Stealing Faces (18 page)

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she had to do everything herself.

Catch Cray. Kill him. Deliver his body to the front steps of the police station, with the faces of his victims pinned to his hide as incontrovertible proof of his guilt.

The faces of his victims ...

She blinked, then slowly lifted her head with a thought.

A crazy thought. Yes, crazy. Of course it was.

But for once that word didn’t scare her. Because she wasn’t crazy. She knew that now.

It was the world that was insane.

27

Shepherd was cruising the interstate, three miles from
Tucson
city limits, when his cell phone chirped. He fumbled it out of the side pocket of his jacket. “Shepherd.”

“Roy, it’s Hector. Something’s come up. Something sort of interesting.”

Alvarez was the phlegmatic type, slow to show excitement, but Shepherd heard a rare intensity in his voice now.

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” he said mildly.

“Well, the fax came in from
Graham
County
.” The sheriff’s file on Kaylie McMillan. After leaving the hospital. Shepherd had called Alvarez and summarized Cray’s story. He’d told Alvarez to watch for the fax. “I took a look at it.”

“And?”

“Decided to post a copy of the lady’s arrest photo on the bulletin board. What the hell. She’s a fugitive, after all. Well, guess what.”

“I’m a real bad guesser. Hector.”

“Couple of patrol guys saw the
 
pic
 
and made her. I mean, they eyeballed her just this morning in a greasy spoon over on
Speedway
.”

Shepherd’s heart froze for an instant, then kicked into high gear. “They’re sure?”

“Real sure. They said she started acting nervous when they sat down at the next table. Even spilled a cup of coffee all over the table, made a real mess—then left in a hurry. They didn’t think too much of it at the time, but when they saw the photo, it was like, bam, that’s her.”

“What time this morning?”

“About nine.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“Hold on.” Alvarez shouted the question, got an indistinct answer, and said, “Rancheros Cafe.”

Shepherd knew it. “
Cross street
is
Woodland
.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’m about five minutes east of town right now. I’m going to detour over to the coffee shop and see if I can talk to anybody who remembers her.”

“You want company?”

“It’s not necessary. She must be long gone. But maybe I can take a statement from someone who works there. Who are the patrol cops, by the way?”

“Leo
 
Galston
—he’s a
 
T.O
.—and Kurt Bane.”

“I know Leo. I want a statement from him and his partner.”

“They’re already writing it up.”

Shepherd took the
Kolb Road
exit and shot north to
Speedway
.

He remembered telling Cray that this wasn’t his case. The
Graham
County
sheriff had primary jurisdiction. There was no urgent reason for him to get involved.

But he hadn’t told Cray the whole truth, had he?

Shepherd’s mouth pinched. No. He’d said nothing about Ginnie.

His wife. His late wife.

Roy and Virginia Shepherd had lived on a cul-de-sac off
Fort Lowell Road
in a modest brick house, ranch style, with pebbles and cacti in the front yard and a small, thirsty, carefully tended garden in the rear. The neighborhood was typical of
Tucson
—middle-class, quiet except for one neighbor’s dog that never quit barking, bare of shade on hot summer days, untouched by any crime more serious than graffiti.

Shepherd and his wife had been happy there, or happy enough. The marriage hadn’t been ideal. Sometimes
Roy
had gotten angry with Ginnie for the amount of time she spent in the den, hunched over her computer keyboard, working on her project.

The project was a Web site she had created, a clearinghouse of information submitted by dozens of local agencies and organizations, public and private, all committed to aiding the poor and homeless.
Ginnie’s
 
goal was to coordinate the efforts of municipal and county relief agencies with the activities of private charities and churches.

Restaurants could check the inventories of local food banks and allocate surplus cuisine more intelligently. Schedules of AA meetings throughout Pima were posted daily; printouts were posted in shelters. People needing assistance in a variety of foreign languages could be matched to appropriate relief workers who might be working across town or outside city limits.

A worthwhile endeavor, but endlessly time-consuming. Every evening, after a day’s work, Ginnie had downloaded her e-mail from all these scattered sources, then had spent hours updating the site before uploading the new pages to the host server.

