Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

“I understand. As I said, I called the sheriff’s office. I’m sure a deputy will be along shortly to take my statement.”

“Relay any information that might be helpful. Pay particular attention to the changes in Kaylie’s appearance. You said she’s blonde now, and more slender. Any other details you can remember will be helpful.”

“I’ll try. But I got only a glimpse.”

“Do your best. And please, could you have the deputies fax the report to me at Tucson PD?”

“I thought it wasn’t your case.”

“I’d like to stay up to speed anyway.” Shepherd handed Cray a card. “Here’s the fax number where they can reach me. Ask them to dig up the file on Kaylie McMillan and fax that too. Okay? Now, there’s one other thing.”

“My safety,” Cray said.

“It could be an issue.”

“In my line of work, Detective, it always is.” Cray smiled. “I suppose we both know something about that.”

“Even so, you need to take precautions.”

“I intend to be vigilant, believe me.”

“Do you have any experience with firearms?”

“None, and I don’t plan to acquire any. Guns scare me.”

“All the more reason to carry one. If she shows up armed, you need to be able to defend yourself. There are classes in firearms safety—”

“Out of the question. I won’t become a lone gunman, toting a six-gun like some character out of the Wild West. Besides, I could never harm Kaylie. She was my patient, you see. She was entrusted to my care.”

Shepherd gave up. There was nothing he could say to that.

“As you wish, Doctor.” He shook Cray’s hand. “Thanks for your time.”

Cray was walking away when Shepherd remembered one more question to ask.

“That book you wrote — The Mask of Self. What was it about?”

Cray turned back, then thought for a moment. “Icebergs,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Have you seen an illustration of an iceberg, Detective? The tip is just one-tenth of the whole, yet it’s all we see above the surface. I think that what we call the personality, the ego, the self, is the iceberg’s tip. The remaining nine-tenths of human nature, the enormous submerged mass, is our great store of inherited drives and instinctual, automatized responses. It is these which really move us. We are animals at heart. The self is mere window dressing. A mask, a false front. We hear about ‘mind over matter.’ It would be more true to say the mind doesn’t matter.”

“Kind of an unusual position for a psychiatrist to take.”

“Not really. It’s my job to delve beneath appearances. To ignore the surface and dive deep.”

“How did the book sell?”

“It’s in its fourth printing.”

“Congratulations. Do you think Kaylie’s read it?”

Cray’s face darkened, and Shepherd knew this was one question the man had not thought to ask himself.

“I can’t say,” Cray answered slowly. “I doubt she would. Is it important?”

“Something set her off. Maybe she took offense. Maybe she didn’t like her own doctor saying that his patients are animals at heart.”

“I wasn’t referring to her, specifically.”

“But you do think of her that way?”

“I think of us all in that way, Detective. You and me and any poor bastard screaming in his isolation cell. Saints and sinners, heroes and knaves — we are, all of us, actors in our own dream, playing roles our minds script for us, while our bodies go their own way, following their innate will.”

“Sounds like a quotation.”

“ The Mask of Self, Chapter Three, page thirty-nine.” Cray at least had the grace to smile.

“So long, Doctor. And take care.”

Shepherd got in his car and drove away, watching Dr. John Bainbridge Cray in the rearview mirror, a tall, neat man in a brown suit, lord of this small, sad fiefdom.

A lonely man. Proud. Not easy to like.

But a killer?

No.

It was Kaylie McMillan who was the killer, and she was on the loose, and violent, and perhaps capable of killing again.

Elizabeth woke in a strange room, a room that was hot and musty and limned in a strange half-light that fell through windows veiled in translucent drapes.

It took her a moment to understand that she was in a motel, yes, another motel in Tucson, her third in the past ten days. She had left the first motel because it was too expensive, and she had left the second because of Cray.

The memory surprised her into full alertness. She sat up too quickly, then spent a moment recovering from a tug of dizziness.

She remembered everything now. She’d had breakfast at a coffee shop, where some cops had frightened her, and then she’d heard the news — the wonderful, impossibly good news about Cray.

He was in custody. They had him. They must have picked him up immediately after examining the contents of the satchel. The damaged Lexus had confirmed her story.

Blinded by relief and joy, she had driven to the first motel she could find, a two-story structure a half mile from the coffee shop, with a red VACANCY sign and a nightly rate of thirty-seven dollars.

The place was an unmistakable improvement over her usual accommodations — a swimming pool, cable TV, definite luxuries — and the price was a bit steep for her diminishing reserve of cash, but she had been both too tired and too happy to argue.

Checking in so early, she’d had to wait for the maid to finish making up the room. For a few minutes she had stood in a corner, watching the young woman vacuum the carpet and replace the towels, thinking vaguely that there was something familiar about her — the dark complexion and round, serious face — her face…

And suddenly she had realized that the maid reminded her of that other woman whose name she didn’t know, the woman whose disembodied face haunted her dreams.

But there would be no more dreams. She was sure of it. Cray had been vanquished, and the last residue of his evil had been swept away.

Finally the maid left with a smiling good-bye, and Elizabeth was alone.

Sleep had taken her almost instantly. She closed the drapes, lay on the bed, and dropped away into the dark.

The dreamless dark. No nightmares. Never again.

That had been at ten in the morning. Now the plastic clock on the nightstand read 2:49. She had slept for nearly five hours, cocooned in the cool hum of the air-conditioning and the smoothness of freshly laundered sheets.

Her first priority at this moment was a shower. Not having bothered to undress, she still wore the clothes she’d put on last night, wrinkled and sticky with a paste of sweat. Her hair felt dirty, matted, lumpy. She needed to be dean.

She undressed, then stood under a cone of spray in the tiled stall, inhaling steam.

Remarkably, shampoo was provided free of charge, an amenity she had not enjoyed in her previous lodgings. She squirted a dollop into her hand and worked the creamy foam into a lather, rubbing the suds deep into her hair, massaging her scalp until her exhaustion was gone.

It felt wonderful.

At 3:10, when she was clean and dry and dressed in fresh clothes, she turned on the radio and traveled around the dial in search of a news station.

She wanted to hear Cray’s name. Her final doubt would be dispelled when the announcer said that it was John Bainbridge Cray, noted psychiatrist and author, who was under arrest.

That was how they would put it too. Noted psychiatrist and author.

She knew about Cray’s psychiatric methods. His talents as an author were more difficult for her to judge. Although she had seen magazine write-ups on his book, she had been unable to bring herself to actually read the damn thing.

It was hard enough just knowing that he was famous — well, moderately famous anyway — and successful.