by John Saul
MICHAEL GAZED around the room once more. Was it possible that Margot Dunn had built a dressing room in the basement? It made no sense—it was two floors away from the master suite, and there were enormous closets and dressing rooms up there—he’d just seen them.
So if it wasn’t a dressing room, what—
The answer came to him before he completed it in his own mind, for as he scanned the walls once again—walls covered nearly completely with life-size photographs of Margot Dunn—it was suddenly obvious.
A shrine.
A shrine that Conrad Dunn had built to his first wife, hiding it away in the basement so no one—especially his second wife—would know it was there.
Rage gripped him as he realized that once again Risa had married the wrong man. He, at least, had loved her, even though it wasn’t in a way that could satisfy her.
Clearly, Conrad Dunn hadn’t loved her at all—he’d still been in love with Margot.
So why had he married Risa?
He looked around again, certain that the answer to that question was somewhere in this room.
He saw the magazines stacked on the vanity, and quickly went through them, then the drawers of the vanity itself. Then he spotted a crumpled piece of paper on the floor near the screen in the corner.
He picked it up, smoothing it.
It was a photograph of Alison.
Alison, in a dress that was far too old for her.
But a dress that looked somehow familiar.
He looked up, trying to think, and found the answer hanging on the wall directly above the vanity.
It was a blow-up of a Vogue cover depicting Margot Dunn wearing the same dress Alison wore in the photograph.
The image his eyes beheld was suddenly replaced by a whole series of images that rose in his memory—images he’d seen over and over again in the past few days, images hundreds of thousands of people had seen last night as they watched Tina Wong’s special.
And the last image—of the face the killer was building—suddenly came clear.
It was Margot Dunn’s face, and he knew that Conrad Dunn was going to build it on his daughter.
He was going to turn Alison into his dead wife.
A howl of fury and frustration rose in his throat. Without thinking, he seized the dressing screen, lifted it from the floor and hurled it at the image of Margot. As it shattered both the glass over the picture and the vanity mirror below, he saw what the screen had hidden.
A door.
He tried the knob.
Locked.
With both fists, he pounded on the door and howled his daughter’s name.
The door held, solid.
He looked around for something he could use to break it down, to burst through it, to smash it.
But there was nothing. Nothing but a flimsy floor lamp and an equally fragile clothes rack.
Then he remembered something.
Something he’d noticed but hadn’t thought about while searching in the vanity. He went back to the vanity, opened Margot Dunn’s jewelry box and began pulling out its drawers.
And there, in the bottom one, he found it.
A key.
A perfectly nondescript, ordinary key.
Could it really be this simple?
He picked it up, the spent adrenaline in his system making his hand tremble.
His heart racing, his breath ragged, he tried to slip the key into the lock.
It fit.
Not breathing at all now, he tried to twist the key.
It turned.
Suddenly wary, Michael paused to take a deep breath, then opened the door.
A dark vestibule lay before him, with another door beyond.
The second door was not locked.
A moment later he stood in Conrad Dunn’s laboratory, gazing through a glass wall at the masked figure of Conrad himself.
He was leaning over Alison, and he held a scalpel in his hand.
“I DON’T KNOW the exact address!” Scott Lawrence said, taking the cell phone from his ear just long enough to glare at it. “It’s up on Stradella Road, way up near the top, near Roscomare.”
“And what exactly is your relationship to Dr. Dunn?” the impersonal voice of the 911 operator asked.
Scott swore under his breath as the stream of traffic ahead of him on the San Diego Freeway slowed to a near stop. He was still two miles from the Skirball Center exit and now he was going to have to waste time trying to explain—
He swore out loud as a black Mercedes cut in front of him, then decided that breaking two laws wasn’t any worse than breaking one, and dropped over to the shoulder of the freeway. “Can’t you just send someone up there?” he pleaded with the operator as he drove on the shoulder. “Surely there’s got to be some way for you to get Conrad Dunn’s home address!”
“This is an emergency line, sir,” the operator explained with a patience that was starting to grate on him. “If you can’t give us any specifics at all, I can’t see how—”
“Fine!” Scott barked into the phone. “I’ll call you when I get there and know exactly what’s going on.” Snapping the phone shut and dropping it on the passenger seat, he pressed down on the accelerator and in less than a minute was pulling off the freeway.
And not a cop in sight, which he wasn’t sure was a blessing. At least an actual officer might have been willing to follow him up to Dunn’s place. Barely glancing to the left as Skirball Center Drive merged into Mulholland, he passed half a dozen cars before abruptly cutting back into the right lane to turn on Roscomare. Minutes later he pulled into the Dunn driveway and parked behind Michael’s car.
Though nothing looked terribly wrong, a chill still ran up his spine.
He retrieved his cell phone from the passenger seat, got out, and approached the front door.
He rang the bell a couple of times, then circled the house, searching for a way in.
On the back terrace, one of the French doors stood half open. He pushed it wide. “Michael?” he called out.
