Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [47]
Roy Shepherd had been there from the start. He had investigated Sharon’s disappearance even before she turned up dead. He’d met her boy, Todd, the seven-year-old now being raised by his maternal grandparents in Sierra Vista. He’d gone to Apache County to share notes with the sheriff’s department there and to see the creek where the body had been found.
The killing belonged to him, really, not to Brookings, not to anyone else. Other cops had worked it to varying degrees, but he had lived it. And he wanted the case cleared. More than anything in his sixteen-year career in law enforcement, he wanted to find the man who had peeled off that woman’s face and taken it with him as a souvenir.
“Don’t hold back, Captain,” he said from the far end of the table. “Share the bad news.”
Brookings found a smile at the corners of his mouth. “You telling me you don’t already know? Shep, I’m surprised at you.”
Shepherd permitted few people to call him Shep, a nickname he detested, but Paul Brookings could get away with it.
“I admit it’s a lapse in my customary omniscience,” he answered mildly. “But Hector and Janice and I were all tied up with that freak who said he stole people’s faces.”
Janice Hirst wasn’t part of the task force, but Hector Alvarez had been on the case almost as long as Shepherd. Alvarez nodded. “We thought we had something, maybe.”
Marty Kroft looked puzzled. “Guess I’m not so, uh, omniscious either. What’s this all about?”
“False alarm.” Shepherd explained about the magazine photos, the warehouse that had become a gallery.
Steve Call snorted. “Sounds like a man who could use some serious downtime.”
“He’s on vacation in the psych ward now,” Alvarez said.
“These street people,” Don Rivera muttered, “man, they just get weirder....”
Then he fell silent, and for a moment so did everyone else, because they had remembered that Shepherd was in the room.
Brookings was first to speak. “Anyway, that’s the shit storm I referred to. Some idiot leaked the story. Major break in the White Mountains case, blah blah blah. Local radio picked it up and ran with it. Story will be in the Citizen too, unless we squelch it fast.”
The Tucson Citizen, the city’s afternoon paper, was just now going to press.
“They give any details?” Yanni Stern asked. Stern worked vice. He’d been drafted by the task force to find out about any local perverts who had a yen for snuff films or an interest in mutilation beyond the body-piercing variety.
Brookings filled out the story. “You can see what happened here. Some jackass blabbed about crazy Mitch’s arrest.”
“Radio said it was a nine-one tip-off,” Rivera said. “What’s that all about?”
“Something different entirely. We’ll get to that part of it in a few minutes.” Brookings sighed. “Bottom line, it’s a royal mess. Graves has been on the phone ever since the story broke.” Graves was the sergeant who handled public relations. He knew every local reporter. “We’ll get a retraction, but hell, it still looks bad. People get all worked up, and then when they’re disappointed, look who takes the blame.”
Shepherd was bored. He tuned out Brookings and listened to the sounds of the station house. Phones rang in a shrill cacophony. Somewhere a woman was talking loudly in Spanish, her voice rising operatically. He made out enough words to know she was not making threats, just venting. She was upset. Most of the civilians who paid a visit to police headquarters were upset.
Brookings and the others were still hashing out the media strategy. Shepherd had never felt any interest in the media. To his way of thinking, reporters always got everything wrong, and anybody who listened to them was a fool.
His wife had found his attitude harsh. He smiled a little, thinking of Ginnie. She had believed in people. She had thought most folks, even reporters, tried honestly to do their best and