by John Saul
Tina hesitated. If she divulged too much without confirmation from them, she’d blow the best angle she had for her special. “I need to know you’re good for this information.”
“What do you want to know?” Sands asked.
“Did Kimberly Elmont lose some glands Saturday night in addition to her ears?”
The look that passed between the two detectives was almost all the confirmation Tina needed.
Almost, but not quite.
“We can neither confirm or deny—” McCoy began, but Sands interrupted him.
“We can give you the answer to that one,” he said, the last trace of sarcasm vanishing from his voice. “What have you got?”
“If she was missing her thymus and adrenals, the same thing happened last year to Caroline Fisher.”
She waited for a reaction from either cop but got none.
“Hello?” Tina said. “Is anybody home? Do I have to spell it out? Does the term ‘serial killer’ mean anything to you two?”
“There isn’t any reason—” McCoy began, but now it was Tina who cut him off.
“Come on,” she snapped. “Obviously you hadn’t connected Caroline Fisher and Kimberly Elmont yet, so at least let me have some credit for giving you that.”
Evan Sands eyed her speculatively. “Which means you’ve got more?”
Tina weighed her options. “I do. But unless Fisher and Elmont are connected, the rest of what I have doesn’t pertain to Elmont. So make up your minds.”
Sands picked up a doughnut and bit into it. “Okay,” he finally said after he’d munched through half the sticky ring of pastry. “According to the coroner, those glands were gone. So you’re right—unless we have a copycat—”
“Copycats don’t wait a year,” Tina Wong cut in. “And there are two others, fifteen years ago.” As McCoy and Sands stared at her, she snapped open the locks on her briefcase and brought out two sheets of paper, laying them on the table. “One in San Diego and one in San Jose. Girls slashed open and their adrenals and thymuses taken. Same M.O., same killer, right?”
“Holy Christ,” Sands breathed, picking up the summary of the San Diego case and starting to scan it as Tina Wong kept talking.
“He’s a serial killer, he’s back, and he’s in Los Angeles now,” the newswoman said. “So how much of Elmont can I report on?”
“Similarities,” Sands said slowly, passing the San Diego report to McCoy in exchange for the one from San Jose. “Don’t give the details about the glands—we’d just as soon not tip too much to the wackos who are going to start ’fessing up the minute they hear it’s a serial.” He looked up at Tina. “And you didn’t hear anything from me. Take all the credit for seeing the similarities yourself.”
Tina snapped her briefcase shut and picked it up from the table. “Thank you, gentlemen—a pleasure doing business with you.”
“Not so fast,” McCoy said, holding up the San Diego report. “What are you planning to do with this stuff?”
Tina smiled sweetly. “The public has a right to know,” she said. Then she opened the door and walked out, leaving them still reading the reports.
If she hurried, she could film her noon update and still be in San Diego before lunch.
ALISON SHAW FOUND her way back to her locker after the final hour of the day, her head still spinning from the differences between Santa Monica High and the Wilson Academy. Aside from the fact that the academy was on a small campus nestled in the hills above Westwood Village, and the buildings looked more like mansions than school buildings, the classes were far smaller than any she’d been in before, and the dining hall was more like a restaurant than a cafeteria. Even the lockers were different—built carefully into the walls, each with a mahogany door with a student’s name engraved on a small brass plaque. Hers was on the first floor of the Science Building, and now, as she stood staring at all her new textbooks, she wondered if she could leave any of them in her locker overnight.
“Mrs. Morgan is always the priority,” someone behind her said.
Alison turned and saw Tasha Rudd and Dawn Masin, the two girls she remembered from her mother’s wedding.
“Literature,” Alison groaned.
“Don’t you just hate it?” Tasha asked. “You have to actually read the material, and God help you if you’re late with a paper.”
Dawn Masin nodded. “She’s the worst.”
“Okay, at least I know,” Alison said, and pulled the heavy literature book off the stack.
“So you made it through your first day,” Tasha said as Alison added her history book to her backpack.
