Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

McMillan paused, half-inside the truck, looking at

Cray over the door frame. “Because she’s not crazy,” McMillan said. “She never was.”

Cray was silent. He stood motionless as McMillan slammed the door and started the engine. Even when the pickup reversed out of the entryway and vanished down the road, he did not move.

“Some kind of nut, huh?” Officer Jansen said finally, for no reason other than to break the long silence.

Cray nodded. “Yes.”

“Think he was serious about all that lawyer business?”

“Yes.”

“So… what are we gonna do?”

“We’ll handle it.” Cray took a step back from the gate and repeated the words. “We’ll handle it.”

He turned and headed back toward the administration building. His mind processed the dilemma, evaluating options, ordering priorities, weighing risks.

McMillan could not be allowed any contact with Kaylie. She knew too much. She would tell him everything. And given what McMillan must know or guess about his son Justin’s past, he might very well put the whole story together, then persuade the sheriff to take a fresh look at the case.

“Dangerous,” Cray murmured, mounting the staircase of the administration building.

Yes. Much too dangerous.

Cray had not avoided arrest this long by taking chances. His survival instinct was finely honed. To save himself, he would do whatever was necessary.

There was only one way to defuse this latest threat. It was a course of action he disliked, one that carried risks and smelled of desperation.

He would dare it, though. He had to. And quickly, before McMillan returned.

Pausing at the front door, he nodded slowly, in silent endorsement of his decision.

Kaylie must die.

Tonight.

A shame, really. He enjoyed having her as his prisoner. He looked forward to their daily sessions, the intricate mind games he played with her. And he would have relished the opportunity to watch her for just a few weeks longer.

To watch her — as she finished going insane.

Kaylie, alone.

That was who she was. She was Kaylie now. She had always been Kaylie, and the rest of it was all lies.

Her head was buzzing again. Wasps in there. A hive between her ears.

Craziness.

She shuddered, hating the disorder of her thoughts. Was insanity a germ? Could you inhale it, like the flu bug, from an infected atmosphere?

She had not been crazy on the night of her arrest. She was sure of that.

But now…

No longer could she seem to keep her thinking straight. She had periods of sharp clarity, when she knew what day it was and how she’d gotten here, but there were other times — more and more frequently — when she was adrift on a raft of strangeness, in a calm yet angry sea.

Losing her mind.

Like last time.

Fear rose in her, a peculiar disembodied fear that clutched at her sense of self and made her small and helpless and not a person, somehow.

The fear was what she hated most of all.

The fear… and Cray.

Cray, yes. Hold on to that. Cling to the certainty of evil. Evil was something hard and real, and she could not lose herself wholly as long as there was one real thing in her world.

She blinked the fear away, and looked around her at the room where she had spent her incarceration. An isolation cell, they called it. Nicer, newer, than the one she’d had last time.

Back then, twelve years ago, they’d kept her in the oldest wing of the hospital, Ward C, and the rooms were poorly heated at night and the cement walls sweated during the day, and there were bugs, brown and shiny like scurrying pennies.

This room was better. It was clean. It had no bad smells. Its furnishings, though meager, were not the stuff of dungeons.

An improvement, yes.

But a cell nonetheless.

The room was small. She had paced it today — or last night? She didn’t know. Time had blurred, melted. Hours were minutes were days.

But the room… Stay focused. Look at the room.

Small. Three paces by four,

A bed — just a cot with rubber sheets — rubber so that if she should wet herself, the sheets could be hosed clean.

Steel toilet in a corner, not hidden, no privacy, and any nurse or orderly who wished to look through the plate-glass window in the door might catch her squatting there. Cray himself might see her.

A shiver hurried through her body like a fever chill.

She hugged herself, rocking on her haunches as she crouched on the linoleum floor.

The round hole in the door was the room’s only window. She had no view of the outside world. She never saw daylight. There was no clock, and they had taken her wristwatch. Morning was when the attendant came with a breakfast tray, noon was the lunch tray, evening the dinner tray.

A single chair rested in a corner. It was plastic, with wobbly legs and no armrests and no seat cushion. Cray used the chair when he came for their therapy sessions once a day.

And that was it. That was all there was for her — the bed and the commode and the chair where Cray sat, and the tile floor that was cold against her bare feet.

She had kicked off her slippers, but she still wore the blue cotton outfit they’d dressed her in, the uniform of the condemned.

For the first day — Wednesday, it must have been, the day after her arrest — she had been strapped facedown to the bed, and when the sedative wore off and she started screaming, they had wedged a rubber throttle in her mouth.

Then there had been nothing she could do except lie motionless on the waterproof sheets, hearing the howls from down the hall, waiting for the nurse to enter with the syringe.

Injections every day. Always in her left arm, now purple with bruises. Medicine, they told her. She wondered.

Cray had visited her on that first day also, Cray who had shown such solicitous concern while the nurse was present, but when the nurse was gone and he was alone with Kaylie…

Then it had been like last time, no difference at all, and she had known for sure that she was Kaylie again, Kaylie the scared teenager, Kaylie in pain.

Later, she had been set free.

A nurse and some orderlies had unstrapped her from the bed, leaving her at liberty within the room’s close confines.

She believed it was three or four days ago that this modest emancipation had occurred. She wasn’t certain, though. It might have been yesterday — or tomorrow. It might have been next month or a million years in the future.

You’re in sad shape, girl, a voice said.

Anson’s voice.

She’d been hearing him a lot lately. At first she had welcomed him. But now an unmistakable hostility had seeped into his speech, and he frightened her.

Everything frightened her.

The small room and the rubber bedding and the nurses with their needles and the screams from the far end of the ward and Cray, of course, always Cray, never forget Cray.

You won’t be wriggling out of this, Anson said. You’re a wily one, sure, kept the bloodhounds at bay for twelve years, but you’re done for now.

“Done for,” Kaylie murmured.

Got what you deserved, you vicious little bitch. Serves you right for killing my boy.

“Don’t say that.”

You killed my boy, and now you expect comfort from me? Rot in hell, whore. Better yet — rot just where you are.

Eyes shut, she drew her knees up against her chin and huddled in the tight knot of her pain.

If even Anson had turned against her, then there was no hope left.

Shepherd was at his desk, eating a chicken taco with too much sour cream, when his phone rang.

“Homicide,” he said through a mouthful of shredded lettuce and cheese.