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    Stealing Faces
    Stealing Faces
    Stealing Faces
    Ebook421 pages6 hours

    Stealing Faces

    By Michael Prescott

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    About this ebook

    From New York Times and USA Today bestseller Michael Prescott, author of FINAL SINS and COLD AROUND THE HEART, comes this exciting novel of relentless psychological suspense.

    John Cray has a secret. For twelve years he has stalked and kidnapped women, setting them loose in the mountains of eastern Arizona, hunting them like animals, and taking their lives. He has left no clues. He is suspected by no one. Or so he thinks.

    But now he has a problem. Somebody -- a woman whose name he doesn't know -- is stalking him.

    She follows him when he makes his nightly rounds in Tucson. She watches him on busy streetcorners and in shadowy restaurants. She seems to know his secret. But if so, why hasn't she gone to the police?

    Cray plans to turn the tables on his mysterious pursuer. He will become the predator, and she -- the prey. Once she's in his power, she will tell him who she is and what she's after. And then she will die.

    But even Cray isn't prepared to confront the truth when he discovers it -- or to deal with the shattering implications of a past he had thought long buried and an obsessive madness he cannot control ...

    "STEALING FACES is truly thrilling as well as chilling: I could not put this book down. Reading the first few chapters of this tale is like reading the climax for most thrillers and the excitement just keeps building. Michael Prescott knows how to keep readers' eyes glued to his pages.... I was completely hooked. Actually, more than completely hooked, I thought the lightning-paced thrills were going to give me a heart attack!" - Judith Flavell, The Mystery Reader

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Prescott
    Release dateSep 7, 2014
    ISBN9781502285225
    Stealing Faces
    Author

    Michael Prescott

    Michael Prescott was born and raised in New Jersey and attended Wesleyan University, majoring in film studies. After college, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a screenwriter. In 1986 he sold his first novel, and has gone on to pen six thrillers under the name Brian Harper and ten books as Michael Prescott. He has sold more than one million print copies and is finding a large new audience through e-books. Fan-favorite character Abby Sinclair, the “stalker’s stalker” first introduced in The Shadow Hunter, has since appeared in three more books.

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      Book preview

      Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott

      STEALING FACES

      Michael Prescott

      www.michaelprescott.net

      Contents

      Epigraph

      Prologue

      PART ONE

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      12

      13

      14

      15

      16

      17

      18

      19

      20

      21

      22

      23

      24

      25

      26

      27

      28

      29

      30

      31

      32

      33

      34

      35

      36

      37

      38

      39

      40

      41

      42

      PART TWO

      43

      44

      45

      46

      47

      48

      49

      50

      51

      52

      53

      54

      55

      56

      Epilogue

      From the author ...

      Author’s Note

      Books by Michael Prescott

      Light thickens,

      And the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood;

      Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

      Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

      —Shakespeare, Macbeth

      Prologue

      She had been a person once.

      Hours earlier, when she started her long run through the hills under the moonless sky, she’d had a name and a job and a son to live for.

      All of that was gone now, and she was only a scratched and muddy animal crawling through tall stands of reeds along a stream bank.

      She was instinct and reflex. Her world was a flow of sensation—the movement of her body, the rack of pain, the press of fear.

      The chase had taken her dignity and her freedom of will, and the shock of the bullet in her leg had taken her memories and hopes. Blood loss and rising panic had done the rest.

      Somewhere, not inside her but out there, apart from her and distant, a presence named Sharon Andrews hovered like a ghost. Sharon Andrews, thirty-four, divorced mother raising a seven-year-old boy named Todd, working five days a week as a receptionist in the showroom of Edison Auto Mart on East Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona.

      This woman, this Sharon Andrews, had read dinosaur books to her son in the evenings. She had worried about the rent on their two-bedroom apartment when the alimony check was late. She had stopped at the local video store once a week to raid the bargain bin for Disney movies on sale, used, for $9.99. When she smiled, her mouth turned downward, and when she sneezed she said, Excuse me, even if she was alone.

      This woman, this Sharon Andrews, had been all quirks and opinions and worries and loves and disappointments and ideas picked up from magazines and strange, lonely moods when she wondered about the infinite.

      This woman did not exist anymore, and would never exist again.

