Stealing Faces (19 page)

28

He had found the red car.

Walter knew it. From the moment he saw the car in the motel parking lot—the red car, it was a red car, just like the picture from the Internet—yes, from that very moment he’d had a feeling that it was the one.

And he never, ever had feelings. He had heard people speak of such things—intuition, hunches—but he’d never had the least idea of what they were talking about.

Yet this time he himself, Walter
 
Luntz
, had experienced a genuine premonition, and he had even said aloud in the cramped confines of his Toyota
 
Tercel
, “This is it. This is the right red car.”

Wary of calling attention to himself, he parked on a side street, not in the parking lot, then doubled back on foot. Although he had been driving for what must have been a long time, he was not tired in the least. He could have driven for hours, for days.

In truth, Walter had little concept of time at all. Time was something he measured mainly by the meals he was served in the hospital commissary. There was breakfast time and lunchtime and, his favorite, dinnertime.

But today he’d had only breakfast, no lunch, no dinner, and so time, for him, had simply stopped, and there was only the task of driving and searching and now, finally, the delicious reward.

He crossed the parking lot to the red car and stood behind it, staring at the license plate until he remembered the slip of paper Dr. Cray had given him.

Carefully he unfolded it and compared the license number with the string of letters and numerals on the plate.

The same.

He checked again. He checked a third time. Then, because he was a conscientious person and he did not want to fail in his important mission, he checked once more.

It was her car. Kaylie McMillan’s car.

His big hands flexed. He thought of last Christmas, when he and some of the other patients had been treated to a turkey dinner, and he’d gotten to play with the wishbone. It had snapped so easily in his fingers, just the way Kaylie McMillan’s neck would snap when he wrenched her head sideways on her shoulders.

He was not prone to violence. He’d never killed anybody, never even hurt an animal. Still, he didn’t imagine it would be too hard.

He just had to find her. She could be behind any of the motel room doors. He supposed the easiest way was to just knock on every door until eventually she answered. Then he would break her neck and walk away.

The nearest door had the number 27 on it in big letters. “Twenty-seven,” Walter said, for no particular reason. He often announced the names of things.

He knocked, but there was no answer. Nobody home.

“Twenty-eight,” he said at his next stop.

This time a person did answer, but it wasn’t Kaylie. It was some guy in a bathrobe, who said, “Yeah?” in a belligerent way.

“Is Kaylie in there?”

“I don’t know no fucking Kaylie. You got the wrong fucking room, asshole.”

The door slammed.

Walter nodded. The man had been helpful. He had made it very plain that Walter had the wrong room. If everyone in the motel was equally cooperative, he would find Kaylie in no time.

His knocking drew no response at rooms 29, 30, and 31.

The door to room 32 was already open. A maid was at work changing the sheets. “Is Kaylie in here?” Walter asked.

The maid was a young woman with dark hair and a round, dark face. She did not speak English. Walter was temporarily flummoxed. Then he thought of a way to get his point across.

He took a pad of motel stationery from a bureau and in a few deft strokes he sketched Kaylie’s face, as he remembered it.

Drawing was one of his few talents. He had heard Dr. Cray remark several times that his skill in this area was
 
really exceptional,
 
which Walter took to mean
 
good.
 
Some of the other patients couldn’t draw at all, couldn’t draw even a stick figure or a cartoon face, and some of them couldn’t recognize a human portrait when they saw one.

Walter might have his problems, but this was not one of them. The drawing he produced was a perfect likeness of Kaylie McMillan at age nineteen, an image culled from a library of faces in his photographic memory and put on paper without a single smudge or wasted line.

He showed it to the maid, and her face brightened.

“Ah, the
 
senora,”
 
she said. “I make up room for her. Very pretty, very nice.”

Walter nodded. He thought Kaylie was pretty too. He thought he might even kiss her once, smack on the lips, after she was dead.

“Where is she?” Walter asked. “I’m looking for her.” He rarely lied, but the importance of this moment inspired him to a brilliant prevarication. “I’m her brother, and I’m here to pick her up.”

This sounded convincing, though he wasn’t sure the maid quite understood.

Whether she did or not, she seemed happy to help. “She is in room, uh ... how you say
 
nombre
?
 
Three and seven.”

Three and seven? Room 10? No, that couldn’t be right.

Then Walter understood.

Room 37. Just a few doors down.

“Thank you,” Walter said. He took the drawing with him when he left.

Well, that had been easy. Now he would kill Kaylie and go home. His stomach was getting a little restless, and he suspected that lunchtime had passed. He hoped he would not miss dinner.

“Thirty-seven,” he said, and rapped on the door.

No answer.

He knocked again. “Kaylie,” he called. “Are you there? Come out, Kaylie.”

