. But abruptly there was something tearing at him, some blind confusion, a howling turmoil, and he needed a moment to understand that it was rage.

He thrust his arm down, clapping the wet cloth on her face, pressing it to her nose and mouth, and her eyes flashed open.

In the dark he couldn’t see their color, but he knew they were blue.

From her throat, a strangled noise of panic, good to hear.

Her arms thrashed. He held her down, not even straining. He was far stronger than she was. She had never been any match for him. It had been sheer suicide for her to go up against him on her own. With a shiver of surrender, she went limp. Her eyes closed slowly. Cray held the cloth in place until he was certain she was unconscious.

“I have you, Kaylie,” he whispered. “After all these years, I have you at last.”

10

Whiteout.

The world was erased behind a brilliant screen of pure white, no depth or texture anywhere, only the perfect whiteness of snow on snow.

Elizabeth
 
struggled to understand it, and then she knew it was a dust storm, like the one that had caught her by surprise on Interstate 10 on her way from
 
Las Cruces
 
to Lordsburg five years ago.

She’d been driving the rattletrap Dodge she owned back then, a car that had never been very reliable, when without warning the highway had disappeared in a sheet of windblown sand, even the hood of her car wiped from sight, and for a few terrifying seconds she had coasted at sixty miles an hour, seeing no road and no traffic, praying she would not be part of a chain collision that would leave her mangled in the wreckage.

Then the dust storm blew past her, and she was in a motel room in
 
Tucson
, slumped in an armchair.

And Cray was there.

“Hello, Kaylie,” he said.

She blinked, focusing on the tall man in black, his gloved hands, the shiny pistol aimed at her. The room was very bright. He’d turned on every lamp.

“Your first instinct will be to fight or flee.” Cray’s voice was low, nearly inaudible over the buzzing drone of the air conditioner. “Resist the impulse to do either. I don’t want to shoot you here, but I will, if you make it necessary.”

She shifted in the armchair and heard the creak of old wood. Her bare toes curled into the carpet’s short nap.

Cray hadn’t tied her to the chair, but he had dressed her in her red Lobos jacket, zipping up the front, knotting the long nylon sleeves to trap her hands across her midsection.

Like a straitjacket. Yes. He would have been amused by that.

“Do you intend to be sensible?” Cray pressed, impatience seeping through his cool smile. “Well, do you?”

Slowly she nodded. It was the only way for her to answer. Her mouth was gagged with what felt like a washcloth, tied in place at the back of her head.

“Good. Then just sit tight. We’ll be leaving soon.”

He wedged the gun in the
 
beltless
 
waistband of his slacks, then turned away. She saw that her suitcase lay open on the folding stand where she’d left it.

He was rummaging through her things.

She became aware of the need to breathe. But she couldn’t breathe with the towel clogging her mouth. For an awful moment she was sure she would suffocate or choke to death.

No, wrong, she could breathe, and to prove it she inhaled slowly through her nostrils, feeding her lungs.

When she was calm again, or almost calm, as calm as she could be under the circumstances, facing death at the hands of the man who was her worst enemy—when she was able to think, she tried to reconstruct what had happened.

She’d talked to Anson, then gone to sleep. Bad dreams ...

Then Cray must have broken in, sedated her somehow.

She remembered an instant of alertness, of disorienting terror, and after that, a long stomach-wrenching fall.

And now ...

She was his prisoner.

Again.

In the suitcase Cray found the clipping from the
 
Dallas
 
newspaper. She saw him study it in the lamplight. His lips formed a circle. “So.” The clipping, neatly folded, went into his pants pocket. He resumed searching.

Her gaze traveled around the room and settled on the bed. The bedspread was a rumpled mess, the pillows strewn. Amid the disorder she saw a canvas satchel, something of his, which he’d tossed there.

Just behind it, on the nightstand where she’d left it, lay her purse.

In one lunge she could reach the purse, grab the gun inside. But first she had to free her hands. She tugged at the knotted sleeves. Cray had tied them tight.

She couldn’t break free, and so the gun would do her no good, and she had no hope and no chance at all.

“I intend to dispose of your luggage, of course.” Cray said it casually, merely for the sake of conversation. “I’ll put your suitcases in your car and drive into a bad neighborhood, then leave the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. The car and its contents will disappear quickly enough.”

He was foraging in the bottom of the suitcase. She watched his hands, gloved in black, slip like twin snakes among her undergarments and toiletries.

“But just in case your personal effects are somehow recovered by the police, I need to ascertain that they include nothing that links you to me.”

Finished with the first suitcase, he closed the canvas lid, then walked to the closet and removed the second one.

“You know the sort of item I mean. A diary or journal, a torn-out page of a phone book with my name circled. Perhaps I’m being paranoid. But even paranoids have enemies. Isn’t that right, Kaylie?”

The second suitcase was large and heavy—she’d never unpacked—but with one arm Cray hefted it easily onto the counter. His strength dismayed her. She had forgotten how powerful he was.

Still, she saw a weakness. Cray looked very much like a man in cool control, but it was an act. His hands were not as steady as they should have been, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

He was fighting for composure. Fighting against an emotion so strong it threatened to overmaster him.

Hatred. Hatred of her.

She’d hurt him deeply, and now it was his turn to inflict pain.

Cray unzipped the suitcase and rummaged in it. At the bottom he found a thick manila envelope.

“Well, well. What have we here?”

My
 
life,
 
she wanted to say.
 
That’s what you have.

He opened the envelope and tamped a clutter of papers and laminated cards onto the countertop.

