Stealing Faces

son and her grieving parents.

But none of this was a reason or an argument or a logical basis for anything at all.

To organize his thoughts, he glanced at the notes he’d scribbled in his pad. “She said this man Cray lives near Safford,” he began. “Safford is roughly halfway between Tucson and the White Mountains. It makes sense.”

“There are lots of places between Tucson and the White Mountains,” Stern said.

“And Safford is one of them. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just interesting — potentially interesting, at least. Then there’s this bit about hunting. You know how scratched up the Andrews woman was. Like she’d been on the run through the brush.”

Brookings shrugged. “She got away from the guy, and he went after her.”

“Or maybe he let her go and then followed. Made a game out of it.”

“Pretty far-fetched.”

Shepherd was undeterred. “She said Cray drives a Lexus SUV. That’s a pretty good all-terrain vehicle, and we’ve always known our guy has four-wheel drive. He didn’t kill Mrs. Andrews anywhere near a paved road.”

“Car’s all banged up, she claimed,” Alvarez added. “It’s something we can check out easy enough.”

Rivera, holding to his squirrel theory, grunted with heavy irony. “Yeah, she banged it up when she escaped from him in the desert. After he tried to hunt her, I guess. She’s a regular Indiana Jones, isn’t she?”

“People get away from bad guys sometimes,” Brookings said, though he seemed dubious.

“Sure.” Rivera shrugged. “And crazy people make up stories about bad guys. The bogeyman’s always after them, and they’re always just barely getting away.”

Stern nodded. “He’s right. This gal’s got nutcase written all over her. She says she’s been following Cray. Why? If she suspects him, why doesn’t she go to the cops right off?”

“She’s afraid of cops,” Call said. “Come on, Yanni, we see it all the time.”

Stern held his ground. “Not in cases like this. She’s delusional. Paranoid.”

Shepherd could see that Rivera and Stern had won over most of the group. But he was still unconvinced. He tried another tack.

“How about the rest of what she said?” In his memo pad he had jotted down breakin, kidnap, and others. “She claimed there were tools in this satchel for breaking and entering. But in the White Mountains case there was no breakin. Mrs. Andrews was snatched right outside the auto dealership, probably forced into the killer’s car.”

Mercado shrugged. “Doesn’t that undercut the credibility of the call even further?”

“Not necessarily. Not if there were breakins in other cases.”

Marty Kroft looked at the ceiling. “We’re back to this again.”

“She said there were others,” Shepherd went on implacably. “Others Cray had killed.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rivera said, “she’s your frigging soul mate. No wonder you believe her.”

Shepherd clamped down on a spasm of anger. “I’m just saying her version of things might turn out to be pretty close to the truth.”

“Close to your idea of the truth,” Stern said. “Your theory.” He put a dismissive emphasis on the word.

“Yeah, my theory. Let’s just say I’m right about my theory. Let’s say Sharon Andrews was not an isolated incident. Let’s say this psycho has been in the game for a while, and we never knew about it because none of the earlier victims turned up anywhere. There are plenty of unsolved missing-persons cases—”

“You can’t go pinning every unsolved juvenile runaway on the White Mountains freak,” Kroft said.

“I’m not talking just runaways. I’m talking kidnappings too. Breakins, and the woman of the house gone, never found again. There have been six I’ve turned up so far—”

“All in different localities,” Rivera interrupted, “Not just different neighborhoods, I mean different counties.”

“The man travels. Most serial killers do.”

“Never the same MO. Method of entry, time of day, choice of victim — no similarities.”

“He varies his methods. He’s smart. He doesn’t leave an obvious trail.”

“Time span of roughly a decade, as I recall. That’s a lot of dead girls, man.”

“He’s not constantly active. The urges follow a cycle. You know about that.”

A serial killer — if that was indeed what Shepherd was dealing with — tended to operate in a long, rhythmic pattern. The killing phase was followed by a period of dormancy. Then the urges would resume, and the killer would begin fantasizing, then stalking, and finally he would kill.

The length of the cycle’s inactive phase varied significantly. Often the killings became more frequent as the urges intensified or earlier caution was abandoned.

It had been five months since Sharon Andrews’ disappearance. She had been murdered within hours of her disappearance; that day’s lunch was found in her stomach at the autopsy.

Five months — and now the female caller claimed the killer was ready to strike again. The time fit Shepherd’s profile.

Actually, profile was too technical a term. He wasn’t a psychologist, and he had no training in behavioral science. But he’d been a cop for a long time. He had an intuitive sense of the man he was looking for.

That man would be sadistic, obsessive, capable of animalistic violence — yet self-controlled, careful, intelligent. He would know the danger in striking too often or too recklessly. He would moderate his urges, suppress or divert them for as long as possible, draw out the period of dormancy until he could restrain himself no longer.

A month was too little time; a year — probably too long.

“One kill about every six months is what I’m guessing,” Shepherd said. “If so, the body count wouldn’t be unrealistically high, not for a guy like this. He could go on doing it for ten years or even longer, assuming he’s good enough.”

Rivera brushed this aside. “No one’s that good.”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“In the movies. Look, Roy. You’re dealing with a bunch of completely unrelated cases with absolutely nothing to link them to the White Mountains thing or to one another. There’s no pattern, except the one you want to see.”

Shepherd considered a counterargument. He knew several he could use. But the effort would be wasted. Kroft, Rivera, and Stern were hostile to the very idea of connecting the Sharon Andrews case to any earlier crime. The others in the room had no opinion. And Brookings would sway with any majority, never holding firm.

“You may be right,” Shepherd said, spreading his hands. “On the other hand, this man Cray just might be the son of a bitch we’re looking for. We’ll have to check it out, that’s all.”

Brookings speared him with his gaze. “You’ll have to. Thanks for volunteering.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Of course,” Alvarez ventured, “it might help to find out if there really is anybody named John Cray in the Safford area.”

The captain nodded. “Might save Shep a long drive. Hey, Kroft — don’t you know a guy over at Graham County Sheriff’s?”

Kroft shrugged. “Chuck Wheelihan, yeah. Met him a couple years ago when I was working vice. There was a meth crew operating out of Safford, hauling the shit into Tucson to sell on the street.”

“Why don’t you give him a call, see if he can find out anything about this Cray.”

“What the hell. My caseload’s empty. I got nothing but time to waste.”

He left the room, and the meeting proceeded to the issue of Baxter Payton, a salesman at the auto dealership who, according to several employees, had aggressively pursued Sharon Andrews, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. Brookings felt Payton was a strong candidate for the role of suspect.

It’s an O.J. thing, he had argued to Shepherd in the earliest stages of the case. This Payton guy, he was obsessed with her, and if he couldn’t have her, no one could.

Shepherd had interviewed Payton and come away with the impression that the man was a loser, obnoxious