20

 

At 9:30 A.M. a meeting of the White Mountains Killer task force convened in an interrogation room at Tucson PD’s downtown headquarters. Captain Paul Brookings, commander of the Homicide Division, presided. He looked unhappy, but he always did.

“Got a shit storm coming,” he said by way of opening the conclave.

His gaze panned over the seven men seated around the long mahogany table and lounging on the metal bench against one wall. The bench was fitted with steel rings, suitable for securing handcuffed prisoners when the room was used for its primary purpose.

“So what else is new?” a detective named Rivera sighed.

Marty Kroft tossed a Styrofoam coffee cup at a wastebasket and missed.

The task force was decidedly informal in both its organization and its membership. A core group of four homicide detectives had stayed with the case since the discovery of Sharon Andrews’ remains last August, but other investigators drifted in and out of the task force as their caseloads dictated.

Roy Shepherd had been there from the start. He had investigated Sharon’s disappearance even before she turned up dead. He’d met her boy, Todd, the seven-year-old now being raised by his maternal grandparents in Sierra Vista. He’d gone to Apache County to share notes with the sheriff’s department there and to see the creek where the body had been found.

The killing belonged to him, really, not to Brookings, not to anyone else. Other cops had worked it to varying degrees, but he had lived it. And he wanted the case cleared. More than anything in his sixteen-year career in law enforcement, he wanted to find the man who had peeled off that woman’s face and taken it with him as a souvenir.

“Don’t hold back, Captain,” he said from the far end of the table. “Share the bad news.”

Brookings found a smile at the corners of his mouth. “You telling me you don’t already know? Shep, I’m surprised at you.”

Shepherd permitted few people to call him Shep, a nickname he detested, but Paul Brookings could get away with it.

“I admit it’s a lapse in my customary omniscience,” he answered mildly. “But Hector and Janice and I were all tied up with that freak who said he stole people’s faces.”

Janice Hirst wasn’t part of the task force, but Hector Alvarez had been on the case almost as long as Shepherd. Alvarez nodded. “We thought we had something, maybe.”

Marty Kroft looked puzzled. “Guess I’m not so, uh, omniscious either. What’s this all about?”

“False alarm.” Shepherd explained about the magazine photos, the warehouse that had become a gallery.

Steve Call snorted. “Sounds like a man who could use some serious downtime.”

“He’s on vacation in the psych ward now,” Alvarez said.

“These street people,” Don Rivera muttered, “man, they just get weirder....”

Then he fell silent, and for a moment so did everyone else, because they had remembered that Shepherd was in the room.

Brookings was first to speak. “Anyway, that’s the shit storm I referred to. Some idiot leaked the story. Major break in the White Mountains case, blah blah blah. Local radio picked it up and ran with it. Story will be in the Citizen too, unless we squelch it fast.”

The Tucson Citizen, the city’s afternoon paper, was just now going to press.

“They give any details?” Yanni Stern asked. Stern worked vice. He’d been drafted by the task force to find out about any local perverts who had a yen for snuff films or an interest in mutilation beyond the body-piercing variety.

Brookings filled out the story. “You can see what happened here. Some jackass blabbed about crazy Mitch’s arrest.”

“Radio said it was a nine-one tip-off,” Rivera said. “What’s that all about?”

“Something different entirely. We’ll get to that part of it in a few minutes.” Brookings sighed. “Bottom line, it’s a royal mess. Graves has been on the phone ever since the story broke.” Graves was the sergeant who handled public relations. He knew every local reporter. “We’ll get a retraction, but hell, it still looks bad. People get all worked up, and then when they’re disappointed, look who takes the blame.”

Shepherd was bored. He tuned out Brookings and listened to the sounds of the station house. Phones rang in a shrill cacophony. Somewhere a woman was talking loudly in Spanish, her voice rising operatically. He made out enough words to know she was not making threats, just venting. She was upset. Most of the civilians who paid a visit to police headquarters were upset.

Brookings and the others were still hashing out the media strategy. Shepherd had never felt any interest in the media. To his way of thinking, reporters always got everything wrong, and anybody who listened to them was a fool.

