He found a favorite book of hers, Watership Down, the one about the rabbits, which she’d bought at a junk sale in Las Cruces and carried with her ever since. Indifferently he riffled the pages, looking for marginal notes or hidden messages. There were none.
“As for your disappearance, I doubt any questions will be raised. In an establishment of this kind, the guests must frequently check out at odd hours. I’ll leave the door unlocked, the room key on the counter with a two-dollar tip. They’ll think you left in a hurry. And they’ll forget you immediately.”
He reached the bottom of the suitcase and took out her photo album. It was a slim spiral-bound volume, only half-filled.
She disliked having her picture taken, for obvious reasons, but at a few parties and picnics over the years she’d been caught on film.
Cray flipped through the sheets of photos, his face unchanging. She wondered what the pictures looked like to him — the silly poses struck by her friends, the sliced watermelon and paper airplanes and big, goofy smiles.
“As long as your car isn’t found in one piece,” he was saying, “no one will have any reason to look for you at all. You’ll have vanished, and no one will even know it.”
The photo album went into his satchel also. He shut the second suitcase. He was done.
“It’s what you’ve wanted, Kaylie. Isn’t it? To disappear completely? Never to be sought, and never found? Why, it’s a dream come true.”
The smile he showed her was so bright with malice, she actually shrank back into the chair.
“Now,” he went on casually, “we’d better be going. I’ll return later for your car and luggage. There’s no hurry about that. Right now I want to get you out the door and on your merry way. But first…”
From his pocket he withdrew a long strip of black fabric.
A blindfold.
“First I need to be sure you won’t run. I’ve been awaiting our reunion for a long time, Kaylie. I would hate to see it cut short.”
He took a step forward, and she knew this was her last chance. Once her eyes were covered, she would be helpless, and Cray could do anything. Anything.
In that moment she remembered how much she hated this man, hated him more than he could possibly hate her, and a flash of raw fury jolted her out of the chair and straight at him with no thought, no plan of action, only the senseless need to attack.
Lightly, with one hand, he shoved her backward. She fell across the bed, and before she could lash out with a kick, he was on top of her, smiling, God damn him.
“There’s that fight-or-flight instinct I warned you of,” Cray said.
Her hands thrashed inside the jacket’s nylon sleeves, and behind the gag she was screaming, but the screams were only stifled sounds that nobody would hear.
The blindfold came down, her sight blotted out in a fall of darkness, and Cray slapped her, the leather glove stinging her cheek.
“No more of your nonsense now,” he said sternly. “If you struggle, if you give me any trouble at all, I’ll hurt you. You’ll win yourself nothing but pain.”
He pulled her off the bed. The darkness tilted around her. She swayed, her knees liquefying, and then Cray’s arm was supporting her, and he was hustling her across the room.
He paused once, apparently to collect something. She heard a rustle of fabric.
The door opened. She felt the balmy night on her face.
As Cray escorted her outside, the sudden sense of air and space was shocking, disorienting. She imagined herself a space traveler ejected from the safety of the capsule into the terrifying emptiness beyond.
The walkway felt cool and smooth against the soles of her bare feet. She tried to count her steps, though she didn’t know why. It was something people did in the movies. They remembered every detail of their kidnapping, and later they could lead the police to the place where they’d been taken.
Jingle of metal, a soft click, the sound of an automobile’s door swinging wide. Cray had brought her to his SUV.
“In you go,” he said.
She prayed someone was watching from one of the motel windows, some insomniac who would see a gagged, blindfolded woman being pushed into a Lexus sport-utility and would call 911.
Cray lifted her in both hands, shoved her roughly into a passenger seat. The front seat, she was fairly sure. He pulled a lap belt tight across her waist, and she heard the snick of the buckle.
Behind the gag, she made a very small sound, something like a moan.
“No need to be scared yet,” Cray said, his voice close to her ear. “We’ve got a good half-hour ride ahead of us before things get interesting.”
Half an hour was not nearly enough time to reach the White Mountains, where Sharon Andrews had been killed. Cray must be taking her someplace nearer to town.
The desert, she guessed. The empty vastness, where he could do whatever he liked, and no 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.