No answer. And the sound of his own voice had that oddly hollow note peculiar to empty houses.
“Anybody home?” he called out, stepping into the library. “Michael?”
Scott’s fingers tightened on the cell phone, and he opened it as he moved farther into the house.
“Michael! Risa! Alison!”
No answer.
He dialed 911 for the second time in less than fifteen minutes, and when the operator answered, knew he still couldn’t tell her exactly what the emergency was. But now at least he had an exact address, and a door that had been standing open at an apparently empty house.
A house Michael had been in fifteen minutes ago, and in front of which his car was still parked.
“Something is terribly wrong at the residence of Conrad Dunn,” he said, then gave the operator the exact address.
“What do you mean, ‘terribly wrong’?”
“I mean I got a call saying something was wrong and to call the police. Nobody would do anything because I didn’t have the address. Now I’m here and my friend is missing. His car is here, but he’s not. Nobody’s here. A door was left standing open and there’s no one here.”
“All right, sir,” the operator said calmly. “I’m sending a car right away. I don’t want you to do anything at all. Do not go into the house or anywhere else until the officers arrive, unless you are in immediate danger. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Scott said, but even as he folded his phone and dropped it into his pocket, he knew he wasn’t about to follow the woman’s orders. Michael was in trouble, and if there was anything he could do to help, he would do it.
And there was no telling when the cops would arrive.
Doing his best to make no sound whatsoever, Scott Lawrence made his way through the house.
Somewhere—somewhere not far away—Michael needed him.
Needed him right now.
He could feel it.
31
He was in a huge windowless room that was obviously underground.
It was some kind of laboratory, with stainless steel counters and sinks, all of it lit by the shadowless glare of the fluorescents that filled the entire ceiling. But even in the white brilliance of the lights, a large tank glowed a poisonous shade of green, as if it were filled with some kind of algae.
A pump was running steadily, and he could see some kind of gas being slowly forced through the green substance in the tank.
To the right, taking up nearly half the space in the laboratory, was what looked like an operating room, entirely enclosed by glass walls, with what looked like an airlock sealing off its interior from the rest of the laboratory.
Every wall of the operating room held a large flat-panel monitor, and both the monitors he could see displayed the same image.
His daughter’s face.
Her face, marked with heavy black lines.
But it wasn’t possible—none of it was possible!
Yet even as he tried to reject the reality of the scene, he found himself charging toward the glassed-in enclosure and pounding on it with both fists. “Alison!” he howled. “Alison!”
He moved around to the outer door of the airlock and wrenched at its handle, but it was locked. Swearing, and bellowing his daughter’s name again, he scanned the area for something to smash the glass with. On one of the stainless steel counters there was a metal stand holding some kind of beaker. Michael seized the stand, knocking the beaker to the floor, and ignored the shards of the shattered object as he swung the stand at the glass.
Nothing—not even a chip, let alone a crack.
THE SCALPEL IN CONRAD DUNN’S RIGHT HAND STOPPED in midair, barely a millimeter above the cut line he’d so carefully drawn on Alison’s face. The noise that had penetrated the strains of Vivaldi filling the operating room had come from behind him, and now he turned and looked for its source.
The ex-husband.
How had he gotten in here?
Not that it mattered. The surgery had already begun, and there was no point in stopping now. Even if the ex-husband were to call someone, he would be far enough along by the time they arrived that no one would dare stop him.
If they did, they would not only destroy Alison Shaw’s beauty, but might easily kill her as well. And when he was finished, and everyone saw what he had accomplished—saw that he had once again created perfection—that would be the end of it.
Taking a deep breath to recover the total concentration he needed to finish the surgery, Conrad turned back to his patient.
He gazed at the monitors for several long seconds, rehearsing each careful incision in his mind.
Using the remote control to turn the Vivaldi up enough to cover any further commotion from outside, he used the fingers of his left hand to pull the skin taut around Alison’s upper lip.
Once again he readied the scalpel.
MICHAEL SEARCHED for something else, and spotted a chair almost hidden by a large bundle wrapped in a plastic sheet. In two steps he crossed to the chair and yanked it off the floor. The bundle tipped over and the plastic sheet fell away, and he was staring into Risa’s face, ashen in the pallor of death, her empty eyes staring up at him.
It froze him for a moment, and he was seized again by the certainty that none of this could be real, that it was all a terrible dream from which he would awaken and find himself home in bed, with Scott sleeping peacefully next to him.
He took an involuntary step back, his heel catching in the plastic sheet and pulling it all the way off Risa’s body, and now he saw her ruined torso, slashed open from just above the pubis all the way up to her chest.
Her ribs had been cut open, and what had once been her internal organs lay in a bloody heap on her thighs. Michael’s gorge rose and a wave of towering fury came over him. Turning away from Risa’s body, he crashed the chair against the wall of the operating room, but instead of the glass shattering, the chair’s frame broke.
