Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

They would come back here and find him boxed in by a wall and a fence and a mound of discarded refuse.

He untied the satchel’s drawstring. Reaching in, he touched the leather sheath of his knife. He could kill one of them, at least, before the other opened fire.

It was better to go out that way than to be carted off to prison, a freak and a laughingstock.

“Ah, fuck it.” That was the driver. “I’m getting too old for this shit. Let’s get out of here.”

“We can ask in the store if they saw anything.”

“Let’s just go,” the driver said, then added in his radio voice, “Mary Twelve.”

He was on his portable, calling in. Cray heard a soft sizzle of static, then the driver again, his words fainter as the two cops walked away.

“The RP is GOA." Gone on arrival. “Negative on the ten-thirty-one…. Yeah, she didn’t leave anything behind…. We’re code four here.”

Cray did not move until he heard the double slam of the squad car’s doors. Then he stepped out from behind the wall. Hidden in shadow at the rear of the alley, he watched the car pull out of the parking lot into the traffic stream on Grant Road. Finally he exhaled a slow breath and lowered his head.

He saw the knife in his hand. It was unsheathed, and his fingers were curled tightly over the handle, holding the weapon poised for a lethal thrust.

He hadn’t even known he’d removed the sheath. The act had been carried out unconsciously, by instinct.

Well, he of all people could hardly be surprised by the limitations of the conscious mind.

Cray sheathed the knife and replaced it in the satchel, then left the alley. Before driving off, he bought a thermos of coffee at the Circle K.

It had been a long night, and if Kaylie had indeed given his name to the 911 operator, then he could expect an equally long day.

“You already told us that. But you haven’t said why. Hey, Mitch? Mitchell? You hear me? Tell us why.”

The raggedy man named Mitch didn’t answer. He had zoned out again, his drawn face going blank, his pale, rheumy eyes losing focus. He stared out the window of the moving car at a blur of strip malls and burrito stands, a trickle of saliva on his chin.

Roy Shepherd sighed. This wasn’t the guy. He was sure of it.

Almost sure.

He didn’t put a great deal of faith in psychological profiles. They were mostly guesswork, and often not very good guesswork at that. He’d worked the streets long enough, first as a patrol cop and now as a plainclothes detective, to know that human nature was too complicated, too multifaceted, to be reduced to a series of simple formulas.

Still, the profiles were reliable in some respects. If the killer was careful and methodical, leaving few clues or none at all, covering his tracks, defying capture, then he almost certainly was not schizophrenic.

The schizos could be violent — oh, yes, Shepherd knew about that — but their violence was apt to be spontaneous, frenzied, splashy. They weren’t organized in their thinking. They were inept at concealment.

Whoever had killed Sharon Andrews in the White Mountains five months ago — killed her and cut off her face and taken it as a grisly souvenir — was surely crazy, a psycho, but not a schizophrenic like glassy-eyed Mitch.

Mitch might have killed somebody, though. He seemed to think he had.

Shepherd settled back in the rear seat of the unmarked car. Two other detectives, Janice Hirst and Hector Alvarez, sat up front. Hirst was driving. Alvarez was rather noisily chewing gum. He always had a stick of Juicy Fruit in his mouth. Shepherd had never seen the man actually eat anything.

He glanced out the window. After fifteen years in Tucson, his whole professional life, he knew the town better than most cabbies. He didn’t even need to check the street signs to know that the unmarked car was crossing the intersection of 22nd Street and Park Avenue.

The warehouse was two blocks away. If there were faces or any other body parts in Mitch’s possession. Shepherd and his colleagues would know soon enough.

“I steal their faces,” Mitch mumbled in a sleepwalker’s voice, and a smile briefly animated his expression.

He’d said the same thing to the patrol cops who arrested him for creating a public disturbance at 6:30 this morning, after Mitch was found directing traffic on Wilmot Road.

I steal their faces.

It had gotten the cops’ attention, at any rate.

Shepherd had taken their report at 7:15. Possible confession in the White Mountains case. Street person saying he took people’s faces.

He hadn’t believed it, and his skepticism had only deepened after a thirty-minute interrogation of the suspect. Mitch was indigent. He lived off handouts and soup-kitchen charity. He slept at shelters and in alleys. He had no driver’s license and no means of transportation.

How was he supposed to have abducted Sharon Andrews and taken her to the White Mountains, roughly a hundred miles northeast of Tucson?

Mitch hadn’t answered that question or very many other questions. He had merely reiterated his mantra with tiresome regularity while his expression varied between epileptic twitches and utter blankness.

The one bit of solid information Shepherd had coaxed from the man was the place where the faces could be found.

CDS , Mitch had said.

When pressed, he carefully repeated the acronym, enunciating each letter with exaggerated precision.

CDS stood for Central District Supply. The company, now defunct, had operated a warehouse near South Tucson. The three letters, painted ten feet high, still adorned the side of the abandoned building.

Looking ahead. Shepherd saw those letters now rising over the roof of a lower building at the end of a dead-end street south of 22nd. “That the place?” he asked Mitch.

Mitch nodded. “CDS.”

“The faces are in there?”

Another nod. “I steal their faces.”

Shepherd looked away. “We’ll see.”

*

Hirst parked in a vacant lot alongside the looming bulk of the warehouse. She and Alvarez climbed out of the unmarked Crown Victoria, then helped Mitch to exit.

He stood vacantly, swaying and humming, his wrists handcuffed behind him. Shepherd had insisted on the handcuffs. He knew you couldn’t take any chances with these people.

Shepherd himself got out last, unfolding himself from the close confines of the sedan’s rear compartment. He was tall and slim, and at thirty-eight he kept himself in shape by rising at 5:30 every day to play vigorous handball at Fort Lowell Park. This morning, after his game, he had driven directly to Tucson police headquarters and showered there. Somehow he had misplaced his comb, and he’d had to smooth and part his close-cropped brown hair with his fingers, a procedure that had left him slightly unkempt.

As he stood by the car, a dusty breeze kicked up and made mischief with his hair, and he knew that if Ginnie were here, he would catch gentle hell from her for the state of his appearance. Ginnie had been the one who’d always straightened his tie, exclaimed over loose threads in his slacks, and made tut-tutting noises when he came down to breakfast in a week-old, unwashed sweatshirt and Jockey briefs.

He smiled, thinking of his wife, but the smile turned to sadness as the wind blew harder. He had not been able to think of Ginnie without sorrow for a long time now. There was a hurt in him, deep and raw, and even an hour of pounding the handball until his palms were numb could not assuage it.

“Show us how to get in,” he told Mitch, hoping the man was sufficiently lucid to comprehend the order.

With a nod, Mitch led the three cops through knee-high weeds and swirls of windblown dust toward the tall chicken-wire fence surrounding the warehouse. He took long, stiff, clumsy strides. He hummed louder.