Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [58]
“No.”
“Still, I have a feeling your visit could be related to my little problem.” Cray leaned back in his chair, studying Shepherd over the neat stacks of paper on the desk. “It’s about her, isn’t it?”
“Her?”
“Kaylie McMillan. Isn’t she why you’ve come to see me?”
“I guess I’m a little slow today, Doctor. Who exactly is Kaylie McMillan?”
“The person who trashed my Lexus—or so I believe.” Cray smiled, a surprisingly warm smile that illumined his face and made him look younger, “I’d better start at the beginning, hadn’t I?”
“That might be good.”
“Please have a seat. Care for some coffee? It’s quite good. One-hundred-percent fresh-ground Kona. There’s a coffee house in Tucson that sells it.”
So he went into Tucson now and then. Hardly a startling admission, but Shepherd took note of it as he pulled a metal chair close to the desk and sat. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“Then perhaps, before I tell you about Kaylie, you might enlighten me as to why you’re here. Since, quite obviously, my guesswork on the subject was all wrong.”
Shepherd kept his answer vague. “Someone’s made some rather serious allegations, Doctor. Allegations concerning yourself. Now, I’m just looking into this on a purely preliminary basis—”
“Kaylie,” Cray said.
He was nodding, his expression curiously content, like a man who’d found the answer to a riddle and was pleased with his own cleverness.
Shepherd shrugged. “Excuse me?”
“These allegations were made anonymously, isn’t that so?”
“Well, yes.”
“Kaylie did it. What precisely did she accuse me of? Kidnapping parochial-school girls and selling them into slavery? Using my basement as a torture chamber? A series of ax murders, perhaps?”
“You’re taking this kind of lightly.”
“I’m not taking it lightly at all. She vandalized my Lexus. She’s evidently spreading false accusations of a nature sufficiently serious to require your presence in my office. And she’s stalking me.”
“Stalking you?”
“Yes. What did she accuse me of?”
Shepherd hadn’t wanted to reveal the charge too soon, but he saw no way around it. “She said ... Well, she said you were the White Mountains Killer. You know the case—”
“Yes, of course. Her claim is original, at least. But hardly unexpected. That crime has received a good deal of publicity, and psychotics are highly suggestible.”
“Kaylie’s a psychotic?”
“Oh, yes. She was a patient here, you see. One of the more difficult ones.”
The woman’s voice on the 911 tape spoke in Shepherd’s memory: I’m not crazy.
“When was this?” he asked.
“Twelve years ago, when she was nineteen. The sheriff’s department placed her in our care after her arrest.”
“On what charge?”
“Homicide.” Cray took another sip of his Kona coffee. “She and her husband, Justin, had been married less than three months when dear, sweet Kaylie shot him in the heart.”
23
Murders were rare in Graham County. A year could pass, even two or three, without a single homicide. For that reason Shepherd was sure Cray would remember the details of the case.
“Tell me how it happened,” he said.
Cray swiveled in his chair, sunlight catching the flecks of amber in his grayish eyes. “All that’s known with certainty,” he answered, “is that Kaylie killed Justin with his own revolver, then panicked and fled in their car. A deputy found the vehicle on a back road the next day. She’d lost control and driven into a ravine. Search patrols were organized. A helicopter spotted her two miles from the crash site, wandering in the brush. When the police reached her, she was on her knees, sobbing.”
Slowly Shepherd nodded. Twelve years ago he had been a patrol officer riding shotgun with Gary Brannigan. He and Gary’d had their hands full with drug shootings and gang fights, and neither of them had paid much attention to crimes outside Tucson city limits. But dimly Shepherd recalled the case of a teenage wife in Graham County who’d murdered her husband and had been found in the desolate foothills, soiled and dehydrated