Free Stealing Faces by Michael Prescott Page A

one would see or hear.
    Something thumped on the floor of the passenger compartment. A second item, less heavy, followed it.
    Then the door banged shut, and for a moment she was alone in the Lexus while Cray circled around to the driver’s side.
    Her toes probed the floor and felt rumpled canvas. The satchel.
    And the other item?
    She felt worn fabric and a tangled strap. Her purse.
    No doubt he’d brought it for the same reason he’d wanted the envelope with her birth certificates and Social Security cards. The purse contained her identification, which he intended to destroy.
    It contained a gun also. A gun now less than three feet from her grasp, if she could only reach it.
    Savagely she pulled at the jacket’s knotted sleeves, fighting to rip the nylon and liberate her hands.
    No use.
    The driver’s door opened, and the Lexus shifted on its springs as Cray slid in beside her. “All ready for our little outing?” he asked cheerfully.
    He shut his door. The engine started, its hum low and ominous.
    “I know I am,” he added. “I’ve been ready for years.”
    There was motion, the Lexus reversing, and   Elizabeth   felt her last hope sliding inexorably away.
     

11
     
    Cray was ten miles west of the motel, driving down a two-lane strip of blacktop through the flat, unforgiving desert, when he decided it was time for a real conversation.
    He reached over to the woman in the passenger seat who called herself Elizabeth Palmer, and loosened the washcloth that had   stoppered   her mouth.
    “Penny for your thoughts,” he said.
    She coughed weakly and repeatedly, a typical reaction to the strain of being gagged. He waited for her to recover her composure, feeling no impatience.
    His rage had cooled. He had no reason to be angry now. She was going to die, and first she would know terror and then pain.
    It was all he could have asked for, all he had wanted throughout the past twelve years.
    When her spate of coughing was finished, she raised her head, turning her blindfolded face toward him, as if she could see through the opaque fabric.
    He thought she might start screaming, or plead for mercy, or thrash in her seat the way some of them did. But to her credit she seemed almost calm. He kept thinking of her as the teenager she had been, but she was older now, and the years had made her stronger.
    A long moment passed, filled with the hum of the engine and the beat of the tires on the rutted road.
    “Where are we going?” she asked finally.
    He was disappointed. The question was too obvious.
    “Is that the first thing you say to me,” he chided softly, “after all these years?”
    “What should I say?”
    “How much you’ve missed me. I’ve missed you. I’m so very glad to see you again. Really. You do believe that, don’t you?”
    “Yes. I do.”
    Her voice was as he remembered it. A soft, girlish voice, strikingly innocent. He had spent many hours in conversation with her, in the days when they had been bound together so intimately, and he had always been intrigued by the childlike quality she projected. He hadn’t expected it to last.
    “Little Kaylie,” he breathed, “back from the dead. At least, I thought you might be dead. So much time had passed, and you had disappeared so utterly. As if you had vanished into some Bermuda Triangle, leaving no trace.”
    She made a ragged throat-clearing noise. “You thought I’d been killed?”
    “To be honest, I wondered if you’d killed yourself. You have definite suicidal tendencies.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Then why have you been following me?”
    She said nothing.
    Another desolate mile sped by. The dashboard’s glow lit his gloved hands on the wheel, her face in profile. The car’s interior was a bubble of light, and around it in all directions lay a great and brooding darkness.
    He wondered if Elizabeth Palmer, whose name when he had known her had been quite different, was thinking of that darkness and of the destiny that would soon make her