25

Cray lived in a house at the rear of the hospital property, screened by hedges and served by a private drive. The director’s mansion, it was called, although it was actually no more than a modest two-story home in the Southwestern style.

Shepherd followed Cray down a winding path to the house, past a small well-tended cemetery where two dozen patients—“the unclaimed ones,” Cray explained offhandedly—were interred. The air was warm and still, and there was birdsong in the high branches of the trees.

At the side of the house was a two-car garage with a single window at shoulder height. The pane had been smashed.

“One of our groundskeepers reported this to me about two hours ago. The break-in must have occurred last night.”

“When you were home?”

“Yes. But my bedroom is upstairs, on the other side of the house. I never heard the sound of breaking glass. Or any other sound.” Cray shrugged. “Perhaps that’s just as well. It wouldn’t have been advisable to directly confront Kaylie—not in her present condition.”

He unlocked the side door and flipped a light switch. Two bare bulbs in the ceiling of the garage snapped on, casting a pale yellow glow over Cray’s Lexus.

Shepherd circled the vehicle. It had been savagely abused. Someone had slashed all four tires and grooved deep scratches in the black finish. The front window on the driver’s side had been shattered; Shepherd saw a large, jagged rock on the bucket seat. The seat cushions were sliced in tatters, and the lid of the glove compartment hung open, the contents strewn. Shepherd saw a scatter of CD cases on the floor. Symphonies, operas. Every disk had been defaced.

“Did she make any attempt to enter the house itself?” he asked.

“No. But of course all the doors were locked, even the door from the garage.”

“Is there a burglar alarm?”

“I’ve never thought it necessary to install one. Not in a gated compound patrolled by armed guards.”

“How about the Lexus? Doesn’t it have a security system?”

“An antitheft system is standard. But I’m afraid I had it disabled soon after I bought the vehicle.”

“Why?”

“Too many false alarms. The system was overly sensitive to vibrations or casual contact. The horn was constantly blaring. I just got tired of it.”

“But Kaylie wouldn’t have known the system was turned off.”

“I doubt she would have thought about it at all. In the throes of her obsession, she would not be functioning rationally.” Cray waved a hand at the vehicle. “As you can see.”

“Did she take anything from the car or the garage?”

“Yes. A spare medical kit I kept in the vehicle.”

“A kit?” Shepherd remembered the 911 tape. “Like a satchel?”

“I suppose one could describe it that way. I think of it as my black bag. Occasionally I’m called out to see a released patient on an emergency basis. Why do you ask?”

“The caller said she had a satchel of yours, which contained your ... instruments of murder.”

“A delusion. What else did she say?”

Shepherd saw no reason to hold anything back at this point. “She claimed that you kidnap women and hunt them. Like animals.”

Cray shrugged. “Unsurprising, really. Most paranoids develop elaborate fantasies that have some basis in their personal experience. Kaylie associates me with the authorities—the police, I mean—who have indeed been hunting her for the past twelve years. You see how her mind might expand the truth of her situation into an imaginative metaphorical construct?”

“She also said we’d find your Lexus in bad shape, because she had to drive it through the desert to escape from you.”

Cray chuckled. The sound echoed off the corners of the garage. “No doubt she believes as much. Of course, if she had taken my vehicle, it would hardly be here in my garage.”

“She expected you to have it, though. She told us to check it out.”

“The inconsistency would never occur to her. You have to understand a person like Kaylie, Detective Shepherd. She’s fundamentally out of contact with reality. She can break in here, vandalize my property, and an hour later she’ll be fully convinced that I’m the villain. She rewrites history from moment to moment.”

“Yet she’s evaded the law for more than a decade.”

“I’m not claiming she’s been this severely irrational throughout that entire time period. She must experience intervals of near-lucidity. Perhaps such intervals persist for months, even years. But always there will be a relapse. Stress or a hormonal change or some neurotic obsession will trigger a crisis, and she’ll regress to acute psychosis. She will decompensate, as we doctors like to say.”

Shepherd surveyed the ruined Lexus. “Looks like she’s decompensated now.”

“I’d have to concur in your diagnosis.”

