Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [127]
She had been a person once. A fugitive concocting aliases. Justin’s widow. Anson’s daughter-in-law. She had been someone real, an individual, all quirks and insecurities and self-doubts and loneliness and proud perseverance and determination.
All of that was gone now, just gone. Where the woman named Kaylie McMillan had been, there was only this dirty, exhausted, tattered, desperate thing, kneeling on cold tiles, hunched with fear, drawing shallow breaths that could not feed her lungs.
The voices, at least, had left her. Confusion and conflict had been banished. She had no alternatives to debate, no decisions to reach. She existed purely in and for the moment, without a yesterday or a tomorrow.
She would stay here, crouched like this, waiting like this, for as long as she had to, an hour or a week or a lifetime. She would never move, ever, until her heart stopped racketing in her chest and she felt safe.
From the end of the corridor, thirty yards from where she knelt, came a rasp of metal.
She looked up, her eyes straining in darkness.
There it was again—the noise—low but audible.
She knew that noise.
A sharper tremor passed through her, and a new squeeze of fear cramped her belly.
Hinges.
The rusty hinges of the exterior door, the north door, the door she’d unlocked with the ring of stolen keys.
Hinges creaking now as that door opened for a second time.
Panic impelled her upright, and she retreated around the bend in the corridor, and then she was running to the door on the east side, the only other exit.
A hard carom off a wall, and with a gasp she came up short against the steel door, yanking furiously at the handle before remembering that all the doors in the hospital wards were locked on both sides, and a key was required to enter or exit.
She had keys, they were in her left hand, and she fumbled with them, jamming one after another into the keyhole until she found the key that fit, then twisting her wrist clockwise.
The bolt, strangely loose, seemed to yield immediately, as if it had never been secured at all.
She tugged the handle again, pulling the door inward. Still it would not open.
Stuck.
Somehow the door was stuck, wouldn’t open, and she was trapped in here, no way out.
* * *
Cray stepped out of the night into the north corridor of Ward C, then clicked on his flashlight. The red-filtered beam wavered over the tile floor and concrete walls, reaching halfway down the hall.
She was not within sight. But her tracks were. The prints of muddy shoes, tracing an irregular, panicky path away from the door.
He breathed in, out. There was a calmness in him, the strange calm before the gale.
He had her. She could not escape.
True, she had a passkey that would unlock the east door. But the bolt on that door had been broken years ago, and rather than bothering to replace it, Cray had merely ordered the door padlocked.
Padlocked from outside.
The door could not be opened from within, a fact Kaylie no doubt had discovered by now.
She could double back and run straight into him. Or hide at the farthest end of the east corridor and wait for his arrival.
Or she could scream. Scream for help.
He would like that. He had never heard her scream.
No one would answer her cries, if there were any. Screams were common on the grounds of the institute. The staff had long ago learned to ignore such distractions.
Cray turned and shut the north door behind him, then carefully locked it with his passkey.
Then he pivoted to face the corridor again and advanced, guided by a beam of red, into the beckoning dark.
* * *
Kaylie stumbled away from the door that would not open, her hands slapping blindly at the side wall in search of an escape route, finding the door to the last cell in the row, not a good place to hide, but the only place left.
The press of a button released the pneumatic lock. The door swung wide, and she slipped into the room, then shut the door and looked for a latch on this side, but there was none, because in rooms like this, patients were locked in. They could