His wife had found his attitude harsh. He smiled a little, thinking of Ginnie. She had believed in people. She had thought most folks, even reporters, tried honestly to do their best and deserved encouragement for it. There had been nothing cynical in her, nothing sour.

Maybe if she had been less trusting, less sure of the fundamental goodness in people, she would still be alive.

Brookings moved to the second item on the agenda, the latest in a series of jurisdictional squabbles between the Apache County Sheriff’s Department and TPD. The dual investigations were not always impeccably coordinated.

Another waste of time. Shepherd shifted in his chair, the metal legs scraping on bare tiles. The room had been carpeted once, but too many agitated prisoners had puked or peed on the floor. It was the innocent ones who got the most nervous. The guilty took arrest in stride.

The discussion was winding down when a community service officer, one of the civilian volunteers who relieved the department’s manpower shortage by doing clerical tasks, wheeled in a reel-to-reel tape player on a cart.

Brookings set the player on the table. “This brings us to that nine-one call our friends in the news media got so excited about.” He glanced at the service officer, an affable septuagenarian named Rudy. “All cued up?”

Shepherd knew Rudy. A week after his retirement from the insurance business, the man had simply shown up for TPD’s civilian training classes, explaining that seven days of inactivity had nearly brought on premature senility, and he could stand no more.

“Yes, sir, Captain.” Rudy nodded. “I matched it to the entry in the nine-one-one log.” All 911 calls were recorded, and the time of each call was marked by the operator in a duty log.

When Rudy was gone, Brookings explained what they were about to hear. “We got an anonymous tip this morning. RP was a woman. She gave us a name. Of course, this had nothing whatsoever to do with crazy—what’s his name?”

“Mitch,” Shepherd said.

“Right. Crazy Mitch. But the call and the arrest happened pretty much at the same time, and you know how things get put together even when they have no connection. Tip-off in the case, and then an arrest of a guy who says he steals faces—bingo, the killer’s in custody.”

Alvarez snapped his gum.

“Now we all get to hear what our anonymous source had to say.” Brookings smiled. “Pretty exciting, huh, Shep?”

“I’m thrilled,” Shepherd intoned with the required ironic frown as he pushed back his chair.

The truth was, he did feel a mild rush of adrenaline. So far the various tips that had come in by phone and mail had proven worthless, but somebody out there might know the killer’s identity.

Maybe this woman was the one.

Brookings played the tape. Shepherd listened, jotting notes on his memo pad, as the voices of the 911 operator and the nameless female caller trembled through the tape deck’s tinny speaker. He liked the woman’s voice. It was soft and breathless, suggestive of vulnerability. He wanted to believe her. But belief got harder as the tape played on.

“I’m not crazy,” she blurted out at one point.

Shepherd wrote down the words. The crazy ones were always quickest to assert their sanity. A normal person never imagined that anyone would doubt his basic rationality, but a person with a history of mental problems, a person accustomed to being prodded and poked by psychologists, learned to be defensive on that subject.

The call lasted less than three minutes. It ended with a click, and the 911 operator saying, “Ma’am? You there? Hell.”

Brookings shut off the machine. “So what do we think?” he inquired of the room.

Rivera looked bored. “Probably a squirrel.”

“That’s what the nine-one operator thought. It’s why he wanted her picked up, and Bentley concurred.” Bentley was the watch commander on the morning shift. “But she was GOA when the beat car got there.”

“And the satchel?” Call asked.

“Nada. She didn’t leave anything at the scene.”

Rivera grunted. “Squirrel,” he said again.

“I’m not so sure.”

Shepherd hadn’t known he was going to speak until the words were out of his mouth. Everyone looked at him.

“Maybe she did have the evidence,” he went on slowly, “but she got scared off before she could leave it for us.”

Brookings frowned. “Other than pure wishful thinking, is there any basis for that supposition?”

There must be, but Shepherd hadn’t worked it all out yet. He knew that he wanted the tip to pan out. He wanted proof that somebody named John Cray, who lived and worked near Safford, had sliced off Sharon Andrews’ face and taken it home with him. He wanted this case cleared, justice done. He wanted closure for Sharon’s young son and her grieving parents.

