by John Saul
Jane brought in a fresh cup of coffee, and he tried to get his mind back to the problem in the boardroom. Somewhere on his desk there was a sign-off from the lawyer who had seen the final edit of the show, and he intended to find it. He began searching through the clutter, hoping he hadn’t given it to someone to file. If he had, they’d never find it.
He picked up his cell phone to flip through the pile of papers underneath it and noticed that he’d missed a call.
Risa?
No. It was from Alison’s phone, and she hadn’t left a message. And that was as strange as Risa missing an appointment, because Alison always left messages—it had become a game with them over the years, and they often had long, involved, convoluted—and generally very funny—conversations back and forth via voice mail.
There was no way Alison would call him and not leave a message, even if it was only some kind of fake gibberish he wouldn’t be able to understand but would spend hours trying to decipher. He speed-dialed her phone, knowing she’d be in class and most likely had turned it off.
Sure enough, her voice mail came on. “It’s me, cupcake,” he said. “Call me at the office as soon as you can, okay? Call me between classes. It’s important.” He hung up, but the ringing in his ears told him his blood pressure was not better, and it was now accompanied by a nervous feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He spotted the sign-off from the lawyer pinned to the cork board on the wall next to his desk and pulled it down. But now his mind was no longer on the meeting in the boardroom.
Alison had called but left no message.
Risa failed to show up for an appointment.
Something was wrong.
He hit the intercom button. “Jane, get me the Wilson Academy.”
A moment later Jane’s voice came over the intercom. “It’s ringing on line two.”
“Good morning, Wilson Academy,” an efficient female voice answered on the third ring.
“Hello—this is Michael Shaw, Alison Shaw’s father. I have an urgent situation and need to speak with her as soon as possible.”
“Just a moment,” the voice said. “Let me see where she is right now.” There was a long pause, then the voice came back on the line: “Mr. Shaw? Alison isn’t here today. Nor have we received a notice of an excused absence.” Michael read the careful phrasing very clearly: they thought Alison was cutting school.
Another thing she simply wouldn’t do.
“All right, thank you,” he said, and hung up. Now the meeting in the boardroom was forgotten. He grabbed his cell phone and the memo, handing the memo to Jane on his way out. “I’ve got a family emergency,” he said. “Give that to Tina and tell her to take it into the boardroom. That should let the lawyers know the ball’s in their court. I’ll call you when I can.”
Jane looked at him in shock. “You’re leaving? Just like that? They’re all in there waiting for you!”
Michael shook his head, already heading toward the elevator. “Something’s going on with Alison—I’ve gotta go.”
As soon as he pulled out of the parking lot and into traffic, he called Scott. “Something’s haywire—I can’t find Risa, and now I can’t find Alison, either. I’m on my way up to Risa and Conrad’s place.”
“What do you mean, you can’t find Alison? Isn’t she at school?”
“Not as far as they know,” Michael said. “I’ll call you when I get there.”
“Be careful.”
“I will,” Michael said.
Closing his phone, he stepped on the accelerator.
COLD.
Freezing cold.
Alison’s teeth chattered as she struggled to reach the blanket at the end of her bed, but she couldn’t get to it.
Indeed, she couldn’t move her arms at all.
What was wrong?
The blackness that had surrounded her only a moment ago began to recede, and as her mind rose through the layers of unconsciousness toward the gathering light, she felt a terrible tiredness overwhelm her.
If she could just sink back down into her bed and retreat into the soft, warm escape of sleep…
But she was too cold.
And there were noises in her room.
Noises she’d never heard before.
Strange, gurgling noises.
Alison opened her eyes and found herself staring straight up into an enormous overhead light. She reflexively closed her eyes against the painful glare, then turned her head and opened her eyes again, more slowly this time.
This wasn’t her bedroom, this was…
A dream?
It had to be. She was dreaming that she was back in Conrad’s operating room at Le Chateau.
But this time she didn’t want the surgery.
Didn’t want it at all.
A wave of panic rising inside her, she tried to sit up, but couldn’t move either her hands or her feet.
She was strapped to the operating table and there was an IV needle in her arm!
She caught a movement in the corner of her eye and turned her head the other way. A figure was looming by the operating table, and though the surgical mask covered all of the face but the eyes, she instantly recognized Conrad Dunn.
“L-Let me up,” she stammered, struggling once more against the surgical tubing that had been tied around her wrists and ankles.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Conrad said, his voice calm and reasonable. “You see, we’re about to get started, and with no one to assist me, I can’t run the risk of you accidentally moving.”
Started? Her mind honed in on that single word. She still felt confused, foggy. What were they about to start?
Another operation?
But that was impossible—after what had happened with Cindy Kearns, she was already wishing she hadn’t let him do the implants. So what was he talking about?
“Just relax,” Conrad said. “It’ll only be a few more minutes before everything is ready.”