“Well, I survived it, anyway,” she replied. “In fact, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
“Then you should celebrate,” Dawn said. “We’re all going up to Tasha’s. Come with us.”
Alison hesitated—neither of the girls had been this friendly at the wedding; in fact, they hadn’t spent more than five minutes with her. So why were they inviting her along now?
“You need to meet some people,” Tasha said, reading the uncertainty in her expression. “Come with us. It’ll be fun.”
“And if you don’t come, my dad will think we didn’t invite you, and I’ll be grounded for a week,” Dawn added.
Alison gaped at her. “Your father told you to invite me?”
Dawn nodded. “But it’s no big deal—if we didn’t want you to come, we would have just lied to our folks. Plus which, Trip says you’re really good in trigonometry, and Tasha and I can’t do it at all, so we’re going to need you to help us. Okay?”
Alison found herself laughing. “Are you always this honest?”
“You’ll get used to it,” Tasha said as Dawn only looked vaguely puzzled by the question. “So come on, okay?
“I need to check with my mom,” she said, still uncertain whether they wanted her to come with them.
“So call her,” Tasha countered. “We’ll wait.”
Two minutes later Alison closed her phone, added her trigonometry book to the two others already in her backpack, then closed her locker. “Let’s go!”
Five minutes later Tasha beeped open her silver BMW roadster, which was parked between a Mercedes coupe and a Saab convertible.
“This is yours?” Alison asked, her eyes taking in the row of glittering automobiles as she pulled open the passenger door of the BMW. She knew one person at Santa Monica High who had a BMW, but it was five years old, and most of the students’ cars had been at least ten. Nor were most of them Mercedes and Saabs and BMWs.
“Got it for my birthday,” Tasha said. She put the car in gear and led a caravan of three other cars full of kids up Roscomare Road to Mulholland Drive, where she turned right and wound her way along the crest of the hills for a mile before turning right through a pair of electric gates and down a steep driveway to a large parking area and garage in front of her family’s house overlooking Stone Canyon.
Tasha parked in the garage, the other cars parked behind her, and then almost a dozen kids piled out, streaming around the house itself and down the stairs to the pool house.
“Let’s go dump our stuff in my room,” Tasha said, leading Alison to the front door. “Then we’ll find you a suit in the cabana.
Two boys—Alison thought they were Cooper Ames and Budge Phelps—were already splashing in the pool by the time she and Tasha arrived at the huge terrace containing not only the pool and a “cabana” that was bigger than the house in Santa Monica had been, but an outdoor kitchen around a huge barbecue.
When they went into the dressing area in the cabana, half a dozen naked girls were rummaging in the drawers full of different size swimsuits. Suddenly, she felt like she was back in gym class.
“Here,” Tasha said, pulling a purple striped two-piece suit out of a drawer and handing it to her. “This should fit you.”
Tasha casually stripped off her clothes and got into her own pink bikini with white piping, then adjusted it in front of the mirror.
Alison
, self-conscious, hesitated, but finally took off her own clothes and pulled the bathing suit on. At least it wasn’t a full bikini, and the bottom sort of fit—it was a bit tighter than anything she’d ever worn before, and her thighs and waist bulged a bit over the spandex.
She told herself it wasn’t too bad.
But the top was way too big—the cups bagged around her small breasts.
“The bra doesn’t fit,” she said, staring dolefully at her reflection in the mirrored wall. “Do you have a smaller one?”
Tasha opened another drawer, pulled out a pair of foam rubber falsies, and handed them to her. “These will fill it out.”
Alison stared at them, praying Tasha was kidding, but knowing by the tone of her voice that she wasn’t. “I’m not sure I—” she began.
“Go on,” Tasha said, cutting her off. “They’re the ones I used to wear before your stepdad gave me these.” She lifted her chest with two hands, exaggerating the bulge of her breasts.
Alison reddened and tried not to stare. “You mean those are implants? Conrad gave you implants?”