But none of this was a reason or an argument or a logical basis for anything at all.

To organize his thoughts, he glanced at the notes he’d scribbled in his pad. “She said this man Cray lives near Safford,” he began. “Safford is roughly halfway between Tucson and the White Mountains. It makes sense.”

“There are lots of places between Tucson and the White Mountains,” Stern said.

“And Safford is one of them. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just interesting—potentially interesting, at least. Then there’s this bit about hunting. You know how scratched up the Andrews woman was. Like she’d been on the run through the brush.”

Brookings shrugged. “She got away from the guy, and he went after her.”

“Or maybe he let her go and then followed. Made a game out of it.”

“Pretty far-fetched.”

Shepherd was undeterred. “She said Cray drives a Lexus SUV. That’s a pretty good all-terrain vehicle, and we’ve always known our guy has four-wheel drive. He didn’t kill Mrs. Andrews anywhere near a paved road.”

“Car’s all banged up, she claimed,” Alvarez added. “It’s something we can check out easy enough.”

Rivera, holding to his squirrel theory, grunted with heavy irony. “Yeah, she banged it up when she escaped from him in the desert. After he tried to hunt her, I guess. She’s a regular Indiana Jones, isn’t she?”

“People get away from bad guys sometimes,” Brookings said, though he seemed dubious.

“Sure.” Rivera shrugged. “And crazy people make up stories about bad guys. The bogeyman’s always after them, and they’re always just barely getting away.”

Stern nodded. “He’s right. This gal’s got nutcase written all over her. She says she’s been following Cray. Why? If she suspects him, why doesn’t she go to the cops right off?”

“She’s afraid of cops,” Call said. “Come on, Yanni, we see it all the time.”

Stern held his ground. “Not in cases like this. She’s delusional. Paranoid.”

Shepherd could see that Rivera and Stern had won over most of the group. But he was still unconvinced. He tried another tack.

“How about the rest of what she said?” In his memo pad he had jotted down break-in, kidnap, and others. “She claimed there were tools in this satchel for breaking and entering. But in the White Mountains case there was no break-in. Mrs. Andrews was snatched right outside the auto dealership, probably forced into the killer’s car.”

Mercado shrugged. “Doesn’t that undercut the credibility of the call even further?”

“Not necessarily. Not if there were break-ins in other cases.”

Marty Kroft looked at the ceiling. “We’re back to this again.”

“She said there were others,” Shepherd went on implacably. “Others Cray had killed.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rivera said, “she’s your frigging soul mate. No wonder you believe her.”

Shepherd clamped down on a spasm of anger. “I’m just saying her version of things might turn out to be pretty close to the truth.”

“Close to your idea of the truth,” Stern said. “Your theory.” He put a dismissive emphasis on the word.

“Yeah, my theory. Let’s just say I’m right about my theory. Let’s say Sharon Andrews was not an isolated incident. Let’s say this psycho has been in the game for a while, and we never knew about it because none of the earlier victims turned up anywhere. There are plenty of unsolved missing-persons cases—”

“You can’t go pinning every unsolved juvenile runaway on the White Mountains freak,” Kroft said.

“I’m not talking just runaways. I’m talking kidnappings too. Break-ins, and the woman of the house gone, never found again. There have been six I’ve turned up so far—”

“All in different localities,” Rivera interrupted, “Not just different neighborhoods, I mean different counties.”

“The man travels. Most serial killers do.”

“Never the same MO. Method of entry, time of day, choice of victim—no similarities.”

“He varies his methods. He’s smart. He doesn’t leave an obvious trail.”

“Time span of roughly a decade, as I recall. That’s a lot of dead girls, man.”

“He’s not constantly active. The urges follow a cycle. You know about that.”

A serial killer—if that was indeed what Shepherd was dealing with—tended to operate in a long, rhythmic pattern. The killing phase was followed by a period of dormancy. Then the urges would resume, and the killer would begin fantasizing, then stalking, and finally he would kill.

The length of the cycle’s inactive phase varied significantly. Often the killings became more frequent as the urges intensified or earlier caution was abandoned.

