Michael Prescott - Stealing Faces

How would it feel, wrapped around her neck and drawn taut as she dangled, dangled…?

“No,” she murmured, “I can’t.”

But she had to.

If she didn’t, Cray would come, and he would kill her.

Could she give him that final victory? After everything he had done to her, could she allow him the obscene triumph of taking her life by his own hand?

This new thought of hers was the only alternative, her only choice.

If she dared to do it.

If she had the will.

The strength.

Time for you to go, Kaylie, said a voice that seemed oddly familiar, not at all threatening — a gentle, persuasive voice. It took her a moment to realize that it was her own.

Slowly she nodded.

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s time for me to go.”

All right, then. Do it.

Now — quickly — before the nurse returned for the day’s last injection.

Kaylie rose from the bed with a sleepwalker’s unselfconscious grace and, moving fast but with no sense of strain, began to strip the top sheet from the bed.

“Yes,” she was saying in a quiet monotone. “Yes, it’s time. It’s time. It’s time, at last, for me to go.”

Shepherd found Anson McMillan in an unfenced desert lot at the rear of his house, an ax in his hands, logs of mesquite scattered on the ground.

The sun was low over the Pinaleno range, the sky burning with fever. Shepherd had expected to find Kaylie’s father-in-law indoors, perhaps fixing a leisurely dinner or nursing a beer in a frosted glass — not splitting mesquite cords while his lank gray hair dripped with sweat.

He watched the ax rise, then drop in a gleaming arc to bisect another dark brown trunk. Then he took a step forward and lifted his hand in a wave.

“Mr. McMillan?”

The older man wrenched the ax head free of the wood before looking up with unhurried curiosity. His face was square and tan, bristling with a silver mat of beard. He stood for a moment, the ax half-raised like a weapon, and then he remembered courtesy and lowered it to his side.

“That’s me,” he said, his soft, growling baritone traveling easily across the few yards of prickly pear and agave that separated him from his visitor. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’m Detective Roy Shepherd, Tucson police.”

“ Tucson?” McMillan digested this. “You helped arrest her, didn’t you?”

Shepherd almost asked how he knew, then recalled that the local paper had given the story extensive coverage. Though he had not granted any interviews, his name had been mentioned.

“I did,” he answered. “Now I’ve come to talk with you about her.”

McMillan let the ax fall. He wiped his hands on a flap of his denim shirt. “What for?” he asked.

“Undersheriff Wheelihan tells me you’re concerned about Kaylie. I’d like to know why.”

“It’s a long way to come, just to chat about a girl who’s already locked up. You city cops must have a lot of time on your hands.”

Shepherd took this with a smile. “Could be. It looks like you’re putting your time to good use, anyway. Laying up firewood for the winter?”

“Hell, no.” McMillan surprised him by looking at the cut logs in disgust. “I hardly ever start a fire. Got good electric heat. I’m doing this”—his shoulders slumped—“just because I need to work it off somehow.”

“Work what off?”

“The frustration. My damn lawyer says it’ll be a couple of days before he gets me in to see her. A couple of days… Somehow I think that might be too long.”

“Too long for what?”

“I’m not even sure. It’s just a feeling I have. A bad feeling. And dammit, there’s nothing I can do.”

“There’s one thing.”

“Yeah. I can talk to you. Right?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ve said it all before. Years ago. Said it to the sheriff and to every friend I’ve got and to any soul who’ll listen.”

“But you haven’t said it to me.”

McMillan squinted at him, taking Shepherd’s measure. Slowly he nodded.

“Okay, Detective. Let’s go sit on the porch and watch the sunset like a couple of old ladies, shall we? And I’ll tell it all again. I’ll explain to you why I care so much about the woman who shot my boy.”

*

The porch was up high, offering a good view of the desert around the McMillan house — a ranch house with adobe walls, resting on an acre of unincorporated county land west of Safford.

Shepherd had obtained the address from a phone book — as he’d expected, there was only one Anson McMillan in Graham County — and had tracked down the one-lane rural route after only a few wrong turns.

On the porch McMillan offered him a root beer, which Shepherd accepted out of politeness, though he hated the beverage. He sipped a little, swallowed it without a grimace, and set down the bottle on a hardwood table that had been hewed by hand.

Anson’s hand, surely. The man’s thick fingers were callused and misshapen from a lifetime of serious labor.

“So,” Shepherd said, letting silence complete the question.

McMillan stared at the sun now kissing the rim of the mountain range, its harsh theatrical light ruddy on his face.

“To understand Kaylie,” he began finally, “you first have to know about Justin. And about the guns.”

“Guns?”

“That’s what did it, I think. Or at least, what brought it out in him.”

“I don’t follow you, Mr. McMillan.”

“Hell, call me Anson.”

“And I’m Roy”

“Okay, Roy. That root beer cold enough, by the way?”

“Perfect,” Shepherd said. He hadn’t touched the bottle after his first reluctant sip.

“I love a good root beer. Takes me back. Well, anyhow, the guns. Thing is, my wife, Regina — may she rest in peace — never permitted a single gun in this house. That was her ironclad rule, and I went along with it, which marked me as unusual among fellows in these parts. Most of them would sooner die than give up their guns, or at least that’s what their bumper stickers say. Me, though — well, I just never cared for the damn things.”

Shepherd, who had seen what a gun could do in the hands of a drunk or a gangbanger or a child, nodded slowly.

“So Justin grew up playing softball and washing the neighbors’ cars for pocket money, and he never had a rifle to his name. Never went hunting. None of that.”

Hunting. The word stirred a small, furtive anxiety in the back of Shepherd’s mind.

He hunts them, Kaylie had said to the 911 operator. It’s a sport for him. He lets them go, and he tracks them, hunts them down like animals.

“Now, I don’t want to mislead you, Roy. When I speak of Justin’s boyhood, I don’t want you to think he was any sort of angel. Guns or not, he did get into trouble. He hot-wired cars, for one thing. Got himself a rap sheet by the age of fourteen for joyriding around.”

“Did he?” Shepherd said softly.

McMillan showed him a sly look. “Yes, sir. You’re thinking of Kaylie, aren’t you? The way she hot-wired a truck after she busted out of the institute twelve years ago?”

“As a matter of fact, I was.”

“She learned it from Justin. Must have. He was chock-full of these special talents.” The man sighed, releasing a great billow of breath. “I don’t mean to make light of it. Fact is, matters got pretty serious for a while. Justin set a fire in the high school gymnasium. Might’ve done some real damage if the gym teacher hadn’t smelled smoke and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher.”

“Why did Justin do that?”

A lift of McMillan’s shoulders. “Why does a cat play with a ball of string? For the sheer pleasure of it, I expect.”