Stealing Faces

STEALING FACES

Michael Prescott

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Light thickens,

And the crow makes wing to
 
th
’ rooky wood;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
—Shakespeare,
 
Macbeth

Prologue

She had been a person once.

Hours earlier, when she started her long run through the hills under the moonless sky, she’d had a name and a job and a son to live for.

All of that was gone now, and she was only a scratched and muddy animal crawling through tall stands of reeds along a stream bank.

She was instinct and reflex. Her world was a flow of sensation—the movement of her body, the rack of pain, the press of fear.

The chase had taken her dignity and her freedom of will, and the shock of the bullet in her leg had taken her memories and hopes. Blood loss and rising panic had done the rest.

Somewhere, not inside her but out there, apart from her and distant, a presence named Sharon Andrews hovered like a ghost. Sharon Andrews, thirty-four, divorced mother raising a seven-year-old boy named Todd, working five days a week as a receptionist in the showroom of Edison Auto Mart on
East Speedway Boulevard
in
Tucson
,
Arizona
.

This woman, this Sharon Andrews, had read dinosaur books to her son in the evenings. She had worried about the rent on their two-bedroom apartment when the alimony check was late. She had stopped at the local video store once a week to raid the bargain bin for Disney movies on sale, used, for $9.99. When she smiled, her mouth turned downward, and when she sneezed she said,
 
Excuse me,
 
even if she was alone.

This woman, this Sharon Andrews, had been all quirks and opinions and worries and loves and disappointments and ideas picked up from magazines and strange, lonely moods when she wondered about the infinite.

This woman did not exist anymore, and would never exist again.

Where she had been, there was the bloodied, wounded, tattered, desperate thing now splashing into the shallow stream, drawn there by an agonizing thirst and a need to soothe the burn of the bullet hole.

The streambed was slick, and her bare feet slipped in a groove of ooze. She fell in the water, inhaling some of it, gasping and retching, then struggled on.

She had no conscious reason to continue. She did not lash herself with
 
what-if
 
and
 
if-only.
 
She was aware of no plan, no strategy for survival, and nothing but fear had impelled her down the steep hillside to the stream.

A person might have imagined that the stream would erase her trail and throw off her pursuer, but there was no person now.

Sometimes limping, sometimes crawling, she splashed through ten inches of water, traveling with the current because she was too tired to resist it, covering distance she couldn’t measure, running a race with an adversary she no longer clearly remembered.

The stream curved, narrowing. Somewhere a coyote sang to the night, its cry high-pitched and sad.

She’d heard it before, when she was Sharon Andrews. Then, she had ignored it, knowing coyotes were no threat to her, but now she knew nothing but direct perception and intuitive response, and the predator’s song chilled her.

She ran faster and lost her footing again, coming down hard on the soft bank, spattered with muck, and abruptly all motion fled her, and she lay utterly still.

The night was large and silent, heavy with darkness. She looked at the sky. The stars had dimmed.

She did not understand that the leakage of blood from the hole in her leg had impaired her thinking and now even her vision.

She was aware of pain and weakness, hunger, and the fast feathery beating of her frightened heart.

This was all there was for her, this and the great stillness all around, the silence that stretched and stretched as if it might last forever.

The second bullet caught her in the hip.

She jerked with the impact, her eyes watering in surprise and pain.

Her hands found the bullet hole and felt the rush of sticky warmth suffusing her skirt. Blindly she tried to plug the hole with her fingers, but the effort was hopeless and she was much too tired.

She’d never even heard the gunshot—perhaps her startled yelp had covered the noise—but she heard the coyote again, keening a ululant song.

It was not a coyote, of course. It never had been.

It was him.

Some part of her registered this fact. She looked behind her and saw him striding along the bank of the stream, the pistol in his gloved hand.

If she had been Sharon Andrews, she would have known she was finished. Somehow she knew anyway, though her body fought against the knowledge, insisting on survival.

When he reached her, she was clawing feebly at the mud, straining to rise, but she would never rise. The second shot had shattered her hip and damaged the base of her spine, leaving her legs limp and unresponsive even as her upper body thrashed and flailed.