Nothing.

He was rather disappointed. It appeared she was out.

The idea that she might not open the door never occurred to him. At the hospital, the only world he knew well, people always responded when he knocked on their doors or called out to them or pressed a buzzer for help.

If Kaylie was not responding, then she wasn’t home. But she would be back. He could wait.

Waiting was another thing he was good at. He could sit in the same position for hours without moving.

Next to room 37 there was a stairwell. A good place to hide.

Walter retreated into the far corner of the stairwell and leaned back against the wall, his arms at his sides, his gaze focused straight ahead on nothing, no thoughts in his mind, no distractions, and he waited for Kaylie to return.

29

“Ma’am? You okay?”

Elizabeth
 
heard the words and looked up.

Two small boys, no older than ten, stood watching her with wary concern. One had a book bag slung over his shoulder, and the other wore a Diamondbacks baseball cap cocked on his head.

“Ma’am?” the boy with the book bag said again, his face scrunching up in a puzzled frown.

“I’m fine,” she answered automatically, wondering why he and his friend had stopped to ask.

Then she realized that unconsciously, while sitting on the bus-stop bench, she had begun to shred the newspaper in her hands. Long curling strips lay everywhere on the bench and sidewalk, a scatter of confetti.

“You’re not
 
s’posed
 
to litter,” the boy in the baseball cap said sternly. “It’s against the law.”

He seemed less helpful than the other boy, and more afraid.

Elizabeth
 
found a smile for him. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” Her gaze widened to include them both. “I won’t do it again.”

The second boy did not return the smile. He just stood silently appraising her, worried by what he saw.

His companion, more trusting, said, “That’s okay. You didn’t mean to. What’s your name?”

Before
 
 
Elizabeth
 
could answer, the other boy cut in. “I don’t think we should be talking to her, Tommy.”

Tommy ignored this. “You waiting for the bus?”

“No. Just sitting down. I wanted to get out of the wind for a while.” She got up, taking care not to scatter the loose strips of newsprint in her grasp. “Guess I’d better get going.”

“We go to Sewell Elementary,” Tommy said.

“Come on.” The other boy tugged at Tommy’s arm. He seemed even more concerned now that
 
 
Elizabeth
 
was on her feet. “Let’s go.”

Tommy reluctantly yielded to the pressure. “Okay,
 
well ...
 
we’ll see you.”

He produced a slightly goofy, lopsided smile, and
 
 
Elizabeth
realized that he was enamored of her, in his boyish way. That was why he’d stopped to talk.

She was charmed, yet at the same time oddly saddened. It took her a moment to realize that she was wondering how much time had passed since anybody had smiled at her like that.

She hadn’t dared intimacy in years. A serious relationship posed the risk of exposing her safeguarded secrets, or of drawing another person into the dangerous mess of her life.

“Bye, Tommy,” she said, with a smile of her own.

She glimpsed a red tinge inflaming his cheeks as he turned quickly away.

The two boys walked off, and she heard the one in the baseball cap saying, “What’s the matter with you, man? You nuts or something?”

She watched them go. They were heading west on their way home from school; her motel lay in the same direction. She didn’t want them to think she was following them. She had a feeling Tommy’s companion wouldn’t care for that development.

When they were well down the street, she wedged the newspaper under her arm and started walking. She knew what she had to do, and she had better get moving if she intended to do it tonight.

The risk was high, but she’d tried everything else.

She could run, of course, just run away and let Cray kill again and again, never to be stopped.

But then she would dream every night of the ride into the desert in the black Lexus, knowing that other women were taking that journey, women she might have saved. And one of those women might have a boy like Tommy, a boy who would grow up without his mother. Sharon Andrews, the last victim, had left a son behind.

“So do it, then,” she whispered to herself. “Do it, and get it over with.”

She thought of Tommy’s serious friend, who’d scolded her for littering. What would he say if he knew her plans for the evening?

In her mind she heard him saying sternly.
 
It’s against the law.
 
But littering was only a misdemeanor. Tonight she would commit a felony.

Well, so what? The law had never helped her. The law had been her enemy for twelve years. The law was obtuse and stubborn and blind, and to hell with it.

The two boys had cut down a side street now. Walking past,
 
Elizabeth
 
saw Tommy’s friend run up the driveway of a small house nestled in tall evergreens.

She envied him. He had a home and friends, and he ran only for the joy of it, not for survival.

The boy waved to Tommy, who yelled something indistinct and continued down the street. His house must be somewhere in the neighborhood.

She thought she saw him turn back once, perhaps looking for her, but probably it was only her imagination.

A boy of ten. If she and Justin had been married for the past twelve years, they might have a child of that age. A child who ran home from school with a book bag on his shoulder.

