Stealing Faces (11 page)

He saw the knife in his hand. It was unsheathed, and his fingers were curled tightly over the handle, holding the weapon poised for a lethal thrust.

He hadn’t even known he’d removed the sheath. The act had been carried out unconsciously, by instinct.

Well, he of all people could hardly be surprised by the limitations of the conscious mind.

Cray sheathed the knife and replaced it in the satchel, then left the alley. Before driving off, he bought a thermos of coffee at the Circle K.

It had been a long night, and if Kaylie had indeed given his name to the 911 operator, then he could expect an equally long day.

18

“You already told us that. But you haven’t said why. Hey, Mitch? Mitchell? You hear me? Tell us why.”

The raggedy man named Mitch didn’t answer. He had zoned out again, his drawn face going blank, his pale, rheumy eyes losing focus. He stared out the window of the moving car at a blur of strip malls and burrito stands, a trickle of saliva on his chin.

Roy Shepherd sighed. This wasn’t the guy. He was sure of it.

Almost sure.

He didn’t put a great deal of faith in psychological profiles. They were mostly guesswork, and often not very good guesswork at that. He’d worked the streets long enough, first as a patrol cop and now as a plainclothes detective, to know that human nature was too complicated, too multifaceted, to be reduced to a series of simple formulas.

Still, the profiles were reliable in some respects. If the killer was careful and methodical, leaving few clues or none at all, covering his tracks, defying capture, then he almost certainly was not schizophrenic.

The
 
schizos
 
could be violent—oh, yes, Shepherd knew about that—but their violence was apt to be spontaneous, frenzied, splashy. They weren’t organized in their thinking. They were inept at concealment.

Whoever had killed Sharon Andrews in the
White Mountains
five months ago—killed her and cut off her face and taken it as a grisly souvenir—was surely crazy, a psycho, but not a schizophrenic like glassy-eyed Mitch.

Mitch might have killed somebody, though. He seemed to think he had.

Shepherd settled back in the rear seat of the unmarked car. Two other detectives, Janice
 
Hirst
 
and Hector Alvarez, sat up front.
 
Hirst
 
was driving. Alvarez was rather noisily chewing gum. He always had a stick of Juicy Fruit in his mouth. Shepherd had never seen the man actually eat anything.

He glanced out the window. After fifteen years in
Tucson
, his whole professional life, he knew the town better than most cabbies. He didn’t even need to check the street signs to know that the unmarked car was crossing the intersection of
22nd Street
and
Park Avenue
.

The warehouse was two blocks away. If there were faces or any other body parts in Mitch’s possession. Shepherd and his colleagues would know soon enough.

“I steal their faces,” Mitch mumbled in a sleepwalker’s voice, and a smile briefly animated his expression.

He’d said the same thing to the patrol cops who arrested him for creating a public disturbance at
6:30
this morning, after Mitch was found directing traffic on
Wilmot Road
.

I steal their faces.

It had gotten the cops’ attention, at any rate.

Shepherd had taken their report at
7:15
. Possible confession in the
White Mountains
case. Street person saying he took people’s faces.

He hadn’t believed it, and his skepticism had only deepened after a thirty-minute interrogation of the suspect. Mitch was indigent. He lived off handouts and soup-kitchen charity. He slept at shelters and in alleys. He had no driver’s license and no means of transportation.

How was he supposed to have abducted Sharon Andrews and taken her to the
White Mountains
, roughly a hundred miles northeast of
Tucson
?

Mitch hadn’t answered that question or very many other questions. He had merely reiterated his mantra with tiresome regularity while his expression varied between epileptic twitches and utter blankness.

The one bit of solid information Shepherd had coaxed from the man was the place where the faces could be found.

CDS
, Mitch had said.

When pressed, he carefully repeated the acronym, enunciating each letter with exaggerated precision.

CDS stood for Central District Supply. The company, now defunct, had operated a warehouse near
South Tucson
. The three letters, painted ten feet
 
high, still adorned the side of the abandoned building.

Looking ahead. Shepherd saw those letters now rising over the roof of a lower building at the end of a dead-end street south of 22nd. “That the place?” he asked Mitch.

Mitch nodded. “CDS.”

“The faces are in there?”

Another nod. “I steal their faces.”

Shepherd looked away. “We’ll see.”

* * *

Hirst
 
parked in a vacant lot alongside the looming bulk of the warehouse. She and Alvarez climbed out of the unmarked Crown
Victoria
, then helped Mitch to exit.

He stood vacantly, swaying and humming, his wrists handcuffed behind him. Shepherd had insisted on the handcuffs. He knew you couldn’t take any chances with these people.

Shepherd himself got out last, unfolding himself from the close confines of the sedan’s rear compartment. He was tall and slim, and at thirty-eight he kept himself in shape by rising at
5:30
every day to play vigorous handball at
Fort
Lowell
Park
. This morning, after his game, he had driven directly to
Tucson
police headquarters and showered there. Somehow he had misplaced his comb, and he’d had to smooth and part his close-cropped brown hair with his fingers, a procedure that had left him slightly unkempt.

As he stood by the car, a dusty breeze kicked up and made mischief with his hair, and he knew that if Ginnie were here, he would catch gentle hell from her for the state of his appearance. Ginnie had been the one who’d always straightened his tie, exclaimed over loose threads in his slacks, and made
 
tut-tutting
 
noises when he came down to breakfast in a week-old, unwashed sweatshirt and Jockey briefs.