      Where she had been, there was the bloodied, wounded, tattered, desperate thing now splashing into the shallow stream, drawn there by an agonizing thirst and a need to soothe the burn of the bullet hole.

      The streambed was slick, and her bare feet slipped in a groove of ooze. She fell in the water, inhaling some of it, gasping and retching, then struggled on.

      She had no conscious reason to continue. She did not lash herself with what-if and if-only. She was aware of no plan, no strategy for survival, and nothing but fear had impelled her down the steep hillside to the stream.

      A person might have imagined that the stream would erase her trail and throw off her pursuer, but there was no person now.

      Sometimes limping, sometimes crawling, she splashed through ten inches of water, traveling with the current because she was too tired to resist it, covering distance she couldn’t measure, running a race with an adversary she no longer clearly remembered.

      The stream curved, narrowing. Somewhere a coyote sang to the night, its cry high-pitched and sad.

      She’d heard it before, when she was Sharon Andrews. Then, she had ignored it, knowing coyotes were no threat to her, but now she knew nothing but direct perception and intuitive response, and the predator’s song chilled her.

      She ran faster and lost her footing again, coming down hard on the soft bank, spattered with muck, and abruptly all motion fled her, and she lay utterly still.

      The night was large and silent, heavy with darkness. She looked at the sky. The stars had dimmed.

      She did not understand that the leakage of blood from the hole in her leg had impaired her thinking and now even her vision.

      She was aware of pain and weakness, hunger, and the fast feathery beating of her frightened heart.

      This was all there was for her, this and the great stillness all around, the silence that stretched and stretched as if it might last forever.

      The second bullet caught her in the hip.

      She jerked with the impact, her eyes watering in surprise and pain.

      Her hands found the bullet hole and felt the rush of sticky warmth suffusing her skirt. Blindly she tried to plug the hole with her fingers, but the effort was hopeless and she was much too tired.

      She’d never even heard the gunshot—perhaps her startled yelp had covered the noise—but she heard the coyote again, keening a ululant song.

      It was not a coyote, of course. It never had been.

      It was him.

      Some part of her registered this fact. She looked behind her and saw him striding along the bank of the stream, the pistol in his gloved hand.

      If she had been Sharon Andrews, she would have known she was finished. Somehow she knew anyway, though her body fought against the knowledge, insisting on survival.

      When he reached her, she was clawing feebly at the mud, straining to rise, but she would never rise. The second shot had shattered her hip and damaged the base of her spine, leaving her legs limp and unresponsive even as her upper body thrashed and flailed.

      Crouching beside her, he touched the carotid artery at the side of her neck. She moaned.

      Quiet now, he said. Quiet.

      Roughly he turned her on her back.

      A light snapped on, dim and red, a low-power flashlight with a red filter.

      Swimming in the red haze was the blur of his face. He leaned close, studying her, his eyes narrowed and intense.

      Now I see you, he whispered. Now I see you as you really are. I see the essence of you.

      She heard words, but they meant nothing, they were only sounds, dull sounds. She was sleepy.

      Her eyes were closing when she saw the knife.

      He’d slipped it from a sheath at his waist. A long knife with a double-edged blade.

      A last reflex of fear stiffened her.

      There, there. He set down the flashlight. Be calm. This won’t take long.

      Then he was bending nearer, one hand on her chin, the other holding the knife against the tender hollow of her jaw.

      You wear a mask, he said. All your life you’ve worn it.

      His tone soothed her, a steady tone that stroked her in a calm caress.

      But not tonight. Tonight you’ve been unmasked. Tonight you’re pretending no longer. Isn’t it good, not to pretend? Isn’t it right, to be real for once? To be only what you are?

      She didn’t understand, but she knew there was only a little more to go, and she relaxed, waiting for it to be over.

      The process is almost complete. Just this last step, to make it official. The final stage of liberation from your stale disguise.

      The knife point pricked her, but the pain was someone else’s. Past his face, the night was growing darker.

      Are you ready? Ready to remove the mask?

      He knew there would be no answer. But she was indeed ready. He could tell.

      And so was he.

      The knife moved, slicing the soft flesh under her chin, and before she could resist or even scream, he took the loose skin flap in both hands and in a single practiced motion he peeled off her face.

