Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [17]
Still, trying wasn’t good enough when a woman might be in danger, somewhere in this city or its outskirts.
“Well, maybe he won’t do it tonight. Maybe he went straight home.”
She hoped this was true. But if it wasn’t—if Cray was a killer and tonight was his night to strike—then she wouldn’t be there to stop him when it mattered.
She wondered how many he had killed. She knew of only two. One case was recent, and the other was from many years ago. But there had to be more.
The recent case was the murder of Sharon Andrews. The corpse swept downriver in a flash flood. A corpse without a face.
The story of the body’s discovery, sufficiently gruesome to make the news wires, had appeared in the August 18 edition of The Dallas Morning News.
On the nineteenth of August a trucker left the paper at the diner where Elizabeth worked. She kept it. Dallas might be a place to go, when she had to run again. She wanted to check the classified ads, get a feel for the job situation.
She didn’t get around to looking at the paper until the evening of August twenty-first. As she flipped through the coffee-stained pages, an AP story datelined Apache County, Arizona, caught her eye.
She read it.
And she knew.
That night she left for Tucson. She drove south on two state highways, then on Interstate 17, stopping only once, at 7 A.M., to call the diner and quit her job.
It was best to leave no loose ends. She didn’t want her boss to file a missing-persons report.
When she arrived in town, taking a furnished apartment on the south side, Tucson’s morning and afternoon papers ran daily stories on the Sharon Andrews case, and the TV news led with the story for a week. But no progress was made, and the fear and excitement subsided. Tucson was not quite a metropolis, but it had grown a lot since 1987, when she had last seen it. The metro area population—city and suburbs and unincorporated county land—was pushing one million.
People were busy. Life went on.
Except, of course, for seven-year-old Todd Andrews, and Sharon’s parents and friends, and the police detectives and sheriffs’ deputies working the case in two counties, and Elizabeth Palmer herself.
Elizabeth’s life had not gone on. It had been stalled and frozen in a compulsive routine.
Every day she watched Cray’s residence. She followed him in the evenings. He had gone out a dozen times, with increasing frequency throughout the month.
She watched. She waited. She took no job, earned no money.
As her savings dwindled, she found it hard to make the weekly rent even on her barrio apartment. Last week she’d switched to a one-star motel on Miracle Mile. She’d stayed until even twenty-five dollars a night seemed a little steep.
Two days ago she had found this place by the interstate. Nineteen dollars a night. She could afford to stay here another three days. Then she would be sleeping in her car.
And if Cray was not, in fact, the man who’d murdered Sharon Andrews ...
Then all the expense and risk she had assumed by returning to Tucson would have been wasted. She would be broke and homeless and jobless, with nothing to show for it but a paranoid delusion.
Well, if so, she would go about rebuilding her life, that’s all. She had done it before.
And though she was tired now, she knew exhaustion would not last. There was something in her that pushed her forward even when the massed resistance of the world seemed to be driving her back. In her worst moments, in flophouses and alleyways, when all hope should have been gone, she’d felt it—some living power, an energy that seemed to renew itself even when she fought against it, preferring despair.
She would survive. But some other woman might not.
The thought made her weary, or more precisely, made her suddenly aware of how weary she already was.
She stretched out on the soiled bedspread and shut her eyes, but sleep would not come.
She knew what she needed. And though it was