“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.
Elizabeth woke in a strange room, a room that was hot and musty and limned in a strange half-light that fell through windows veiled in translucent drapes.
It took her a moment to understand that she was in a motel, yes, another motel in Tucson, her third in the past ten days. She had left the first motel because it was too expensive, and she had left the second because of Cray.
The memory surprised her into full alertness. She sat up too quickly, then spent a moment recovering from a tug of dizziness.
She remembered everything now. She’d had breakfast at a coffee shop, where some cops had frightened her, and then she’d heard the news — the wonderful, impossibly good news about Cray.
He was in custody. They had him. They must have picked him up immediately after examining the contents of the satchel. The damaged Lexus had confirmed her story.
Blinded by relief and joy, she had driven to the first motel she could find, a two-story structure a half mile from the coffee shop, with a red VACANCY sign and a nightly rate of thirty-seven dollars.
The place was an unmistakable improvement over her usual accommodations — a swimming pool, cable TV, definite luxuries — and the price was a bit steep for her diminishing reserve of cash, but she had been both too tired and too happy to argue.
Checking in so early, she’d had to wait for the maid to finish making up the room. For a few minutes she had stood in a corner, watching the young woman vacuum the carpet and replace the towels, thinking vaguely that there was something familiar about her — the dark complexion and round, serious face — her face…
And suddenly she had realized that the maid reminded her of that other woman whose name she didn’t know, the woman whose disembodied face haunted her dreams.
But there would be no more dreams. She was sure of it. Cray had been vanquished, and the last residue of his evil had been swept away.
Finally the maid left with a smiling good-bye, and Elizabeth was alone.
Sleep had taken her almost instantly. She closed the drapes, lay on the bed, and dropped away into the dark.
The dreamless dark. No nightmares. Never again.
That had been at ten in the morning. Now the plastic clock on the nightstand read 2:49. She had slept for nearly five hours, cocooned in the cool hum of the air-conditioning and the smoothness of freshly laundered sheets.
Her first priority at this moment was a shower. Not having bothered to undress, she still wore the clothes she’d put on last night, wrinkled and sticky with a paste of sweat. Her hair felt dirty, matted, lumpy. She needed to be dean.
She undressed, then stood under a cone of spray in the tiled stall, inhaling steam.
Remarkably, shampoo was provided free of charge, an amenity she had not enjoyed in her previous lodgings. She squirted a dollop into her hand and worked the creamy foam into a lather, rubbing the suds deep into her hair, massaging her scalp until her exhaustion was gone.
It felt wonderful.
At 3:10, when she was clean and dry and dressed in fresh clothes, she turned on the radio and traveled around the dial in search of a news station.
She wanted to hear Cray’s name. Her final doubt would be dispelled when the announcer said that it was John Bainbridge Cray, noted psychiatrist and author, who was under arrest.
That was how they would put it too. Noted psychiatrist and author.
She knew about Cray’s psychiatric methods. His talents as an author were more difficult for her to judge. Although she had seen magazine write-ups on his book, she had been unable to bring herself to actually read the damn thing.
It was hard enough just knowing that he was famous — well, moderately famous anyway — and successful.
She didn’t like to believe there was no justice in the universe. She had seen what such a belief did to people, the bitterness it bred, the cynicism and ugly despondency.
But when she thought of Cray writing about the human psyche and finding an audience for his views, she almost couldn’t stand it. There was a limit to the unfairness a person ought to be asked to accept.
She was unable to find a news station, only a lot of pop music and a couple of talk shows dealing with national affairs.
There would be local news updates at four o’clock, she supposed — nearly an hour from now.
Too long to wait. How about the TV? She turned it on and used the remote control to search through more than twenty channels. She found news, but again nothing local.
“Damn,” she muttered.
She switched off the TV and felt herself trembling with impatience and frustration and the desperate need to know.
She told herself to relax. It was over now. That was the thing to remember.
Cray had not won in the end. All his triumphs had been temporary. She had outsmarted him, and now he was in custody, in custody, in custody, where he belonged.
But she had to be sure.
Well, there might be a way.
Tucson had two newspapers, and one of them, the Citizen, came out in the afternoon. It was just barely possible that the details of Cray’s arrest had been reported in time to make today’s edition.
She grabbed her purse and the room key, then left in a hurry.
The day was warm and bright. Blinking at the glare, she fished sunglasses from her purse, then headed east on Speedway Boulevard in search of a newspaper.
Traffic rushed past in an impatient stream. The street was wide, six lanes with a landscaped median, and lined on both sides with strip malls and family restaurants. Not a ritzy neighborhood, to be sure, but in comparison with the grime of Miracle Mile and the blighted desolation of the frontage road along the interstate, it seemed like Rodeo Drive.
She felt herself smiling. Things had worked out. Last night had been a close call, very close, but she had survived, and she had won.