Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

“Yes, sir, Captain.” Rudy nodded. “I matched it to the entry in the nine-one-one log.” All 911 calls were recorded, and the time of each call was marked by the operator in a duty log.

When Rudy was gone, Brookings explained what they were about to hear. “We got an anonymous tip this morning. RP was a woman. She gave us a name. Of course, this had nothing whatsoever to do with crazy — what’s his name?”

“Mitch,” Shepherd said.

“Right. Crazy Mitch. But the call and the arrest happened pretty much at the same time, and you know how things get put together even when they have no connection. Tip-off in the case, and then an arrest of a guy who says he steals faces — bingo, the killer’s in custody.”

Alvarez snapped his gum.

“Now we all get to hear what our anonymous source had to say.” Brookings smiled. “Pretty exciting, huh, Shep?”

“I’m thrilled,” Shepherd intoned with the required ironic frown as he pushed back his chair.

The truth was, he did feel a mild rush of adrenaline. So far the various tips that had come in by phone and mail had proven worthless, but somebody out there might know the killer’s identity.

Maybe this woman was the one.

Brookings played the tape. Shepherd listened, jotting notes on his memo pad, as the voices of the 911 operator and the nameless female caller trembled through the tape deck’s tinny speaker. He liked the woman’s voice. It was soft and breathless, suggestive of vulnerability. He wanted to believe her. But belief got harder as the tape played on.

“I’m not crazy,” she blurted out at one point.

Shepherd wrote down the words. The crazy ones were always quickest to assert their sanity. A normal person never imagined that anyone would doubt his basic rationality, but a person with a history of mental problems, a person accustomed to being prodded and poked by psychologists, learned to be defensive on that subject.

The call lasted less than three minutes. It ended with a click, and the 911 operator saying, “Ma’am? You there? Hell.”

Brookings shut off the machine. “So what do we think?” he inquired of the room.

Rivera looked bored. “Probably a squirrel.”

“That’s what the nine-one operator thought. It’s why he wanted her picked up, and Bentley concurred.” Bentley was the watch commander on the morning shift. “But she was GOA when the beat car got there.”

“And the satchel?” Call asked.

“ Nada. She didn’t leave anything at the scene.”

Rivera grunted. “Squirrel,” he said again.

“I’m not so sure.”

Shepherd hadn’t known he was going to speak until the words were out of his mouth. Everyone looked at him.

“Maybe she did have the evidence,” he went on slowly, “but she got scared off before she could leave it for us.”

Brookings frowned. “Other than pure wishful thinking, is there any basis for that supposition?”

There must be, but Shepherd hadn’t worked it all out yet. He knew that he wanted the tip to pan out. He wanted proof that somebody named John Cray, who lived and worked near Safford, had sliced off Sharon Andrews’ face and taken it home with him. He wanted this case cleared, justice done. He wanted closure for Sharon’s young son and her grieving parents.

But none of this was a reason or an argument or a logical basis for anything at all.

To organize his thoughts, he glanced at the notes he’d scribbled in his pad. “She said this man Cray lives near Safford,” he began. “Safford is roughly halfway between Tucson and the White Mountains. It makes sense.”

“There are lots of places between Tucson and the White Mountains,” Stern said.

“And Safford is one of them. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just interesting — potentially interesting, at least. Then there’s this bit about hunting. You know how scratched up the Andrews woman was. Like she’d been on the run through the brush.”

Brookings shrugged. “She got away from the guy, and he went after her.”

“Or maybe he let her go and then followed. Made a game out of it.”

“Pretty far-fetched.”

Shepherd was undeterred. “She said Cray drives a Lexus SUV. That’s a pretty good all-terrain vehicle, and we’ve always known our guy has four-wheel drive. He didn’t kill Mrs. Andrews anywhere near a paved road.”

“Car’s all banged up, she claimed,” Alvarez added. “It’s something we can check out easy enough.”

Rivera, holding to his squirrel theory, grunted with heavy irony. “Yeah, she banged it up when she escaped from him in the desert. After he tried to hunt her, I guess. She’s a regular Indiana Jones, isn’t she?”

“People get away from bad guys sometimes,” Brookings said, though he seemed dubious.

“Sure.” Rivera shrugged. “And crazy people make up stories about bad guys. The bogeyman’s always after them, and they’re always just barely getting away.”

Stern nodded. “He’s right. This gal’s got nutcase written all over her. She says she’s been following Cray. Why? If she suspects him, why doesn’t she go to the cops right off?”

“She’s afraid of cops,” Call said. “Come on, Yanni, we see it all the time.”

Stern held his ground. “Not in cases like this. She’s delusional. Paranoid.”

Shepherd could see that Rivera and Stern had won over most of the group. But he was still unconvinced. He tried another tack.

“How about the rest of what she said?” In his memo pad he had jotted down breakin, kidnap, and others. “She claimed there were tools in this satchel for breaking and entering. But in the White Mountains case there was no breakin. Mrs. Andrews was snatched right outside the auto dealership, probably forced into the killer’s car.”

Mercado shrugged. “Doesn’t that undercut the credibility of the call even further?”

“Not necessarily. Not if there were breakins in other cases.”

Marty Kroft looked at the ceiling. “We’re back to this again.”

“She said there were others,” Shepherd went on implacably. “Others Cray had killed.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rivera said, “she’s your frigging soul mate. No wonder you believe her.”

Shepherd clamped down on a spasm of anger. “I’m just saying her version of things might turn out to be pretty close to the truth.”

“Close to your idea of the truth,” Stern said. “Your theory.” He put a dismissive emphasis on the word.

“Yeah, my theory. Let’s just say I’m right about my theory. Let’s say Sharon Andrews was not an isolated incident. Let’s say this psycho has been in the game for a while, and we never knew about it because none of the earlier victims turned up anywhere. There are plenty of unsolved missing-persons cases—”

“You can’t go pinning every unsolved juvenile runaway on the White Mountains freak,” Kroft said.

“I’m not talking just runaways. I’m talking kidnappings too. Breakins, and the woman of the house gone, never found again. There have been six I’ve turned up so far—”

“All in different localities,” Rivera interrupted, “Not just different neighborhoods, I mean different counties.”

“The man travels. Most serial killers do.”

“Never the same MO. Method of entry, time of day, choice of victim — no similarities.”

“He varies his methods. He’s smart. He doesn’t leave an obvious trail.”

“Time span of roughly a decade, as I recall. That’s a lot of dead girls, man.”

“He’s not constantly active. The urges follow a cycle. You know about that.”

A serial killer — if that was indeed what Shepherd was dealing with — tended to operate in a long, rhythmic pattern. The killing phase was followed by a period of dormancy. Then the urges would resume, and the killer would begin fantasizing, then stalking, and finally he would kill.