Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [38]
That was the smart thing to do, but she knew it wasn’t a real option. She had to get this over with. Her fear would only get worse the longer she delayed.
She found the key in her pocket and placed it in the satchel, then carefully knotted the drawstring.
This time she was ready.
She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her pale, frightened face.
“Ready,” she said, confirming the fact, just in case there was any doubt.
Out of the car again. She approached the convenience store. The two phones at the side of the building were both unused at the moment. Good.
She checked out the street. No patrol cars. She looked through the glass wall of the store. No cops inside. Not even a security guard, from what she could tell.
Better and better.
She placed the satchel on the ground below the kiosk, pushing it against the brick wall of the building to hide it from a casual observer. Then she lifted the telephone handset in her gloved hand.
Calling the police. She was really doing it, really calling the police.
She took a breath, fighting for composure, and then with a trembling finger she stabbed three digits.
A long ring. Another.
She was shaking so hard she could barely breathe.
A third ring, cut off early as a businesslike male voice came on the line.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
* * *
The bitch wasn’t on Speedway.
Cray had covered the wide, well-traveled boulevard in two directions. Twice he’d seen a red hatchback that might have been the Chevette, but both times the sighting had been a false alarm.
At the corner of Grant and Campbell he hooked north. Returning to I-10 would take too long. He would take Campbell to Grant Road and head west.
On the passenger seat, the transceiver stuttered and crackled, his lifeline to the police—and just possibly his last hope.
17
“I’m calling with information,” Elizabeth said, her mouth pressed close to the handset, “about Sharon Andrews, the woman who was killed in the White Mountains. I know who did it.”
“All right,” the man on the other end said in a low, neutral tone.
She’d heard that tone before, though she wasn’t quite sure where.
“His name is John Cray.” She spelled it. “He lives in Safford. Just outside Safford, I mean. Lives there and works there.”
The words had come out in curiously disjointed blocks of speech. She had rehearsed this conversation many times, but now she couldn’t remember a single thing she’d meant to say.
“Go on,” the man said.
If he was impatient or skeptical, he hid it well. He sounded interested, open to whatever she might say. A calm, reassuring, practiced voice, a doctor’s voice ...
Then she remembered where she’d encountered that tone before. It was the quiet, unstressed monotone a psychiatrist used when humoring a difficult patient.
For a moment she froze up, old memories blasting her like a cold wind, and she couldn’t say anything.
“Ma’am?” the 911 operator prompted.
“John Cray,” she said again, just to kick her mind into gear. “He killed Sharon Andrews.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because he tried to kill me, too.”
No, God, that had come out wrong. It sounded paranoid, delusional.
“Tried to kill you?” the man asked with the faintest lilt of skepticism.
“I’ve been watching him, following him.” Still all wrong. She could hear the desperate craziness in her words. “No, look, forget about that. It doesn’t matter how I know. All right? It doesn’t matter....”
She was screwing up, blowing it. If she got this wrong, she might never have another chance. Cray would go on killing, and she couldn’t stop him, couldn’t do anything.
There was too much at stake, and she was too scared. After what she’d been through last night, she wouldn’t have thought she could ever be scared again, but here she was, in a state of stupid panic over a phone call.
Eyes shut, she fought for calm.
“I’m sorry to sound so flustered,” she said softly. “This is hard for me.”
“Of course it is.”
There