      PART ONE

      NIGHT’S BLACK AGENT

      1

      On a Monday evening in September, five months after he had hunted Sharon Andrews in the southern foothills of the White Mountains, John Cray drove into Tucson in search of a fresh kill.

      It was a long drive, one he enjoyed, especially when the sun was westering, its light golden on the hills and desert flats. He headed south on Route 191 toward Interstate 10. The highway was uncrowded. A few pickup trucks shot past in the northbound lane, and far behind him sparkled a glimmer of sun on a chrome fender, but otherwise he was alone.

      Solitude suited him. Cray was hemmed in by people throughout the day, even on weekends. The work never stopped, it was frustrating and demoralizing, and there was so rarely any relief.

      But he would find relief tonight.

      The road passed lightly under him. Ruts and potholes were smoothed away by a precision suspension system, and the engine’s soft hum disappeared behind the controlled violence of Mahler’s Eighth on the CD player. Cray settled deeper into the leather seat and felt care leave him.

      He had paid more than $50,000 for these niceties, without regret. The salesman at the Lexus dealership had assured him that the LX 470 was the finest sport-utility vehicle on the market, exceeding even the rival Mercedes model. It was, he’d said, the perfect choice for the driver who would not sacrifice comfort, yet required the capability to travel off-road.

      Cray required that capability. He had not told the salesman why.

      As he approached the interstate, he noticed that the car with the chrome fender was still behind him, a mile in the distance, maintaining a steady rate of speed.

      The freeway took him southwest, then curved north into Tucson. Downtown’s modest skyline passed on his right, a few medium-high office towers, tiers of windows glazed red with the sunset. Around the city lay the mountains, range upon range, pasted against the deepening cobalt of the sky.

      Just north of the city limits, Cray turned off the interstate and traveled through the Catalina foothills on Ina Road. The sun was in his rearview mirror now, and only night lay ahead.

      Resort hotels were scattered among the steep canyons and high ridges of the foothills. He chose an older one, recently renovated, a place unlikely to be too crowded in September. The tourist season did not start until the heat abated, and in the desert, summer lingered an extra month or two.

      The parking lot near the lobby was largely empty. Cray parked the Lexus in a corner spot, away from the light poles. He did not want the vehicle to be noticed and perhaps remembered.

      He was careful. Experience had made him wise. In twelve years of nocturnal adventures, he had slipped up only once.

      Still, his one mistake had been recent enough to make him doubly cautious now.

      From his studies of criminal psychopathology, he understood that self-control was critical to his continued success. The ones who got caught, the ones whose names the public knew, almost invariably were betrayed by their own spiraling appetites. They went faster, abandoned caution, pushed the envelope of risk, and lost everything.

      Whenever one of them was apprehended, the fool was always stupidly surprised to discover he had covered his tracks less carefully than he’d imagined. It was apparent in the suspect’s face, captured in shaky close-up by a handheld news camera: the dull astonishment at having been arrested, the incredulity at finding himself no better or no smarter than those who’d come before.

      Cray knew he could fall victim to the same hubris. Still, he was better.

      He was more intelligent than most others who enjoyed similar pastimes, and his needs, though intense, had not ossified into obsessions. He could avoid the obvious, costly mistakes that recklessness would breed.

      But even he could not hold out indefinitely against the urgings of his deepest nature. Months might pass, or even a year or two, and then one day he would feel it again, too strong to resist: the itch in his fingers, the insomnia, the sexual arousal that kept him hot and agitated.

      He had felt it for the past three weeks, stronger with every passing day. So here he was, a wolf in a sheep’s mask, stalking the witless flock.

      Before leaving home, he’d shed his business suit in favor of his standard nighttime ensemble. He was dressed entirely in black. Black boots, black denim slacks, black long-sleeve shirt.

      His shirt collar was buttoned, though he wore no tie, and his dark hair was slicked back. Lately his hair was sparser than it had been, and his hairline had begun to recede. His forehead was pale and smooth, like a skull.

      The black ensemble gave him a mildly dangerous edge, but his face was that of any other man in middle age who worked hard and bore up patiently under life’s load. A nice face, people would say: a kind and thoughtful face. And they would wonder why he had never married, what private heartache kept him solitary at the age of forty-six.