As he turned away again, she struggled to clear her mind, to banish the strange fog that made this feel like a nightmare. But it wasn’t a nightmare—she was sure of it.
She was awake, and what was happening was real, and she had to remember what had happened.
How she had gotten here.
Breakfast.
Conrad had lied about her mother having gone to an early appointment.
“Where’s my mother?” she asked, but without the force she’d intended to put into her words. Instead of sounding commanding, her voice seemed tiny and almost inaudible in the cold, cavernous room.
Conrad turned and looked down at her, his dark eyes ominous over the top of the surgical mask. “She didn’t approve of our project.”
There was a note almost like sadness in his voice, and it sent a terrible chill of certainty through Alison.
Her mother was dead.
And she was alone.
She wanted to cry out, wanted to give in to the terrible grief rising inside her, but she knew she couldn’t. Her mother was dead, and she was alone, and if anyone was going to save her from whatever Conrad was planning, it would have to be her.
“P-Project?” she said, cursing herself for the stammer and determining not to let it happen again.
Conrad laid a cold gloved hand on her arm, sending shivers all the way up to the back of her head. “I am going to do for you what no one else on earth could do.”
Alison searched for the right words—the words that would stop him from what he was about to do, or at least slow him down long enough for her to find some way to escape the bindings that held her to the table. She said, “I—I don’t understand. What are you going to do?”
He reached out as if to touch her, and she instinctively turned her head away.
And saw the green tank that stood next to the table to which she was bound.
The tank that had to be the source of the gurgling sounds that seemed so loud when she was first waking up, but now was no more than a murmur in the background.
&nbs
p; She focused on the contents of the tank, and suddenly found herself back in the grip of the nightmare.
An ear.
Lips.
It wasn’t possible—in a second she would wake up and be back in her bed and the dream would be over and—
And she remembered the woman in the composite who had looked like Margot.
Margot Dunn.
The cords in her neck strained as she struggled yet again to sit up, to get loose, to get away.
And once more she failed and fell back, gasping for breath.
“Let me show you,” Conrad said. “What we’re going to do is very exciting—absolutely revolutionary, in fact.”
Alison lay still, trying desperately to take a deep breath. She needed her strength—needed to keep her wits.
Conrad stepped over to a computer keyboard.
An enormous flat-screen monitor came to life, and she saw an image of herself, wearing the black dress he’d brought to her to try on. The screen zoomed in on her face, then split in two.
Next to her face there appeared a photograph of Molly Roberts—the same photograph from Tina Wong’s special.
The special on the Frankenstein Killer.
And now she knew who that killer was.
Conrad Dunn.
Unable to tear her eyes away from the screen, she watched in mute fascination as Molly’s face faded away, except for her nose, which moved—almost by magic, it seemed—over to her own face, replacing her nose.
And she understood with terrible clarity exactly why she was here.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh God—please, Conrad.”
She twisted her head again, and saw the flesh that had been Molly Roberts’s nose suspended in green gel.
“That’s just the beginning,” Conrad said.
Unable to bring herself to look away, Alison stared at the monitor as his fingers manipulated the keyboard with as much skill as they could manipulate a scalpel. She watched in growing horror as her face slowly morphed, piece by piece, element by element, into the face of Margot Dunn.
“This will be our end result,” Conrad whispered when the transformation was complete. His voice was rapt now, as if he were caught up in religious fervor and beholding the Madonna herself. “I will make you into the most perfect woman in the world.”
“No,” Alison breathed. Everything that she was, he was going take away from her. He was going to make her into someone else, and the person she was—the person she had always been—would be gone.
Alison Shaw would no longer exist.
And Margot Dunn would live again.
Tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks as a great sob racked her chest and throat.
“You’ll thank me when it’s over,” Conrad assured her. He moved around the end of the table to the tank. “I hated putting those implants under your breasts,” he went on, dipping his gloved hand into the tank and pulling out what at first looked like nothing more than some kind of misshapen mass. But as Conrad cradled it in his hands, turning it so Alison could see it from every angle, she realized what it was.
She felt her gorge rise, and struggled against the wave of nausea that gripped her.
“We should have done this graft the first time,” he went on, his tone still utterly clinical, as if he were discussing nothing more than a minor adjustment that would amount to practically nothing. “But the timing wasn’t right. After today, though, your breasts will be perfect. As perfect as Margot’s. And with nothing false in them—no silicone, no fatty tissue stolen from your thighs or buttocks.”
As his voice droned on, Alison realized that there would be no escape, that she didn’t have the strength to free herself from her bonds.
There was, though, one weapon he hadn’t taken from her.
Conrad had a whole staff of nurses and aides at Le Chateau twenty-four hours a day, and if she could just make them hear her—just make even one of them hear her—
With all the strength she could muster, Alison filled her lungs with air and let out a scream.
A scream that built, growing louder and louder, echoing in the operating room, its force straining every fiber in her.
