Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [100]
McMillan paused, half-inside the truck, looking at
Cray over the door frame. “Because she’s not crazy,” McMillan said. “She never was.”
Cray was silent. He stood motionless as McMillan slammed the door and started the engine. Even when the pickup reversed out of the entryway and vanished down the road, he did not move.
“Some kind of nut, huh?” Officer Jansen said finally, for no reason other than to break the long silence.
Cray nodded. “Yes.”
“Think he was serious about all that lawyer business?”
“Yes.”
“So ... what are we gonna do?”
“We’ll handle it.” Cray took a step back from the gate and repeated the words. “We’ll handle it.”
He turned and headed back toward the administration building. His mind processed the dilemma, evaluating options, ordering priorities, weighing risks.
McMillan could not be allowed any contact with Kaylie. She knew too much. She would tell him everything. And given what McMillan must know or guess about his son Justin’s past, he might very well put the whole story together, then persuade the sheriff to take a fresh look at the case.
“Dangerous,” Cray murmured, mounting the staircase of the administration building.
Yes. Much too dangerous.
Cray had not avoided arrest this long by taking chances. His survival instinct was finely honed. To save himself, he would do whatever was necessary.
There was only one way to defuse this latest threat. It was a course of action he disliked, one that carried risks and smelled of desperation.
He would dare it, though. He had to. And quickly, before McMillan returned.
Pausing at the front door, he nodded slowly, in silent endorsement of his decision.
Kaylie must die.
Tonight.
A shame, really. He enjoyed having her as his prisoner. He looked forward to their daily sessions, the intricate mind games he played with her. And he would have relished the opportunity to watch her for just a few weeks longer.
To watch her—as she finished going insane.
44
Kaylie, alone.
That was who she was. She was Kaylie now. She had always been Kaylie, and the rest of it was all lies.
Her head was buzzing again. Wasps in there. A hive between her ears.
Craziness.
She shuddered, hating the disorder of her thoughts. Was insanity a germ? Could you inhale it, like the flu bug, from an infected atmosphere?
She had not been crazy on the night of her arrest. She was sure of that.
But now ...
No longer could she seem to keep her thinking straight. She had periods of sharp clarity, when she knew what day it was and how she’d gotten here, but there were other times—more and more frequently—when she was adrift on a raft of strangeness, in a calm yet angry sea.
Losing her mind.
Like last time.
Fear rose in her, a peculiar disembodied fear that clutched at her sense of self and made her small and helpless and not a person, somehow.
The fear was what she hated most of all.
The fear ... and Cray.
Cray, yes. Hold on to that. Cling to the certainty of evil. Evil was something hard and real, and she could not lose herself wholly as long as there was one real thing in her world.
She blinked the fear away, and looked around her at the room where she had spent her incarceration. An isolation cell, they called it. Nicer, newer, than the one she’d had last time.
Back then, twelve years ago, they’d kept her in the oldest wing of the hospital, Ward C, and the rooms were poorly heated at night and the cement walls sweated during the day, and there were bugs, brown and shiny like scurrying pennies.
This room was better. It was clean. It had no bad smells. Its furnishings, though meager, were not the stuff of dungeons.
An improvement, yes.
But a cell nonetheless.
The room was small. She had paced it today—or last night? She didn’t know. Time had blurred, melted. Hours were minutes were days.
But the room ... Stay focused. Look at the room.
Small. Three paces by four,
A bed—just a cot with rubber sheets—rubber so that if she should wet herself, the sheets could be hosed clean.
Steel toilet