and insecure and intensely dislikable, but no murderer. Still, after the body turned up, Brookings had pushed hard for a second look. Shepherd had foisted the job on Lou Mercado and Steve Call, two younger detectives who had just made rank.
Now they had the unpleasant duty of informing their captain that there was no way, positively no way, that this creep Payton had done Sharon. They alternated in their presentation. Call leaning forward to tick off points on his blunt, meaty fingers, Mercado sitting ramrod-straight in a dignified courtroom pose.
“We checked out every angle,” Call began. “Day of her disappearance, Payton worked late, writing up a sale. We found the buyer, and he confirmed it. So Payton’s alibied. But we say, okay, even so, maybe he could get away for a minute, snatch her, stash her in his car.”
Mercado took over. “We asked him about it. He let us do a search. Forensics vacuumed his vehicle — trunk, backseat, everything. They turned up nothing they can tie to Sharon, no fibers from her clothes or her carpet at home, no blood, no hair. She wasn’t in there.”
“ ’Course,” Call said, anticipating an objection, “Payton had access to every vehicle on the lot. It’s a used- car shop, you know. Salesmen take cars home with them sometimes. But they keep a log of cars signed out, and he didn’t sign out anything that week.”
“So he’s alibied,” Mercado concluded, “and there’s no physical evidence, and he didn’t do it.”
Call wanted the last word. “Plus, the guy is a little weasel who wouldn’t have the balls to snuff a housefly.”
Brookings processed this information, then shrugged. “Yeah, I never figured it was him. Too obvious.”
Shepherd smothered a grin. That was just like Brookings. The captain was a certified specialist in covering his ass. He knew how to deflect blame and absorb credit, how to alienate nobody and be everyone’s best friend. Shepherd ought to hate him for it.
But hell, CYA was an art every cop had to learn — a survival skill, no less than proficiency with firearms. Cops were civil servants, and civil servants who flouted the rules and dissed their superiors were just begging for a dead-end career.
Anyway, he couldn’t dislike Paul Brookings, and not just because they’d gone fishing together more often than the other men in the squad needed to know.
Shepherd owed Brookings. He wasn’t sure he could have endured the past two years without the captain’s calm, steady support.
Kroft returned, a peculiar look on his face. “Talked to Wheelihan. Hell, you know he’s made undersheriff now? When’s my promotion coming up, Captain?”
“When you tell me what the hell your pal said to you.”
“Well, there’s a John Cray in the Safford area, all right. Chuck didn’t even have to look it up. He knows the guy. Whole department knows him. Fact is, he’s sort of famous, at least locally.”
“Famous how?”
“Mainly ’cause he wrote a book that sold pretty well.
Shepherd had never heard of it, but the word
“Some kind of mystery novel?” he asked, his tone even.
“Nonfiction.” Kroft looked at him, and Shepherd tried to read his expression but failed. “About how who we think we are is only an illusion. ’Least, that’s how Chuck described it.”
“So he’s an author,” Brookings said, perturbed. “What does that tell us?”
Kroft shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. That’s not how the local cops know him, anyway. They knew him a long time before he ever got into print. They work with him.”
Shepherd felt his optimism slipping away. “Do they?”
“Yeah.”
Then Kroft’s face reshaped itself in a huge, unfriendly smile, and Shepherd realized why his expression had been so oddly strained. He’d been holding back that smile, fighting it like a man warding off a sneeze.
“Dr. John Cray,” Kroft said, “is the director of the Hawk Ridge Institute for Psychiatric Care.”
Kroft let a moment pass while this information registered.
“He runs a goddamned mental hospital,” Kroft finished, not trusting subtlety where this point was concerned. “He takes in all the loons who’ve gotta be held for observation. And, Shep — he’s made a lot of enemies, Chuck says.”
Enemies. Yes.
Every psychiatrist made enemies, and a man like Cray, a man who supervised a mental institution harboring scores of patients, would make more enemies than most.
Rivera laughed. “Man, I told you she’s a squirrel.”
Stern, at least, was polite enough not to say a word.
“Sounds like you were right,” Shepherd said without rancor. “On the other hand, just because he’s a shrink doesn’t mean he’s not a killer.”
This was, in part, bravado. But he couldn’t shake free of that word
“You happen to ask if Cray drives a Lexus?” he added.
Kroft’s smile slipped a little. “Yeah, I asked. He’s got one — an SUV, like the woman said. But any of his patients could know that. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“No,” Shepherd said. “It doesn’t.” He scraped back his chair and got up. “Better get moving. It’s still early. I might be able to catch him before he goes to lunch.”
Kroft looked baffled. “You figure it’s even necessary to do a meet-and-greet? I mean, you could phone the guy, or I could have Wheelihan send some deputies to chat him up.”
“I can’t tell much from a phone call. And it sounds like the local deputies are a little too friendly with this guy.”
Stern spoke. “You don’t still think there’s anything to this?”
“I’ll know soon enough when I talk to Cray. And when I take a look at that Lexus of his.”
Brookings looked unhappy. “I’m betting it hasn’t got a scratch. Face it, Shep. The lady’s a head case.”
“My second one today. Looks like I hit the jackpot. Lucky me.”
He meant it as a joke, but it hit too close to home, and nobody was laughing as Roy Shepherd walked out the door.
21
The Hawk Ridge Institute for Psychiatric Care was a large, rambling complex of brick buildings, none higher than two stories, set amid rolling greenery in the foothills of the Pinaleno Mountains. Route 366 was nearby, feeding traffic into Safford, but the institute lay on a desolate back road, and its neighbors were farms and ranches and, a few miles distant, a federal prison camp.
From the road, the institute looked something like a prison itself, with its high iron fence and the guardhouse at the gate. But once inside the grounds, visitors were surprised to see flower beds, neatly tended, and sparkling fountains and birdbaths and colonnades of eucalyptus trees. The less severely afflicted patients were free to roam the property, and they could be seen here and there, some clustered in companionable groups, others solitary.
