Stealing Faces (34 page)

She’d made it.

But not for long.

The duct trembled, groaning with new weight.

Cray, lifting himself into the hole.

Following.

Red glare behind her. The flashlight.

She shouldn’t look back, shouldn’t look back, but she did, and there he was, scrambling in pursuit, the flashlight in one hand, knife in the other.

She heard his fast, hysterical breathing, or maybe it was her own.

Forward. Go.

There was nothing for her then but a smeared impression of her elbows and knees in furious motion. Speed and panic and pure darkness ahead, red death behind.

She’d done this before—crawled like this, through this ventilation duct—crawled when she escaped from Hawk Ridge. Only then no monster had been chasing her, and she had crawled slowly, silently, afraid of being heard. Crawled to the midpoint of the ward, the bend in the L, where a vertical shaft intercepted this duct and rose a few feet to an opening in the roof.

Ahead she saw a faint fall of starlight, the roof exit, her one way out, her last chance.

Yards away.

Too far.

Cray was closing fast, and she wouldn’t get there.

She kept going, terror drumming in her chest. She was all fear now, nothing but fear, as Cray was nothing but hunger.

He grabbed her ankle.

With a gasp of panic she shook loose. Drove herself forward, pawing at the shaft, her hands gummy with old dust, the light from the rooftop opening still too far away.

Behind her, Cray sped up.

He had her scent in his nostrils now, the flavor of a fresh kill tingling in his mouth, and with feral quickness he came on fast, chuffing hard, the flashlight abandoned, the knife bared like teeth, and Kaylie almost in range for the final, lethal pounce.

She crawled for the light, the exit, and then the light was gone, blotted out—she didn’t understand how, and there was no time to think about it, because she heard Cray snarl, a low indrawn sound packed full of menace, the sound a dog would make in the instant before it leaped, and she knew he was tensing for the kill.

Directly ahead, something dropped into the shaft.

A human figure.

Twisting toward her—a man—and in his hand, a gun which rose for a shot he could not try, because Kaylie blocked the target.

“
Take it!”
 
he shouted, and he pitched the gun at her, a handgun, sliding along the shaft.

A gun that was just an illusion, like the man himself, a mirage out of nowhere.

Cray sprang.

The pistol completed its slide, spinning into Kaylie’s grasp, and remarkably it was real—as tangible and solid as the gun that had killed Justin many years ago—and with the gun in both hands she twisted onto her back, face to face with Cray as he fell on her, and she fired one shot directly into his heart.

Cray shuddered all over. Kaylie looked up into his eyes in the dim ambient light, eyes that widened with sudden intelligence, the shocked awareness that somehow, impossibly, she had beaten him.

Then she saw darkness filling those eyes, a flood of darkness, extinguishing the light, and Cray saw it too, she knew he did. He saw the dark tide that was fast flowing in to wash him away, and for the first time he was frightened by the dark, afraid like a child, afraid and alone.

She saw all this, in the moment when their gazes locked for the last time, and then the last living part of him was devoured by the dark, and everything was gone from his eyes, forever.

Cray sagged, a limp, dead thing, the knife in his hand as harmless as a toy.

Kaylie let go of the gun. It clattered in the vent with a hollow sound.

She made no further movement. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think.

“Kaylie?”

A familiar voice. She’d heard it before, but when? Oh, yes. On the night of her arrest.

It was Detective Shepherd’s voice. He was the man who’d materialized out of nothingness and saved her life.

She had no idea how he’d gotten here, no strength to ask. Later she would make him tell.

Later.

“Kaylie? You all right?”

He had crawled to her. Blinking, she looked at him.

“I’m fine,” she said, as if it were a summer day and she had merely responded to a casual pleasantry. “Just fine.”

He released a long-held breath. “Thank God.”

“Cray’s dead.”

“I know. Let’s get out of here.”

“Cray’s dead,” she repeated for no reason.

“There’s an exit to the roof.” Shepherd took her hand, gently coaxing her forward, away from the dead sprawl of John Cray. “Come on.”

She eased free of Cray’s loose, boneless limbs. “I know about the exit,” she whispered. “I used it to escape from this place once before.
 
But ...
 
not really.”

Abruptly she lifted her head, searching for Shepherd’s gaze in the faint light, wishing to make eye contact, feeling suddenly that it was very important for him to understand about the years of running, the scared-rabbit hiding, the night dreams and daytime fears.

“I never
 
really
 
escaped,” Kaylie said quietly.

Shepherd tightened his grip on her hand. “This time you did.”

Epilogue

“How did you find me?” Kaylie asked.

It was ten days after the events at Hawk Ridge, and she was sitting in an armchair by the window of her hospital room, a book in her hands.

Shepherd stopped just inside the doorway. “No hello? That’s the first thing you say to me?”

“Hello comes later. I have to know.”

“Well, at the sign-in desk the nurse told me you were in room three-twenty-two.”

“I meant that night, when I was in the air duct with Cray. You showed up and saved me. How?”

He smiled, circling the bed to approach her. The day was clear, the view through the window green and bright. He had not expected the grounds of
Graham
County
’s medical center to be so nicely landscaped.