Crouching beside her, he touched the carotid artery at the side of her neck. She moaned.

“Quiet now,” he said. “Quiet.”

Roughly he turned her on her back.

A light snapped on, dim and red, a low-power flashlight with a red filter.

Swimming in the red haze was the blur of his face. He leaned close, studying her, his eyes narrowed and intense.

“Now I see you,” he whispered. “Now I see you as you really are. I see the essence of you.”

She heard words, but they meant nothing, they were only sounds, dull sounds. She was sleepy.

Her eyes were closing when she saw the knife.

He’d slipped it from a sheath at his waist. A long knife with a double-edged blade.

A last reflex of fear stiffened her.

“There, there.” He set down the flashlight. “Be calm. This won’t take long.”

Then he was bending nearer, one hand on her chin, the other holding the knife against the tender hollow of her jaw.

“You wear a mask,” he said. “All your life you’ve worn it.”

His tone soothed her, a steady tone that stroked her in a calm caress.

“But not tonight. Tonight you’ve been unmasked. Tonight you’re pretending no longer. Isn’t it good, not to pretend? Isn’t it right, to be real for once? To be only what you are?”

She didn’t understand, but she knew there was only a little more to go, and she relaxed, waiting for it to be over.

“The process is almost complete. Just this last step, to make it official. The final stage of liberation from your stale disguise.”

The knife point pricked her, but the pain was someone else’s. Past his face, the night was growing darker.

“Are you ready? Ready to remove the mask?”

He knew there would be no answer. But she was indeed ready. He could tell.

And so was he.

The knife moved, slicing the soft flesh under her chin, and before she could resist or even scream, he took the loose skin flap in both hands and in a single practiced motion he peeled off her face.

PART
 
ONE

NIGHT’S BLACK AGENT

1

On a Monday evening in September, five months after he had hunted Sharon Andrews in the southern foothills of the
 
White Mountains
, John Cray drove into
 
Tucson
 
in search of a fresh kill.

It was a long drive, one he enjoyed, especially when the sun was
 
westering
, its light golden on the hills and desert flats. He headed south on Route 191 toward Interstate 10. The highway was
 
uncrowded
. A few pickup trucks shot past in the northbound lane, and far behind him sparkled a glimmer of sun on a chrome fender, but otherwise he was alone.

Solitude suited him. Cray was hemmed in by people throughout the day, even on weekends. The work never stopped, it was frustrating and demoralizing, and there was so rarely any relief.

But he would find relief tonight.

The road passed lightly under him. Ruts and potholes were smoothed away by a precision suspension system, and the engine’s soft hum disappeared behind the controlled violence of Mahler’s Eighth on the CD player. Cray settled deeper into the leather seat and felt care leave him.

He had paid more than $50,000 for these niceties, without regret. The salesman at the Lexus dealership had assured him that the LX 470 was the finest sport-utility vehicle on the market, exceeding even the rival Mercedes model. It was, he’d said, the perfect choice for the driver who would not sacrifice comfort, yet required the capability to travel off-road.

Cray required that capability. He had not told the salesman why.

As he approached the interstate, he noticed that the car with the chrome fender was still behind him, a mile in the distance, maintaining a steady rate of speed.

The freeway took him southwest, then curved north into
 
Tucson
. Downtown’s modest skyline passed on his right, a few medium-high office towers, tiers of windows glazed red with the sunset. Around the city lay the mountains, range upon range, pasted against the deepening cobalt of the sky.

Just north of the city limits, Cray turned off the interstate and traveled through the Catalina foothills on
Ina Road
.
 
The sun was in his rearview mirror now, and only night lay ahead.

Resort hotels were scattered among the steep canyons and high ridges of the foothills. He chose an older one, recently renovated, a place unlikely to be too crowded in September. The tourist season did not start until the heat abated, and in the desert, summer lingered an extra month or two.

The parking lot near the lobby was largely empty. Cray parked the Lexus in a corner spot, away from the light poles. He did not want the vehicle to be noticed and perhaps remembered.

He was careful. Experience had made him wise. In twelve years of nocturnal adventures, he had slipped up only once.

