She uncoiled from her crouch and hurried forward, hugging the fence, staying low, still afraid Cray would glance back toward the driveway and glimpse a pale, moving shadow amid the bushes.
The Lexus started forward, down the road. A wisp of an aria reached her through the open window on the driver’s side, then trailed off into silence as the big black vehicle receded.
She was near the gate now, less than two yards away, but it was swinging shut too fast, and she didn’t think she could slip through in time.
Only a narrow gap was left between the leading edge of the gate and the masonry gate post, a post also topped with spikes to discourage intruders.
In a moment the gate would slip into place against the post, the latch fastening automatically, and she would be locked out.
She dived headlong for the opening, aware that if she misjudged her jump she would be caught between metal and stone, with a crushed leg or snapped ribs as her reward — immobilized, stuck here to wait for Cray’s return.
The ground came up fast and shocked her with its impact, and she heard iron squealing on its hinges on one side, felt cold stone on the other, and with a gasping effort she scrambled through, pulling both feet clear just before the gate clanged shut.
Made it.
She lay on the lawn near a flower bed, gulping air, wishing she were on the road to San Antonio right now. Then she raised herself to a half-crouch and carefully made her way down the driveway to the front of the house.
She had no idea how to break in. The last time she’d trespassed on somebody’s property, she had been on the run after escaping from this hospital. She’d found a truck in a farmer’s barn and hot-wired it, a skill she’d learned from Justin, of course — Justin, who knew so many things he shouldn’t have known.
Justin could have told her how to break into Cray’s house, if he were here, if he were alive, if she hadn’t shot him in the heart.
But of course, had she not shot him, she wouldn’t be on the trail of John Cray’s secrets. Had she not shot him, she would still be Kaylie McMillan and not Elizabeth Palmer or Paula Neilson or whoever she was now.
Anyway, there had to be some way in.
She tested the front door, hoping absurdly that it was unlocked. No luck, naturally. The front windows, too, were locked. Cray was careful.
Through the windows she could see his living room, part of the house that had not been visible from her vantage point on the ridge. She noted a fireplace, bookshelves, an overstuffed sofa and armchair, plush carpet, soft lighting, all the graces and amenities she had been denied in her long flight from what the world called justice.
But somewhere in this house there was the evidence that would take Cray’s comforts away from him, put him in a cell with a steel toilet and bunk beds.
The thought — the hope — buoyed her as she crept around the side of the residence, to the garage.
Somewhere close, a mockingbird announced its presence, running through a litany of bird calls. A breeze stirred the leafy branches of an arbor looming on her right. She smelled fresh-cut grass, a rarity in the desert.
Birds and trees and green lawns — she’d never imagined any of these things when she was imprisoned in this hospital, confined to a windowless isolation room in Ward C, the oldest ward, now abandoned to the deer mice and scorpions.
For her, there had been only concrete and steel, loneliness and terror, and the gibbering complaints of other patients down the hall.
The bird stopped singing. She heard a rustle of wings, and it was gone. Something had scared it off. A predator perhaps. The night was crowded with them.
There was a side door to the garage. She tested it. Like the front door and front windows, it was locked. But nearby, almost at eye level, was a window.
A broken window.
Elizabeth stared at it, baffled. It was like an invitation to enter.
And suddenly she knew something was wrong.
She didn’t know what, precisely. She knew only that the window, open and welcoming, was a stroke of fortune too good to be believed.
She had learned suspicion over the past twelve years. She had learned to trust the tingle at the back of her neck, warning her of danger.
She felt that tingle now.
Get away, she told herself. Get away now, run, hide—
She turned from the window, and the lights came on.
Two lights from the arbor where the mockingbird had sung, the mockingbird that had not been scared off by any predator, except the human kind, the kind that hunted her.
Flashlights.
A pair of them, beams wavering through a scrim of leaves, and from the shadows — a voice.
“Don’t move, Kaylie. Just stay where you are.”
Past shock, past panic, she knew she’d heard that voice before, and she remembered where: at the motel this afternoon, while she hid in an alcove and a man entered the manager’s office, announcing himself as Detective Shepherd.
He was here, and this was some kind of trap, and Cray—
Cray was part of it, was in on it, was helping the police to catch…
“No,” she whispered, and she waved her arms at the lights in a frantic effort to make them disappear, make this stop happening. “No, you can’t, you can’t!”
“Don’t move!”
The flashlights swam toward her, two dark figures limned in their backsplash — Shepherd in his dark suit, and another man, a deputy, tan shirt and brown pants and a gun belt.
Closing in.
She had to run, her every instinct insisted that she run, but there was nowhere to go. She was cornered, her back against the garage wall and the two men drawing near, pinning her in the wavering circles of light.
“No, please,” she said, speaking not to them but to whatever justice there might be in the universe. “Please, this isn’t right.”
“Calm down, Kaylie.”
That was Shepherd, Shepherd who was showing her a smooth, false smile, the smile she had seen on doctors’ faces, on Cray’s face, and why not? Cray and Shepherd — they were in league together, allies united against her, smiling killers working hand in hand.
She felt the pressure of a scream welling in her throat.
“Kaylie…” Shepherd said again in his deceitful, soothing voice.
“Not my name,” she whispered, and then the scream broke out of her in a rush of furious words: “That’s not my name, I’m not Kaylie, stop calling me that, stop calling me—”
Abruptly they were all over her, their hands, their hot breath — too strong for her — the deputy and Shepherd overpowering her frenzied resistance, twisting her around, then grabbing her arms, wrenching them behind her back, pain in her shoulders, metal on her wrists, handcuffs, they were cuffing her, and she was struggling, thrashing, refusing to surrender even as they pressed her face to the wall and wood splinters pricked her cheek.