Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she had to do everything herself.

Catch Cray. Kill him. Deliver his body to the front steps of the police station, with the faces of his victims pinned to his hide as incontrovertible proof of his guilt.

The faces of his victims…

She blinked, then slowly lifted her head with a thought.

A crazy thought. Yes, crazy. Of course it was.

But for once that word didn’t scare her. Because she wasn’t crazy. She knew that now.

It was the world that was insane.

Shepherd was cruising the interstate, three miles from Tucson city limits, when his cell phone chirped. He fumbled it out of the side pocket of his jacket. “Shepherd.”

“Roy, it’s Hector. Something’s come up. Something sort of interesting.”

Alvarez was the phlegmatic type, slow to show excitement, but Shepherd heard a rare intensity in his voice now.

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” he said mildly.

“Well, the fax came in from Graham County.” The sheriff’s file on Kaylie McMillan. After leaving the hospital. Shepherd had called Alvarez and summarized Cray’s story. He’d told Alvarez to watch for the fax. “I took a look at it.”

“And?”

“Decided to post a copy of the lady’s arrest photo on the bulletin board. What the hell. She’s a fugitive, after all. Well, guess what.”

“I’m a real bad guesser. Hector.”

“Couple of patrol guys saw the pic and made her. I mean, they eyeballed her just this morning in a greasy spoon over on Speedway.”

Shepherd’s heart froze for an instant, then kicked into high gear. “They’re sure?”

“Real sure. They said she started acting nervous when they sat down at the next table. Even spilled a cup of coffee all over the table, made a real mess — then left in a hurry. They didn’t think too much of it at the time, but when they saw the photo, it was like, bam, that’s her.”

“What time this morning?”

“About nine.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“Hold on.” Alvarez shouted the question, got an indistinct answer, and said, “Rancheros Cafe.”

Shepherd knew it. “Cross street is Woodland.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’m about five minutes east of town right now. I’m going to detour over to the coffee shop and see if I can talk to anybody who remembers her.”

“You want company?”

“It’s not necessary. She must be long gone. But maybe I can take a statement from someone who works there. Who are the patrol cops, by the way?”

“Leo Galston — he’s a T.O. — and Kurt Bane.”

“I know Leo. I want a statement from him and his partner.”

“They’re already writing it up.”

Shepherd took the Kolb Road exit and shot north to Speedway.

He remembered telling Cray that this wasn’t his case. The Graham County sheriff had primary jurisdiction. There was no urgent reason for him to get involved.

But he hadn’t told Cray the whole truth, had he?

Shepherd’s mouth pinched. No. He’d said nothing about Ginnie.

His wife. His late wife.

Roy and Virginia Shepherd had lived on a cul-de-sac off Fort Lowell Road in a modest brick house, ranch style, with pebbles and cacti in the front yard and a small, thirsty, carefully tended garden in the rear. The neighborhood was typical of Tucson — middle-class, quiet except for one neighbor’s dog that never quit barking, bare of shade on hot summer days, untouched by any crime more serious than graffiti.

Shepherd and his wife had been happy there, or happy enough. The marriage hadn’t been ideal. Sometimes Roy had gotten angry with Ginnie for the amount of time she spent in the den, hunched over her computer keyboard, working on her project.

The project was a Web site she had created, a clearinghouse of information submitted by dozens of local agencies and organizations, public and private, all committed to aiding the poor and homeless. Ginnie’s goal was to coordinate the efforts of municipal and county relief agencies with the activities of private charities and churches.

Restaurants could check the inventories of local food banks and allocate surplus cuisine more intelligently. Schedules of AA meetings throughout Pima were posted daily; printouts were posted in shelters. People needing assistance in a variety of foreign languages could be matched to appropriate relief workers who might be working across town or outside city limits.

A worthwhile endeavor, but endlessly time-consuming. Every evening, after a day’s work, Ginnie had downloaded her e-mail from all these scattered sources, then had spent hours updating the site before uploading the new pages to the host server.

Shepherd had worried about her. She wasn’t getting any sleep. And she had no time for him — or for anyone.

It was ironic, in a way. Ordinarily a cop’s wife would complain that he was never home, but Shepherd had always made time for his personal life, and he wanted his wife to share it with him.

After some weeks of argument, an agreement had been reached. Ginnie would give up her job downtown and take on the Web site as a full-time occupation. She would earn no money for the work, but money had never been the point. Anyway, she was paid little more than minimum wage at the health clinic where she worked from eight to five every weekday.

Shepherd thought of the Tuesday night when she told him she’d given notice. They just need me to stay on till they find a replacement, she said. Another week or so. And, smiling, she’d added. You can live with that, can’t you?

As it turned out, Ginnie was the one who couldn’t live with it.

They celebrated her decision with wine and take-out meals from the best Italian restaurant in the world, just down the street. Drunk and laughing, they made love in the living room, progressing in giddy stages from the couch to the rug to the bare hardwood floor in the foyer.

And the next day Timothy Fries had visited the clinic.

Fries was a street person who had spent most of his life shuttling from one psychiatric ward to another. Doctors had variously diagnosed him as acutely psychotic, manic-depressive, paranoid, and schizophrenic. Every pharmaceutical treatment had been tried; none had achieved more than transitory success. He had periods of lucidity, then relapsed into craziness. His family had given up on him. He had no friends, no home, no job, no life.

When his path had crossed Virginia Shepherd’s, Fries had been thirty-two years old, penniless, ragged, and constantly afraid.

Ginnie did clerical work at the clinic, freeing up the staff nurses for more important duties. Part of her job was to interview incoming patients to elicit their medical histories.

On that Wednesday morning two years ago. Fries had entered, complaining of a headache. He had visited the place twice before, but always on weekends, when Ginnie wasn’t around.

Had she been familiar with his case, she would have known that his headaches were psychosomatic, a product of his belief that larval worms had crawled into his skull via his ear canal and were presently feeding on his brain.

As it was, she knew only that the man in the anteroom was emaciated and scared and in pain. She asked him the standard questions, marked down his more intelligible replies.

He was mentally ill — this much was evident from his scattershot thought processes and muted affect — but she didn’t judge him to be either paranoid or dangerous.

And so she made an error, a small error, hardly important.

She turned away from him to put her clipboard in the out basket. That was all.

In that moment Timothy Fries lunged at her, and she felt something sharp and hot burst through the bunched muscles at the base of her spine, and there was a rush of numbness in her legs, a dizzy collapse, an impression of chaos as nurses and doctors filled the anteroom and dragged the shrieking man away.