Shepherd had worried about her. She wasn’t getting any sleep. And she had no time for him—or for anyone.

It was ironic, in a way. Ordinarily a cop’s wife would complain that he was never home, but Shepherd had always made time for his personal life, and he wanted his wife to share it with him.

After some weeks of argument, an agreement had been reached. Ginnie would give up her job downtown and take on the Web site as a full-time occupation. She would earn no money for the work, but money had never been the point. Anyway, she was paid little more than minimum wage at the health clinic where she worked from eight to five every weekday.

Shepherd thought of the Tuesday night when she told him she’d given notice.
 
They just need me to stay on till they find a replacement,
 
she said.
 
Another week or so.
 
And, smiling, she’d added.
 
You can live with that, can’t you?

As it turned out, Ginnie was the one who couldn’t live with it.

They celebrated her decision with wine and take-out meals from the best Italian restaurant in the world, just down the street. Drunk and laughing, they made love in the living room, progressing in giddy stages from the couch to the rug to the bare hardwood floor in the foyer.

And the next day Timothy Fries had visited the clinic.

Fries was a street person who had spent most of his life shuttling from one psychiatric ward to another. Doctors had variously diagnosed him as acutely psychotic, manic-depressive, paranoid, and schizophrenic. Every pharmaceutical treatment had been tried; none had achieved more than transitory success. He had periods of lucidity, then relapsed into craziness. His family had given up on him. He had no friends, no home, no job, no life.

When his path had crossed Virginia Shepherd’s, Fries had been thirty-two years old, penniless, ragged, and constantly afraid.

Ginnie did clerical work at the clinic, freeing up the staff nurses for more important duties. Part of her job was to interview incoming patients to elicit their medical histories.

On that Wednesday morning two years ago. Fries had entered, complaining of a headache. He had visited the place twice before, but always on weekends, when Ginnie wasn’t around.

Had she been familiar with his case, she would have known that his headaches were psychosomatic, a product of his belief that larval worms had crawled into his skull via his ear canal and were presently feeding on his brain.

As it was, she knew only that the man in the anteroom was emaciated and scared and in pain. She asked him the standard questions, marked down his more intelligible replies.

He was mentally ill—this much was evident from his scattershot thought processes and muted affect—but she didn’t judge him to be either paranoid or dangerous.

And so she made an error, a small error, hardly important.

She turned away from him to put her clipboard in the out basket. That was all.

In that moment Timothy Fries lunged at her, and she felt something sharp and hot burst through the bunched muscles at the base of her spine, and there was a rush of numbness in her legs, a dizzy collapse, an impression of chaos as nurses and doctors filled the anteroom and dragged the shrieking man away.

He had found a knife, a rusty treasure scavenged from the trash, and had concealed it under his coat when he entered the clinic. Apparently he’d become convinced that the clinic itself was responsible for the worms in his brain, and he was determined to take revenge.

Anyone who worked there could have been his target. Ginnie just happened to be convenient.

The blade had severed her spinal cord but hadn’t killed her. She lingered in the hospital for two weeks.

During that time Shepherd left her room only once a day, for an hour, to go home, shower, shave, and change his clothes.

The doctors did what they could. They injected Ginnie with massive doses of
 
methylprednisolone
 
to minimize the swelling that could choke the blood vessels near her spine. They gave her morphine when her legs
 
spasmed
. They ordered soft-tissue massages to prevent the loss of muscle tone in her legs, and antibiotics to ward off infection.

Even so, after ten days they knew enough to tell Roy Shepherd that his wife was unlikely ever to walk again. Having suffered a complete
 
transection
 
of her spinal cord, she had neither feeling nor voluntary movement below the waist.

Shepherd remembered the blank stretch of time that followed his conversation with the doctors. Numb, disoriented, he walked blindly out of the hospital and stood on a walkway near a stand of
 
palo
 
verde
trees. He blinked at the sun. He tried to think.

Then he saw a hummingbird alight briefly on a green branch before launching itself in hectic motion.

It flew so fast, with such ease, darting from bush to bush in search of nectar, wings
 
strobing
 
in the sun.