      Sometimes, gazing in a mirror, he glimpsed the reality behind the persona, his living soul behind the public mask. It glimmered in his eyes, gray-green eyes, amber-flecked, which had looked deeply into the essence of things, eyes that did not flinch from horror.

      His eyes were not nice or kind or thoughtful. Anyone who had seen those eyes, really seen them, would no longer wonder why he was unmarried.

      As he crossed the parking lot in the sunset’s afterglow, the air, desert-dry, brushed the nape of his neck like a caress of velvet.

      Adjacent to the lobby was a bar and grill, a place of soft music and glimmering candles, uncrowded at this hour. Cray took a window table and ordered a margarita, then watched the fading sunset and the growing dark.

      The mountains vanished into the night. But the city remained, a spread of twinkling color, large and misty.

      Cray looked at the lights for a long time, lifting his glass now and then to taste the tequila’s soothing burn. It was not the lights that fascinated him. It was his awareness of the people represented by those lights, a half million people or more, with different names and different backgrounds, strangers to one another, living, struggling, dying, each one an individual.

      Yet how easily their individuality could be discarded. And if it could be stripped away, then was it even real?

      Or was it only a disguise, a persona—complex and subtle, yes, rich with nuance, elaborately refined, but nonetheless a mere facade?

      Cray looked toward the long mahogany bar at the front of the room. A man in tapered jeans and a big-buckled Western belt had just mounted a bar stool beside an unescorted woman in an invitingly short skirt.

      The man would say something, and the woman would respond. Perhaps he would offer to buy her a drink; perhaps she would agree. He would compliment her dress or her hair or her eyes, and she would ask what he did for a living.

      The two of them operated purely on instinct and reflex. Every move, every word, every detail of their grooming had been prompted by the unconscious emulation of others or the irresistible pull of instinctual drives.

      The man wore those jeans and that belt because he had seen other men wearing them; imitative as a monkey, he had bought them for himself.

      He had come to a bar because it was where other people would come. He had taken the empty seat beside the woman because this too was the action that was expected of him.

      His conversational gambits had been picked up from movies or TV shows or from dialogue he’d overheard in other bars—nothing original, lines spoken by strangers, who in turn copied behavior they had witnessed elsewhere.

      The ritual of offering to buy a drink, of making some cheap and obvious toast, of clinking glasses, all of it was a show played out countless times by countless others.

      And if the woman allowed him to take her home, she would do so only because it was expected of her, because she had been raised in a culture that permitted and slyly approved of such behavior; she would be fitting herself seamlessly into the social framework that had shaped her.

      The only honest part of what either of them did was their instinctive need for sexual relief, and this was a need they shared with every animal.

      Cray had heard much about the dignity of man, but what he had seen was only the vacant thoughtlessness of a herd. The mind was largely an illusion; the great majority of people were, for all practical purposes, unconscious most of the time. Their conscious minds, if functional at all, served only to provide a veneer of rationalization for behavior patterns already prompted by social conditioning and instinct.

      Cray considered the woman in the short skirt, and saw a mandrill, her buttocks flaming red in sexual heat. He studied the man dutifully attempting to seduce her, and saw a rutting gorilla driven by the need to establish himself as the alpha male.

      Those two were random examples. He could have focused on anyone around him and seen the same. There were exceptions, but they were rare. In his life he had found only one person able to understand, really understand.

      One person besides himself.

      Sir? Would you like to see our dinner menu?

      A waitress had paused by the table, smiling at him from under a raft of loose auburn hair. Her name tag read DEBBI.

      Not quite yet, Cray said. Perhaps you could bring me another drink.

      Right away. Her smile brightened, and she shook her ringlets of red hair as she walked away.

      Cray watched her go. She was most cheerful, a healthy and vital young animal, but he wondered how long her high spirits would last if he took her into the mountains tonight and used her for sport.

      The prospect did not entice him. He could do better. Debbi the waitress was too youthful and unformed to be really interesting. It was preferable to select a mature specimen, ripe for harvest.

      He needed to find a woman who was alone, or who could be separated from her party. He would target his victim, trail her to her home or hotel room, then carry out the abduction. He would find a way to do it quietly.

      Cray let his gaze travel around the room. A fair number of the tables had filled up since his arrival.

