Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [66]
It took her a moment to understand that she was in a motel, yes, another motel in Tucson, her third in the past ten days. She had left the first motel because it was too expensive, and she had left the second because of Cray.
The memory surprised her into full alertness. She sat up too quickly, then spent a moment recovering from a tug of dizziness.
She remembered everything now. She’d had breakfast at a coffee shop, where some cops had frightened her, and then she’d heard the news—the wonderful, impossibly good news about Cray.
He was in custody. They had him. They must have picked him up immediately after examining the contents of the satchel. The damaged Lexus had confirmed her story.
Blinded by relief and joy, she had driven to the first motel she could find, a two-story structure a half mile from the coffee shop, with a red VACANCY sign and a nightly rate of thirty-seven dollars.
The place was an unmistakable improvement over her usual accommodations—a swimming pool, cable TV, definite luxuries—and the price was a bit steep for her diminishing reserve of cash, but she had been both too tired and too happy to argue.
Checking in so early, she’d had to wait for the maid to finish making up the room. For a few minutes she had stood in a corner, watching the young woman vacuum the carpet and replace the towels, thinking vaguely that there was something familiar about her —the dark complexion and round, serious face—her face ...
And suddenly she had realized that the maid reminded her of that other woman whose name she didn’t know, the woman whose disembodied face haunted her dreams.
But there would be no more dreams. She was sure of it. Cray had been vanquished, and the last residue of his evil had been swept away.
Finally the maid left with a smiling good-bye, and Elizabeth was alone.
Sleep had taken her almost instantly. She closed the drapes, lay on the bed, and dropped away into the dark.
The dreamless dark. No nightmares. Never again.
That had been at ten in the morning. Now the plastic clock on the nightstand read 2:49. She had slept for nearly five hours, cocooned in the cool hum of the air-conditioning and the smoothness of freshly laundered sheets.
Her first priority at this moment was a shower. Not having bothered to undress, she still wore the clothes she’d put on last night, wrinkled and sticky with a paste of sweat. Her hair felt dirty, matted, lumpy. She needed to be dean.
She undressed, then stood under a cone of spray in the tiled stall, inhaling steam.
Remarkably, shampoo was provided free of charge, an amenity she had not enjoyed in her previous lodgings. She squirted a dollop into her hand and worked the creamy foam into a lather, rubbing the suds deep into her hair, massaging her scalp until her exhaustion was gone.
It felt wonderful.
At 3:10, when she was clean and dry and dressed in fresh clothes, she turned on the radio and traveled around the dial in search of a news station.
She wanted to hear Cray’s name. Her final doubt would be dispelled when the announcer said that it was John Bainbridge Cray, noted psychiatrist and author, who was under arrest.
That was how they would put it too. Noted psychiatrist and author.
She knew about Cray’s psychiatric methods. His talents as an author were more difficult for her to judge. Although she had seen magazine write-ups on his book, she had been unable to bring herself to actually read the damn thing.
It was hard enough just knowing that he was famous—well, moderately famous anyway—and successful.
She didn’t like to believe there was no justice in the universe. She had seen what such a belief did to people, the bitterness it bred, the cynicism and ugly despondency.
But when she thought of Cray writing about the human psyche and finding an audience for his views, she almost couldn’t stand it. There was a limit to the unfairness a person ought to be asked to accept.
She was unable to find a news