Ginnie had been like that once. Always moving, a blur of energy and purpose. Shepherd had loved that quality in her. He recalled walking with her in
Reid
Park
when she abruptly challenged him to a race and started running, her legs swallowing distance in long strides, and her dark hair billowing behind her.

Shepherd had caught up with her and won, but what he recalled more vividly than the race itself was the electric charge that shivered through him when he saw her spring into action, this lithe creature who was all speed and air and laughter.

He thought of this, watching the hummingbird until it had darted away into a blue haze of distance and he was alone.

Then he went back inside the hospital to tell Ginnie the news. He said it gently, of course, but the truth was sharp-edged, and it could not be softened. When he was done speaking, he held his wife’s hand. Ginnie was silent for a moment, and then she said she wasn’t really surprised.

It looks like I’ll be spending more time in front of that computer than I’d counted on,
 
she added, and incredibly she managed a brief, wan smile.

The smile told Shepherd that things would be all right. His wife’s spirit was intact, even if her body was not. She would recover.

That night, at
 
Ginnie’s
 
urging, he went home to sleep in his own bed. He was exhausted. He’d had perhaps twenty hours’ rest in ten days.

Yet he woke in the middle of the night, his heart racing, a headache inflaming his skull.

And he knew.

Something was wrong.

He threw on his clothes and drove to the hospital. When he got there at
4 A.M.
, he found a team of doctors and nurses
 
engaged in a frantic rescue operation in Virginia Shepherd’s room.

Later he learned that she had suffered a condition called autonomic
 
dysreflexia
, common in cases of spinal cord injury. Despite the antibiotics, her urinary tract had become infected; because she had no sensation in the lower portion of her body, there had been no burning discomfort to serve as a warning of the problem.

Thirty minutes before Shepherd’s arrival, at perhaps the exact moment when he had awakened with a premonition and a pounding migraine,
 
Ginnie’s
 
blood pressure had spiked, stopping her heart, and her cardiac monitor had triggered an alarm at the nurses’ station.

Epinephrine and defibrillators were used to restart her heart, but her blood pressure continued to climb, and again she went into cardiac arrest.

The second time she could not be revived.

At
4:45
, Shepherd was informed that his wife had died.

He stood in the hallway, trying to take in this news that was at once so simple and so impossibly complicated.

Did she feel anything?
 
he asked the doctor finally.
 
I
 
mean ... any pain?

The doctor said a sudden, severe headache was normally the only symptom the patient reported.

Shepherd nodded. His own headache, which had blinded him with pain for more than an hour, had gone away at
4:33
precisely.

It was the exact moment when Ginnie had gone away too.

He lived alone now, in the modest brick house in the cul-de-sac off
Fort Lowell Road
. His friends advised
 
him to sell the place, put the memories behind him, but he wanted those memories, painful though they were.

He had changed nothing in the den where she worked. The computer was still there, untouched in two years. Sometimes he stood in the doorway of the small, untidy room stacked with books and paperwork, and he imagined that he saw her sitting at the keyboard, perhaps in a wheelchair, perhaps not.

The wheelchair didn’t matter one way or the other. Only she mattered, and she was lost to him.

And Timothy Fries?

He was back in an institution, no threat to anyone—at least until some new doctor recommended his release.

Someone would. Because there were too many people with soft hearts. People who didn’t know how to hate.

Shepherd wasn’t one of them, not anymore. He had learned hatred. There might be virtue in forgiveness, but there was no vigilance in it. Those who were quick to forgive, who prided themselves on their tolerance, were the ones who had dropped their guard and let the mad dog Fries out of his pen.

Now there was another Tim Fries on the loose. Not a man of thirty-two this time, but a woman of thirty-one.

She had shot her husband, escaped from an asylum, and she was obsessed with the doctor who had treated her, just as Fries had been obsessed with the clinic where Ginnie worked.

It was not Shepherd’s case, at least not primarily. But hell, he was handling it anyway.

He would get Kaylie McMillan off the street and see that she was locked up, in a jail cell or a mental ward, for the rest of her life.