      In a general sense he knew what he was looking for, but he had no precise image in mind. She might be tall or short, blonde or brunette or red-haired. She might be of any race. He liked them slender, never younger than sixteen or older than forty-five, but those were his only criteria.

      Most of the patrons around him were couples, but a pair of unattached women sat at the bar, talking to the bartender and watching Monday Night Football on a large, muted TV.

      There were no other solitary women in sight ... except one, seated in a far corner.

      Cray glimpsed her face, half-concealed behind a wide-brimmed straw hat. For an instant she seemed to meet his gaze, and then she averted her head slightly, a movement so subtle as to be almost natural.

      Here you go. Debbi the waitress, returning with Cray’s second margarita.

      He accepted it with thanks, then held the cold glass in his hand.

      It was a hand that trembled now, only a little, and not so obviously that anyone would notice. He sat motionless, afraid to lift the drink and perhaps spill it. He studied the distant city in the window.

      To the southwest he could see the lighted towers of downtown Tucson. Downtown, where he’d gone on Saturday night, only forty-eight hours ago. A street fair had drawn him there, a monthly bacchanal that attracted throngs of students from the university and other locals in search of fun and distraction. The scene had been crowded and noisy. Bands played on street corners, a blare of drums and amplified guitars and caterwauling voices. People threw money into open guitar cases at the musicians’ feet, because it was expected of them.

      University students, back for the fall semester, yelled primal challenges at the night sky. Here and there a juggler or a magician would attract an audience, as their counterparts had done in medieval markets and Roman festivals.

      Human nature never changed, because at its root it was not human at all. It was something older.

      Cray had been musing on this as he wended, supple as smoke, through the noise and shadow-flicker of the crowd. The subject often occupied him. He had written a book, well received, to explore part of it—the less dangerous part. The title had been The Mask of Self.

      He’d thought of masks while his eyes, narrowed and alert, scanned the swirl of faces around him. What part of these people was unique? Not their attire or grooming, their mores and tastes, not even their thoughts. What, then? Their souls? And what was the soul, if not the primordial part of them, predating words and ego? What was the soul, if not the beast within?

      Yet they did not release the beast. They kept it caged and hidden. They hid it even from themselves. They wore masks, all of them, masks of flesh—smiling or frowning masks, as unreal as the stylized faces worn by Roman actors in the last decadent days of Empire.

      He saw those masks and yearned to strip them off and see the bare truth beneath, the truth that was blood and fear and a racing heartbeat.

      And then he had seen her.

      Only fleetingly, a pale face in the swarm.

      Blonde hair, a slim neck, white arms.

      She was gone almost before he registered her existence. But in the instant of eye contact between them, he had sensed something, a frisson of mutual excitement.

      He wanted her.

      She was the one.

      But she’d vanished. Though he looked for hours, elbowing his way through the masses of strangers, he had not spotted her again.

      Until tonight.

      The woman in the corner, with the straw hat that almost hid her face ...

      A pale face. And beneath the hat, a wisp of blonde hair.

      It was the same woman.

      He was certain.

      He wanted to believe that this second sighting was a coincidence. But to believe in coincidence required faith.

      Cray had no faith. He did not believe.

      There was, then, no explanation for her presence except the obvious one.

      He remembered the glint of chrome behind him on Route 191. The car that had maintained a steady distance from his Lexus, mile after mile.

      Her car. It must have been.

      She had followed him to the street fair. She had followed him to this resort.

      She must be staking out his home and tailing him whenever he left.

      She was ... stalking him.

      Cray peered into the salt-rimmed margarita glass, turning the thought over and over, marveling at it, fascinated and afraid. It made no sense. The very idea was preposterous, an inversion of the normal order of things.

      He knew who and what he was. He was a predator. More than that—the essence of all predators. He was cruelty and stealth, he was hunger, he was quickness in the night. He was rapacity personified, the universal wolf. He hunted and he killed, and to him screams were music.

      No one hunted him.

      He was not prey. That role was left to others who could play it better. Who had played it again and again on many secret nights, year after year.

      Others, like the woman across the room.

      He watched her without turning his head, using peripheral vision. At a distance of thirty feet, her profile was hard to discern clearly. She had a round, childish face, and her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her small, pale hands fidgeted on the table. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, reached tentatively for her drink and then pulled away.

