Stealing Faces

bundled nerve cells of the brain stem, the autonomic functions of the body.

She would be pure, liberated, and absolutely honest for the first and only time since infancy.

It was a wondrous transformation. He’d written about it in his book. Not everything, of course. He’d omitted the more dangerous ideas. Still it was remarkable, the things a person could write from behind the cloak of disinterested scholarship.

Imagine if he were to approach a stranger and tell him that his life was worthless and meaningless, his most cherished virtues a lie, his aspirations and convictions a stupid joke. Cray would be lucky to escape a fistfight.

But write it in a book, and the world turned upside down. Tell people, as he had, that their personalities were an illusion, their every conscious thought only an irrelevant by-product of biological processes, and that they were apes, or lower than apes — automatons, robots — and they shook his hand, requesting his autograph and wanting more.

He spat in their faces, and they licked it up like candy. He had expected angry denials, defensive ridicule — anything but what he’d received.

Money.

Acclaim.

The Mask of Self was in its fourth printing. There was a trade paperback edition in the works, with a new foreword by the author. His book had not quite achieved bestseller status, but he had earned enough to pay for the Lexus and to fund a comfortable portfolio of diversified investments.

Yet in retrospect he saw that his amazement was misplaced. He had spoken the truth, and it had filtered through the layers of deception people wove around themselves. He should not have been surprised. In their instinctive, visceral responses — in the bodily wisdom that the ancient Greeks called thumos — people knew what they essentially were. They knew and, hating the disease of consciousness, they instinctively sought a cure.

The door of the bar opened, and Elizabeth Palmer emerged. She’d spent only a couple of minutes inside, enough time for a quick look around, perhaps a question asked of the bartender — Have you seen a man in here, all dressed in black? She hurried to her car, her steps nimble and fast.

When the Chevette pulled away, Cray followed.

She would keep looking, of course. Though she must be tired and hungry and scared, she would not give up.

That was all right. Cray had time. He had all night.

And, like her, he could be persistent in the chase.

6

Cray stayed well behind the Chevette, keeping the hatchback just within sight, counting on Elizabeth Palmer not to check her rearview mirror too closely. He knew she wouldn’t. She was on the hunt, or so she thought. Her attention would be fixed on what lay ahead.

She led him to the seedy strip of trailer parks, cheap motels, and bars called, inevitably, Miracle Mile. The district was crowded even at this late hour. Young men in ponytails and buzz cuts stood in angry clusters under the streetlights. Tattooed and mini-skirted women walked past, eliciting the usual simian responses.

The area was a center of prostitution and drug use. Many of the motels were rented by the hour. An adult bookstore competed for business with a gospel mission. There was a great deal of neon everywhere, and there was darkness in the places where the bright lights didn’t reach.

It had been two weeks since Cray’s last visit to Miracle Mile. Had Elizabeth Palmer been tailing him even then? Had she shadowed him for that many nights before he became aware of her?

The establishment he’d patronized was a topless bar, not his usual sort of place, but he’d been in a restless mood, the first phase of his killing cycle.

He watched as the Chevette pulled behind the building and made a quick circuit of the parking lot. The persistent Miss Palmer was looking for his Lexus.

Failing to find it, she continued down the street. Cray cruised well behind her, past a department store that had shut its doors and was now a garish mausoleum of dead hopes, spray-painted with taggers’ signs, the parking lot a wasteland of asphalt inside a sagging security fence.

At a bowling alley the Chevette again performed a quick search of the perimeter. Cray, parked at a curb a block away, tried to fathom why she would look there. He was no bowler, for God’s sake. The activity was far too declasse for his tastes.

And yet…

He had gone there, hadn’t he?

Cruising the strip, he’d seen a woman enter the bowling alley on a Friday night. She had a golden fall of hair, and a wide, laughing mouth that intrigued him. He’d parked and sought her out inside. But predictably she had proven to be of no interest whatsoever, merely a glorified barfly, chortling raucously at the coarse jokes of her companions, using foul language, embarrassing herself. After eavesdropping on her conversation long enough to determine her true character, Cray had left.

Yes. He’d done that. But not very recently. Perhaps as long as a month ago.

Elizabeth Palmer could not have tailed him for a month. She wasn’t good enough, slick enough. He would have spotted her long before tonight.

Or would he?

Making eye contact with her at the street fair had been pure accident. If it hadn’t been for that split second of awareness, the instant when he saw her and sensed she was watching him, would he even have noticed her in the resort bar?

She could have been after him for thirty days, thirty nights. Staking out his home, then following him whenever he left in the evening. Following remorselessly, tirelessly, night after night. Following and watching.

For a month. A month…

It was only a little more than a month ago that Sharon Andrews’ body had been found.

The discovery had been Cray’s fault. For the first time in twelve years, he’d gotten careless.

Ordinarily he was meticulous in the disposal of his victim’s remains. But Sharon Andrews had led him on a long chase, and by the time he ran her down, night was ebbing. He had used a collapsible shovel to dig a shallow grave near the stream bank. Sealed inside an extra-large, heavy-duty trash bag to discourage scavengers, she was laid in the hole and covered over.

That should have been the last anyone saw of her, but Cray hadn’t counted on the summer flash flood season. In late August, torrential rains had fallen in the White Mountains. The stream had overflowed, the rush of water widening the banks, and Sharon Andrews had been dislodged from her grave and swept downriver.

He had buried her too close to the stream. A stupid error. Had he been less tired and more clearheaded, he would have moved her higher up the hillside. Or perhaps he should have simply left her in the open for the scavengers to find.

The trash bag, knotted shut, had kept her body dry. Without moisture, bacteria could not thrive. Some mummification had taken place, but little decay. And because the body was well preserved, no one could miss the obvious mutilation.

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