Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

“Hey, Roy — I mean, Detective — I mean…” Panic jumped in the guard’s voice. “I mean, what the hell are you fucking doing?”

“I’m taking a look at what’s inside that bag.”

Shepherd climbed through the window, onto the couch, then grabbed the satchel and dumped its contents on a teakwood coffee table.

Duct tape, glass cutter, suction cup, locksmith tools, Glock pistol with a spare magazine…

It was true, then — what Kaylie had said. All true.

“Roy.” Collins, at the window. “I gotta radio my boss about this. I’ll lose my damn job—”

“I thought you didn’t like this job. I thought you wanted to be a cop.”

“Well… yeah.”

“Then get in here. I need you to find a phone and make a call.” Shepherd found Chuck Wheelihan’s name in his address book and read off the undersheriff’s home phone number. “Say I need some backup fast. All the patrol units they’ve got. But no lights and siren. They come in quietly. Okay?”

“Shit, Detective, what is going on?”

“Just do it.”

Shepherd left the living room while Collins was still scrambling through the window.

The house was large. He had no time to do a thorough inspection. But he had to check out the obvious places.

Kaylie had told him to search the house, had insisted Cray kept his trophies inside. She’d been right about the rest of it. Maybe about this part too.

He made a quick circuit of the ground floor — den, bathroom, kitchen. The freezer held no surprises.

Garage? The Lexus was parked in there. He found some tools in a cabinet, cans of paint and other innocuous items on the shelves.

He stepped back into the alcove that led to the garage, then noticed another door. He opened it. Stairs descended into the dark.

A cellar.

Shepherd knew then. He knew even before he found the wall switch just inside the doorway and switched on the single, unshaded ceiling bulb.

I steal their faces.

Mitch’s voice floated back to him, Mitch with his warehouse gallery of photo cutouts.

Shepherd walked halfway down the cellar stairs, looking at the walls, concrete walls streaked with mildew, and on the walls a series of unframed plastic blocks, transparent and smooth.

In each block, a woman’s face.

Cray had preserved his trophies in plastic, sealed away from air and germs. Eyeless faces. Open mouths. Ragged edges where the blade had sliced through the tender flesh of their chins and foreheads.

The blade…

There had been no knife in the satchel.

Cray had taken it.

He’d left the gun, because an unsilenced firearm was useless to him on the institute’s grounds. But the knife he had carried with him when he left the house.

He needed it. He was hunting her.

Shepherd had turned to climb the stairs when Collins appeared in the doorway. “I talked to him. You didn’t tell me I was calling the goddamned undersheriff. This better be—”

Then he saw the things in the cellar, and he blinked.

“They’re not real,” he whispered, “are they?”

“Cray’s been busy.” Shepherd reached the top of the stairs. “He still is.”

He guided Collins away from the cellar door and shook him gently to get his attention. “Here’s what you need to do now,” Shepherd said. “Find your boss, the chief security officer. What’s his name?”

He didn’t care about the man’s name. He just wanted the kid to start thinking again, to unfreeze his mind.

“Blysdale,” Collins said after a moment.

“Good, Blysdale. Track him down. Tell him what’s going on.”

“I can hail him on the radio.”

Shepherd had already thought of this — and had remembered how the satchel Kaylie left for the police had vanished before the squad car got there.

Cray had retrieved it. He could have found it only by monitoring police cross talk, beating the patrol unit to its destination.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want you on the air. Cray may be listening in. We can’t afford to tip him off. Got it?”

“Think so.” Collins nodded, then said more firmly, “Sure I do.”

Shepherd patted his shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

He moved away, toward the door at the rear of the kitchen, which led outside.

“What about you?” Collins called after him. “What are you going to do?”

Shepherd opened the door on the night, then looked back.

“I’ll find Cray,” he said, “and make up for a bad mistake I made… if I still can.”

Ward C, the abandoned ward of the Hawk Ridge Institute, was a one-story building in the shape of an L, with a brick exterior and a flat roof and not a single window, barred or otherwise. Access was afforded by doors on the north and east sides.

When it had been in use, Ward C had been known variously as the barred ward, the violent ward, the forensic ward, the disturbed ward. The hard cases had been interred there. Kaylie McMillan, murderess, had been one of them.

She was here again, not a prisoner now, only a hunted animal, crouching in a tight cluster of fear on the tile floor of the corridor, precisely at the midpoint of the building, the bend in the L.

There was no light in the ward. She hugged herself in the utter dark.

Her garments had been scratched and torn by brambles and cactus spines. She was dirty, rank with sweat. Her hair lay pasted to her scalp in a dense mat. Nausea bubbled in her gut. Her teeth chattered softly, though she was not cold.

Perhaps she had intended to come to this place. Perhaps it had been her plan to hide here. Equally likely, she had come only because she sought shelter, temporary concealment, with no strategy, no longer range in view.

Whatever she had done, she’d had no conscious reason for it. Her last instance of rational planning was the moment when she heard the squeak of rubber-soled shoes in the hallway outside her cell and knew the nurse was coming. Then she slipped her head into the noose she’d so carefully prepared, wedging her hand in also to relieve the deadly pressure on her throat.

Everything that happened since had been instinct, reflex, the blind impulse to survive. No thoughts. No identity. Only terror, panic, the brutal slamming of her heart against her ribs.

She had been a person once. A fugitive concocting aliases. Justin’s widow. Anson’s daughter-in-law. She had been someone real, an individual, all quirks and insecurities and self-doubts and loneliness and proud perseverance and determination.

All of that was gone now, just gone. Where the woman named Kaylie McMillan had been, there was only this dirty, exhausted, tattered, desperate thing, kneeling on cold tiles, hunched with fear, drawing shallow breaths that could not feed her lungs.

The voices, at least, had left her. Confusion and conflict had been banished. She had no alternatives to debate, no decisions to reach. She existed purely in and for the moment, without a yesterday or a tomorrow.

She would stay here, crouched like this, waiting like this, for as long as she had to, an hour or a week or a lifetime. She would never move, ever, until her heart stopped racketing in her chest and she felt safe.

From the end of the corridor, thirty yards from where she knelt, came a rasp of metal.

She looked up, her eyes straining in darkness.

There it was again — the noise — low but audible.

She knew that noise.

A sharper tremor passed through her, and a new squeeze of fear cramped her belly.

Hinges.

The rusty hinges of the exterior door, the north door, the door she’d unlocked with the ring of stolen keys.

Hinges creaking now as that door opened for a second time.

Panic impelled her upright, and she retreated around the bend in the corridor, and then she was running to the door on the east side, the only other exit.