Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

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.

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.

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.