Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

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.

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.