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.”