Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

He drove on. The aria reached its climax. “Mi struggo e mi tormento,” the soprano sang. Her suffering, her torment.

Kaylie had struggled so hard to evade capture, all these long years.

Soon her torment would be over.

But in another sense, it had only just begun.

Wheelihan watched the Lexus cruise past. He waited another twenty seconds, watching the car with no headlights as it approached in the green fog of the night scope.

A small car, subcompact, not new, in poor condition.

Lone occupant, hunched over the wheel, a smeared glow of green.

Close now.

Almost here…

Wheelihan lifted his rover radio and scrambled his troops with a one-word command: “Go.”

Three pairs of high beams snapped on, bright fans of light crisscrossing the desert brush, and a moment later the dome lights burst into whirls of furious color.

The trio of patrol cars skidded around clumps of mesquite and careened onto the gravel road, then halted, forming a disorderly row that blocked both lanes. They waited there, garish in the pulsing varicolored light, but silent; Wheelihan had told his men to keep their sirens off.

The little car was still coming, confronted now by a barricade of steel.

For a tense moment Wheelihan wondered if Kaylie would stop and surrender peacefully, or panic and try to ram through the roadblock.

His men were ready for that eventuality. If Kaylie offered resistance, they were under orders to shoot.

Shoot to kill.

He didn’t want it to end that way, and so he was relieved when the subcompact slowed, brakes squealing, and finally stuttered to a stop a few yards from the blockade.

His men stayed in their vehicles, as they’d been told. Every one of them had his weapon sighted on the suspect huddled behind the wheel. From the ground by his feet, Wheelihan picked up an electronic bullhorn, a toy he’d rarely had the opportunity to use,

“Turn off your engine,” he said, speaking normally. It was a mistake to shout into one of these things.

There was a moment’s hesitation, and the little car shuddered as the motor died.

Good. Very good.

“Now raise your hands. Raise them where we can see them.”

Another pause. Then slowly two pale, trembling hands were lifted out of the shadows.

“Keep them raised. Do not move. You will not be harmed.”

His men were emerging from their vehicles now, first using the open doors for cover, then approaching fast and low, their guns leading them.

When the subcompact was surrounded, Wheelihan allowed himself to breathe.

“Got her,” he whispered.

He was still congratulating himself on a smooth operation, damn smooth, when Mel Baylor, who had missed his wife’s pot roast this evening, called out, “Chuck, we got a problem here.”

Problem?

Wheelihan set down his bullhorn and hurried to the car, a battered and dented Toyota Tercel. As he drew near, he saw what the problem was. Yes, indeed.

Hunched in the front seat was the driver, who was not Kaylie McMillan, but instead a very large, very bald man blubbering like a child.

*

Cray reached the scene at a run, his medical bag swinging at his side, and found Walter standing in tears by the side of his car. He kept repeating two words, “Dr. Cray,” with imbecilic insistence.

“This guy seems to know you, Doc,” Undersheriff Wheelihan said, disgust souring his voice.

Cray hated being called Doc. He pushed his irritation away.

“He’s a patient,” he said, trying to be calm, but afraid suddenly — terribly afraid of what Walter might say. “He lives at the institute. But he’s not confined there. He has a car, this car, and he runs errands.”

“Runs ’em at night? With his lights off?”

“That isn’t standard procedure, obviously. Let me speak with him.”

“He’s all yours.”

Cray hoped the undersheriff and his deputies would move away, afford him some privacy with Walter, but none of them moved.

Gingerly he touched the big man’s arm. “Walter,” he began in his best professional tone, “why don’t you tell me what’s happened here.”

“Got arrested,” Walter said, his eyes hollow with fear.

“No, you’re not under arrest. There’s been a misunderstanding. A mistake. Now, why were you out driving around after dark?”

A pendulous thread of mucus dangled from Walter’s left nostril. With an equine snort, he sniffed it back.

“Following you,” he whispered.

“I see. That’s why you had your headlights off. So I wouldn’t see you?”

“That’s right, Dr. Cray”

“Now, why was it so important to follow me?”

“Because of Kaylie. I thought you’d go looking for her, like I—”

“Yes, I understand now.” It was imperative to cut off this dangerous line of discussion. “You asked me earlier today why the police had come by, and I told you about Kaylie. You were worried that I’d try to find her somehow. You were hoping to protect me.”

“Protect you.” Walter seized on these words, as Cray had hoped he would. “Yes, protect you, it’s all I wanted to do, just protect you, Dr. Cray.”

“That’s fine, Walter.”

“Because I know how dangerous she is.”

“Yes, fine.”

“She could hurt you. She tried to hurt—”

“That’s enough, Walter. We all understand you. You’re not in any trouble. You haven’t broken any laws.”

Wheelihan coughed. “Well, Doc, he was driving without his headlights.”

Doc again. Cray was growing tired of this man. “Write up a ticket,” he snapped. “I’ll pay it for him.”

Walter’s lip trembled in the prelude to another sob.

The undersheriff looked at the big man, then at Cray, then shrugged. “Aw, to hell with it. I’m just pissed off, is all. I thought we had her. As it turns out, probably she was never even here.”

“She was here. I—” I felt her, Cray almost said. I sensed her presence with the tips of my nerve endings. But he couldn’t say that. “I know her well enough to anticipate her behavior patterns. She came here tonight.”

Wheelihan looked dubious. “Well, if so, she’s gone by now. All this commotion would’ve scared her off for sure.”

“Unless she wasn’t on this road, because she never meant to follow me in the first place.”

“The house, you mean?”

Cray nodded. Of course. It would be the house. Now that he thought about it, the house was the only thing that really made sense.

She hadn’t come here to kill him. She wasn’t a killer, not really, though neither Shepherd nor Wheelihan knew it. She had come for evidence — hard evidence, conclusive, impossible for the police to ignore.

His trophies.

That was what she was after, crafty Kaylie. The faces of his victims, the totems he had collected during twelve years of nocturnal sport, which she hoped to find in his residence while he was away.

“Yes…” he murmured, and then remembering he was surrounded by people, he added more loudly, “yes, she’ll try to break into my house.”

Security at the Hawk Ridge Institute was tight. The hospital compound was entirely fenced in, patrolled by a small but vigilant guard detail. The front gate was monitored by a guard in a gatehouse.

But the gate across Cray’s private driveway was not monitored by anyone.

Elizabeth had thought about that gate many times on the long nights when she watched Cray’s house. She thought of it again as she left her perch on the ridge and descended the foot trail to the fire road.

Her car was parked on the road, but she wouldn’t need it. She paused only long enough to stow her binoculars inside. Then she jogged down the winding road toward flatter ground. Had to hurry. She needed to be in position near the gate by the time Cray left for the evening.