6

Cray stayed well behind the Chevette, keeping the hatchback just within sight, counting on Elizabeth Palmer not to check her rearview mirror too closely. He knew she wouldn’t. She was on the hunt, or so she thought. Her attention would be fixed on what lay ahead.

She led him to the seedy strip of trailer parks, cheap motels, and bars called, inevitably, Miracle Mile. The district was crowded even at this late hour. Young men in ponytails and buzz cuts stood in angry clusters under the streetlights. Tattooed and mini-skirted women walked past, eliciting the usual simian responses.

The area was a center of prostitution and drug use. Many of the motels were rented by the hour. An adult bookstore competed for business with a gospel mission. There was a great deal of neon everywhere, and there was darkness in the places where the bright lights didn’t reach.

It had been two weeks since Cray’s last visit to Miracle Mile. Had Elizabeth Palmer been tailing him even then? Had she shadowed him for that many nights before he became aware of her?

The establishment he’d patronized was a topless bar, not his usual sort of place, but he’d been in a restless mood, the first phase of his killing cycle.

He watched as the Chevette pulled behind the building and made a quick circuit of the parking lot. The persistent Miss Palmer was looking for his Lexus.

Failing to find it, she continued down the street. Cray cruised well behind her, past a department store that had shut its doors and was now a garish mausoleum of dead hopes, spray-painted with taggers’ signs, the parking lot a wasteland of asphalt inside a sagging security fence.

At a bowling alley the Chevette again performed a quick search of the perimeter. Cray, parked at a curb a block away, tried to fathom why she would look there. He was no bowler, for God’s sake. The activity was far too declasse for his tastes.

And yet ...

He had gone there, hadn’t he?

Cruising the strip, he’d seen a woman enter the bowling alley on a Friday night. She had a golden fall of hair, and a wide, laughing mouth that intrigued him. He’d parked and sought her out inside. But predictably she had proven to be of no interest whatsoever, merely a glorified barfly, chortling raucously at the coarse jokes of her companions, using foul language, embarrassing herself. After eavesdropping on her conversation long enough to determine her true character, Cray had left.

Yes. He’d done that. But not very recently. Perhaps as long as a month ago.

Elizabeth Palmer could not have tailed him for a month. She wasn’t good enough, slick enough. He would have spotted her long before tonight.

Or would he?

Making eye contact with her at the street fair had been pure accident. If it hadn’t been for that split second of awareness, the instant when he saw her and sensed she was watching him, would he even have noticed her in the resort bar?

She could have been after him for thirty days, thirty nights. Staking out his home, then following him whenever he left in the evening. Following remorselessly, tirelessly, night after night. Following and watching.

For a month. A month ...

It was only a little more than a month ago that Sharon Andrews’ body had been found.

The discovery had been Cray’s fault. For the first time in twelve years, he’d gotten careless.

Ordinarily he was meticulous in the disposal of his victim’s remains. But Sharon Andrews had led him on a long chase, and by the time he ran her down, night was ebbing. He had used a collapsible shovel to dig a shallow grave near the stream bank. Sealed inside an extra-large, heavy-duty trash bag to discourage scavengers, she was laid in the hole and covered over.

That should have been the last anyone saw of her, but Cray hadn’t counted on the summer flash flood season. In late August, torrential rains had fallen in the White Mountains. The stream had overflowed, the rush of water widening the banks, and Sharon Andrews had been dislodged from her grave and swept downriver.

He had buried her too close to the stream. A stupid error. Had he been less tired and more clearheaded, he would have moved her higher up the hillside. Or perhaps he should have simply left her in the open for the scavengers to find.

The trash bag, knotted shut, had kept her body dry. Without moisture, bacteria could not thrive. Some mummification had taken place, but little decay. And because the body was well preserved, no one could miss the obvious mutilation.

WOMAN’S FACELESS CORPSE FOUND IN WHITE MOUNTAINS.

That had been the headline in the Tucson Citizen on the day after the storm, when, at a campground three miles from the site of the kill, Sharon Andrews was found entangled in a floating deadfall, bobbing amid ribbons of shredded plastic. A pair of forest rangers fished her from the water.

Nothing about the corpse or the plastic bag could lead investigators to a suspect. The bag was a common type, available anywhere. The two bullets imbedded in Sharon Andrews’ leg and hip were 9mm semi-jacketed hollow points, untraceable.