      Nervous. Vulnerable.

      A deer at a water hole.

      And he—he was the lion in the tall grass.

      Yet tonight the deer stalked the lion.

      He could almost understand it if she were a cop. But an undercover cop was a professional, trained to shadow a suspect without being noticed. This woman’s technique was clumsy. Twice, on two separate nights, she had looked directly at him and caught his gaze.

      She was no cop. She was an amateur.

      If she knew or even suspected who he was, then why not call the police, tip them off, let them handle it?

      Well.

      He would have to ask her, that’s all.

      Cray relaxed, his frown of concentration easing into a smooth, unreadable expression again.

      Things were fine. No problem. He had needed a victim, hadn’t he? Now he had one.

      Before he played with her, he would make her talk. She would tell him everything. Then he would start her running, and he would follow, predator and prey in their proper roles again.

      He had not yet touched his second margarita. Calm now, he lifted the glass and licked salt from the rim, then settled back in his chair and mouthed a silent toast to the mystery woman.

      To your health.

      2

      Elizabeth Palmer watched the man at the window table as he finished his second drink. She was relieved to note that he’d looked in her direction only once. If he had noticed her, if he’d recognized her from one of the previous nights, then surely he would have sneaked another glance her way.

      Her fingers tapped nervously on the tabletop until she became aware of their senseless drumming and made herself stop.

      She was probably safe. Wearing different clothes, her face shielded by a hat, her corner table in shadow, she must look like a different woman to him.

      Or maybe she was just kidding herself.

      She’d known there was a good chance she would be spotted eventually. She could beat the odds for a while, but not forever. And if Cray was on to her ...

      She didn’t like to think about that possibility. If Cray was the man she feared he was, then her fate would be the same as that of the other women.

      Elizabeth couldn’t guess exactly what he did with them, what sort of mental or physical torture he inflicted before the kill, but it would be bad, and there would be no escape.

      And at the end, of course, he would take his victim’s face.

      The thought chilled her. She hugged herself. She had thin, pale, lightly freckled arms prone to goose bumps, and she held them tight against her body, her wrists crossed over her small, shy breasts.

      Being in the same room with him was hard. She wanted to get up and run, as she had run from him once before.

      Was she crazy to have run so far, and for so long, and now to seek him out and risk everything, merely to confirm a suspicion that might be groundless?

      You must be really brave, Elizabeth, she told herself. Or really, really stupid.

      Maybe it would have been better not to enter the bar at all. She could have waited outside, hoping to catch Cray when he left.

      But she’d tried that strategy a week ago, after tailing him to a bikers’ bar on Tucson’s dangerous south side, and when he departed, she’d nearly missed him.

      She couldn’t afford to take that risk. Didn’t dare let him out of her sight.

      Because, if her suspicion was correct, he was getting ready to try something.

      She could almost feel it, sense it, as surely as she could sometimes sense the gathering electricity in the air before a summer thunderstorm.

      She touched the purse in her lap, feeling the small hard shape of the most important item inside, simply to reassure herself that it was there.

      Surreptitiously she studied Cray. She had not been this close to her quarry at any time since her return to Tucson.

      He had been thirty-four when she’d first known him. He was forty-six now. His profile was sharper, more angular, than she recalled. He’d lost weight, but although lean, he was far from scrawny. His long shirtsleeves did not quite conceal the sinewy muscles of his arms, and his tapered slacks wrapped his strong thighs and calves like a second skin.

      Black shirt, black pants. He’d worn the same outfit every time she’d followed him. He was a man in silhouette, a living cutout of the night.

      Last Saturday, shadowing Cray in the hectic downtown streets, catching glimpses of him in the crush of people, she’d seen the way he carried himself—the long, liquid strides, the loose swing of his wide shoulders, and always his head turning slowly from side to side as he scanned the crowd.

      He had reminded her of a panther, sleek and black and lethal, a hungry animal on the hunt. She’d imagined he was sniffing the air, picking up the scent of prey.

      But of course she could be all wrong about him. That was the thing to keep in mind. John Bainbridge Cray might never have killed anyone.

      In the whole time she had watched him, he’d done nothing worse than make a few

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