Michael Prescott: Stealing Faces

WOMAN’S FACELESS CORPSE FOUND IN WHITE MOUNTAINS.

That had been the headline in the Tucson Citizen on the day after the storm, when, at a campground three miles from the site of the kill, Sharon Andrews was found entangled in a floating deadfall, bobbing amid ribbons of shredded plastic. A pair of forest rangers fished her from the water.

Nothing about the corpse or the plastic bag could lead investigators to a suspect. The bag was a common type, available anywhere. The two bullets imbedded in Sharon Andrews’ leg and hip were 9mm semi-jacketed hollow points, untraceable.

No real harm had been done. Even so, Cray hated having his work uncovered. He endured two weeks of media speculation on the twisted psychology of the killer.

The coverage enraged him. He felt violated.

Oddly, every expert assumed that the mutilation was postmortem. No one seemed able to conceive of the truth — that Sharon Andrews had been alive to witness her own final unmasking.

Pain had killed her almost at once, but not before Cray had shown her the trophy he’d taken. She had stared at her own face in his gloved hands, and it had stared back in eyeless mockery, the last thing she would ever see.

That was the whole point, and it was so very obvious, yet not one of them could see it. Not one.

Cray shook free of those thoughts and focused on recalling the exact date of the body’s discovery.

August 17. Five weeks ago.

Elizabeth Palmer had begun following him just afterward. Or so it would appear.

He pondered this sequence of events as he chased the little hatchback into South Tucson, a blighted barrio landscape of rusty low-riders and security-barred windows and brick walls tattooed by gang graffiti.

Brave Elizabeth risked a look into a bikers’ bar and then a noisy pool hall.

Cray had been to both places within the past month. He could not recall exactly when.

She couldn’t have followed him inside on every occasion. She would have attracted notice in the rougher places — the notice of the other patrons, certainly, if not of Cray himself. Perhaps she had sat outside, watching from her car as Cray entered and left.

If so, the tableau was reversed now. It was Cray who sat and watched, sunk deep in the Lexus’ leather seat.

She did not give up until Cray’s dashboard clock read 2 A.M. The bars were closing. There was nowhere left to look.

Now she could only go home. She must be worn out, poor thing.

The Chevette headed north on Park Avenue, then west on Silverlake Road, toward the interstate. Cray, staying far behind, watched the red rectangles of her taillights.

Elizabeth drove steadily, never exceeding the speed limit. At every stop sign and red light she came to a full stop. She never ran the yellows. She used her turn signal even when no other vehicle was near.

Such caution seemed out of character for a huntress sniffing John Cray’s spoor.

Then abruptly she turned down a side street, the move so quick it had to be unpremeditated. Cray worried that she’d seen him behind her and was trying to shake him off.

No. There was a simpler explanation.

A few blocks ahead, the light bar of a Tucson PD patrol unit shimmered at the curb. A police car was making a traffic stop.

Cray did not take the side street. He continued past the police car and the motorcyclist who’d been pulled over, then waited at an intersection until he saw the Chevette reappear a quarter mile ahead.

Elizabeth Palmer had gone out of her way to avoid passing a police car.

And now Cray knew why she drove so timidly.

She was afraid of being stopped. Afraid of the police.

Now why would that be, Elizabeth? he wondered. What would a nice girl like you have to fear from an officer of the law?

He couldn’t guess, but he began to understand why she would follow him on her own. If the police were off limits for some reason, then she would have no choice but to handle things herself.

It seemed a heavy burden for such frail shoulders.

He would be glad to lift it from her, to give her peace.

He expected her to get on Interstate 10, but instead she passed beneath it, then pulled into a motel on the frontage road.

She was not even a local resident. And the motel, a ramshackle one-story building amid miles of desolation, looked as seedy as the car she drove. Whoever she was, she had no money.

She was nobody. Nobody at all. A stranger from out of town, alone, engaged in a secret quest. Who would miss her when she disappeared?

Cray parked on the frontage road, then retracted his side window and stared at the motel parking lot across a waste of weeds and flat, parched land. Trucks howled past on I-10, shaking the world.

He watched as Elizabeth Palmer got out of the car and headed toward the motel. Halfway there, she stopped, lifting her head to look around sharply.

“Do you know I’m here, Elizabeth?” Cray asked in a whisper. “Do you feel my gaze?”

With a dismissive shake of her head, she resumed walking. At the side of the building she fumbled in her purse for her keys, then unlocked the door of her room.

The door shut behind her, and a light came on behind closed drapes. There was a pause, and suddenly her shadow passed over the drapes, sweeping like a pendulum. Again. Again.

She was pacing. Upset.

“You’re tired, child,” Cray said. “You need your rest.”

She would fall asleep eventually. Cray could wait.

Another bevy of trucks roared past, and then in a stretch of sudden stillness, Cray heard the distant wail of a coyote somewhere on the flats, another predator like himself.

The room was quiet, at least. Elizabeth was grateful for that. She had spent much of the afternoon trying to block out the pornographic sounds from the adjacent units.

The motel, if she could judge by the scarcity of cars in the parking lot, was largely empty now. Apparently it did most of its business during the day.

Many times in the past twelve years she had been holed up in a place like this. Sometimes it was a motel just off the interstate, and sometimes an apartment house that rented single rooms by the week, with a common bathroom down the hall.

There had been a nice cottage in Santa Fe, which she’d rented for nearly a year while doing clerical work at an accounting firm. Trellises of climbing roses had garlanded the patio; she would sit outside in the soft springtime air.

That had been one of the good times. Colorado Springs had been good also. She’d spent six months there, in a two-bedroom apartment with modern appliances and quiet, respectable neighbors. She had been tempted to buy a cat and settle in, but then things had gone wrong and she’d had to clear out fast, loading up her Chevette in the night.

So much running, twelve years of it, crossing state lines, moving from the desert to the mountains, from cities to small towns.

A month ago — had it been only a month? — she’d been living at the edge of a Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area, where the sculpted buttes took great jagged bites out of the turquoise sky. She had been a waitress in a truck-stop diner, a job that always seemed strangely glamorous in the movies. Her feet were sore every night, and in her sleep she would dream of balancing stacks of dishes.

She’d run and run, and now here she was in southern Arizona, not fifty miles from where her zigzag trek had started.

Elizabeth kicked off her shoes, tossed her jacket on the armchair by the standing lamp. It was a nylon jacket, red with silver and white trim, bearing the insignia of the University of New Mexico Lobos. She’d bought it in Albuquerque, on an excursion from Santa Fe — just one of many things she’d picked up in her wanderings.

Barefoot, she paced the floor. A window air conditioner rattled and hummed, stirring a lukewarm breeze. The spotty beige drapes shivered in the current of air.