Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

On the loose.

Kaylie, on the loose.

The only successful escapee in his tenure as director of Hawk Ridge, and now again she was out, she was uncaged — and his plan — the fire, the fake suicide — it was all spoiled now.

She’d cheated him, the bitch.

He held his voice steady. “When did this happen?”

“Couple minutes ago, is all.”

Then she hadn’t had time to go far.

She could be caught.

Cray’s anger vanished, replaced by a sudden warmth of good feeling. Every crisis, as the cliché had it, could be seen to represent an opportunity.

“I’ll meet you and your men outside the administration building,” Cray said coolly. “In five minutes.”

“Ten-four. And, sir? Should I call the sheriff?”

“Not yet. We’ll handle this on our own.”

“She’s a felon, sir. I think procedure—”

“On our own, Bob.”

He slammed down the phone, then ran to the foyer closet. With all the repair work that had been done on his Lexus in the last week, he had felt it prudent not to keep his satchel in the vehicle’s storage compartment. It was stowed in the back of the closet, behind an empty suitcase.

He hefted the satchel and swung it in one easy motion onto the sofa by the front window, then rummaged in it for his flashlight — a mini-flash with a red filter to preserve his night vision. He pocketed it, then searched further until he found his knife.

Justin’s knife, originally. But Cray’s, for the past twelve years.

The leather sheath, blood-spotted and worn with use, was as familiar to his touch as a lover’s hand.

He slipped the sheath inside his jacket. There was nothing else in the satchel he could use. His burglar’s tools were of no value in this situation, and his gun, the Glock 9mm, had no silencer. He couldn’t risk firing a shot. The noise would travel for miles in the stillness of the desert foothills.

That was all right. He wouldn’t need a bullet for Kaylie. Only the knife’s keen blade.

He left the house at a run. Crossing the hospital grounds, passing the cemetery where Walter had been laid to rest a few hours earlier, Cray reflected that Kaylie would have been better off had she committed suicide, as he’d suggested.

A slipknot, a short jump, an instant’s pain. Her death would have been quick that way.

Not now.

Bob Blysdale and four security officers in khaki uniforms were assembling before the entrance to the administration building when Cray arrived. He had sprinted the full distance from his house to the meeting place, four hundred yards, but he was not the least bit winded.

He was, in point of fact, invigorated.

“How did she get through the exterior door?” he asked Blysdale.

“Stole a set of keys.”

“Then she has access to every building on these grounds.”

“Sure. But you don’t think she’ll hang around, do you? I figure she’ll try to find a way out.”

“Quite likely. But how?” Cray was thinking aloud. “Last time she just climbed the fence.”

She couldn’t do that now. After Kaylie’s escape twelve years ago, the perimeter fence had been topped with spear points and razor wire.

“She could try one of the gates,” an officer named Collins suggested.

“Main gate’s guarded,” Blysdale said, cocking a thumb at the gatehouse, where the silhouette of a guard was visible in a lighted rectangle of glass.

“But not the gate at my driveway,” Cray said. “It’s how she got in the other night. It may be how she tries to get out.”

“I’ll send a man there, have him stand post.”

“And the others should fan out, search the perimeter. She may be looking for gaps in the fence.” There weren’t any, but she wouldn’t know that.

“All right, Dr. Cray.” Blysdale sent Collins to watch the driveway, and then he and the rest of his men scattered to the four points of the compass.

Cray watched them go. The various assignments ought to keep them busy. But none of them would find Kaylie. That was his job, and his alone.

He was the hunter. She was his prey.

Running again, past the administration building, to the side door of Ward B, the exit Kaylie had taken.

He switched on the mini-flash, beaming a dim red cone of light at the ground. The grass had been trampled by too many shoes. Some of the guards must have rushed to this spot in the first frantic moments after the reported escape.

He moved farther from the door, into virgin ground. Here the grass was stiff and smooth. He detected no tracks, no spoor.

He drifted away from the building, not in a straight line but in a wide semicircle. Standard technique. When unable to pick up a trail, circle ahead in the hope of intercepting the tracks.

Cray walked in silence, his toes pointed forward to feel their way, each step taken with the ball of his foot only. He kept to a fast stride, arms swinging loosely, gaze sweeping the grass. Looking not for shoe prints alone, but for less obvious signs as well: scattered twigs, crushed leaves, clots of dirt kicked up by racing feet.

Justin had taught him all this. Justin had taught him so much in their brief partnership.

There.

A puddle of standing water, residue of the sprinkler system, which soaked the lawns each morning in the predawn dark. At the edge of the puddle, the partial impression of a shoe heel.

But was it Kaylie’s? Or a false lead, a print left hours earlier by some wandering patient or groundskeeper?

Cray knelt, examined blades of grass flattened by the footstep. Bent but not broken, even now springing back. The track was recent.

It was hers.

Cray felt a twitch brush the corners of his mouth. He required an instant to identify it as a smile.

He stood. Looked ahead, following the direction of the print.

The wide expanse of the lawn was interrupted here and there by eucalyptus trees, some growing close together, others majestic in solitude. Small thickets of mesquite and purple sage glimmered in the starlight.

Cray let thought leave him, summoning instinct in its place.

A fleeing animal tends to take the easiest route, cutting through the widest spaces between the trees, avoiding thickets of underbrush that would impede progress. The hunter, seeing the lie of the land as his prey would see it, could sometimes deduce his quarry’s line of advance.

The most direct and least obstructed path would have taken Kaylie McMillan on a zigzag run between a ragged colonnade of trees, bypassing any snarls of ground cover.

Cray followed this route, running hard, not bothering to look for other tracks. He knew that a hunted animal would normally proceed as far as possible along its original avenue of escape.

He stopped only when he reached a denser thicket of ground cover bordering a duck pond. In the scatter of bird droppings along the muddy shore, he found more shoe prints.

She had turned here. Turned south.

That was odd. The nearest stretch of perimeter fencing lay to the east. He would have expected her to head for the fence in search of a way out.

Instead she had veered in a different direction — back toward the buildings of the institute.

The last place she would want to go, or so it seemed. The administration building and the two active wards were staffed twenty-four hours a day.

But the other building, Ward C, the abandoned ward…

A person could hide in there. A person who had stolen a full set of keys, as Kaylie had. And she knew the building. It was where she been incarcerated during her first stay at Hawk Ridge.

Had she planned to conceal herself in the abandoned ward from the start? Or had she panicked after escaping, when she realized the guards would be called immediately and she would have no chance to find a way out of the hospital compound?