“Well, it didn’t look like I was ever going to grow them, so first I used those.” She nodded toward the two foam pads that were still in Alison’s hand. “They’ll push you up and fill out the top. Try it.”
“They fit into a pocket in the bottom of the cups,” Dawn said. “Here, take it off and I’ll show you.”
Reluctantly, Alison took off the bathing suit top, trying to resist the impulse to hide her breasts behind her arms since the other girls seemed to be so unconcerned about their nudity.
Dawn expertly fitted the rubber push-ups into the bikini top, then handed it back to her. “Try that.”
Alison put the top back on and tried not to blush as Dawn readjusted everything.
“Take a look,” Dawn said when she was finished.
Alison stared at herself in the mirror and for a moment thought she was looking at someone else. How could those little pieces of rubber make such a difference? She looked like an actual woman instead of a flat-chested adolescent child.
Her breasts were actually mounding over the top of the bathing suit’s bra.
“Just like me,” Tasha said, nodding in approval at the new contours. “You need implants. Ask Santa for a pair.”
Alison stared at her. “Me? You’ve got to be kidding! I could never—”
“Never say never,” Dawn Masin interrupted. “You’ve probably got everything you’re going to get from nature. So now’s the time. You want to get it all done before you go to college.”
Alison turned to Dawn, whose body filled her bikini as perfectly as Tasha’s. “You’ve had something done, too?”
Everybody laughed.
“We all have,” a girl Alison hadn’t met yet said.
“It’s no big deal,” Dawn said. “I had my boobs and lips done over Christmas, and Tasha’s getting cheek implants next summer.”
Alison stared at Dawn’s lips. They were plump and looked perfectly natural. How was it possible she hadn’t been born with them?
“Believe me,” Dawn said, leaning forward so Alison could see her mouth more closely, “I had no lips before. None.”
Tasha sucked in her cheeks so Alison could get an idea of what she was planning, then let them back out again. “I think the way we’re born is just a suggestion.”
A suggestion? Alison thought as she wrapped a beach towel around her body and followed the rest of the girls out to the pool. What were they, crazy? Yet as she listened to the whistles from the boys in the pool, she hesitated.
Nobody had ever whistled at her like that, and they weren’t right now, either. They were whistling at Tasha and Dawn and all the rest of them.
“Come on in, Alison,” Budge Phelps called out. “We’re losing. We need you.” He held up the volleyball.
“Going in?” Alison asked Tasha.
“Later,” Tasha said as she smeared lotion on her long brown legs.
“Come on, Alison!” Trip called. “We need you.”
Alison dropped the towel and waited.
No whistles—none at all.
They knew her breasts were not her own.
Suddenly regretting that she hadn’t just gone home, she plunged into the pool, wishing that not just her body, but she herself could disappear.
DAHLIA MOORE CLOSED the file on her desk and reached for the next on the stack. Before she opened it, she rubbed her neck, trying to relieve some of the pain in her shoulders and upper back that eight hours a day of sitting at her keyboard had made into a chronic condition. And trying to decipher the scribbled notes the doctors made on the patients’ charts wasn’t doing anything for her eyes, either. Sighing heavily, she flexed her fingers, took a sip of her tea, inhaled deeply, and reached for the next folder on the bottomless heap in her in-box.
She was just opening the file when the door to the Records Office opened and a woman walked in.
A woman Dahlia recognized not only from television, but because she’d been in this very office at least three times before, and not once had the newswoman ever gotten anything at all out of her.
But apparently she never learned.
“Hello, Dahlia,” Tina said, her lips curling into the smile she usually used only on TV.
Dahlia wondered if Tina Wong had actually remembered her name or just read it in one of the directories in the hospital lobby. “May I help you?” she said, doing her best not to let the newswoman know she’d been recognized.