“Let’s see. A
 
New Mexico
 
driver’s license issued to one Ellen Pendleton. Miss Pendleton looks rather like you, Kaylie, except for the brown hair and the rather mousy librarian’s glasses.” He flipped the card aside. “An obvious fake. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”

She hadn’t. It was the first false I.D. she’d obtained after going on the run. A man with a camera had stood her up against a life-size
 
posterboard
 
display of a driver’s license form, the details filled out by hand in large block letters that looked almost like type. He’d taken her picture, then simply laminated the photo.

The results had been terrible, but for fifty dollars she couldn’t complain. Later she’d done better.

“Here we go,” Cray said. “This looks more professional. You were Paula Neilson for a while.” He studied the
 
Colorado
 
driver’s license, the Social Security card, the birth certificate, credit cards, even a voter-registration card, all in Paula Neilson’s name. “These documents are genuine. You got her name from a death roll, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

Knowing that the Ellen Pendleton I.D. would never hold up to scrutiny, she had stopped at a cemetery outside
 
Colorado Springs
 
and found a young woman’s grave. It had been easy to obtain the deceased’s birth certificate from the local department of records; she’d handled the transaction by mail.

With the birth certificate in hand, she had applied for a driver’s license, then obtained a Social Security card and the other items. As Cray had said, all the documents were authentic. For six years she had been Paula Neilson.

“And one more document. Elizabeth Palmer’s birth certificate. Another return from the dead?”

He didn’t want an answer. If he had, and if she could have spoken, she would have told him that Elizabeth Palmer was a name she had made up, and the documents establishing her reality had been created with the aid of a desktop computer, a scanner, and a color printer.

She had done the job herself, during the period in
 
Santa Fe
 
when she did clerical work and had access to the proper equipment. She’d been wary of retaining any one identity for too long.

Later, upon returning to
 
Arizona
, she had exchanged her fake
 
New Mexico
 
driver’s license for a genuine one, issued by the Motor Vehicles Division. From that moment forward, she had been Elizabeth Palmer. It was who she was now. It was her real identity, as far as she was concerned.

She had created
 
Elizabeth
, and she had become
 
Elizabeth
, and she never—never—had been anything else.

Cray would not see it that way, of course. He knew her only from her former life.

He was studying the birth certificate, generated with a desktop publishing program. “
Elizabeth
 
was born on
 
October third, 1967
. Her birthday is coming up. She’ll be thirty-two. I’ll have to remember to send a gift. The other items under Miss Palmer’s name are in your wallet, I suppose.”

She stiffened. She didn’t want him to look in her purse.

He didn’t. He merely shrugged. “Well, you’ve been a busy girl, I’ll give you that.”

Cray dumped the assorted cards and papers back into the envelope, then put the envelope in his satchel.

“I’ll take these with me. Nobody will find them. They would raise too many questions. I don’t intend to have people looking into your disappearance very closely, if at all.”

Rapidly he worked his way toward the bottom of the suitcase, speaking in a low, informal tone.

“I’ve already replaced the set of master keys I stole from the storage closet. The damage to the closet’s lock will be attributed to vandalism. Since nothing was taken, probably the management won’t even bother to file a report.”

He found a favorite book of hers,
 
Watership
 
Down,
 
the one about the rabbits, which she’d bought at a junk sale in Las Cruces and carried with her ever since. Indifferently he riffled the pages, looking for marginal notes or hidden messages. There were none.

“As for your disappearance, I doubt any questions will be raised. In an establishment of this kind, the guests must frequently check out at odd hours. I’ll leave the door unlocked, the room key on the counter with a two-dollar tip. They’ll think you left in a hurry. And they’ll forget you immediately.”

He reached the bottom of the suitcase and took out her photo album. It was a slim spiral-bound volume, only half-filled.

She disliked having her picture taken, for obvious reasons, but at a few parties and picnics over the years she’d been caught on film.

Cray flipped through the sheets of photos, his face unchanging. She wondered what the pictures looked like to him—the silly poses struck by her friends, the sliced watermelon and paper airplanes and big, goofy smiles.

“As long as your car isn’t found in one piece,” he was saying, “no one will have any reason to look for you at all. You’ll have vanished, and no one will even know it.”

The photo album went into his satchel also. He shut the second suitcase. He was done.

“It’s what you’ve wanted, Kaylie. Isn’t it? To disappear completely? Never to be sought, and never found? Why, it’s a dream come true.”

The smile he showed her was so bright with malice, she actually shrank back into the chair.

“Now,” he went on casually, “we’d better be going. I’ll return later for your car and luggage. There’s no hurry about that. Right now I want to get you out the door and on your merry way. But first ...”

From his pocket he withdrew a long strip of black fabric.

A blindfold.

“First I need to be sure you won’t run. I’ve been awaiting our reunion for a long time, Kaylie. I would hate to see it cut short.”

He took a step forward, and she knew this was her last chance. Once her eyes were covered, she would be helpless, and Cray could do anything. Anything.

In that moment she remembered how much she hated this man, hated him more than he could possibly hate her, and a flash of raw fury jolted her out of the chair and straight at him with no thought, no plan of action, only the senseless need to attack.

Lightly, with one hand, he shoved her backward. She fell across the bed, and before she could lash out with a kick, he was on top of her, smiling, God damn him.

“There’s that fight-or-flight instinct I warned you of,” Cray said.

Her hands thrashed inside the jacket’s nylon sleeves, and behind the gag she was screaming, but the screams were only stifled sounds that nobody would hear.