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?

Yet they did not release the beast. They kept it caged and hidden. They hid it even from themselves. They wore masks, all of them, masks of flesh—smiling or frowning masks, as unreal as the stylized faces worn by Roman actors in the last decadent days of Empire.

He saw those masks and yearned to strip them off and see the bare truth beneath, the truth that was blood and fear and a racing heartbeat.

And then he had seen her.

Only fleetingly, a pale face in the swarm.

Blonde hair, a slim neck, white arms.

She was gone almost before he registered her existence. But in the instant of eye contact between them, he had sensed something, a frisson of mutual excitement.

He wanted her.

She was the one.

But she’d vanished. Though he looked for hours, elbowing his way through the masses of strangers, he had not spotted her again.

Until tonight.

The woman in the corner, with the straw hat that almost hid her face ...

A pale face. And beneath the hat, a wisp of blonde hair.

It was the same woman.

He was certain.

He wanted to believe that this second sighting was a coincidence. But to believe in coincidence required faith.

Cray had no faith. He did not believe.

There was, then, no explanation for her presence except the obvious one.

He remembered the glint of chrome behind him on Route 191. The car that had maintained a steady distance from his Lexus, mile after mile.

Her car. It must have been.

She had followed him to the street fair. She had followed him to this resort.

She must be staking out his home and tailing him whenever he left.

She was ... stalking him.

Cray peered into the salt-rimmed margarita glass, turning the thought over and over, marveling at it, fascinated and afraid. It made no sense. The very idea was preposterous, an inversion of the normal order of things.

He knew who and what he was. He was a predator. More than that—the essence of all predators. He was cruelty and stealth, he was hunger, he was quickness in the night. He was rapacity personified, the universal wolf. He hunted and he killed, and to him screams were music.

No one hunted him.

He was not prey. That role was left to others who could play it better. Who had played it again and again on many secret nights, year after year.

Others, like the woman across the room.

He watched her without turning his head, using peripheral vision. At a distance of thirty feet her profile was hard to discern clearly. She had a round, childish face, and her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her small, pale hands fidgeted on the table. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, reached tentatively for her drink and then pulled away.

Nervous. Vulnerable.

A deer at a water hole.

And he—he was the lion in the tall grass.

Yet tonight the deer stalked the lion.

He could almost understand it if she were a cop. But an undercover cop was a professional, trained to shadow a suspect without being noticed. This woman’s technique was clumsy. Twice, on two separate nights, she had looked directly at him and caught his gaze.

She was no cop. She was an amateur.

If she knew or even suspected who he was, then why not call the police, tip them off, let them handle it?

Well.

He would have to ask her, that’s all.

Cray relaxed, his frown of concentration easing into a smooth, unreadable expression again.

Things were fine. No problem. He had needed a victim, hadn’t he? Now he had one.

Before he played with her, he would make her talk. She would tell him everything. Then he would start her running, and he would follow, predator and prey in their proper roles again.

He had not yet touched his second margarita. Calm now, he lifted the glass and licked salt from the rim, then settled back in his chair and mouthed a silent toast to the mystery woman.

To your health.