Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [121]
Cunningham registered his statement, then slumped against a wall. “Call them.”
Eddie still didn’t react, until the nurse fairly screamed the order.
“Call security, you idiot!”
Security. Damn. He still had the chief officer on the phone.
Eddie stumbled to the desk, found the handset dangling from its cord, and spoke four words into the mouthpiece:
“There’s been an escape.”
53
Cray pulled on his black slacks and shirt, then smiled at himself in the bedroom mirror.
Black. His favorite color. Camouflage for a predator.
Camouflage that was unnecessary tonight, of course—but he felt the need to clothe himself in darkness.
It had been months since he’d taken Sharon Andrews from the parking lot outside the auto dealership. The deepest part of him, the elemental self that announced its presence only in the dark, was restless for blood sport.
What he’d done to Walter had sated his urges not at all. He needed a worthy victim. Kaylie. That was the prey his blood required. And he would have her. In mere minutes, she would trouble him no more, ever.
He checked his shirt pocket for the cigarettes, the lighter. The only other item he would need was a syringe filled with sedative. Then he would be ready for this special kill.
With his hair combed back, his heart beating fast and steady, he descended the stairs to the living room. Mozart played on the stereo system wired throughout the ground floor of his house. He found the music relaxing, and he preferred to be relaxed before the start of a nocturnal outing.
The piece now playing was the Requiem. It had been composed as a tribute to things spiritual—the majesty of God, the highest aspirations of the human heart. In Mozart’s era, so long ago, such notions had not yet been rendered laughable and quaint. People had believed, back then. They had yearned.
Cray knew better. He was a man of the new millennium. He believed in nothing but brute facts, measurable, reducible to numbers. He yearned for nothing high, great, or noble. He knew that Mozart’s gift had been no more than the excited firing of neurons, his moments of highest passion merely a surge of stress hormones—adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol—triggered by electrical overstimulation of the brain. Cray himself could duplicate this neurological phenomenon quite easily in the operating room adjacent to the anteroom of Ward B, where he sometimes performed electroconvulsive therapy on the most recalcitrant patients. By passing a hundred joules of voltage through a patient’s two cerebral hemispheres, he could produce a storm of excitation equal to anything Mozart had experienced.
But he could not produce the Requiem. This stray thought, irritatingly provocative, teased him as he went into the den and turned off the stereo.
The house was silent, Mozart’s hymn muted.
Cray was leaving the den when the phone rang.
“Yes?” he answered, hoping it was nothing important, impatient to get going.
“Sir, it’s Blysdale.” Bob Blysdale was the Institute’s chief security officer, and he sounded nervous. “Got a problem. The new patient, the forensic case—McMillan.”
Cray stiffened. Kaylie.
Was it possible she’d accepted his advice? Taken her own life? Part of him would be almost sorry if she had. Although it would simplify matters a great deal, he would prefer to take care of her personally.
“What about her?” Cray asked, proper concern in his voice.
“She broke out.”
Cray heard this, but it made no sense. It was some sort of unintelligible message in another language, or a joke, or insanity.
“What?” he breathed.
“She ambushed the RN and a tech. Got out into the yard. She’s on the loose right now.”
On the loose.
Kaylie, on the loose.
The only successful escapee in his tenure as director of Hawk Ridge, and now again she was out, she was uncaged—and his plan—the fire, the fake suicide—it was all spoiled now.
She’d cheated him, the bitch.
He held his voice steady. “When did this happen?”
“Couple minutes ago, is all.”
Then she hadn’t had time to go far.
She could be caught.
Cray’s anger vanished, replaced