Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

“Dr. Cray.” Shepherd stepped through the doorway into Cray’s office. “I’m Detective Roy Shepherd, Tucson PD.”

He watched Cray’s face for a reaction. Cray merely frowned.

“Tucson? I was expecting someone from the sheriff’s department.”

This response baffled Shepherd. He let a moment pass as he approached the desk. Automatically he noted Cray’s age, approximately mid-forties, and a few other details.

He wore no wedding band. His complexion was sallow; he did not get out in the sun very much. He wore a brown suit of good quality, in need of being pressed. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, revealing a taut, muscular neck.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Shepherd said finally.

Cray looked impatient. “This is about the vandalism, isn’t it?”

“Vandalism?”

A sigh leaked out of Cray, the sigh of a man who was smarter and better organized than everyone around him, and weary of this burden. Shepherd decided he disliked John Cray.

But the truth was, he disliked all psychiatrists, disliked the profession of psychiatry as such. He had his reasons.

“Apparently,” Cray said, “we’ve got our wires crossed. You see, my sport-utility vehicle was vandalized last night. I called the sheriff’s department about it just half an hour ago. They said they’d send someone to take a report. But of course that’s not at all why you’re here.”

“No.”

“Still, I have a feeling your visit could be related to my little problem.” Cray leaned back in his chair, studying Shepherd over the neat stacks of paper on the desk. “It’s about her, isn’t it?”

“Her?”

“Kaylie McMillan. Isn’t she why you’ve come to see me?”

“I guess I’m a little slow today, Doctor. Who exactly is Kaylie McMillan?”

“The person who trashed my Lexus — or so I believe.” Cray smiled, a surprisingly warm smile that illumined his face and made him look younger, “I’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t I?”

“That might be good.”

“Please have a seat. Care for some coffee? It’s quite good. One-hundred-percent fresh-ground Kona. There’s a coffee house in Tucson that sells it.”

So he went into Tucson now and then. Hardly a startling admission, but Shepherd took note of it as he pulled a metal chair close to the desk and sat. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Then perhaps, before I tell you about Kaylie, you might enlighten me as to why you’re here. Since, quite obviously, my guesswork on the subject was all wrong.”

Shepherd kept his answer vague. “Someone’s made some rather serious allegations, Doctor. Allegations concerning yourself. Now, I’m just looking into this on a purely preliminary basis—”

“Kaylie,” Cray said.

He was nodding, his expression curiously content, like a man who’d found the answer to a riddle and was pleased with his own cleverness.

Shepherd shrugged. “Excuse me?”

“These allegations were made anonymously, isn’t that so?”

“Well, yes.”

“Kaylie did it. What precisely did she accuse me of? Kidnapping parochial-school girls and selling them into slavery? Using my basement as a torture chamber? A series of ax murders, perhaps?”

“You’re taking this kind of lightly.”

“I’m not taking it lightly at all. She vandalized my Lexus. She’s evidently spreading false accusations of a nature sufficiently serious to require your presence in my office. And she’s stalking me.”

“Stalking you?”

“Yes. What did she accuse me of?”

Shepherd hadn’t wanted to reveal the charge too soon, but he saw no way around it. “She said… Well, she said you were the White Mountains Killer. You know the case—”

“Yes, of course. Her claim is original, at least. But hardly unexpected. That crime has received a good deal of publicity, and psychotics are highly suggestible.”

“Kaylie’s a psychotic?”

“Oh, yes. She was a patient here, you see. One of the more difficult ones.”

The woman’s voice on the 911 tape spoke in Shepherd’s memory: I’m not crazy.

“When was this?” he asked.

“Twelve years ago, when she was nineteen. The sheriff’s department placed her in our care after her arrest.”

“On what charge?”

“Homicide.” Cray took another sip of his Kona coffee. “She and her husband, Justin, had been married less than three months when dear, sweet Kaylie shot him in the heart.”

Murders were rare in Graham County. A year could pass, even two or three, without a single homicide. For that reason Shepherd was sure Cray would remember the details of the case.

“Tell me how it happened,” he said.

Cray swiveled in his chair, sunlight catching the flecks of amber in his grayish eyes. “All that’s known with certainty,” he answered, “is that Kaylie killed Justin with his own revolver, then panicked and fled in their car. A deputy found the vehicle on a back road the next day. She’d lost control and driven into a ravine. Search patrols were organized. A helicopter spotted her two miles from the crash site, wandering in the brush. When the police reached her, she was on her knees, sobbing.”

Slowly Shepherd nodded. Twelve years ago he had been a patrol officer riding shotgun with Gary Brannigan. He and Gary’d had their hands full with drug shootings and gang fights, and neither of them had paid much attention to crimes outside Tucson city limits. But dimly Shepherd recalled the case of a teenage wife in Graham County who’d murdered her husband and had been found in the desolate foothills, soiled and dehydrated and distraught.

“They never found out why she did it,” he said, more to himself than to Cray.

“Unfortunately, no. When the sobbing subsided, Kaylie entered a catatonic state. Essentially, she had suffered what the layman calls a nervous breakdown. So the deputies brought her to us. She was admitted to our forensic ward — Ward C, which is no longer in use. She was kept in seclusion, and was utterly uncommunicative.”

“Catatonic?”

Cray shook his head. “Initially she exhibited unpredictable outbursts of violence. She had to be kept under restraint, for both her own safety and the safety of the other patients.”

“Under restraint? You mean, in a straitjacket?”

“Only at the beginning. The first few days.”

“How long was she here?”

“Four months.”

“Who treated her?”

“I did. They delegate the more challenging ones to me.” Shepherd caught the lift of pride in the statement. “After a few weeks she recovered the ability to communicate. We had many long talks, Kaylie and I.”

“Do you remember anything distinctive about her voice?”

Cray hesitated, seemingly bewildered by the question. “Her voice?” Then his eyes narrowed. “Oh, I see. It was a telephone call, wasn’t it? That’s how she contacted you. Well, her voice is rather girlish, actually. She sounds like a sweet little thing. Shy and sensitive and vulnerable. Her true personality profile, however, is rather more complicated than that.”

The description matched the voice Shepherd had heard on the 911 tape. “Okay. Sorry for interrupting. You were talking about the progress Kaylie made in your therapy sessions.”

“She seemed to be getting better. But she professed complete amnesia when it came to the killing of her husband.”

“Professed? You think she was lying?”

“She’s certainly capable of carrying off an elaborate deception. As subsequent events were to prove.”

“What events?”

Before answering, Cray paused for another long swallow of coffee. Shepherd waited, casting his gaze around the office.

Papers and folders were everywhere, all stacked tidily, with no impression of disorder. There were a couple of framed paintings on the walls, but otherwise the office was bare of decoration — no knickknacks or mementos, no family photos on the desk.