Cray locked up the garage and walked with Shepherd to the parking lot. Strange laughter rained down from a second-floor window in the administration building. Shepherd wondered if it was the young man who’d set fire to a toolshed because the TV had told him to, or if it was somebody else.

At his car, he stopped, facing Cray in the bright daylight.

“All right, Doctor. It seems clear that this woman is harassing you, and that she made a false report. The case, though, belongs primarily to the jurisdiction of the local sheriff. Breaking and entering, vandalizing your vehicle, theft of your medical bag—all those crimes were committed here in Graham County, not in Tucson. The only aspect of the case that’s properly within my purview is the phone call to the nine-one-one line. And we get lots of phony tips. We could never prosecute them all.”

“I understand. As I said, I called the sheriff’s office. I’m sure a deputy will be along shortly to take my statement.”

“Relay any information that might be helpful. Pay particular attention to the changes in Kaylie’s appearance. You said she’s blonde now, and more slender. Any other details you can remember will be helpful.”

“I’ll try. But I got only a glimpse.”

“Do your best. And please, could you have the deputies fax the report to me at Tucson PD?”

“I thought it wasn’t your case.”

“I’d like to stay up to speed anyway.” Shepherd handed Cray a card. “Here’s the fax number where they can reach me. Ask them to dig up the file on Kaylie McMillan and fax that too. Okay? Now, there’s one other thing.”

“My safety,” Cray said.

“It could be an issue.”

“In my line of work, Detective, it always is.” Cray smiled. “I suppose we both know something about that.”

“Even so, you need to take precautions.”

“I intend to be vigilant, believe me.”

“Do you have any experience with firearms?”

“None, and I don’t plan to acquire any. Guns scare me.”

“All the more reason to carry one. If she shows up armed, you need to be able to defend yourself. There are classes in firearms safety—”

“Out of the question. I won’t become a lone gunman, toting a six-gun like some character out of the Wild West. Besides, I could never harm Kaylie. She was my patient, you see. She was entrusted to my care.”

Shepherd gave up. There was nothing he could say to that.

“As you wish, Doctor.” He shook Cray’s hand. “Thanks for your time.”

Cray was walking away when Shepherd remembered one more question to ask.

“That book you wrote—The Mask of Self. What was it about?”

Cray turned back, then thought for a moment. “Icebergs,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Have you seen an illustration of an iceberg, Detective? The tip is just one-tenth of the whole, yet it’s all we see above the surface. I think that what we call the personality, the ego, the self, is the iceberg’s tip. The remaining nine-tenths of human nature, the enormous submerged mass, is our great store of inherited drives and instinctual, automatized responses. It is these which really move us. We are animals at heart. The self is mere window dressing. A mask, a false front. We hear about ‘mind over matter.’ It would be more true to say the mind doesn’t matter.”

“Kind of an unusual position for a psychiatrist to take.”

“Not really. It’s my job to delve beneath appearances. To ignore the surface and dive deep.”

“How did the book sell?”

“It’s in its fourth printing.”

“Congratulations. Do you think Kaylie’s read it?”

Cray’s face darkened, and Shepherd knew this was one question the man had not thought to ask himself.

“I can’t say,” Cray answered slowly. “I doubt she would. Is it important?”

“Something set her off. Maybe she took offense. Maybe she didn’t like her own doctor saying that his patients are animals at heart.”

“I wasn’t referring to her, specifically.”

“But you do think of her that way?”

“I think of us all in that way, Detective. You and me and any poor bastard screaming in his isolation cell. Saints and sinners, heroes and knaves—we are, all of us, actors in our own dream, playing roles our minds script for us, while our bodies go their own way, following their innate will.”

“Sounds like a quotation.”

“The Mask of Self, Chapter Three, page thirty-nine.” Cray at least had the grace to smile.

“So long, Doctor. And take care.”

Shepherd got in his car and drove away, watching Dr. John Bainbridge Cray in the rearview mirror, a tall, neat man in a brown suit, lord of this small, sad fiefdom.

A lonely man. Proud. Not easy to like.

But a killer?

No.

It was Kaylie McMillan who was the killer, and she was on the loose, and violent, and perhaps capable of killing again.