Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [64]
Shepherd circled the vehicle. It had been savagely abused. Someone had slashed all four tires and grooved deep scratches in the black finish. The front window on the driver’s side had been shattered; Shepherd saw a large, jagged rock on the bucket seat. The seat cushions were sliced in tatters, and the lid of the glove compartment hung open, the contents strewn. Shepherd saw a scatter of CD cases on the floor. Symphonies, operas. Every disk had been defaced.
“Did she make any attempt to enter the house itself?” he asked.
“No. But of course all the doors were locked, even the door from the garage.”
“Is there a burglar alarm?”
“I’ve never thought it necessary to install one. Not in a gated compound patrolled by armed guards.”
“How about the Lexus? Doesn’t it have a security system?”
“An antitheft system is standard. But I’m afraid I had it disabled soon after I bought the vehicle.”
“Why?”
“Too many false alarms. The system was overly sensitive to vibrations or casual contact. The horn was constantly blaring. I just got tired of it.”
“But Kaylie wouldn’t have known the system was turned off.”
“I doubt she would have thought about it at all. In the throes of her obsession, she would not be functioning rationally.” Cray waved a hand at the vehicle. “As you can see.”
“Did she take anything from the car or the garage?”
“Yes. A spare medical kit I kept in the vehicle.”
“A kit?” Shepherd remembered the 911 tape. “Like a satchel?”
“I suppose one could describe it that way. I think of it as my black bag. Occasionally I’m called out to see a released patient on an emergency basis. Why do you ask?”
“The caller said she had a satchel of yours, which contained your ... instruments of murder.”
“A delusion. What else did she say?”
Shepherd saw no reason to hold anything back at this point. “She claimed that you kidnap women and hunt them. Like animals.”
Cray shrugged. “Unsurprising, really. Most paranoids develop elaborate fantasies that have some basis in their personal experience. Kaylie associates me with the authorities—the police, I mean—who have indeed been hunting her for the past twelve years. You see how her mind might expand the truth of her situation into an imaginative metaphorical construct?”
“She also said we’d find your Lexus in bad shape, because she had to drive it through the desert to escape from you.”
Cray chuckled. The sound echoed off the corners of the garage. “No doubt she believes as much. Of course, if she had taken my vehicle, it would hardly be here in my garage.”
“She expected you to have it, though. She told us to check it out.”
“The inconsistency would never occur to her. You have to understand a person like Kaylie, Detective Shepherd. She’s fundamentally out of contact with reality. She can break in here, vandalize my property, and an hour later she’ll be fully convinced that I’m the villain. She rewrites history from moment to moment.”
“Yet she’s evaded the law for more than a decade.”
“I’m not claiming she’s been this severely irrational throughout that entire time period. She must experience intervals of near-lucidity. Perhaps such intervals persist for months, even years. But always there will be a relapse. Stress or a hormonal change or some neurotic obsession will trigger a crisis, and she’ll regress to acute psychosis. She will decompensate, as we doctors like to say.”
Shepherd surveyed the ruined Lexus. “Looks like she’s decompensated now.”
“I’d have to concur in your diagnosis.”
Cray locked up the garage and walked with Shepherd to the parking lot. Strange laughter rained down from a second-floor window in the administration building. Shepherd wondered if it was the young man who’d set fire to a toolshed because the TV had told him to, or if it was somebody else.
At his car, he stopped, facing Cray in the bright daylight.
“All right, Doctor. It seems clear that this woman is harassing you, and that she made a false report. The case, though, belongs primarily to the jurisdiction of the local sheriff. Breaking and