Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [12]
No, it was better to abduct her from her home, interrogate her in solitude, and when the night’s sport was done, leave her body in the desert for the turkey vultures to find.
After losing her on the fitness trail, he had quickly doubled back to the parking lot. Since obviously she had followed him, it seemed safe to surmise that her car was parked near his own.
He’d moved his Lexus to another part of the complex, and from a hill he had watched the lot until the woman returned, hatless now, and wary. She must have spent two hours looking for him. Good. He wanted her tired, frustrated, not thinking clearly.
She got into a Chevrolet Chevette, the oldest and most unprepossessing vehicle in the parking area. Irrationally he was disappointed. He’d expected her to drive something better.
Before she left, he trained a pair of collapsible binoculars on the car, and in the light of a sodium-vapor lamp, he read her license plate. An Arizona plate, battered and soiled like the car itself.
He departed from the resort when she did, and followed her at a safe distance, listening to a handheld radio he kept in his glove compartment. The cheap speaker crackled with police codes.
Cray had purchased the radio from a black-market dealer who advertised on the Internet. Commercially available scanners only received police frequencies, but this radio was a transceiver; it transmitted on police bands. Cray could talk to the police.
As the hatchback pulled onto Oracle, Cray had heard a Tucson PD traffic unit call in a ten-seven. The officer was going on a break. Cray had waited a minute or two, to be sure the cop was out of his car and safely preoccupied. Then he pushed the transmit button.
“Traffic five-six,” he said in a neutral voice. “Can you, uh, ten-twenty-eight a stoplight?”
“Go ahead, five-six,” the dispatcher said.
Cray recited the hatchback’s license number. There was silence as the request was processed.
He was sure the dispatcher suspected nothing. His only worry was that the traffic cop might still be monitoring the frequency. If so, he would have heard his unit number, Traffic 5-6, and would alert Dispatch to the scam.
Most likely, however, the cop was using a public rest room or ordering a Big Mac and fries, or engaged in some equivalent proletarian distraction, and paying no attention to his radio at all.
“Traffic five-six,” the dispatcher said.
Cray smiled. “Five-six, go.”
“Twenty-eight returning. December ninety-nine, Chevrolet Chevette, to Elizabeth Palmer.”
They all talked that way, in shorthand. Cray knew the codes and phrases. The dispatcher meant that the requested information had come up on the computer: the vehicle registration was valid through December, the car was a Chevette, and it was registered in the name of Elizabeth Palmer.
Cray had repeated the last name in a questioning tone, and the dispatcher had spelled it in code: “Paul Adam Lincoln Mary Edward Robert.”
“Ten-four,” Cray had said, switching the radio off.
Now, as the Chevette passed Grant Road, approaching downtown Tucson, Cray tried out the name one last time:
“Elizabeth Palmer.”
He didn’t know it. The name was new to him.
So this woman, this Elizabeth Palmer, was not someone from his past, not a piece of his life.
She was a stranger.
Very odd.
He would have many questions for her.
And she would answer them all. He would see to that.
Idly he wondered what she was thinking and feeling right now. Most likely she had not eaten dinner. Perhaps she was thinking of a meal she could fix for herself. Her last meal, but she wouldn’t know it.
Or possibly her thoughts had wandered to some current or former boyfriend in whose arms she had experienced the intimacy that passed for passion in this debased age.
She might be musing on love, or her future, or some pretty memory.
He enjoyed this game of speculation. It made her real to him, a person with a life.
Though not for long.
Traffic thinned as Oracle curved into the dark grid of downtown streets.