No real harm had been done. Even so, Cray hated having his work uncovered. He endured two weeks of media speculation on the twisted psychology of the killer.

The coverage enraged him. He felt violated.

Oddly, every expert assumed that the mutilation was postmortem. No one seemed able to conceive of the truth—that Sharon Andrews had been alive to witness her own final unmasking.

Pain had killed her almost at once, but not before Cray had shown her the trophy he’d taken. She had stared at her own face in his gloved hands, and it had stared back in eyeless mockery, the last thing she would ever see.

That was the whole point, and it was so very obvious, yet not one of them could see it. Not one.

Cray shook free of those thoughts and focused on recalling the exact date of the body’s discovery.

August 17. Five weeks ago.

Elizabeth Palmer had begun following him just afterward. Or so it would appear.

He pondered this sequence of events as he chased the little hatchback into South Tucson, a blighted barrio landscape of rusty low-riders and security-barred windows and brick walls tattooed by gang graffiti.

Brave Elizabeth risked a look into a bikers’ bar and then a noisy pool hall.

Cray had been to both places within the past month. He could not recall exactly when.

She couldn’t have followed him inside on every occasion. She would have attracted notice in the rougher places—the notice of the other patrons, certainly, if not of Cray himself. Perhaps she had sat outside, watching from her car as Cray entered and left.

If so, the tableau was reversed now. It was Cray who sat and watched, sunk deep in the Lexus’ leather seat.

She did not give up until Cray’s dashboard clock read 2 A.M. The bars were closing. There was nowhere left to look.

Now she could only go home. She must be worn out, poor thing.

The Chevette headed north on Park Avenue, then west on Silverlake Road, toward the interstate. Cray, staying far behind, watched the red rectangles of her taillights.

Elizabeth drove steadily, never exceeding the speed limit. At every stop sign and red light she came to a full stop. She never ran the yellows. She used her turn signal even when no other vehicle was near.

Such caution seemed out of character for a huntress sniffing John Cray’s spoor.

Then abruptly she turned down a side street, the move so quick it had to be unpremeditated. Cray worried that she’d seen him behind her and was trying to shake him off.

No. There was a simpler explanation.

A few blocks ahead, the light bar of a Tucson PD patrol unit shimmered at the curb. A police car was making a traffic stop.

Cray did not take the side street. He continued past the police car and the motorcyclist who’d been pulled over, then waited at an intersection until he saw the Chevette reappear a quarter mile ahead.

Elizabeth Palmer had gone out of her way to avoid passing a police car.

And now Cray knew why she drove so timidly.

She was afraid of being stopped. Afraid of the police.

Now why would that be, Elizabeth? he wondered. What would a nice girl like you have to fear from an officer of the law?

He couldn’t guess, but he began to understand why she would follow him on her own. If the police were off limits for some reason, then she would have no choice but to handle things herself.

It seemed a heavy burden for such frail shoulders.

He would be glad to lift it from her, to give her peace.

He expected her to get on Interstate 10, but instead she passed beneath it, then pulled into a motel on the frontage road.

She was not even a local resident. And the motel, a ramshackle one-story building amid miles of desolation, looked as seedy as the car she drove. Whoever she was, she had no money.

She was nobody. Nobody at all. A stranger from out of town, alone, engaged in a secret quest. Who would miss her when she disappeared?

Cray parked on the frontage road, then retracted his side window and stared at the motel parking lot across a waste of weeds and flat, parched land. Trucks howled past on I-10, shaking the world.

He watched as Elizabeth Palmer got out of the car and headed toward the motel. Halfway there, she stopped, lifting her head to look around sharply.

“Do you know I’m here, Elizabeth?” Cray asked in a whisper. “Do you feel my gaze?”

With a dismissive shake of her head, she resumed walking. At the side of the building she fumbled in her purse for her keys, then unlocked the door of her room.

The door shut behind her, and a light came on behind closed drapes. There was a pause, and suddenly her shadow passed over the drapes, sweeping like a pendulum. Again. Again.

She was pacing. Upset.

“You’re tired, child,” Cray said. “You need your rest.”

She would fall asleep eventually. Cray could wait.

Another bevy of trucks roared past, and then in a stretch of sudden stillness, Cray heard the distant wail of a coyote somewhere on the flats, another predator like himself.