Stealing Faces Read Free Page B

must look like a different woman to him.
    Or maybe she was just kidding herself.
    She’d known there was a good chance she would be spotted eventually. She could beat the odds for a while, but not forever. And if Cray was on to her ...
    She didn’t like to think about that possibility. If Cray was the man she feared he was, then her fate would be the same as that of the other women.
    Elizabeth   couldn’t guess exactly what he did with them, what sort of mental or physical torture he inflicted before the kill, but it would be bad, and there would be no escape.
    And at the end, of course, he would take his victim’s face.
    The thought chilled her. She hugged herself. She had thin, pale, lightly freckled arms prone to goose bumps, and she held them tight against her body, her wrists crossed over her small, shy breasts.
    Being in the same room with him was hard. She wanted to get up and run, as she had run from him once before.
    Was she crazy to have run so far, and for so long, and now to seek him out and risk everything, merely to confirm a suspicion that might be groundless?
    You must be really brave,   Elizabeth , she told herself. Or really, really stupid.
    Maybe it would have been better not to enter the bar at all. She could have waited outside, hoping to catch Cray when he left.
    But she’d tried that strategy a week ago, after tailing him to a bikers’ bar on   Tucson ’s dangerous south side, and when he departed, she’d nearly missed him.
    She couldn’t afford to take that risk. Didn’t dare let him out of her sight.
    Because, if her suspicion was correct, he was getting ready to try something.
    She could almost feel it, sense it, as surely as she could sometimes sense the gathering electricity in the air before a summer thunderstorm.
    She touched the purse in her lap, feeling the small hard shape of the most important item inside, simply to reassure herself that it was there.
    Surreptitiously she studied Cray. She had not been this close to her quarry at any time since her return to   Tucson .
    He had been thirty-four when she’d first known him. He was forty-six now. His profile was sharper, more angular, than she recalled. He’d lost weight, but although lean, he was far from scrawny. His long shirtsleeves did not quite conceal the sinewy muscles of his arms, and his tapered slacks wrapped his strong thighs and calves like a second skin.
    Black shirt, black pants. He’d worn the same outfit every time she’d followed him. He was a man in silhouette, a living cutout of the night.
    Last Saturday, shadowing Cray in the hectic downtown streets, catching glimpses of him in the crush of people, she’d seen the way he carried himself—the long, liquid strides, the loose swing of his wide shoulders, and always his head turning slowly from side to side as he scanned the crowd.
    He had reminded her of a panther, sleek and black and lethal, a hungry animal on the hunt. She’d imagined he was sniffing the air, picking up the scent of prey.
    But of course she could be all wrong about him. That was the thing to keep in mind. John Bainbridge Cray might never have killed anyone.
    In the whole time she had watched him, he’d done nothing worse than make a few forays to   Tucson   nightspots. On such outings he was always alone, which was unusual, and he kept to himself in crowded places, never seeking company.
    But aloofness was no crime. Eccentricity was no crime.
    Even what he’d done to her, so many years ago ...
    No, even that was not a crime. Or, if it was, it was a crime for which there was no name, a crime that could never be proved.
    Her fingers were drumming the table again. She stopped herself. Her hands were always doing that, fidgeting and worrying at things. Restless, undisciplined hands.
    She supposed they suited her. She was always on the move too, wasn’t she? And always nervous, always on edge.
    She felt someone looking at her and glanced up, afraid that it was Cray, but it was only the