It had been five months since Sharon Andrews’ disappearance. She had been murdered within hours of her disappearance; that day’s lunch was found in her stomach at the autopsy.

Five months—and now the female caller claimed the killer was ready to strike again. The time fit Shepherd’s profile.

Actually, profile was too technical a term. He wasn’t a psychologist, and he had no training in behavioral science. But he’d been a cop for a long time. He had an intuitive sense of the man he was looking for.

That man would be sadistic, obsessive, capable of animalistic violence—yet self-controlled, careful, intelligent. He would know the danger in striking too often or too recklessly. He would moderate his urges, suppress or divert them for as long as possible, draw out the period of dormancy until he could restrain himself no longer.

A month was too little time; a year—probably too long.

“One kill about every six months is what I’m guessing,” Shepherd said. “If so, the body count wouldn’t be unrealistically high, not for a guy like this. He could go on doing it for ten years or even longer, assuming he’s good enough.”

Rivera brushed this aside. “No one’s that good.”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“In the movies. Look, Roy. You’re dealing with a bunch of completely unrelated cases with absolutely nothing to link them to the White Mountains thing or to one another. There’s no pattern, except the one you want to see.”

Shepherd considered a counterargument. He knew several he could use. But the effort would be wasted. Kroft, Rivera, and Stern were hostile to the very idea of connecting the Sharon Andrews case to any earlier crime. The others in the room had no opinion. And Brookings would sway with any majority, never holding firm.

“You may be right,” Shepherd said, spreading his hands. “On the other hand, this man Cray just might be the son of a bitch we’re looking for. We’ll have to check it out, that’s all.”

Brookings speared him with his gaze. “You’ll have to. Thanks for volunteering.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Of course,” Alvarez ventured, “it might help to find out if there really is anybody named John Cray in the Safford area.”

The captain nodded. “Might save Shep a long drive. Hey, Kroft—don’t you know a guy over at Graham County Sheriff’s?”

Kroft shrugged. “Chuck Wheelihan, yeah. Met him a couple years ago when I was working vice. There was a meth crew operating out of Safford, hauling the shit into Tucson to sell on the street.”

“Why don’t you give him a call, see if he can find out anything about this Cray.”

“What the hell. My caseload’s empty. I got nothing but time to waste.”

He left the room, and the meeting proceeded to the issue of Baxter Payton, a salesman at the auto dealership who, according to several employees, had aggressively pursued Sharon Andrews, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. Brookings felt Payton was a strong candidate for the role of suspect.

It’s an O.J. thing, he had argued to Shepherd in the earliest stages of the case. This Payton guy, he was obsessed with her, and if he couldn’t have her, no one could.

Shepherd had interviewed Payton and come away with the impression that the man was a loser, obnoxious and insecure and intensely dislikable, but no murderer. Still, after the body turned up, Brookings had pushed hard for a second look. Shepherd had foisted the job on Lou Mercado and Steve Call, two younger detectives who had just made rank.

Now they had the unpleasant duty of informing their captain that there was no way, positively no way, that this creep Payton had done Sharon. They alternated in their presentation. Call leaning forward to tick off points on his blunt, meaty fingers, Mercado sitting ramrod-straight in a dignified courtroom pose.

“We checked out every angle,” Call began. “Day of her disappearance, Payton worked late, writing up a sale. We found the buyer, and he confirmed it. So Payton’s alibied. But we say, okay, even so, maybe he could get away for a minute, snatch her, stash her in his car.”

Mercado took over. “We asked him about it. He let us do a search. Forensics vacuumed his vehicle—trunk, backseat, everything. They turned up nothing they can tie to Sharon, no fibers from her clothes or her carpet at home, no blood, no hair. She wasn’t in there.”

“ ’Course,” Call said, anticipating an objection, “Payton had access to every vehicle on the lot. It’s a used-car shop, you know. Salesmen take cars home with them sometimes. But they keep a log of cars signed out, and he didn’t sign out anything that week.”

“So he’s alibied,” Mercado concluded, “and there’s no physical evidence, and he didn’t do it.”