Still, his one mistake had been recent enough to make him doubly cautious now.

From his studies of criminal psychopathology, he understood that self-control was critical to his continued success. The ones who got caught, the ones whose names the public knew, almost invariably were betrayed by their own spiraling appetites. They went faster, abandoned caution, pushed the envelope of risk, and lost everything.

Whenever one of them was apprehended, the fool was always stupidly surprised to discover he had covered his tracks less carefully than he’d imagined. It was apparent in the suspect’s face, captured in shaky close-up by a handheld news camera: the dull astonishment at having been arrested, the incredulity at finding himself no better or no smarter than those who’d come before.

Cray knew he could fall victim to the same hubris. Still, he
 
was
 
better.

He was more intelligent than most others who enjoyed similar pastimes, and his needs, though intense, had not ossified into obsessions. He could avoid the obvious, costly mistakes that recklessness would breed.

But even he could not hold out indefinitely against the urgings of his deepest nature. Months might pass, or even a year or two, and then one day he would feel it again, too strong to resist: the itch in his fingers, the insomnia, the sexual arousal that kept him hot and agitated.

He had felt it for the past three weeks, stronger with every passing day. So here he was, a wolf in a sheep’s mask, stalking the witless flock.

Before leaving home, he’d shed his business suit in favor of his standard nighttime ensemble. He was dressed entirely in black. Black boots, black denim slacks, black long-sleeve shirt.

His shirt collar was buttoned, though he wore no tie, and his dark hair was slicked back. Lately his hair was sparser than it had been, and his hairline had begun to recede. His forehead was pale and smooth, like a skull.

The black ensemble gave him a mildly dangerous edge, but his face was that of any other man in middle age who worked hard and bore up patiently under life’s load. A nice face, people would say: a kind and thoughtful face. And they would wonder why he had never married, what private heartache kept him solitary at the age of forty-six.

Sometimes, gazing in a mirror, he glimpsed the reality behind the persona, his living soul behind the public mask. It glimmered in his eyes, gray-green eyes, amber-flecked, which had looked deeply into the essence of things, eyes that did not flinch from horror.

His eyes were not nice or kind or thoughtful. Anyone who had seen those eyes, really seen them, would no longer wonder why he was unmarried.

As he crossed the parking lot in the sunset’s afterglow, the air, desert-dry, brushed the nape of his neck like a caress of velvet.

Adjacent to the lobby was a bar and grill, a place of soft music and glimmering candles,
 
uncrowded
 
at this hour. Cray took a window table and ordered a margarita, then watched the fading sunset and the growing dark.

The mountains vanished into the night. But the city remained, a spread of twinkling color, large and misty.

Cray looked at the lights for a long time, lifting his glass now and then to taste the tequila’s soothing burn. It was not the lights that fascinated him. It was his awareness of the people represented by those lights, a half million people or more, with different names and different backgrounds, strangers to one another, living, struggling, dying, each one an individual.

Yet how easily their individuality could be discarded. And if it could be stripped away, then was it even real?

Or was it only a disguise, a persona—complex and subtle, yes, rich with nuance, elaborately refined, but nonetheless a mere facade?

Cray looked toward the long mahogany bar at the front of the room. A man in tapered jeans and a big-buckled Western belt had just mounted a bar stool beside an unescorted woman in an invitingly short skirt.

The man would say something, and the woman would respond. Perhaps he would offer to buy her a drink; perhaps she would agree. He would compliment her dress or her hair or her eyes, and she would ask what he did for a living.

The two of them operated purely on instinct and reflex. Every move, every word, every detail of their grooming had been prompted by the unconscious emulation of others or the irresistible pull of instinctual drives.

The man wore those jeans and that belt because he had seen other men wearing them; imitative as a monkey, he had bought them for himself.

He had come to a bar because it was where other people would come. He had taken the empty seat beside the woman because this too was the action that was expected of him.

His conversational gambits had been picked up from movies or TV shows or from dialogue he’d overheard in other bars—nothing original, lines spoken by strangers, who in turn copied behavior they had witnessed elsewhere.

