Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

Shepherd sighed. “Sure she will, Hector. It’s a big country. Plenty of places to hide. And she’s been on the run for years. She’s damn good at it. She can run and hide… if she wants to.”

“But you don’t think she does.”

“No.”

“What else would she do?”

“I don’t know. But she’s gone over the edge, that’s for sure. Cray said psychotics go through cycles, phases. He said Kaylie was in the acute phase now. Maybe it’s been building for the last twelve years. Like a volcano — more and more pressure — then bang. Eruption.”

“You sound worried,” Alvarez said.

“I am.”

Galston tried to shrug it off. “She was just a little bit of a thing. She didn’t look so dangerous.”

“Tim Fries didn’t look so dangerous, either,” Shepherd snapped, not quite realizing the words were spoken aloud until he heard their echo in the room.

Bane asked who Tim Fries was. Alvarez and Galston both knew, and they both shushed him, Galston with a clamp on his arm, Alvarez with a look.

Then there was silence. Shepherd was thinking.

“She’ll go after Cray,” he said.

Alvarez said she already had. But that wasn’t what Shepherd meant.

“I’m not saying she’ll stalk him or wreck his car. She’ll go after him personally.”

“Try to take him out, you think?”

Shepherd’s shoulders lifted. “She shot her husband. Why not Cray? She seems to think he’s a serial killer. In her mind, she’ll be performing a public service.”

“Graham County Sheriff’s will have to handle it,” Alvarez said. “Patrol the area near the hospital. Get Cray to lie low for a few days. Maybe he’ll even leave town.”

“I doubt it. He’s stubborn.”

“Well, it’s their problem, not ours.”

Shepherd didn’t respond directly. He scanned the mess in the room — the scatter of clothes, the broken TV, the shards of glass in the bathroom, the blood spots on the floor. He thought of the frantic voice on the 911 tape, accusing Cray of murder, saying he entrapped his victims and hunted them like animals in the moonlit wilderness.

He couldn’t walk away from this. Ginnie’s ghost would never forgive him.

“So,” Alvarez said, “you’re gonna call Graham County. Right?”

Slowly Shepherd nodded. “I’ll call that guy Kroft knows — Chuck Wheelihan — the one who was promoted to undersheriff.”

“I don’t think you need to talk to the undersheriff.”

“Oh, yeah.” Shepherd smiled, a secret smile that puzzled the two patrol cops and worried Alvarez. “Yeah, I think I do. But first I need to get in touch with somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Cray.”

The phone in the room might have Kaylie’s prints on it, so Shepherd used his cell phone instead. He stood outside for a clearer transmission and found the number he needed in his memo pad.

There were four rings at the other end of the line, and then a receptionist — no doubt the woman in the lobby who’d been bent over her computer keyboard, the woman who’d reminded him briefly of Ginnie at her desk — answered. “Hawk Ridge Institute.”

He identified himself. His call was transferred to Cray’s secretary, then to Cray himself.

“Yes, Detective?” The man sounded harried and tired. “How may I help you?”

“We just had a close encounter with your former patient.”

“With Kaylie?” Instantly the weariness was gone from Cray’s voice. “Is she under arrest?”

“I’m afraid not. She eluded us, but just barely. Before she left, she did a lot of damage to her motel room.”

“Damage?”

Cray seemed surprised by the news. Distantly Shepherd found this odd. The man knew what Kaylie had done to his Lexus, after all.

“She messed up the place pretty badly,” he said. “Apparently she’s still in a violent frame of mind.”

“I see.” Peculiar hesitation there. “Well, I suppose you intend to warn me again that I need to watch out for her. I do appreciate your concern—”

“Actually, I’m calling for a slightly different reason.” It was Shepherd’s turn to hesitate. “I want to ask you for help.”

“Help?”

“In apprehending this woman. Tonight.”

“You want my assistance… in catching her. I see.”

There was something new in Cray’s tone, something Shepherd could not quite define. Under other circumstances, he might have thought it was a note of sly amusement. But the cell phone’s reception was muddy, and he was sure he’d misinterpreted what he heard.

“It may entail some risk,” Shepherd said, choosing his words with care. “And I haven’t contacted the sheriff’s department to work things out with them. But if I can get their cooperation, can I count on yours, as well?”

He waited. On the other end of the line, Cray exhaled a long, slow breath.

“Detective,” Cray said, “when it comes to putting Kaylie safely in custody where she belongs, I assure you I’ll do everything I can.”

Chuck Wheelihan, undersheriff of Graham County, stood by the side of his Chevy Caprice cruiser in the desert night.

Three deputies loitered nearby. They wore tan short-sleeve shirts, open at the collar, and brown trousers encircled by gun belts, and they had yellow-bordered patches on their shoulders and silver badges on their chests. They were young. Damnably young, Wheelihan thought.

One was smoking a cigarette, another had just returned from taking a whiz in a creosote patch, and the third was drumming his fingers restlessly on the hood of Wheelihan’s car.

“So, Chuck,” the drummer said, “what do you think the odds are of this working?”

Wheelihan took a moment to think it over. The great quiet of the desert loomed around him, and above the high peaks of the Pinaleno range the stars dazzled.

“One in three,” he answered at length.

“That guy from Tucson seems to think our chances are a good deal better’n that.”

“That’s because he thinks the girl is watching Cray’s house.”

“And you don’t?”

“Way I see it, she ran to the border or to another state. Or she’s layin’ low.”

“If she’s sensible, sure. But she’s crazy, they say.”

There was eagerness in the young man’s voice. He wanted to go up against somebody crazy, somebody dangerous, even if it was only a woman.

Not much action here in Graham County. The militia types stirred up a fuss from time to time, setting off explosives in the desert or scaring folks with their silly war games, and there was that local man who’d taken a tire iron to his girlfriend’s skull one drunken night, but that was about it, as far as excitement went.

So Chuck couldn’t blame the boy for straining at his harness. Still, he preferred to keep things low-key, which was why he took his time in making his reply.

“Sure she’s crazy. I know that. I’m one of the ones that nabbed her, way back when. I was part of the search-and-rescue team. We came across the gal, out in the desert about twenty miles from here, and you should’ve seen her, all dirty and crying, and she wouldn’t say nothing. She was just kneeling there, kneeling like she was at her prayers. Her eyes were empty. Nobody home. You know what I mean?”

The boy didn’t. “I guess.”

“She’s a psycho, all right, like all the other nutcases they got there in the loony bin. But she’s not stupid, see? She escaped from the nuthouse, didn’t she? She’s stayed on the lam for twelve years. Am I right?”

“You’re right, Chuck.”

“She’s not so dumb. Some of these fruitcake types, they can be pretty damned shrewd. So I’m saying, she’s nowhere near this spot, is my guess. She’s off in Sonora, maybe, or cruising up to Salt Lake. Or she’s gone to ground like the scared bunny rabbit she is. Whatever. Point is, she’s not gonna risk coming anywhere near Dr. John Cray.”