Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

“Yes, he took me there. He always takes his victims into the wilderness. Mountains, desert — he hunts them. It’s a sport for him. He lets them go, and he tracks them, hunts them down like animals. It’s what he was going to do to me, but… but I got away.”

This sounded rather unlikely even to her.

“I have proof,” she added.

“What sort of proof?” The voice sounded almost bored now.

Had he already dismissed her as a nut? Maybe she shouldn’t have called 911. Maybe it would have been smarter to try talking to one of the detectives. Or a desk officer. Maybe…

“A bag,” she said. “A satchel. Cray’s satchel — I took it from him. It’s got all his stuff, the stuff he uses to break into places and kidnap women. There’s some ammunition in it, and a knife. The knife he used on Sharon Andrews and the others. And the ignition key to the Lexus. It’s all in here, the proof you need, and all you have to do is come and get it.”

“Perhaps you could bring it in.”

“I’m leaving it for you. Here, at this phone. You already know where I’m calling from. You do an instant trace on nine-one-one calls.”

“Actually, our trace equipment is malfunctioning at the moment. If you could tell me your location…”

This had to be a lie, and why would he lie to her, if not to buy time?

The squad car had already been dispatched. It was coming.

Coming right now.

“Ma’am?”

Elizabeth slammed down the handset, and then she was running to her car.

*

Cray was cruising west on Grant Road in heavy traffic, scanning the roadside for a parked Chevette, when the call came over the transceiver.

“Mary Twelve”—the dispatcher was calling for a patrol unit—“requesting a ten-twenty.”

“Uh, we’re at Oracle and Prince,” the unit answered.

“Okay, we need you to make contact with a female RP at a pay phone. Circle K store. Grant and Fifteenth Avenue. This is a code two incident, code two.”

“Ten-four.”

An RP was a reporting person.

It was Kaylie. Had to be.

Cray locked in that channel on the radio, then accelerated, weaving between two cars into a clear stretch of road. Fifteenth Avenue was twenty blocks away. Near the interstate.

She was calling from a phone at a convenience store, and she meant to make a quick escape and leave the satchel for the cops to find.

The plan might work. He wasn’t sure he could beat the squad car to the scene.

“Mary Twelve, we got some additional information on that RP. She’s not expecting to be contacted. Nine-one’s holding her on the line. It’s a — sounds like it could be a disturbed individual.”

“Ten-four.”

Disturbed individual. Cray smiled at that diagnosis as he maneuvered from lane to lane, blowing past slower traffic.

Ahead, the stoplight at First Avenue cycled to red, stopping a logjam of cars. He couldn’t afford to be stuck at the light. With a spin of the wheel, he whipped into the right lane and cut north on First, then veered west on the first side street.

He sped through a residential neighborhood, past rows of one-story homes with dirt yards and RVs in the driveways.

“ETA, Mary Twelve?” the dispatcher asked.

“ETA in two minutes.”

Two minutes.

It would be close.

The next major street was Stone Avenue. Traffic was running north and south, but he skidded into a gap, southbound, and immediately hooked onto Grant again, racing west.

“Mary Twelve, we got a nine-one hang-up on that RP.”

She’d fled.

“ETA one minute,” the patrol unit responded.

They were still hoping to catch her.

Probably they wouldn’t succeed, but they would find the package she had left for them — unless Cray found it first.

He looked ahead. Coming up was Oracle Road, the six-lane highway he’d taken last night when he followed the Chevette south from the foothills.

A red light at that intersection would last a good two minutes, and he would have no chance.

The light was green as he approached, but the DON’T WALK sign was solid red, and he knew a change was coming.

Yellow.

He floored the gas, and his tachometer buzzed into the danger zone.

The car in front of him was stopping, damn it, and the lane to his left was jammed.

On the shoulder, then.

He swung the wheel, and the Lexus bounded around the slowing traffic and streaked through the intersection under a red light. Somewhere a horn blared.

Close now. Fifteenth Avenue was within sight.

The Circle K appeared in waves of shimmering heat, a mirage of hope.

Patrol car? He didn’t see one. Not yet.

Then he saw a flash of red shoot away from the curb a block past the Circle K, and he knew it was the hatchback with Kaylie McMillan at the wheel.

For an insane moment all he wanted to do was follow the little car, yes, follow it at a distance, unseen, follow until Kaylie thought she was safe, and when she pulled over—

Grab her. Take her away. Kill her slowly. And at the climax, lift her face from her skull, his greatest prize.

But he couldn’t do that.

The satchel was what mattered.

She must have left it by the phone.

The Chevette disappeared down the road, streaking toward the freeway, and Cray let it go.

Cutting speed, he hauled the Lexus into the Circle K’s parking lot and killed the engine.

Then he was out and looking around desperately for a pay phone. None was in sight. But there had to be one here. At the side of the building, perhaps. He checked one side — nothing. Ran to the other.

Two phone kiosks, neither in use.

The satchel, where was the satchel?

There. On the ground beneath the nearer phone.

He seized it, then looked outside and saw a Tucson PD Crown Victoria roll into the lot.

They were here.

And he was trapped at the side of the building with the evidence in his hands.

The store’s brick wall loomed on his left. A hurricane fence, too high to climb, faced him to his right.

Directly ahead of him, the two cops were getting out of the car.

He could ambush them, kill them both.

Except he couldn’t. He’d left his Glock in the Lexus.

Anyway, the bitch would have mentioned his name over the phone. Killing these two errand boys would serve no purpose except to confirm her story.

Run, then.

He turned and sprinted toward the rear of the store, the satchel thudding against his hip. Between the back wall and the fence protecting the adjacent vacant lot, there was a narrow gap, barely wide enough to squeeze through.

Cray eased into the gap and came up against a clutter of planks and cinder blocks, the remnants of some minor construction job, thrown back here and forgotten. The mess was high enough to block his path. He couldn’t advance.

Breathing hard, he hugged the wall and listened as the cops came around to the phones.

“—said there was some kind of bag she left,” one of them was saying.

“What are we, UPS, picking up parcels?”

“I’m just telling you what it said on the MDT.”

Mobile Data Terminal. The squad car’s computer. A fuller explanation must have been transmitted electronically, and the cop riding shotgun had read it while his partner drove.

“Well,” the driver said, “I don’t see any damn bag.”

“She was probably a mental case anyway.”

“Did they say what kind of bag?”

“Nah.”

“Like a shopping bag? Or a suitcase?”

“They just said bag. What difference does it make? Nothing’s here.”

There was a pause, long enough to let Cray think they had gone away, and then the driver said, “Think she could’ve taken off around back?”

“We can check it out.”

Cray stiffened.