The ritual of offering to buy a drink, of making some cheap and obvious toast, of clinking glasses, all of it was a show played out countless times by countless others.

And if the woman allowed him to take her home, she would do so only because it was expected of her, because she had been raised in a culture that permitted and slyly approved of such behavior; she would be fitting herself seamlessly into the social framework that had shaped her.

The only honest part of what either of them did was their instinctive need for sexual relief, and this was a need they shared with every animal.

Cray had heard much about the dignity of man, but what he had seen was only the vacant thoughtlessness of a herd. The mind was largely an illusion; the great majority of people were, for all practical purposes, unconscious most of the time. Their conscious minds, if functional at all, served only to provide a veneer of rationalization for behavior patterns already prompted by social conditioning and instinct.

Cray considered the woman in the short skirt, and saw a mandrill, her buttocks flaming red in sexual heat. He studied the man dutifully attempting to seduce her, and saw a rutting gorilla driven by the need to establish himself as the alpha male.

Those two were random examples. He could have focused on anyone around him and seen the same. There were exceptions, but they were rare. In his life he had found only one person able to understand, really understand.

One person besides himself.

“Sir? Would you like to see our dinner menu?”

A waitress had paused by the table, smiling at him from under a raft of loose auburn hair. Her name tag read
 
DEBBI
.

“Not quite yet,” Cray said. “Perhaps you could bring me another drink.”

“Right away.” Her smile brightened, and she shook her ringlets of red hair as she walked away.

Cray watched her go. She was most cheerful, a healthy and vital young animal, but he wondered how long her high spirits would last if he took her into the mountains tonight and used her for sport.

The prospect did not entice him. He could do better.
 
Debbi
 
the waitress was too youthful and unformed to be really interesting. It was preferable to select a mature specimen, ripe for harvest.

He needed to find a woman who was alone, or who could be separated from her party. He would target his victim, trail her to her home or hotel room, then carry out the abduction. He would find a way to do it quietly.

Cray let his gaze travel around the room. A fair number of the tables had filled up since his arrival.

In a general sense he knew what he was looking for, but he had no precise image in mind. She might be tall or short, blonde or brunette or red-haired. She might be of any race. He liked them slender, never younger than sixteen or older than forty-five, but those were his only criteria.

Most of the patrons around him were couples, but a pair of unattached women sat at the bar, talking to the bartender and watching
 
Monday Night Football
 
on a large, muted TV.

There were no other solitary women in sight ... except one, seated in a far corner.

Cray glimpsed her face, half-concealed behind a wide-brimmed straw hat. For an instant she seemed to meet his gaze, and then she averted her head slightly, a movement so subtle as to be almost natural.

“Here you go.”
 
Debbi
 
the waitress, returning with Cray’s second margarita.

He accepted it with thanks, then held the cold glass in his hand.

It was a hand that trembled now, only a little, and not so obviously that anyone would notice. He sat motionless, afraid to lift the drink and perhaps spill it. He studied the distant city in the window.

To the southwest he could see the lighted towers of downtown
 
Tucson
. Downtown, where he’d gone on Saturday night, only forty-eight hours ago.
A street
fair had drawn him there, a monthly bacchanal that attracted throngs of students from the university and other locals in search of fun and distraction. The scene had been crowded and noisy. Bands played on street corners, a blare of drums and amplified guitars and caterwauling voices. People threw money into open guitar cases at the musicians’ feet, because it was expected of them.

University students, back for the fall semester, yelled primal challenges at the night sky. Here and there a juggler or a magician would attract an audience, as their counterparts had done in medieval markets and Roman festivals.

Human nature never changed, because at its root it was not human at all. It was something older.

Cray had been musing on this as he wended, supple as smoke, through the noise and shadow-flicker of the crowd. The subject often occupied him. He had written a book, well received, to explore part of it—the less dangerous part. The title had been
 
The Mask of Self.

He’d thought of masks while his eyes, narrowed and alert, scanned the swirl of faces around him. What part of these people was unique? Not their attire or grooming, their mores and tastes, not even their thoughts. What, then? Their souls? And what was the soul, if not the primordial part of them, predating words and ego? What was the soul, if not the beast within?