Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [124]
“Sure. Go straight to the parking lot, hook left on the maintenance road, and when you’re past the utility shed make a hard right.”
“Thanks.”
The gate opened, and Shepherd pulled through, then followed the directions, driving fast but not recklessly, his thoughts racing.
During the drive from Anson McMillan’s house, he’d had time to piece together a possible scenario, still hypothetical, quite conceivably all wrong.
But suppose ... just suppose ...
Suppose Cray was a killer, as Kaylie believed. Killers might be born or made—Shepherd had no opinion about that—but however they got started, there was always one critical moment in their development, the moment of transition from fantasy and speculation and preparation to the deed itself.
Now just suppose Cray had needed help with that step.
Shepherd could picture him as he’d been twelve years ago, a much younger man, a man who’d passed his time in classrooms and seminars, a man with soft hands.
A murderer in embryo. Evolving by degrees toward the final, fatal commitment.
How had he started along that path? With a man like Cray, his progress would have begun as an intellectual proposition. At least this was how he would have rationalized and justified any strange new emotions that invaded the cool sanctuary of his self-control.
We are animals at heart. The self is mere window dressing. A mask, a false front. We hear about “mind over matter.” It would be more true to say that the mind doesn’t matter.
Cray had said that to Shepherd. The idea obsessed him. He’d written a book on it.
Shepherd had slept through most of his mandatory Philosophy 101 course in college. He was no expert in the subject. But he knew that Cray’s viewpoint was grounded in a deep aversion to humanity, an aversion that could easily translate into contempt or hatred.
What a man hated, he might wish to destroy. But being soft and cloistered, he would not know how.
And then into his office comes Justin’s mother, telling him of this son of hers, with his guns and his blood lust and his sick obsessions and his skills at tracking game.
The man Cray needs. The partner he has been seeking—seeking perhaps unconsciously, as the last missing piece of himself.
So Cray goes to Justin McMillan, feels him out. There are ways for a clever, manipulative man to gain the trust of someone younger and inexperienced.
He proposes an arrangement. They will hunt together. Justin will teach him to stalk and kill. And Cray—Cray will procure a more interesting quarry than any bobcat or mule deer.
Cray has the intellect, the talent to plan a crime and execute it without leaving clues. Justin has the practical experience at killing. Each completes the other.
And so they hunt. Twelve years ago ...
In his investigation of the White Mountains case. Shepherd had compiled a list of possible abductees and other missing persons throughout southeastern Arizona over the past fifteen years. There had been no fewer than four disappearances in the early spring of 1987, the proper time frame.
It was unlikely that Cray and Justin were responsible for all four cases. But perhaps for one. Just one.
And if Kaylie had found out? If she had learned that her husband had killed a woman, skinned her face as a trophy?
If she tried to go to the police, and Justin attacked her, and she shot him, then went into shock afterward, mute, helpless, entrusted to a doctor’s care ...?
Cray’s care.
Only a scenario, a sketch of what might have happened. All of it could be wrong. But if it was true, then an unforgivable injustice had been done to Kaylie McMillan.
And Shepherd, though unwitting, had played his own role in that injustice, and bore his own measure of guilt.
Cray’s house appeared in the headlights. Shepherd braked the sedan and got out. At the front door he leaned his fist on the buzzer.
“The doc’s not in.”
Shepherd turned, saw a guard in khaki approaching from the shadowy foliage near the gate.
“Hey,” the guard added, “I know