“Tina Wong?” Tina said, moving close to the counter in front of Dahlia’s desk. “You remember me, don’t you, Dahlia? Channel 3 News?” Barely acknowledging Dahlia’s curt nod, she plunged on. “I’m doing a story on the Kimberly Elmont murder, and her mother told me that Kimberly’s appendix had been removed here at Holy Cross two years ago.”
Dahlia scowled. Of all people, Tina Wong should understand patient confidentiality. It wasn’t as if they’d never played this game before. “So?”
“So I’m hoping you can tell me who has access to her medical records.”
“Her doctors,” Dahlia responded. This was way too simple a question for the famous Tina Wong, so she was after something else, but Dahlia knew her job, and wasn’t about to jeopardize it for a reporter. “That’s assuming she was a patient here, and you know as well as I do that I can’t tell you anything about a patient.”
“I told you—I’m not asking for information about the patients. All I want to know is if anyone but their doctors accessed their records.”
Dahlia Moore’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘patients’?” she asked, emphasizing the plural. “Kimberly Elmont was only one person, wasn’t she?”
Tina pounced. “So she was a patient here!”
“You already knew that,” Dahlia retorted, rolling her eyes. “Her mother told you, didn’t she?”
“Can you tell me if a woman named Caroline Fisher was ever treated here?”
Dahlia frowned. “How many times do I have to explain confidentiality to you?”
“Confidentiality dies with the patient,” Tina said, putting a lot more certainty into her voice than she felt. Then, as Dahlia’s expression turned even stonier, she changed her tactics. “Look,” she said, her voice much softer. “Both of these girls were murdered. I can’t believe you didn’t hear about Kimberly—I broke the story, but every other station’s been on it ever since. Caroline Fisher was murdered last year, and I think the same person killed them both.”
Dahlia pursed her lips but said nothing. She’d certainly heard about Kimberly Elmont—there’d been practically nothing else on TV all weekend. And she remembered Caroline Fisher, too, because Caroline had been killed only two blocks from the house Dahlia shared with her husband and daughter, and she’d made Fred put extra locks on the day after they found the Fisher girl.
“Come on, Dahlia,” Tina said, sensing the records clerk’s indecision. “I don’t even want medical information. All I want to know is if Caroline Fish
er was ever a patient here, and if she was, if there was anyone who looked at both their records.”
Dahlia turned it over in her mind. Technically, Tina Wong was right—the information she wanted wouldn’t break any laws. On the other hand, it would sure violate hospital policy, maybe even badly enough to get her fired. On the third hand, she and Fred hadn’t spent fifteen years raising Jessica so some madman could kill her, and if all Tina Wong wanted was a simple confirmation that someone had been here—
Dahlia’s fingers flew over the keyboard for a few seconds, and finally she nodded. “Okay, Caroline Fisher was a patient here, too.”
“Can you tell me if the same people accessed both those girls’ records?” Tina pressed. “I’m not asking for names—just whether anybody worked with both of them.”
Dahlia opened a second window on her computer screen and pulled up Kimberly Elmont’s records, then pulled up pop-ups in both windows that showed the names and dates of everyone who had ever accessed them.
Both lists were short, and none of the names appeared on both lists. Then, just as she was about to close the window on the Elmont record, she noticed something: the last entry on the access record showed a date, but no name. Dahlia’s brows furrowed as her eyes shifted to the Fisher girl’s file.
“What is it?” Tina Wong asked. “What did you find?”
“Now, that’s not right,” Dahlia muttered, barely even aware that she’d spoken out loud.
“What’s not right, Dahlia? What did you find?”
“Kimberly Elmont’s file was accessed two weeks ago, but there’s no log-on information. And the same thing with the Fisher girl. A little over a year ago someone looked at her file, but there’s no log-on information.”
“What does that mean?” Tina pressed.
Dahlia opened her mouth, but before she could say anything she remembered to whom she was talking. If there was a hole in the hospital’s security system, the last thing she needed was for Tina Wong to know about it before she told her boss. “Probably nothing,” she said. “It’s just a violation of policy, that’s all. Now I’ll have to try to run it down and write up the violations.”