He smiled, thinking of his wife, but the smile turned to sadness as the wind blew harder. He had not been able to think of Ginnie without sorrow for a long time now. There was a hurt in him, deep and raw, and even an hour of pounding the handball until his palms were numb could not assuage it.

“Show us how to get in,” he told Mitch, hoping the man was sufficiently lucid to comprehend the order.

With a nod, Mitch led the three cops through knee-high weeds and swirls of windblown dust toward the tall chicken-wire fence surrounding the warehouse. He took long, stiff, clumsy strides. He hummed louder.

At the rear there was a gap in the fence, professionally cut. Mitch hadn’t done that. The work was too clean, too competent.

The four of them slipped through the gap and came to the back of the building, where Mitch pointed at a door that had been chained shut.

The chain links had been severed—again, a neat, professional job.

“Somebody busted in here,” Hector Alvarez said, “probably hoping there was still some merchandise inside.”

Janice
 
Hirst
 
studied the broken chain. “Long time ago. See? The links are rusty even where they were cut through.”

Mitch just stood, waiting.

“So they’re inside?” Shepherd asked him. “The faces?”

Nod.

“Anybody else in there? Friends of yours?”

Head shake.

It was probably true. But Shepherd unholstered his Beretta anyway.

“Janice, stand post out here with our friend Mitch. Hector, give me some cover.”

Alvarez snapped his Juicy Fruit. “Right.”

Shepherd tested the doorknob. It turned freely. He eased the door an inch ajar, then took out his flashlight.

Flash in one hand, gun in the other, he pushed the door wide and sidestepped in, not lingering in the doorway where he was silhouetted against the glare. Then he turned on the flashlight, holding it away from his body, and panned the beam over the windowless, cavernous room.

He saw them.

Faces.

They leaped out of the shadows, face after face, tacked to walls and support columns, faces young and old, in many hues, all staring
 
eyelessly
.

Mitch had cut out the eyes. Perhaps his trophies’ lifeless gazes had disturbed him.

“Jesus,” Alvarez muttered.

Outside, Mitch released a giggle. “Told you,” he said. “I steal their faces. I steal their faces.”

Shepherd nodded. “You sure do.” To Alvarez he added, “Hang back for a minute. I want to check it out.”

His flashlight leading him, Shepherd advanced into the gloom.

The ceiling was high, the walls far away, his every step on the concrete floor echoing from distant corners. Clusters of trash were piled here and there like atolls in a sea of dust. Magazines, mostly. Mitch must have scavenged them from Dumpsters. He—

There was movement to Shepherd’s left, and he swung the flash at it, glimpsing a pink tail and a scurrying blur.

Nice place, he thought grimly.

When he was satisfied that the warehouse was empty except for the rats and the faces, he approached the nearest pylon. It was steel, reinforced with concrete, and Mitch’s artistry had made it a totem pole of faces.

Most were women, but there were a few men. Shepherd recognized some of them. Fashion models, actresses, other celebrities.

Nearly all the photos were in color, glossy, and large enough to be almost life-size.

Mitch had cut them out very neatly, omitting the eyes, and with thumbtacks or finishing nails he had mounted the photos around the warehouse, scores of them, hundreds of them, the work of a lifetime.

“This is quite impressive, Mitch,” Shepherd said. “You’re an artist.”

“I steal their faces,” Mitch informed him from the doorway.

“It’s good you told us. Work like this deserves an audience.”

“I steal their faces.”

“Yes. We got that.”

Shepherd loitered in the warehouse for a minute or two. He truly was impressed with the man’s achievement. Mitch was like those people who build monuments out of junk or amass the world’s largest ball of string. He was crazy, to be sure, and compulsive or obsessive or whatever the term was, but he had demonstrated a degree of diligence and sheer persistence that few sane people could equal. The warehouse was a kind of art gallery, and stamped on it was Mitch’s personality, fascinating and unique.

“You could charge admission,” he told Mitch as he rejoined the others in the sunlight.

Mitch only blinked, but Shepherd thought he detected a hint of shy gratitude in the man’s twitchy smile.

They returned to the car, easing their prisoner into the backseat. Janice
 
Hirst
 
looked sad.

“It’s almost a shame,” she said.

Shepherd asked what she meant.

She lowered her voice. “Well, they’ll put him away, at least for a while. It’s too bad. He’s harmless, don’t you think?”

Hirst
 
was a transfer from the sheriff’s department in
Pinal
County
and there were a lot of things she didn’t know. Alvarez, though, had been with Tucson PD nearly as long as Shepherd himself, and he turned away, uncomfortable.

Shepherd ought to have let it go, but he couldn’t. “When they’re this far gone, they’re not harmless.”

“But you said he ought to charge admission.”

“What he’s done here is harmless. Interesting, even. But who knows what he might do next?”

“You mean violence?”
 
Hirst
 
frowned. “That’s rare among schizophrenics.”

“So I’ve been told. You handle a lot of street people in Pinal?”

“Not really. Rural area, you know.
 
Illegals
 
camping out in the woods ...”

“Mental patients? Deinstitutionalized? Mainstreamed?”

“Hardly ever.” She lifted her chin. “But I’ve read up on it. I know—”

“You don’t know a fucking thing,” Shepherd said without emphasis. “Now let’s get out of here.”

There was silence on the drive back, except for Mitch, who hummed an unmelodic time and stared at distant visions only he could see.