Call wanted the last word. “Plus, the guy is a little weasel who wouldn’t have the balls to snuff a housefly.”

Brookings processed this information, then shrugged. “Yeah, I never figured it was him. Too obvious.”

Shepherd smothered a grin. That was just like Brookings. The captain was a certified specialist in covering his ass. He knew how to deflect blame and absorb credit, how to alienate nobody and be everyone’s best friend. Shepherd ought to hate him for it.

But hell, CYA was an art every cop had to learn—a survival skill, no less than proficiency with firearms. Cops were civil servants, and civil servants who flouted the rules and dissed their superiors were just begging for a dead-end career.

Anyway, he couldn’t dislike Paul Brookings, and not just because they’d gone fishing together more often than the other men in the squad needed to know.

Shepherd owed Brookings. He wasn’t sure he could have endured the past two years without the captain’s calm, steady support.

Kroft returned, a peculiar look on his face. “Talked to Wheelihan. Hell, you know he’s made undersheriff now? When’s my promotion coming up, Captain?”

“When you tell me what the hell your pal said to you.”

“Well, there’s a John Cray in the Safford area, all right. Chuck didn’t even have to look it up. He knows the guy. Whole department knows him. Fact is, he’s sort of famous, at least locally.”

“Famous how?”

“Mainly ’cause he wrote a book that sold pretty well. The Mask of Self—that’s the title.”

Shepherd had never heard of it, but the word mask pricked his interest. He thought of Sharon Andrews’ faceless corpse.

“Some kind of mystery novel?” he asked, his tone even.

“Nonfiction.” Kroft looked at him, and Shepherd tried to read his expression but failed. “About how who we think we are is only an illusion. ’Least, that’s how Chuck described it.”

“So he’s an author,” Brookings said, perturbed. “What does that tell us?”

Kroft shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. That’s not how the local cops know him, anyway. They knew him a long time before he ever got into print. They work with him.”

Shepherd felt his optimism slipping away. “Do they?”

“Yeah.”

Then Kroft’s face reshaped itself in a huge, unfriendly smile, and Shepherd realized why his expression had been so oddly strained. He’d been holding back that smile, fighting it like a man warding off a sneeze.

“Dr. John Cray,” Kroft said, “is the director of the Hawk Ridge Institute for Psychiatric Care.”

Kroft let a moment pass while this information registered.

“He runs a goddamned mental hospital,” Kroft finished, not trusting subtlety where this point was concerned. “He takes in all the loons who’ve gotta be held for observation. And, Shep—he’s made a lot of enemies, Chuck says.”

Enemies. Yes.

Every psychiatrist made enemies, and a man like Cray, a man who supervised a mental institution harboring scores of patients, would make more enemies than most.

Rivera laughed. “Man, I told you she’s a squirrel.”

Stern, at least, was polite enough not to say a word.

“Sounds like you were right,” Shepherd said without rancor. “On the other hand, just because he’s a shrink doesn’t mean he’s not a killer.”

This was, in part, bravado. But he couldn’t shake free of that word mask. It fit the case too well.

“You happen to ask if Cray drives a Lexus?” he added.

Kroft’s smile slipped a little. “Yeah, I asked. He’s got one—an SUV, like the woman said. But any of his patients could know that. It doesn’t prove anything.”

“No,” Shepherd said. “It doesn’t.” He scraped back his chair and got up. “Better get moving. It’s still early. I might be able to catch him before he goes to lunch.”

Kroft looked baffled. “You figure it’s even necessary to do a meet-and-greet? I mean, you could phone the guy, or I could have Wheelihan send some deputies to chat him up.”

“I can’t tell much from a phone call. And it sounds like the local deputies are a little too friendly with this guy.”

Stern spoke. “You don’t still think there’s anything to this?”

“I’ll know soon enough when I talk to Cray. And when I take a look at that Lexus of his.”

Brookings looked unhappy. “I’m betting it hasn’t got a scratch. Face it, Shep. The lady’s a head case.”

“My second one today. Looks like I hit the jackpot. Lucky me.”

He meant it as a joke, but it hit too close to home, and nobody was laughing as Roy Shepherd walked out the door.