Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Cray passed the exit for downtown without slowing. Kaylie wouldn’t go into the heart of the city. Too much traffic. Too great a risk of encountering a delay after she had made her call.

The next major street was Speedway. He got off there, heading west for six blocks, looking for the Chevette.

Nothing.

This was hopeless. He would never find her. She would call, and even though the police would surely be skeptical, a squad car would be dispatched to pick up the package she had left.

Squad car.

Of course.

Cray pulled onto the roadside and opened his glove compartment, hoping fervently that Kaylie McMillan, clever as she was, had not thought to look inside and clean out its contents.

She hadn’t. The police-band transceiver was still there.

Six of the channels were preset to Tucson PD frequencies. He activated the scan mode, dialing the volume high. Coded cross talk chattered over the speaker. If the patrol unit had not yet been dispatched, he might hear the call go out.

The scanner, roaming among the various frequencies, buzzed and chirruped with ten-codes and half-intelligible inquiries and responses. He listened for the particular assignment he was waiting for.

Obviously there was a chance Kaylie had gone outside city limits, in which case the call would be handled by a sheriff’s department cruiser. Cray wasn’t monitoring those bands; he couldn’t listen to a dozen channels at once.

Or, if she had called already, he might have missed the dispatcher’s signal. Or the assignment could have been conveyed electronically via the mobile computers installed in TPD cars. Perhaps even now the police had the satchel in their hands, and an evidence technician was examining each separate, incriminating item.

He pulled back into traffic and made a U-turn, then headed east on Speedway. He would travel it for a mile or two beyond the freeway. If he still hadn’t found her car, he would continue north.

Grant Road was the next exit. Maybe he would find her there.

Elizabeth almost got out of the car again, and then in an excess of self-doubt she opened the satchel and checked its contents one last time.

She was sure there was something she’d forgotten. But no, it was all here.

Chloroform. Duct tape. Smelling salts. Pocket flashlight. Locksmith tools. Glass cutter. Suction cup. Spare clip for the gun. And the knife in its sheath.

Okay. She was set. She was ready to go.

No, she wasn’t.

Cray’s ignition key. That was the item she’d overlooked.

The key to the Lexus was the one item that could be definitively connected to Cray. And it was still in the pocket of her blouse.

“You’re cracking up,” she told herself, and she wasn’t sure if it was a joke or not.

If she could overlook so many obvious details, what else was she failing to see? Maybe she ought to wait, have some breakfast. She hadn’t eaten since — when? — since yesterday afternoon, actually. She could find a coffee shop, have some eggs, some coffee. Clear her head.

That was the smart thing to do, but she knew it wasn’t a real option. She had to get this over with. Her fear would only get worse the longer she delayed.

She found the key in her pocket and placed it in the satchel, then carefully knotted the drawstring.

This time she was ready.

She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her pale, frightened face.

“Ready,” she said, confirming the fact, just in case there was any doubt.

Out of the car again. She approached the convenience store. The two phones at the side of the building were both unused at the moment. Good.

She checked out the street. No patrol cars. She looked through the glass wall of the store. No cops inside. Not even a security guard, from what she could tell.

Better and better.

She placed the satchel on the ground below the kiosk, pushing it against the brick wall of the building to hide it from a casual observer. Then she lifted the telephone handset in her gloved hand.

Calling the police. She was really doing it, really calling the police.

She took a breath, fighting for composure, and then with a trembling finger she stabbed three digits.

A long ring. Another.

She was shaking so hard she could barely breathe.

A third ring, cut off early as a businesslike male voice came on the line.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

*

The bitch wasn’t on Speedway.

Cray had covered the wide, well-traveled boulevard in two directions. Twice he’d seen a red hatchback that might have been the Chevette, but both times the sighting had been a false alarm.

At the corner of Grant and Campbell he hooked north. Returning to I-10 would take too long. He would take Campbell to Grant Road and head west.

On the passenger seat, the transceiver stuttered and crackled, his lifeline to the police — and just possibly his last hope.

“I’m calling with information,” Elizabeth said, her mouth pressed close to the handset, “about Sharon Andrews, the woman who was killed in the White Mountains. I know who did it.”

“All right,” the man on the other end said in a low, neutral tone.

She’d heard that tone before, though she wasn’t quite sure where.

“His name is John Cray.” She spelled it. “He lives in Safford. Just outside Safford, I mean. Lives there and works there.”

The words had come out in curiously disjointed blocks of speech. She had rehearsed this conversation many times, but now she couldn’t remember a single thing she’d meant to say.

“Go on,” the man said.

If he was impatient or skeptical, he hid it well. He sounded interested, open to whatever she might say. A calm, reassuring, practiced voice, a doctor’s voice…

Then she remembered where she’d encountered that tone before. It was the quiet, unstressed monotone a psychiatrist used when humoring a difficult patient.

For a moment she froze up, old memories blasting her like a cold wind, and she couldn’t say anything.

“Ma’am?” the 911 operator prompted.

“John Cray,” she said again, just to kick her mind into gear. “He killed Sharon Andrews.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because he tried to kill me, too.”

No, God, that had come out wrong. It sounded paranoid, delusional.

“Tried to kill you?” the man asked with the faintest lilt of skepticism.

“I’ve been watching him, following him.” Still all wrong. She could hear the desperate craziness in her words. “No, look, forget about that. It doesn’t matter how I know. All right? It doesn’t matter….”

She was screwing up, blowing it. If she got this wrong, she might never have another chance. Cray would go on killing, and she couldn’t stop him, couldn’t do anything.

There was too much at stake, and she was too scared. After what she’d been through last night, she wouldn’t have thought she could ever be scared again, but here she was, in a state of stupid panic over a phone call.

Eyes shut, she fought for calm.

“I’m sorry to sound so flustered,” she said softly. “This is hard for me.”

“Of course it is.”

There it was again, that psychiatrist’s voice of his. She hated that voice. It mocked her, and without thinking she snapped, “Damn it, I’m not crazy.”

Shit.

That was exactly the sort of thing a crazy person would say.

She was messing up so badly. She’d had no idea she could be such a fool.

“No one’s suggesting—” the man began, but she cut him off.

“Cray drives a black Lexus sport-utility vehicle. If you look at it, you’ll see it’s pretty banged up. I drove it through the desert to escape from him.”

“You were in the desert?”