But was it Kaylie’s? Or a false lead, a print left hours earlier by some wandering patient or groundskeeper?
Cray knelt, examined blades of grass flattened by the footstep. Bent but not broken, even now springing back. The track was recent.
It was hers.
Cray felt a twitch brush the corners of his mouth. He required an instant to identify it as a smile.
He stood. Looked ahead, following the direction of the print.
The wide expanse of the lawn was interrupted here and there by eucalyptus trees, some growing close together, others majestic in solitude. Small thickets of mesquite and purple sage glimmered in the starlight.
Cray let thought leave him, summoning instinct in its place.
A fleeing animal tends to take the easiest route, cutting through the widest spaces between the trees, avoiding thickets of underbrush that would impede progress. The hunter, seeing the lie of the land as his prey would see it, could sometimes deduce his quarry’s line of advance.
The most direct and least obstructed path would have taken Kaylie McMillan on a zigzag run between a ragged colonnade of trees, bypassing any snarls of ground cover.
Cray followed this route, running hard, not bothering to look for other tracks. He knew that a hunted animal would normally proceed as far as possible along its original avenue of escape.
He stopped only when he reached a denser thicket of ground cover bordering a duck pond. In the scatter of bird droppings along the muddy shore, he found more shoe prints.
She had turned here. Turned south.
That was odd. The nearest stretch of perimeter fencing lay to the east. He would have expected her to head for the fence in search of a way out.
Instead she had veered in a different direction — back toward the buildings of the institute.
The last place she would want to go, or so it seemed. The administration building and the two active wards were staffed twenty-four hours a day.
But the other building, Ward C, the abandoned ward…
A person could hide in there. A person who had stolen a full set of keys, as Kaylie had. And she knew the building. It was where she been incarcerated during her first stay at Hawk Ridge.
Had she planned to conceal herself in the abandoned ward from the start? Or had she panicked after escaping, when she realized the guards would be called immediately and she would have no chance to find a way out of the hospital compound?
The answer didn’t matter. In either case, she was in the old ward, hunkered down, a huddle of fear. Easy prey.
Grinning fiercely, heart thumping with a familiar savage joy, Cray started running again.
The guard at the gatehouse took a long look at Shepherd’s badge before handing back his I.D. holder. “You here about the McMillan woman?” he asked.
Shepherd leaned out the window of his idling sedan. “How’d you know?”
The answer came with a shrug. “She’s the only escapee we’ve got at the moment.”
It took Shepherd a moment to absorb this. “She escaped? Tonight?”
Another shrug. “Thought you knew. You said you were here about her.”
“I want to ask her some questions.”
“Our guys’ll have to find her first. She busted out. Pretty hard case, that one — though you wouldn’t think it to look at her.”
“How long ago did this happen?”
“Ten minutes, is all.”
If he couldn’t talk to Kaylie, he would do the next best thing. “Where’s Dr. Cray?”
“That, I don’t know. In his residence, I’d guess. Want me to ring him up for you?”
Shepherd preferred not to give Cray any advance notice of his arrival. “That’s all right. Can I drive to his house from here?”
“Sure. Go straight to the parking lot, hook left on the maintenance road, and when you’re past the utility shed make a hard right.”
“Thanks.”
The gate opened, and Shepherd pulled through, then followed the directions, driving fast but not recklessly, his thoughts racing.
During the drive from Anson McMillan’s house, he’d had time to piece together a possible scenario, still hypothetical, quite conceivably all wrong.
But suppose… just suppose…
Suppose Cray was a killer, as Kaylie believed. Killers might be born or made — Shepherd had no opinion about that — but however they got started, there was always one critical moment in their development, the moment of transition from fantasy and speculation and preparation to the deed itself.
Now just suppose Cray had needed help with that step.
Shepherd could picture him as he’d been twelve years ago, a much younger man, a man who’d passed his time in classrooms and seminars, a man with soft hands.
A murderer in embryo. Evolving by degrees toward the final, fatal commitment.
How had he started along that path? With a man like Cray, his progress would have begun as an intellectual proposition. At least this was how he would have rationalized and justified any strange new emotions that invaded the cool sanctuary of his self-control.
We are animals at heart. The self is mere window dressing. A mask, a false front. We hear about “mind over matter.” It would be more true to say that the mind doesn’t matter.
Cray had said that to Shepherd. The idea obsessed him. He’d written a book on it.
Shepherd had slept through most of his mandatory Philosophy 101 course in college. He was no expert in the subject. But he knew that Cray’s viewpoint was grounded in a deep aversion to humanity, an aversion that could easily translate into contempt or hatred.
What a man hated, he might wish to destroy. But being soft and cloistered, he would not know how.
And then into his office comes Justin’s mother, telling him of this son of hers, with his guns and his blood lust and his sick obsessions and his skills at tracking game.
The man Cray needs. The partner he has been seeking — seeking perhaps unconsciously, as the last missing piece of himself.
So Cray goes to Justin McMillan, feels him out. There are ways for a clever, manipulative man to gain the trust of someone younger and inexperienced.