Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

The hatchback had cost $350 when she bought it two years ago in a liquidation sale at a car lot in Flagstaff. The salesman had seemed ashamed to sell it to her, but she could afford nothing better. Remarkably, the Chevette had proven reliable enough.

She unlocked the door on the driver’s side and sank behind the wheel, then jerked upright with the sudden certainty that Cray was in the car with her, in the backseat, waiting to take her by surprise—

He was not in the backseat. He was nowhere.

“Oh, quit it,” she snapped, tired of herself. “Just cut it the hell out.”

She keyed the ignition, and instantly the car began to shake like a washing machine on the spin cycle. With an unsteady hand Elizabeth rolled down the window to get some air.

Pulling out of the lot, she cast another look at the red Fiat, which was still a Fiat, not a Lexus SUV.

Cray really was gone.

She’d done her best, but he had slipped away. There was nothing more she could do. Nothing.

Except, of course, there was.

Elizabeth Palmer.

Cray repeated the name silently in the confines of his Lexus, over the low hum of the engine.

Elizabeth Palmer.

A reasonably mellifluous name. One he was likely to remember, if he had ever heard it before.

He tried it aloud: “Elizabeth Palmer.”

The taste of the words in his mouth was sweet and subtle and forbidden. He liked it.

He was driving down Oracle Road, the highway that descended from the outskirts of the Catalina foothills into Tucson’s downtown. Traffic had worsened in the city throughout the past decade, and tonight, at nearly eleven o’clock, his SUV was part of an endless flow of cars and pickup trucks, while the northbound lanes to his left were a thick mass of headlights.

Ordinarily he disliked city traffic. It made him grateful to live far from town, thirty miles to the east, where the roads at night were dark and quiet under the undimmed stars.

But tonight the congested streets were helpful to him. He would have found it difficult to follow Elizabeth Palmer on an empty road. She might have seen his headlights, as he’d seen the glint of her chrome.

She would never notice him now. He could follow her as far along Oracle as he pleased, keeping her red hatchback just within sight.

No doubt she was heading home — wherever home might be. He was curious about that. He would be able to tell a good deal about her simply from her residence. And once he had subdued her, he could search the place, comb through any file cabinets or desk drawers, learn who she was and what she was after.

His desire to see where she lived was one reason he had chosen not to attack her at the resort. The other was simple prudence. Though he might have surprised her on the fitness trail and rendered her unconscious, he would have had difficulty removing her from the hotel grounds without being seen.

And to kill her at the hotel and leave her there would be too great a risk. Someone might remember that she had left the bar soon after he had, that she had walked in the same direction he had taken.

No, it was better to abduct her from her home, interrogate her in solitude, and when the night’s sport was done, leave her body in the desert for the turkey vultures to find.

After losing her on the fitness trail, he had quickly doubled back to the parking lot. Since obviously she had followed him, it seemed safe to surmise that her car was parked near his own.

He’d moved his Lexus to another part of the complex, and from a hill he had watched the lot until the woman returned, hatless now, and wary. She must have spent two hours looking for him. Good. He wanted her tired, frustrated, not thinking clearly.

She got into a Chevrolet Chevette, the oldest and most unprepossessing vehicle in the parking area. Irrationally he was disappointed. He’d expected her to drive something better.

Before she left, he trained a pair of collapsible binoculars on the car, and in the light of a sodium-vapor lamp, he read her license plate. An Arizona plate, battered and soiled like the car itself.

He departed from the resort when she did, and followed her at a safe distance, listening to a handheld radio he kept in his glove compartment. The cheap speaker crackled with police codes.

Cray had purchased the radio from a black-market dealer who advertised on the Internet. Commercially available scanners only received police frequencies, but this radio was a transceiver; it transmitted on police bands. Cray could talk to the police.

As the hatchback pulled onto Oracle, Cray had heard a Tucson PD traffic unit call in a ten-seven. The officer was going on a break. Cray had waited a minute or two, to be sure the cop was out of his car and safely preoccupied. Then he pushed the transmit button.

“Traffic five-six,” he said in a neutral voice. “Can you, uh, ten-twenty-eight a stoplight?”

“Go ahead, five-six,” the dispatcher said.

Cray recited the hatchback’s license number. There was silence as the request was processed.

He was sure the dispatcher suspected nothing. His only worry was that the traffic cop might still be monitoring the frequency. If so, he would have heard his unit number, Traffic 5–6, and would alert Dispatch to the scam.

Most likely, however, the cop was using a public rest room or ordering a Big Mac and fries, or engaged in some equivalent proletarian distraction, and paying no attention to his radio at all.

“Traffic five-six,” the dispatcher said.

Cray smiled. “Five-six, go.”

“Twenty-eight returning. December ninety-nine, Chevrolet Chevette, to Elizabeth Palmer.”

They all talked that way, in shorthand. Cray knew the codes and phrases. The dispatcher meant that the requested information had come up on the computer: the vehicle registration was valid through December, the car was a Chevette, and it was registered in the name of Elizabeth Palmer.

Cray had repeated the last name in a questioning tone, and the dispatcher had spelled it in code: “Paul Adam Lincoln Mary Edward Robert.”

“Ten-four,” Cray had said, switching the radio off.

Now, as the Chevette passed Grant Road, approaching downtown Tucson, Cray tried out the name one last time:

“Elizabeth Palmer.”

He didn’t know it. The name was new to him.

So this woman, this Elizabeth Palmer, was not someone from his past, not a piece of his life.

She was a stranger.

Very odd.

He would have many questions for her.

And she would answer them all. He would see to that.

Idly he wondered what she was thinking and feeling right now. Most likely she had not eaten dinner. Perhaps she was thinking of a meal she could fix for herself. Her last meal, but she wouldn’t know it.

Or possibly her thoughts had wandered to some current or former boyfriend in whose arms she had experienced the intimacy that passed for passion in this debased age.

She might be musing on love, or her future, or some pretty memory.

He enjoyed this game of speculation. It made her real to him, a person with a life.

Though not for long.

Traffic thinned as Oracle curved into the dark grid of downtown streets. Cray fell farther back.

She must live here. Not a good neighborhood.

He expected her to veer off toward one of the residential districts, but instead she kept going into the heart of downtown, where the street fair had been held on Saturday night. Oracle Road was called Main Street here. At the corner of Main and Sixth, Elizabeth Palmer parked her car.

Cray cut down a side street, then circled around to Main, a block south of the parked car, and found a spot at the curb. He was in time to see Elizabeth Palmer emerge from the Chevette and jaywalk across the street.