Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [49]
There must be, but Shepherd hadn’t worked it all out yet. He knew that he wanted the tip to pan out. He wanted proof that somebody named John Cray, who lived and worked near Safford, had sliced off Sharon Andrews’ face and taken it home with him. He wanted this case cleared, justice done. He wanted closure for Sharon’s young son and her grieving parents.
But none of this was a reason or an argument or a logical basis for anything at all.
To organize his thoughts, he glanced at the notes he’d scribbled in his pad. “She said this man Cray lives near Safford,” he began. “Safford is roughly halfway between Tucson and the White Mountains. It makes sense.”
“There are lots of places between Tucson and the White Mountains,” Stern said.
“And Safford is one of them. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just interesting—potentially interesting, at least. Then there’s this bit about hunting. You know how scratched up the Andrews woman was. Like she’d been on the run through the brush.”
Brookings shrugged. “She got away from the guy, and he went after her.”
“Or maybe he let her go and then followed. Made a game out of it.”
“Pretty far-fetched.”
Shepherd was undeterred. “She said Cray drives a Lexus SUV. That’s a pretty good all-terrain vehicle, and we’ve always known our guy has four-wheel drive. He didn’t kill Mrs. Andrews anywhere near a paved road.”
“Car’s all banged up, she claimed,” Alvarez added. “It’s something we can check out easy enough.”
Rivera, holding to his squirrel theory, grunted with heavy irony. “Yeah, she banged it up when she escaped from him in the desert. After he tried to hunt her, I guess. She’s a regular Indiana Jones, isn’t she?”
“People get away from bad guys sometimes,” Brookings said, though he seemed dubious.
“Sure.” Rivera shrugged. “And crazy people make up stories about bad guys. The bogeyman’s always after them, and they’re always just barely getting away.”
Stern nodded. “He’s right. This gal’s got nutcase written all over her. She says she’s been following Cray. Why? If she suspects him, why doesn’t she go to the cops right off?”
“She’s afraid of cops,” Call said. “Come on, Yanni, we see it all the time.”
Stern held his ground. “Not in cases like this. She’s delusional. Paranoid.”
Shepherd could see that Rivera and Stern had won over most of the group. But he was still unconvinced. He tried another tack.
“How about the rest of what she said?” In his memo pad he had jotted down break-in, kidnap, and others. “She claimed there were tools in this satchel for breaking and entering. But in the White Mountains case there was no break-in. Mrs. Andrews was snatched right outside the auto dealership, probably forced into the killer’s car.”
Mercado shrugged. “Doesn’t that undercut the credibility of the call even further?”
“Not necessarily. Not if there were break-ins in other cases.”
Marty Kroft looked at the ceiling. “We’re back to this again.”
“She said there were others,” Shepherd went on implacably. “Others Cray had killed.”
“Oh, Christ,” Rivera said, “she’s your frigging soul mate. No wonder you believe her.”
Shepherd clamped down on a spasm of anger. “I’m just saying her version of things might turn out to be pretty close to the truth.”
“Close to your idea of the truth,” Stern said. “Your theory.” He put a dismissive emphasis on the word.
“Yeah, my theory. Let’s just say I’m right about my theory. Let’s say Sharon Andrews was not an isolated incident. Let’s say this psycho has been in the game for a while, and we never knew about it because none of the earlier victims turned up anywhere. There are plenty of unsolved missing-persons cases—”
“You can’t go pinning every unsolved juvenile runaway on the White Mountains freak,” Kroft said.
“I’m not talking just runaways. I’m talking kidnappings too. Break-ins, and the woman of the house gone, never found again. There have been six I’ve turned up so far—”
“All in different localities,” Rivera interrupted, “Not just different neighborhoods, I mean different counties.