“You mean nobody’s told you in all this time?” he said, teasing her by withholding a reply.

“Nobody seems to know. I was in too much of a daze to ask you that night. The stuff Cray was giving
 
me ...”
 
She put down the book and hugged herself. “I was half out of my mind.”

“Taking that much methamphetamine every day would make anybody crazy.” The smile slipped off his face. “How’s your treatment coming?”

“I’ve gotten over the addiction. The withdrawal symptoms weren’t too pleasant. But I can’t really complain.” She spread her arms to take in the room, with its sterile bedding and gleaming countertops, its private bath. “This place is a lot nicer than my previous accommodations—and I’m including the motels I used to stay in, not just Hawk Ridge.”

“You have the room all to yourself.”

“The institute’s paying for it.” She raised a mischievous eyebrow. “They’ll be paying for quite a few things. That lawyer Anson hired is pretty darn good.” Then she frowned. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“First I’d like an answer to one of mine.” He took a small manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I want you to look at this.” He unclasped the envelope and removed a photograph, then hesitated. “It may upset you.”

“After all that’s happened to me recently, I’m past being upset.”

Even so, her hands trembled slightly as she studied the photo during a long, thoughtful silence.

“It’s her,” she said finally. “The one in the garage, twelve years ago.”

“We thought it was. She’s the only victim who disappeared in the right time frame. This is her yearbook photo, senior year.”

“Who was she?”

“Rebecca Morgan. Age nineteen when she was reported missing. She was never found. She got into a fight with her boyfriend and went out to the highway to thumb a ride home.”

“And Justin picked her up. Justin ... and Cray.”

“They must have.”

Kaylie nodded slowly. “Nineteen. My age at the time. I wonder if Justin would’ve gotten around to hunting me before long.”

Shepherd didn’t answer.

“When I saw her,” Kaylie went on softly, “she was only a face. Like a mask. A rubber mask. That’s what I thought it was, at first, until I touched it, felt the texture .... Justin had preserved her with some sort of tanning oil, and pressed her between two plywood planks, like a dry leaf pressed in a book.”

“Cray used a different method later on,” Shepherd said, but she didn’t seem to hear, and he knew she was not in this room, but in the garage of the house she’d shared with her young husband, the garage with its secrets, its insanity.

“I went in there,” she whispered, “because Justin was always ordering me to stay out, mind my own business. I knew he was hiding something, and finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I never imagined—until I found
 
that ...
 
trophy ...”

“And then he found you.”

Her eyes closed briefly in confirmation. “He’d gone out that night, in his camouflage fatigues. Normally when he went hunting, he didn’t return for hours, even days. I thought it was safe to poke around. But that time he came back only a few minutes after he’d left. He’d forgotten something, I guess. He walked right in on me—while I was holding it in my hands—that girl, Rebecca Morgan—her face in my hands—”

Shepherd stepped beside the chair and touched her shoulder gently. She managed a weak, faltering smile.

“I guess you were right,” she said. “I guess I am still capable of getting upset. It’s just that I’ve dreamed about it so often in the years since. Nightmares, awful ones. And seeing her picture now just brings it all back.”

“I’m sorry. But we needed to confirm that last detail.”

“I’ll be okay.” She remembered the photo she was holding, and handed it back without another look. “Anyway, I’m glad to know her name. For all these years she’s been a mystery to me. She didn’t live in Safford, did she?”

“Miles away. A whole different county. Justin and Cray must have been cruising far from home when they gave her a lift.”

“That’s why I never heard about her disappearance. If she’d been local, I would have known. As it was, I only knew she was some stranger Justin had murdered, and he’d kept part of her—kept it the way he kept the antlers and hides of other things he’d killed. And later ... later I began to think he hadn’t acted alone.”

“Because the evidence vanished. There was nothing in the garage when the police searched the house.”

“It was all gone. The girl’s face, and the jars of blood, the tapes with Indian chanting on them—everything. So nobody ever believed a word I said. They didn’t even listen.” She shook her head. “If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have taken some of it as proof, gone straight to the police. But I couldn’t think at all. After I shot
 
him ...”

The words trailed off, and for a moment Shepherd thought she wouldn’t speak again, but then she lifted her head, determined to finish the story.

“I had no choice about it. He had backed me up against the garage wall, and he was closing in, and his eyes—I’ve never seen eyes like that, so wild and dangerous, tiger’s eyes.” She stared into some far distance, and Shepherd knew she was seeing those eyes now. “All I could do was grab a pistol off the gun rack. He always kept them loaded. I squeezed the trigger once, and it was so loud, the noise, and there was blood, a lot of blood, spraying me, my hands, all
 
red....”

Her fingers interlaced, her wrists twisting.

“After that, I lost it. I just went away somewhere, and whatever I did, I was only going through the motions. When they found me in the desert, I was on my knees, crying, and I couldn’t say a word.”

“You were in shock, Kaylie. That’s all.”

“I thought I was insane. And when I heard all the evidence was gone, I thought maybe I’d imagined the whole thing—that maybe there never had been any woman’s face, that Justin hadn’t tried to kill me, that all of it was in my mind, and I’d killed him, murdered him, for no reason at all....” She took a breath, then added, “And Cray, of course—my therapist—Cray did his best to convince me that I was crazy. He told me I was a hopeless case, and there would never be a cure.”

