Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

They had merely shoved her out of the truck and watched her land sprawling in the brush, and then Justin had raised his rifle and fired a single shot into the air.

The rifle dipped, targeting the girl. No speeches were necessary. She understood.

And she ran.

By silent agreement Cray and Justin lingered near the truck for fifteen minutes, allowing the girl a head start. Then Justin said, Let’s go.

Simple words. But packed tight with meaning, as richly crammed with all the potentialities of an unknown future as a bridegroom’s utterance of I do.

What had followed was the greatest experience of Cray’s life. He had always been staid, aloof, safely cerebral in his habits and predispositions. Even murder had come to him largely as an act of intellectual daring, the last link in a chain of propositions carried to their logical terminus.

But that night with Justin, the two of them racing in pursuit of the girl, Justin advancing with practiced confidence, Cray slower and less sure, stumbling on loose rocks, snagging his trouser legs on thorny brush, gasping to keep up — that night, when he and Justin hunted in tandem, a team of human predators, hot for blood, hungry for the kill — that night was Cray’s awakening.

He remembered the chase as a dream of fury and need, and high-pitched animal howling that was around him and above and below and inside him too, howling that was his own, because in his extremity of excitement he could not contain the instinctive impulse to bay the moon.

Later, Cray marveled at the changes that had come over him, the inexplicable madness that had consumed and redefined him. He could not understand it, but he knew it was real, and he knew there was no going back.

He had unleashed something in himself that would not be caged or killed. From his Apollonian torpor he had emerged into a Dionysiac frenzy, shedding inhibition, yielding to instinct, mad as a Bacchal reveler in the high hills of ancient Macedonia, wild as a lion. He returned from the hunt like Zarathustra descending from the mountaintop, like Rousseau’s unspoiled savage. The mummy wrappings of intellect and culture had been peeled away, and there was only the predatory ape, living for the thrill of hot flesh and crunched bone.

When the time had come to kill the girl, Justin had let Cray do it. Go ahead, Doc, he’d said in his calm way. She’s yours.

Cray had never heard an offer so tender. And then Justin had handed over his knife, and Cray, his hand trembling only slightly, had cut the girl’s pale throat.

He had not meant to take her face. His first trophy was a product of pure accident. In cutting his victim’s throat, he loosened the flap of skin over her skull, and remembering an autopsy he had witnessed, he had simply lifted the skin flap, peeling the face from its substructure of bone.

Justin had laughed in rare delight. Man, that’s a beauty, he’d said. You could hang that on the damn wall next to a four-point buck.

Cray had given Justin this prize. It was only right that the younger man should keep the trophy, after Cray had been honored with the kill.

A generous gesture, but in retrospect — calamitous. Had Cray kept the trophy, Kaylie never would have found it. Justin need not have died by her hand.

And Cray need not have mourned the man who meant most to him, the one man who had mattered.

Well, there was no point in pondering such things. The past was fixed and final. Justin was gone, but Cray, alone, had continued their work. And he used Justin’s knife — the sharp knife in its leather sheath — a knife for hunting, and better still for flaying the quarry when caught.

If events had worked out differently, he would have used that knife on Kaylie. Now that option was foreclosed. Her face would not be added to his wall.

A disappointment, surely. But he could live without that particular trophy. It was her life he wanted most, and her life he meant to take.

He patted the vest pocket of his jacket, reassuring himself that its secret contents were still in place.

On his way back to the office after his session with Kaylie, Cray had stopped in the hospital’s storeroom, a repository for all varieties of contraband collected from the patients. Amid the haphazard assemblage of junk, he had found an unopened pack of Marlboros and a Bic lighter.

Tonight he would have need of them.

Tonight — less than two hours from now — he would toss a lighted cigarette into the shrubbery outside the main door of Ward B.

There had been no rain since August. The brush was tinder-dry, easily ignited.

Once the blaze was roaring, he would barge into the ward, feigning alarm. Nurse Cunningham and the orderly on duty would fetch fire extinguishers and put out the fire.

Meanwhile, he would check on the patients upset by the commotion. But only one patient concerned him, of course.

He would enter Kaylie’s room at 7:30, roughly half an hour after her last scheduled injection, when the methyl amphetamine would have peaked in her bloodstream, rendering her most vulnerable to attack.

Agitated and confused, she would be easy to overpower. All he need do was pin her down, then slide a needle into her arm and pump in four milligrams of lorazepam.

A strong sedative, used on patients undergoing surgery. It would put Kaylie to sleep instantly.

No more resistance after that.

He would lash one end of the bedsheet to Kaylie’s neck, hoist her up, then run the other end through the grilled vent cover and tie it tight….

And let her dangle as breath was choked off by the sliding knot.

A peaceful death, really. Quicker and easier than Walter’s. She would be unconscious for the worst of it. She would know only a moment of struggle against Cray’s superior strength, then the stab of the needle and a numbing plunge of vertigo, then nothing, ever again.

He wished he could make it harder on her. He wished he could see her suffer.

But the important thing was that she would be dead, and when Anson McMillan showed up with authorization to see his darling Kaylie, he would cast his eyes on nothing but a corpse.

McMillan might well suspect foul play, but his accusations would be dismissed as an old man’s dementia. To the rest of the world it would be obvious that Kaylie had hanged herself in her cell. And because it was obvious, no detailed autopsy would be required and no toxicology tests would be done.

No one would ever find evidence of amphetamine poisoning or a massive dose of sedative administered immediately prior to death. No one who mattered would ever suspect a thing.

“You cost me a great deal, Kaylie,” Cray whispered to the crowd of faces that were his silent audience. “More than you know. Now you’ll pay the price.”

In the hall, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes.

Kaylie knew that sound. The night nurse, whose name tag read CUNNINGHAM, had left her station and was coming this way.

“Talk to her,” she murmured, “Make her understand.”

It won’t work, Justin said coldly. Nobody’ll listen to a sad little piece of shit like you.

Kaylie ignored him. She had to get the nurse to listen. Cray had promised to be back after nightfall, and although she couldn’t judge the time of day in her windowless room, she knew from the crawl of hunger in her belly that evening had drawn near.

She had no idea how he would gain entrance, what subterfuge he would use, no idea how he would end her life and how he expected to cover it up. But she knew he would find a way.

Since Cray’s departure she had not moved from the floor. Now she struggled to her feet, dizzy with the effort, while the voices of Anson and Justin blended in a singsong mockery of her failing strength.