Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

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.