“When did you start to suspect him as Justin’s accomplice?”

“Only later, after I’d escaped from Hawk Ridge. I asked myself if there was any way the evidence could have really existed and then vanished. There was only one answer. Justin had a partner—whoever he was meeting that night. And when Justin didn’t show up, his partner came to our house, found him dead, and cleaned out the garage so the police would find nothing incriminating.”

“You still didn’t know it was Cray.”

“No. I was never sure. Even after I read about Sharon Andrews—how she was found in the river, found without a face—even then, I didn’t know if Cray had been Justin’s accomplice, or if it was someone else, or if I really was deluding myself about the whole thing. But I knew Cray
 
might
 
be the one. Because at Hawk Ridge he’d hated me so much. And why would he hate me, unless I’d killed someone who mattered to him? He’s a loner—a lone wolf—but with Justin he found someone who understood him. Justin must have been the only person who ever meant anything to Cray. The one person he loved.”

Shepherd realized he was still holding the photograph. He took a last look at Rebecca Morgan, smiling into the abyss of her future, and then he slipped the photo back into the envelope and fastened its clasp.

“Well,” he said, “that wraps it up, I think. Case closed, after twelve years.”

“I guess so. I guess ...” Then Kaylie lifted her head, playful annoyance furrowing her brow. “
Hey.
 
You’re still holding out on me. The air shaft—remember?”

Shepherd shrugged. “It’s getting late. You can wait another few days, can’t you?”

“Tell me, or I’ll get violent. I’m good at it. Ask that poor nurse I ambushed at Hawk Ridge.”

He smiled, giving in. “It’s less of a miracle than it might have seemed. See, I was looking for you. I knew Cray was on the hunt. Then I heard the noises he was making inside the abandoned ward. Animal cries, but it was no animal. I couldn’t unlock the doors, didn’t have any keys, but I remembered Cray telling me how you’d gotten out years ago through an air shaft. I figured I could get in the same way. I climbed to the roof, dropped into the vent—and saw you coming, with Cray right behind.” He shrugged. “That’s it.”

She nodded, absorbing this. “Thanks,” she said after a moment. “I just wanted to know.”

Shepherd could hear fatigue in her voice, and he knew he ought to depart, but he lingered, reluctant to leave her.

“They letting you out of here soon?” he asked.

“Couple days.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll stay with Anson for a while. Don’t know what I’ll do afterward. I have to get used to thinking of a long-term future, not just living moment to moment, on the run.”

“You’ll handle it.”

“Oh, sure.” She hesitated. “I’ve been thinking I might try to find a way to help other people like me. People on the street, with nowhere to turn.” A shrug. “I don’t know how. But it’s what I’d like to do.”

Shepherd thought of his wife’s computer, untouched for two years. Her project. A way to help people on the street.

“I might have an idea about that,” he said slowly.

“Do you?”

“I don’t know if you’d be interested. We can talk about it some other time. When you’re feeling all better.”

Still he didn’t go, and suddenly he knew why. There was something he had to say, something she deserved to hear.

“I should have listened to you, Kaylie. That night when I put you under arrest, you told me to look in Cray’s house. You told me.”

“You thought I was a psycho.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

Unexpectedly she smiled at him, a light and easy smile, girlish on her freckled face. “
Roy
, you’re the first person, other than Anson, who ever
 
did
 
listen to me in all this time. Not to mention that you saved my life. So don’t be too rough on yourself.”

“I’ll try not to be.
 
And ...
 
thanks.”

“Anson feels the same way, incidentally. He wants to have you over for dinner once I’m staying with him.”

“I’d like that. I, uh, I’d like to see you again—if it’s all right.”

“Of course you can. You’ve got an idea for my future, remember? I want to hear it.” Her smile widened. “I need all the help I can get.”

Shepherd suddenly felt young, younger than he had since
 
Ginnie’s
 
death. The world was new again, a burden lifted.

“Well,” he said, “I’d better move along. You can get back to your book. What are you reading, anyway?”

He took a step closer to the table where the slim hardcover volume lay, and he read the title.

The Mask of Self.

Cray’s book.

“I asked Anson to bring it to me,” Kaylie said.

Shepherd stared at the book as if it were a spider. His voice was low and puzzled. “Why?”

“I wanted to understand Cray. I thought this might help.”

“Has it?”

“Yes. I think so.” She picked up the book and flipped idly through the pages. “Everything we ought to revere in people, he saw as an illusion. When you think that way, you shut off the best parts of yourself, and all that’s left is the animal inside.”

“He would say that’s all there is.”

“And look where it got him.” The book thumped on the table, released from her hand. “We have to believe there’s more to us than just instincts and chemicals. Even if we can’t prove it, even if it’s not even true, we can’t live any other way.”

* * *

The afternoon sun was golden on the desert when Shepherd drove back to
Tucson
. He let the highway flow under him, the
 
Pinaleno
 
range passing to the north, then dropping back as shadows lengthened.