But Justin was dead, of course.

And she had killed him.

She had shot him in the chest and left him to bleed to death in the garage.

She still remembered—she would always remember—the stunned look on his face when he sank to his knees, the empty disappointment in his eyes, and the awful trembling of his lips as he tried to form words and failed.

The memory moved through her like a shudder, and briefly she was dizzy.

Too much sun. She needed to sit down. Well, her motel was close now. She could read the sign, outlined against the bright sky. The Desert Dream Inn.

It seemed appropriate. A desert dream was a mirage, wasn’t it? An illusion. A false hope.

She had been fooling herself to expect the police to believe her. She had been the victim of an illusion.

But not anymore.

30

Lois
 
Belham
 
had been on her feet from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, and now, at
3:15
, after shedding her waitress uniform and counting her tip money, all she wanted to do was go home and soak in a tub.

But first she had to talk to the cop.

He was a plainclothes guy, and he’d introduced himself as Detective Shepherd. She was grateful to him for suggesting that they sit in a corner booth. At least she could get off her feet.

“I remember her,” Lois said when Shepherd mentioned the incident of the spilled coffee. “Cute little thing, but all fluttery, like a bird.”

“You hadn’t seen her before?”

“No, never. Guess Leo and Kurt told you about her, huh?”

“That’s right.”

Leo
 
Galston
 
and Kurt Bane were the two patrol guys who came into the coffee shop now and then. Lois knew them pretty well. Nice guys, good tippers, and that Leo had a linebacker’s shoulders. Lois was big on shoulders. Her ex-husband Oswald had been built that way, and it might’ve been the reason she married him.

“Can you describe her?” Shepherd asked.

“She’s a blonde. Fair skin, freckles—like a schoolgirl.”

“Color of her eyes?”

“Didn’t notice. Might’ve been blue. Blue would work well for her, with the blonde hair and all, but I can’t really say.”

“Anything else?”

“Let me see. Her hair was fairly mussed, I remember. There was some dirt on her clothes, too. Not that she was, you know, slovenly.” She was proud to use this word, which she’d learned doing her crosswords for relaxation in the evenings when her feet were sore. “She needed to wash up, is all. She looked like she’d spent some time outdoors.”

Shepherd jotted this in a memo pad, appearing unsurprised. “What was she wearing?”

“She had on a jacket, one of those vinyl ones with a zipper. It was dark in color, as I recall.” Cops on TV were always saying things like that—
dark in color,
 
not just
 
dark.
 
Sounded more official, somehow. “And a skirt, a white skirt. I remember because I thought it looked nice, and I was going to ask her where she got it.”

“Did you?”

“Never got a chance. After the wet cleanup, she was so upset, she just paid her tab and scrammed.”

“How old was she, would you say?”

“Lord, I’m not a good judge of age. Middle twenties, maybe.” She almost added something, but reconsidered.

Shepherd seemed to sense her hesitation. “And?”

“It’s just—well, I’d bet she didn’t go far.”

He looked at her. “Why do you say that?”

“Because she was tired. She looked like she’d been up all night and had just wore herself out. I know how that feels.” She surely did. She was bone-tired right now. “You just want to crawl into a bath or a bed and shut your eyes. This lady you’re after had that same look about her.”

“So you think she’s close by?”

“Right in the neighborhood. That’s what I think.”

In the neighborhood.

Shepherd emerged from the coffee shop, blinking at the glare, and scanned the rows of strip malls lining
Speedway Boulevard
. He knew of two motels on
Speedway
within a half-mile radius of the Rancheros Cafe. If the McMillan woman had indeed been ready to crash in a nice, warm bed, she might have checked into one of those motels after leaving the coffee shop.

It was a long shot, but any shot at all was better than none.

Which motel? One lay to the east, the other to the west.

West seemed right. Going west, she wouldn’t have had to make a difficult left turn onto
Speedway
. She would have simply eased into the traffic flow and let the current carry her to the first available lodgings.

Worth a try.

He got in his sedan and pulled out of the parking lot, driving fast out of habit.

Of course, it was possible that she had checked into a motel days ago, in an entirely different part of town. But he didn’t think so. If she’d had a place to stay, she would have gone there directly after making her 911 call in order to wash up and change. Women hated dirt.

He smiled, imagining what Ginnie would have said if she’d heard such an obvious example of stereotypical thinking.

The motel appeared on his right, two blocks ahead. Drawing near, he could read the sign out front, advertising
 
CABLE TV
 
and
 
AIR CONDITIONING,
 
as if both features were exotic luxuries. In larger letters the motel’s name was spelled out:

THE DESERT DREAM INN.