Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

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.