In custody.
Words that had haunted her, frightened her, for the past twelve years — but not this time.
“I won,” she told John Bainbridge Cray. “I beat you, you evil son of a bitch. I beat you.”
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.