But on the first hunt, he had not hunted alone.
Justin had been with him. Leading him.
His guide. His mentor, in some ways. Most of all, his partner and soul mate, the only human being who had ever understood Cray, and the only human being Cray had loved.
Justin had loved him too. They had shared something — no, it was not sexual — something of the spirit, or if that word was too anachronistic for a new millennium, then something instinctual, a common inheritance in the blood.
Whatever satisfaction Justin had found in his brief marriage to Kaylie, it could not compare with what he and Cray had known together, on the one night when they ran free as wolves, chasing their prey through the White Mountains until they brought her down.
They had made a perfect team. Justin was a natural hunter, cruel and patient and starved for blood. A natural sociopath as well — Cray knew the type. The combination of an outdoorsman’s skills and a killer’s instincts had made Justin McMillan the ideal partner for John Cray — Cray, who had never killed anything other than the schnauzer, Shoe, which he’d strangled and secretly buried in the woods.
Except for that one incident, Cray’s nearest encounter with death had been the dissection of corpses in medical school. But he had come to realize that he would have to widen his horizons if he were ever to grasp the full reality of his essential nature. Observation and analysis were useful within limits, but some things must be experienced firsthand.
Aware of the need to take this next step in his evolution, he had sought out Justin, befriended him, and persuaded the younger man that they could do great things together.
And so one night they’d gone cruising, venturing miles afield, until Cray spotted a female hitchhiker on a dark highway.
There’s one.
Cray still remembered the tremor of exhilaration in his voice, and how he’d leaned forward in the passenger seat of Justin’s pickup truck to point to the girl on the shoulder of the road. A girl disheveled, forlorn in the night, and utterly alone.
Justin had slowed the truck. You’re sure? he asked, the question coming slowly but without the least quaver of fear.
Cray nodded. She’s perfect. She’ll never be missed.
The girl, still a teenager, had been wary of the two men who’d stopped for her. But preferring their company to the nocturnal desolation of the highway, she’d accepted the ride.
Later, when she realized her mistake, she had put up a fight, scratching and pummeling until Cray subdued her with an ampoule of sedative.
She awoke in the White Mountains, beyond the reach of help. The moon was high and nearly full, the ridgeline shiny in the light.
Cray hadn’t made any sort of speech to her. On later occasions it would become his practice to inform the victim fully of the lethal sport that was about to be played, but on that first night he and Justin had exchanged no words with the girl, had not even acknowledged her confused questions and pleas.
They had merely shoved her out of the truck and watched her land sprawling in the brush, and then Justin had raised his rifle and fired a single shot into the air.
The rifle dipped, targeting the girl. No speeches were necessary. She understood.
And she ran.
By silent agreement Cray and Justin lingered near the truck for fifteen minutes, allowing the girl a head start. Then Justin said, Let’s go.
Simple words. But packed tight with meaning, as richly crammed with all the potentialities of an unknown future as a bridegroom’s utterance of I do.
What had followed was the greatest experience of Cray’s life. He had always been staid, aloof, safely cerebral in his habits and predispositions. Even murder had come to him largely as an act of intellectual daring, the last link in a chain of propositions carried to their logical terminus.
But that night with Justin, the two of them racing in pursuit of the girl, Justin advancing with practiced confidence, Cray slower and less sure, stumbling on loose rocks, snagging his trouser legs on thorny brush, gasping to keep up — that night, when he and Justin hunted in tandem, a team of human predators, hot for blood, hungry for the kill — that night was Cray’s awakening.
He remembered the chase as a dream of fury and need, and high-pitched animal howling that was around him and above and below and inside him too, howling that was his own, because in his extremity of excitement he could not contain the instinctive impulse to bay the moon.
Later, Cray marveled at the changes that had come over him, the inexplicable madness that had consumed and redefined him. He could not understand it, but he knew it was real, and he knew there was no going back.
He had unleashed something in himself that would not be caged or killed. From his Apollonian torpor he had emerged into a Dionysiac frenzy, shedding inhibition, yielding to instinct, mad as a Bacchal reveler in the high hills of ancient Macedonia, wild as a lion. He returned from the hunt like Zarathustra descending from the mountaintop, like Rousseau’s unspoiled savage. The mummy wrappings of intellect and culture had been peeled away, and there was only the predatory ape, living for the thrill of hot flesh and crunched bone.
When the time had come to kill the girl, Justin had let Cray do it. Go ahead, Doc, he’d said in his calm way. She’s yours.
Cray had never heard an offer so tender. And then Justin had handed over his knife, and Cray, his hand trembling only slightly, had cut the girl’s pale throat.
He had not meant to take her face. His first trophy was a product of pure accident. In cutting his victim’s throat, he loosened the flap of skin over her skull, and remembering an autopsy he had witnessed, he had simply lifted the skin flap, peeling the face from its substructure of bone.
Justin had laughed in rare delight. Man, that’s a beauty, he’d said. You could hang that on the damn wall next to a four-point buck.
Cray had given Justin this prize. It was only right that the younger man should keep the trophy, after Cray had been honored with the kill.
A generous gesture, but in retrospect — calamitous. Had Cray kept the trophy, Kaylie never would have found it. Justin need not have died by her hand.
And Cray need not have mourned the man who meant most to him, the one man who had mattered.
Well, there was no point in pondering such things. The past was fixed and final. Justin was gone, but Cray, alone, had continued their work. And he used Justin’s knife — the sharp knife in its leather sheath — a knife for hunting, and better still for flaying the quarry when caught.
If events had worked out differently, he would have used that knife on Kaylie. Now that option was foreclosed. Her face would not be added to his wall.
A disappointment, surely. But he could live without that particular trophy. It was her life he wanted most, and her life he meant to take.
He patted the vest pocket of his jacket, reassuring himself that its secret contents were still in place.
On his way back to the office after his session with Kaylie, Cray had stopped in the hospital’s storeroom, a repository for all varieties of contraband collected from the patients. Amid the haphazard assemblage of junk, he had found an unopened pack of Marlboros and a Bic lighter.
Tonight he would have need of them.
Tonight — less than two hours from now — he would toss a lighted cigarette into the shrubbery outside the main door of Ward B.
There had been no rain since August. The brush was tinder-dry, easily ignited.
Once the blaze was roaring, he would barge into the ward, feigning alarm. Nurse Cunningham and the orderly on duty would fetch fire extinguishers and put out the fire.