Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [61]
Shepherd wasn’t sure what to say. But a response seemed unnecessary. Cray was already rising.
“Words can’t tell the whole story,” he said. “Let me show you what she did to my Lexus.”
He led Shepherd into the anteroom, where the secretary was just returning from lunch.
“I’ll be gone a few minutes, Margaret.” Cray shrugged. “Police business.”
Margaret was no more impressed than the receptionist downstairs had been. She glanced at Shepherd only long enough to ascertain that she didn’t know him.
“Walter back yet?” she inquired of Cray.
“No. He may be gone awhile.”
He and Shepherd left together. In the hall Shepherd asked, “Who’s Walter?”
“A patient. One of our long-termers. He’s functional up to a point, but he can never be deinstitutionalized. He’s been here too long.”
The thought of a lifetime spent inside these drab walls was insufferably depressing to Shepherd. “Where is he now?” he asked.
“Running an errand for me.”
“You use your patients to run errands?”
“Only this one patient. Walter is special. You’d be surprised how adept he is at certain rather simple tasks.” Cray reached the stairwell door and paused with his hand on the knob, a long-fingered, elegant hand with perfectly manicured nails. “Schizophrenia can be something of an asset, you know.”
Shepherd thought this was a joke, but he saw no humor in Cray’s face.
“It’s quite true,” Cray said. “Every adaptation of the human organism must have some survival value, or it would have been bred out of the gene pool.”
“What survival value?”
“Well, take Walter, for instance. Like many schizophrenics, his sensitivity to visual stimuli is acute. He’s tireless, resistant to fatigue. And single-minded. Give him an assignment, and he won’t stop until he gets it done. In many ways he’s far superior to us normals.”
“I’m not sure I’d buy that.”
“But think about it, Detective.” There was Cray’s smile again, cool and bland and somehow secretive. “This is a man who misses nothing around him, who never loses his focus ... and who never, ever quits.”
24
“Find the red car. Find the red car. Find the red car. Find the red car.”
Walter Luntz repeated the words in a steady monotone as he drove the Toyota Tercel down Tucson’s streets.
He loved the Tercel, which Dr. Cray had bought for him—think of it, just for him, a gift from the great Dr. Cray. It was the car he used for running errands, a wonderful car, though too small for Walter, who stood six foot three and had to stoop in doorways.
Hunched in the driver’s seat, his callused hands wrapped around the steering wheel, his bald head bent low under the roof, he devoted his full concentration to the job he’d been given.
“Find the red car. Find the red car.”
He was unaware that he was speaking. He heard the instructions in his mind, spoken not by his own voice but by Dr. Cray’s.
“Find the red car.”
It was the last thing Dr. Cray had told him before sending him forth on his mission. It was the only thing that mattered, and Dr. Cray had stressed the importance of the red car, of finding the red car, over and over again. He had even shown Walter a picture of a very similar car, which he had found in a place called the Internet.
The car in the picture was not red, but Dr. Cray had told Walter to imagine it as red, and with effort, Walter had been able to do so.
Find this car, Dr. Cray had said as they sat together in his office with the door closed. It could be anywhere in Tucson, but most likely you’ll find it at a motel, in the parking lot. Do you know how to recognize a motel?
Walter knew. He had even stayed in a motel once, years ago, when he was a young man. He remembered that there had been a slot by the bed that you put quarters into, and the bed would quiver. Fun.
There are many cars like this in Tucson, Dr. Cray had told him. You can’t check every one, so just check the ones in the motel