I thought you were more reliable, Cray chided softly.
Walter hung his head. I’m sorry, Dr. Cray.
We’ll speak of this later. In the meantime, you are to tell no one what happened today. Do you understand me, Walter? No one at all.
Walter had said he understood, and Cray had let him leave, his shoulders hunched, head down, a large man diminished by disgrace.
So Kaylie, of course, had not trashed her room, any more than she had vandalized the Lexus. Still, she might well have been driven to the point of blind rage, even derangement, by all that had transpired in the past twenty-four hours.
She was unstable, after all. Cray had never doubted it. Psychotic? No. But hardly well adjusted, either.
If she was armed — if she had recovered her gun from the weeds where he’d thrown it, or had obtained a substitute firearm — then she might attempt an ambush. Might take a shot at him from outside the fence, or from the roadside.
Unlikely. Not impossible. A gamble. One he was willing to take.
The garage door had risen. Cocooned in Puccini, Cray backed slowly into the driveway, where Kaylie McMillan just might be waiting with a gun.
Wheelihan got the message on his handheld radio and signaled to the deputies.
“He’s leaving. Get ready.”
The three men climbed into their patrol cars and started the engines, then waited, headlights off.
At the roadside Wheelihan knelt in the mesquite brush and tipped a night-vision scope to his eyes. He peered at the long strip of gravel.
Cray would be coming this way. Cray — and maybe someone in slow pursuit.
“Come on, Kaylie,” Wheelihan whispered, a cold crawl of sweat glazing his neck. “Don’t disappoint us now.”
The gate at the end of Cray’s driveway swung open in the red glow of his taillights. He eased the Lexus onto the road.
His heart rate was steady at sixty-eight beats per minute. His respiration was slow and deep. Puccini wavered over the speakers.
The road was empty in both directions.
Cray headed west, toward Highway 191.
A bullet might snap out of the darkness at any moment, but he felt no fear. He fiddled with the controls on the CD player, skipping a few damaged tracks before settling on the opera’s best aria, one of the peaks of Puccini’s art.
Then he settled back, listening as the soprano’s first notes trembled from the audio console in luxuriant stereo.
“O mio babbino caro…”
Cray let the rich waves of sound wash over him, a tidal flow of high emotion, of love and longing, passionate yet civilized.
There was dignity in this music, and sadness also. Puccini had composed Gianni Schicchi at the end of World War I, when the naive optimism of the Romantic era was fading to ashes. The world never again would cherish the illusion of an immortal soul, a ghost in the machine. And things would change.
At rare times, upon waking in the dawn twilight, Cray would wish he’d been born earlier in history, when no one knew that a human being was only a basket of chemical compounds, a glorified ape disguising its basic animality behind layers of personae that could be all too easily stripped away.
He might have fit into that earlier era, had he been given the chance. He might have proved himself elegant and mannered and even dashing, like the gentlemen of that vanished world.
And not knowing any better, he might even have found a way to believe in something great, something higher than reflex and instinct, hormones and encoded instructions in the genes.
The mood always passed. Heartsickness was not for him. He was a realist. He took life as it was.
At his hip, the handheld radio squawked.
Cray grabbed it. “Yes?”
The rough masculine voice sizzling on the radio belonged to Undersheriff Wheelihan. “I’ve spotted her. She’s a quarter mile behind you.”
Cray glanced at the rearview mirror. “I don’t see anything.”
“She’s got her headlights off. I’m using a night-vision scope. Maintain your speed till you’re past the checkpoint. We’ll take it from there.”
“I understand,” Cray said.
He set down the radio on the passenger seat next to his medical kit, feeling vaguely disappointed. It hardly seemed sporting of the law enforcement authorities to hunt poor Kaylie with a night-vision scope. Cray himself had never used such equipment when he chased down his prey.
He drove on. The aria reached its climax. “Mi struggo e mi tormento,” the soprano sang. Her suffering, her torment.
Kaylie had struggled so hard to evade capture, all these long years.
Soon her torment would be over.
But in another sense, it had only just begun.
Wheelihan watched the Lexus cruise past. He waited another twenty seconds, watching the car with no headlights as it approached in the green fog of the night scope.
A small car, subcompact, not new, in poor condition.
Lone occupant, hunched over the wheel, a smeared glow of green.
Close now.
Almost here…
Wheelihan lifted his rover radio and scrambled his troops with a one-word command: “Go.”
Three pairs of high beams snapped on, bright fans of light crisscrossing the desert brush, and a moment later the dome lights burst into whirls of furious color.
The trio of patrol cars skidded around clumps of mesquite and careened onto the gravel road, then halted, forming a disorderly row that blocked both lanes. They waited there, garish in the pulsing varicolored light, but silent; Wheelihan had told his men to keep their sirens off.
The little car was still coming, confronted now by a barricade of steel.
For a tense moment Wheelihan wondered if Kaylie would stop and surrender peacefully, or panic and try to ram through the roadblock.