She screamed again, then repeated it until even her own ears were ringing with the sound.
Her eyes shut, praying that someone—anyone—would hear her, she screamed out her terror and her rage and her grief. Even as a burning that felt like liquid fire began to course through the vein in her arm, she kept screaming.
Yet no matter how loud she screamed, the fire consumed her and the darkness began to close around her once more, and when the last iota of her strength had been drained away, she dropped back down into the void, praying that she might never wake up again.
30
MICHAEL KNEW CONRAD DUNN’S HOUSE WAS EMPTY AS SOON AS HE entered through the unlocked French door after walking around to the terrace at the back of the mansion. The air itself felt vacant, abandoned. Though he had yet to look anywhere but in the library in which he now stood, he knew that no hearts but his beat in this house.
Still, he couldn’t keep calling out for his daughter and ex-wife. “Alison! Risa! Hello?” He moved from the library into the living room, calling out again in the irrational hope that someone—maybe a housekeeper—would respond, but his certainty that the house was empty was reinforced by the echo of his voice coming back to him, bouncing off the cavernous ceilings.
He took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, heading straight for where Alison had told him her room was.
Empty—not only of Alison, but her backpack as well! Hope suddenly flared within him. Maybe she was all right after all. Maybe she’d merely cut school today and didn’t want to answer her phone.
But what about Risa?
He moved on, coming to the master bedroom, where his brief flash of hope faded as quickly as it had come: Alison’s pink cell phone lay cracked on the carpet next to the wall. Just the sight of it—abandoned, vulnerable, broken—brought a silent prayer for her safety to his lips. He bent to pick it up, then stopped.
Better not to touch anything.
Not yet.
He straightened up, struggling against the panic rising inside him.
A panic that intensified when he saw her backpack open on the floor near the bed, books spilling out.
The phone, broken.
The backpack, open and spilling out its contents.
So Alison hadn’t gone anywhere without at least some kind of fight.
Michael forced his panic down—if she hadn’t given up without a fight, neither would he. The last of his panic dissolving into cold resolve, he backed away from the bedroom door, opening his own cell phone to speed-dial Scott.
“I’m at Conrad Dunn’s house,” he said when Scott answered. “Something’s happened—call the police.”
“What do you mean, something’s happened?” Scott asked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t have time to explain. I’m looking for Alison, and I can’t do that and answer the questions 911 will ask—I don’t even know the address up here. So just call them for me and tell them to get up here right now.” Before Scott could say anything else, Michael folded his phone and dropped it back in his pocket.
In Risa’s closet he found the Vuitton bag, complete with cell phone and wallet.
Now he moved quickly from room to room, calling out Alison’s name, throwing open every bedroom door, but knowing in his heart she wasn’t up here.
Nor was Risa.
Back downstairs, he took in the remains of breakfast on the dining room table with a single glance, and when he looked into the garage from the kitchen, he saw Conrad’s Bentley and Risa’s Buick.
With a growing sense that he was missing something—that he was wasting time—he went through the rest of the house.
Empty.
Every room, empty.
It was as if three people—four, if he counted the housekeeper—had suddenly vanished from the face of the earth.
> He went back to the kitchen, trying to decide what to do next, when his eyes fell on an unobtrusive door just off the kitchen that he’d been in too much of a hurry to notice the first time around.
He threw it open and stared down a flight of stairs leading into the basement. Without a second’s hesitation, he ran down the stairs into darkness below, shouting once more.
“Alison? Risa!”
One room after another opened off the corridor that seemed to run the full length of the house: wine cellar, pool equipment room, furnace room.
All empty.
None of them with places to hide, let alone doors to the outside.
Then he caught a whiff of something sweet, and followed the fragrance around the corner to one more door.
A door that stood ajar, with a soft light emanating from the opening.
His heart suddenly beating faster, Michael pushed the door wide, and found himself looking at some kind of dressing room.
But why would there be a dressing room in a basement?
Then he saw the photographs that covered the walls.
Photographs of Margot Dunn.
CONRAD DUNN’S CELL PHONE BUZZED in his pocket.
“For God’s sake,” he muttered. “Always when I’m sterile.” He tried to ignore the interruption, but the phone continued to buzz, and at last he peeled off a glove, pulled the surgical gown aside and reached into his pants pocket.
The silent alarm in Margot’s room!
But who could be in there?
He’d sent Maria home.
Someone looking for Alison?
Or even Risa?
Damn!
Still, he’d locked the door behind the screen, and even if whoever was in the house found the laboratory, the operating room was impenetrable.
And it was far too late to stop the surgery—Alison was already unconscious, and he couldn’t leave her alone on the table while he went to see what was happening in the house. If Alison died on the table, he’d never find anyone else with her bone structure.
He threw the two dead bolts on the airlock door that kept the lab and the operating room from contaminating each other, turned off his cell phone, and stepped over to the basin to begin scrubbing his hands all over again.
