Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [59]
“They never found out why she did it,” he said, more to himself than to Cray.
“Unfortunately, no. When the sobbing subsided, Kaylie entered a catatonic state. Essentially, she had suffered what the layman calls a nervous breakdown. So the deputies brought her to us. She was admitted to our forensic ward—Ward C, which is no longer in use. She was kept in seclusion, and was utterly uncommunicative.”
“Catatonic?”
Cray shook his head. “Initially she exhibited unpredictable outbursts of violence. She had to be kept under restraint, for both her own safety and the safety of the other patients.”
“Under restraint? You mean, in a straitjacket?”
“Only at the beginning. The first few days.”
“How long was she here?”
“Four months.”
“Who treated her?”
“I did. They delegate the more challenging ones to me.” Shepherd caught the lift of pride in the statement. “After a few weeks she recovered the ability to communicate. We had many long talks, Kaylie and I.”
“Do you remember anything distinctive about her voice?”
Cray hesitated, seemingly bewildered by the question. “Her voice?” Then his eyes narrowed. “Oh, I see. It was a telephone call, wasn’t it? That’s how she contacted you. Well, her voice is rather girlish, actually. She sounds like a sweet little thing. Shy and sensitive and vulnerable. Her true personality profile, however, is rather more complicated than that.”
The description matched the voice Shepherd had heard on the 911 tape. “Okay. Sorry for interrupting. You were talking about the progress Kaylie made in your therapy sessions.”
“She seemed to be getting better. But she professed complete amnesia when it came to the killing of her husband.”
“Professed? You think she was lying?”
“She’s certainly capable of carrying off an elaborate deception. As subsequent events were to prove.”
“What events?”
Before answering, Cray paused for another long swallow of coffee. Shepherd waited, casting his gaze around the office.
Papers and folders were everywhere, all stacked tidily, with no impression of disorder. There were a couple of framed paintings on the walls, but otherwise the office was bare of decoration—no knickknacks or mementos, no family photos on the desk.
Did Cray have friends, a lover? Shepherd doubted it. The man seemed too distant to inspire affection.
He could inspire hatred, though. Especially in a patient consigned to his care, wrapped in a straitjacket, imprisoned in a cell ...
“The events,” Cray said at last, “of the night of June twenty-third, 1987. The night when Kaylie escaped.”
Old bitterness laced the words. Shepherd heard it in Cray’s tone, saw it in the angry twist of his mouth.
“If she’d been watched more closely, she never would have gotten away. But she’d fooled us into dropping our guard. We had no idea that she spent every night loosening the bolts on the grille over the air duct in her room.”
The air duct. Yes, Shepherd remembered that detail.
It had stuck in his memory because it was so much like something in a movie. He had rarely heard of anyone actually escaping that way.
“She took off the grille,” Cray said, “and crawled into the duct. Kaylie is a small woman, and there was room for her, though it must have been a tight fit. She belly-crawled to the midpoint of the building, a distance of eighty feet, and ascended a short vertical shaft to a rooftop vent. She kicked out the wire-mesh panel at that end of the duct system, then emerged onto the roof. She was able to climb down and run to the perimeter fence, which she scaled easily. Later we found her footprints in the dirt.”
“And then,” Shepherd said, more facts of the case returning to him from some long-forgotten mental file, “she proceeded on foot to a farm or a ranch, something like that—and stole a car.”
“A pickup truck.”
“Hot-wired it.”
“Yes. I have no idea where she learned that particular skill. But you see, that’s the thing you need to understand about Kaylie McMillan. Despite her illness, she’s smart and determined and ... unexpectedly resourceful.”
Shepherd noted the hesitation. Cray, it seemed,