The figure on the other side of the glass turned, and Michael found himself staring into Conrad Dunn’s darkly hooded eyes. The surgeon held up the scalpel in his right hand as if it was explanation enough, then shifted back to his unconscious patient.
Michael dropped the broken chair, already searching for something else to use against the barrier between him and his daughter.
The computer stand! It was big, looked heavy, and had enough sharp angles on it that—
He swept the computer off the stand and sent it crashing to the floor.
Every monitor on every wall in both the laboratory and the operating room instantly went dark.
Now Conrad Dunn whirled around to glower furiously at him, his eyes dark and menacing above the white surgical mask.
“I’m coming for you, you bastard,” Michael whispered, and seizing the heavy computer stand in both hands, lifted it up. Using every bit of strength he could muster, he swung the stand against the glass wall. A searing pain shot up Michael’s arms as the shock of the blow knocked the stand out of his hands and sent it crashing into the racks of test tubes on the countertop behind him. Though Michael was knocked almost to his knees, the heavy tempered glass held.
Taking a deep breath, and wiping the sweat from his palms, he pulled the stand from the countertop, gripped it even tighter than he had a moment ago, and swung it again.
The stand hit the glass and bounced back, but this time Michael let it go and ducked out of the way.
A small crack appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the glass panel.
Michael took a deep breath, heaved the computer stand up for a third time, and swung it once more into the glass.
CONRAD DUNN STARED at the crack in the glass panel with unbelieving eyes. The glass was supposed to be unbreakable—bulletproof!
And now Alison’s father had broken it.
Broken it!
Suddenly everything he’d been working on for so long—every careful plan he’d laid, every perfect feature he’d collected, every sacrifice he’d made, was in jeopardy.
Everything—everything!—could be ruined.
All the work he had done could be ruined right here, right now.
But that wouldn’t happen—he wouldn’t let it happen.
Not now, not in the final moments, not when he was on the verge of creating perfection.
So he would deal with it.
He would deal with—what was his name? Michael!—yes, he would deal with Michael Shaw just as he had dealt with Daniel DeLorian.
The way he had dealt with his wife.
Nothing—nobody—would stand in his way. Not now, not when he was so close.
Not when everything could be so easily ruined.
Conrad Dunn took a fresh grip on the scalpel just as the computer stand crashed through the wall, showering shattered glass everywhere.
Over him.
Over his instrument tray.
And—worst of all—over his patient’s unfinished face.
MICHAEL LEAPED into the operating room, but his pant leg caught on a thick shard of glass still jammed in the window frame. He tripped, his pant leg tore loose, and he skidded over the thousands of pieces the single pane of glass had exploded into.
Trying desperately to hold his balance, he slammed into the operating table, sending it crashing against a glass-sided tank filled with the same greenish substance he’d seen in the lab. The tank shattered and the green stuff spilled out onto the floor.
But the green slime wasn’t all the tank had contained.
Against his own will, Michael’s eyes closed against the gruesome sight of the fragments of human flesh that were now mixed in with the broken glass on the floor.
A ROAR OF PURE FURY FORMED in Conrad Dunn’s throat as he watched years of work spew across the floor. But even before he gave vent
to his rage, he’d already repressed it.
Not now!
This was not the time to indulge himself in mere anger.
It wasn’t ruined yet—not all of it. If he worked quickly—
A new sound now rose over the blaring strains of Vivaldi.
Sirens.
Conrad snaked his arm around Michael’s neck, knocking his feet from under him and squeezing off his carotid artery.
Michael thrashed wildly on the floor, trying desperately to get his feet back beneath him but succeeding only in slashing dozens of cuts into the palms of his hands as he tried to grab hold of something that might help him escape from the choking arm around his neck. But Conrad only increased the pressure on his neck, and then Michael could no longer breathe.
He clawed at the arm around his neck. He wouldn’t die—not here, not now, not as long as Alison needed him. But even as he tried to find new strength, he felt his body weakening.
And with the weakening, a strange blackness began to gather around him.
The blackness of death…
I’m sorry, he silently cried out to Alison and to Risa. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Just as the blackness was enveloping him, Michael reached over his head and tried to grab Conrad by the back of the neck to pull him down to the floor with him.
Then his muscles went slack and he slid into the blackness.
CONRAD BARELY NOTICED a new shadow in the room before he felt fingers close on his hair and jerk his head backward. The attack came so quickly that he lost his grip on Michael Shaw and let his body drop away from him. Then he was twisted around and forced down as well.
Michael rolled over onto his back and lay still. Then, as his lungs took a deep, convulsive breath, the darkness began to clear from his vision.
He saw Conrad Dunn squirming on the floor next to him, and heard a scream of agony as an oddly familiar tan shoe ground the fingers of Conrad’s right hand into the broken glass.
As the music of Vivaldi that still filled the air faded to a quiet passage, Michael could hear the crunching of glass beneath the heavy shoe—or maybe it was the sound of the surgeon’s fingers being crushed.
