Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Repeatedly he’d actually stopped to check the license plate of a Chevrolet Chevette, comparing it with the number Dr. Cray had written down. Every time his heart had been beating fast and hard with excitement, because he was so very eager to complete his mission and please Dr. Cray, but every time he had been disappointed. The license plates had been wrong.

The last time it happened, in sheer frustration he had banged his fist on the side panel of the Chevette, and a man coming out of the motel had stopped to look at him.

That was bad. He was not supposed to attract attention. Dr. Cray had been very clear on that point.

“Find the red car. Find the red car.” For variety he altered his emphasis on the words. “Find the red car. Find the red car. Find the red car.”

He would find it. He knew he would. There were countless things he was no good at. He couldn’t write more than a few words without losing track of what he wanted to say, and he couldn’t get the jokes on TV comedy shows, even when they were explained to him, and he couldn’t do laundry or have long conversations or eat soup without getting it all over himself.

But this job he could do.

He would find the red car.

But he would not use the telephone to call Dr. Cray.

He would take care of Kaylie McMillan all by himself.

She had hurt Dr. Cray once before, simply by running off. How much worse could she hurt him if she really tried?

Walter didn’t intend to find out. After all, the great Dr. Cray might be God, but he was a human person too, and Walter didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. He didn’t want Dr. Cray to… die. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if Dr. Cray died.

Kaylie McMillan, on the other hand…

She could die, and no one would care.

Killing her would be easy. She wasn’t big, and he was. He would ambush her, leap up and take her by surprise, clap his hands to her head, and with one twist of his wide shoulders he would snap her neck.

Then she would never hurt anyone ever again, and everything would be fine, just fine.

“Find the red car,” Walter Luntz said, nodding in obedience to the command. “Find the red car. Find the red car. Find the red car.”

Cray lived in a house at the rear of the hospital property, screened by hedges and served by a private drive. The director’s mansion, it was called, although it was actually no more than a modest two-story home in the Southwestern style.

Shepherd followed Cray down a winding path to the house, past a small well-tended cemetery where two dozen patients—“the unclaimed ones,” Cray explained offhandedly — were interred. The air was warm and still, and there was birdsong in the high branches of the trees.

At the side of the house was a two-car garage with a single window at shoulder height. The pane had been smashed.

“One of our groundskeepers reported this to me about two hours ago. The breakin must have occurred last night.”

“When you were home?”

“Yes. But my bedroom is upstairs, on the other side of the house. I never heard the sound of breaking glass. Or any other sound.” Cray shrugged. “Perhaps that’s just as well. It wouldn’t have been advisable to directly confront Kaylie — not in her present condition.”

He unlocked the side door and flipped a light switch. Two bare bulbs in the ceiling of the garage snapped on, casting a pale yellow glow over Cray’s Lexus.

Shepherd circled the vehicle. It had been savagely abused. Someone had slashed all four tires and grooved deep scratches in the black finish. The front window on the driver’s side had been shattered; Shepherd saw a large, jagged rock on the bucket seat. The seat cushions were sliced in tatters, and the lid of the glove compartment hung open, the contents strewn. Shepherd saw a scatter of CD cases on the floor. Symphonies, operas. Every disk had been defaced.

“Did she make any attempt to enter the house itself?” he asked.

“No. But of course all the doors were locked, even the door from the garage.”

“Is there a burglar alarm?”

“I’ve never thought it necessary to install one. Not in a gated compound patrolled by armed guards.”

“How about the Lexus? Doesn’t it have a security system?”

“An antitheft system is standard. But I’m afraid I had it disabled soon after I bought the vehicle.”

“Why?”

“Too many false alarms. The system was overly sensitive to vibrations or casual contact. The horn was constantly blaring. I just got tired of it.”

“But Kaylie wouldn’t have known the system was turned off.”

“I doubt she would have thought about it at all. In the throes of her obsession, she would not be functioning rationally.” Cray waved a hand at the vehicle. “As you can see.”

“Did she take anything from the car or the garage?”

“Yes. A spare medical kit I kept in the vehicle.”

“A kit?” Shepherd remembered the 911 tape. “Like a satchel?”

“I suppose one could describe it that way. I think of it as my black bag. Occasionally I’m called out to see a released patient on an emergency basis. Why do you ask?”

“The caller said she had a satchel of yours, which contained your… instruments of murder.”

“A delusion. What else did she say?”

Shepherd saw no reason to hold anything back at this point. “She claimed that you kidnap women and hunt them. Like animals.”

Cray shrugged. “Unsurprising, really. Most paranoids develop elaborate fantasies that have some basis in their personal experience. Kaylie associates me with the authorities — the police, I mean — who have indeed been hunting her for the past twelve years. You see how her mind might expand the truth of her situation into an imaginative metaphorical construct?”

“She also said we’d find your Lexus in bad shape, because she had to drive it through the desert to escape from you.”

Cray chuckled. The sound echoed off the corners of the garage. “No doubt she believes as much. Of course, if she had taken my vehicle, it would hardly be here in my garage.”

“She expected you to have it, though. She told us to check it out.”

“The inconsistency would never occur to her. You have to understand a person like Kaylie, Detective Shepherd. She’s fundamentally out of contact with reality. She can break in here, vandalize my property, and an hour later she’ll be fully convinced that I’m the villain. She rewrites history from moment to moment.”

“Yet she’s evaded the law for more than a decade.”

“I’m not claiming she’s been this severely irrational throughout that entire time period. She must experience intervals of near-lucidity. Perhaps such intervals persist for months, even years. But always there will be a relapse. Stress or a hormonal change or some neurotic obsession will trigger a crisis, and she’ll regress to acute psychosis. She will decompensate, as we doctors like to say.”

Shepherd surveyed the ruined Lexus. “Looks like she’s decompensated now.”

“I’d have to concur in your diagnosis.”

Cray locked up the garage and walked with Shepherd to the parking lot. Strange laughter rained down from a second-floor window in the administration building. Shepherd wondered if it was the young man who’d set fire to a toolshed because the TV had told him to, or if it was somebody else.

At his car, he stopped, facing Cray in the bright daylight.

“All right, Doctor. It seems clear that this woman is harassing you, and that she made a false report. The case, though, belongs primarily to the jurisdiction of the local sheriff. Breaking and entering, vandalizing your vehicle, theft of your medical bag — all those crimes were committed here in Graham County, not in Tucson. The only aspect of the case that’s properly within my purview is the phone call to the nine-one-one line. And we get lots of phony tips. We could never prosecute them all.”