Faces of Fear (34 page)

Twenty yards away she could once again smell the sweet scent of the perfume that still pervaded the area.

She opened the door and reached in to turn on the light. The room was exactly as it had been before—though Conrad had told her he would have it dismantled, he obviously hadn't. And as she gazed around at the pictures of Margot Dunn, she realized that Alison had been right: the resemblance to the composite image Tina Wong had created was definitely there.

Risa moved slowly around the museum, looking closely at each of the old photographs of Conrad Dunn's first wife, and with each image she studied, the truth of it became clearer. It wasn't that the features stolen from each of the dead women were different from Margot's counterparts, but that Margot's face had been shaped differently, the framework of her cheekbones and jaw and upper skull all combining to support each of her features at the best angle to show them off and meld them into the perfect beauty that had made Margot famous.

She scanned the images one more time. Yes, the resemblance, at least feature by feature, was uncanny. But what did it mean?

She turned away from the last one, the huge blow-up of the
Vogue
cover that had been Margot's favorite, and her eyes fell on the mannequin that stood below it.

It had been displaying the dress Margot wore for the
Vogue
shoot, but it now stood naked, stripped of the elegant black dress.

Except she saw that it wasn't quite naked; there was something pinned to it.

A photograph.

Another photo of Margot?

Risa moved closer, reached out, and pulled the eight-by-ten loose, holding it so the light from Margot's vanity fell fully upon it.

And she froze.

The picture wasn't of Margot Dunn at all.

It was of Alison.

And the dress Alison wore in it was the black Valentino that had hung on the mannequin the last time she'd been in this room.

The room seemed to swirl around her, and she sank onto the velvet vanity stool, the photograph of her daughter clutched in her hand.

* * *

CONRAD OPENED the closet door in the dressing room adjoining his private office and found a clean shirt, fresh from the laundry. The clean one would betray no evidence of his visit to Danielle, and the one he was wearing would soon be burned in the furnace below his house. He shook the clean shirt out and unbuttoned the collar, but before he could change into it, the cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Frowning, he glanced at the caller ID.

The silent alarm in the room where all of Margot's things were gathered had been set off by the motion detector.

Damn.

Abandoning the clean shirt, he left his office and took the private elevator to the underground garage of Le Chateau. But instead of getting in his car and driving through the twisting streets that would get him up to his home, he unlocked a nondescript door that appeared to hide nothing more than a storage closet and turned on the lights.

Behind a sliding door at the back of the closet, a series of recessed lights illuminated a steep stairway that led directly up through a tunnel from Le Chateau to the private lab connected to the basement of his house.

The lab that only he and Danielle DeLorian had ever used.

Taking the stairs two at a time, he unlocked the laboratory door, switched on the lights, and looked quickly around.

Everything was as it should be. The tanks were undisturbed, the organs he'd harvested from Danielle floating in the gel exactly as he'd left them before he'd gone back to his office to change his shirt.

He moved through the laboratory and paused at the door that opened directly into the room where Margot's treasures were on display.

He could see a line of light beneath that door.

Sighing tiredly, knowing what he would have to do, he opened the door.

* * *

RISA'S HEAD SNAPPED UP when she heard the sound of a door opening from behind the dressing screen in the back corner.

"Hello, Risa," Conrad said softly as he stepped into the room.

She rose from the vanity stool, instinctively trying to hide the photograph of Alison behind her back, her mind racing.
What was Conrad doing here? Where had he come from?

"Are you looking for something?" Conrad asked as he approached, then stopped and frowned. "What's that behind your back?"

"N-Nothing," Risa stammered, staring at the spatters of blood on his shirt.

Conrad's gaze flicked to the mannequin, and a slight smile came over his lips. "Ah! The picture of Alison. Doesn't she look lovely in that dress?"

He stepped closer, reaching out as if to take the picture from her, and Risa took a step back.

Conrad's smile faded. "She's going to be beautiful," he said. "Did you know that her face has the exact same bone structure as Margot's?"

And in an instant the truth—the unimaginable truth—exploded in Risa's mind.

She had to get Alison out of the house!

She turned toward the door, but it was too late. In two strides Conrad was next to her, his right arm curling around her neck. "I'm going to show you something, Risa," he whispered in her ear. "Something wonderful."

The pressure on her neck grew, and though she could still breathe, she felt herself starting to black out.

"But you have to behave," Conrad whispered. "Do you understand?"

As her vision began to fail her, Risa managed a slight nod.

The pressure on her neck eased slightly, and Conrad began to move her toward the dressing screen.

Even if she could scream, she knew no one would hear her. The house was empty, except for Alison, who was two floors away.

Without a struggle, Risa let him walk her through the door that lay behind the screen.

THE PRESSURE ON RISA'S NECK EASED JUST ENOUGH THAT SHE DIDN'T black out, and Conrad's grip on her arm kept her from falling even though her knees were buckling.

Stay calm,
she told herself.
Stay calm and save Alison.

Having moved her through the door behind Margot's changing screen, he slammed it shut behind him.

Looking around, it seemed she'd sunk into a nightmare.

Everywhere she looked there were tanks filled with a greenish fluid, and objects floating in them.

Grisly objects.

Objects that looked as if they had been cut away from human corpses.

Or living human beings.

"My laboratory," she heard Conrad say. "This is where I do all the truly
important
work." His stress on the penultimate word sent a chill through her. "Interesting, aren't they?" he said as his eyes followed her gaze to the objects in the tanks. "They don't look like much at the moment, but wait until tomorrow."

Risa, repeating the two words—
Keep calm
—over and over in her mind, tore her eyes away from the tanks. "T-Tomorrow?" she rasped, her throat raw from the pressure of Conrad's arm.

"Alison's surgery," he said, still moving her through the laboratory and into the operating room, where motion-sensitive switches turned on blindingly bright overhead lights.

Risa blinked in the sudden glare, saw the operating table, an IV stand, monitors, instrument trays already laid out—everything a surgeon would need.

All of it there.

All of it ready.

She struggled to comprehend what she thought she'd heard him say.

Alison's surgery?

What was he talking about?

Then her mind flashed back to the photograph of Alison in Margot's dress.

Then further back, to the television special she'd watched that evening.

"No," she whispered, barely able to hear her own choking voice.

Instead of answering her, he strong-armed her into a metal chair, then bound her arms and legs to it with surgical tape. She saw him step out into the laboratory and tap at a computer keyboard. A moment later one of the large wall-mounted monitors on the wall of the surgery room came to life.

As Conrad returned from the laboratory, Alison's face, at least three times larger than life, appeared on the monitor.

Risa gazed at the image of her beautiful daughter.

"It's her features," he said. "That's the problem—nature was not as kind to her as it should have been."

Risa felt her blood run cold.

"Now you'll see how God intended Alison to look." He flicked some kind of remote control toward the computer in the laboratory and the image on the monitor began to change.

As Risa watched in growing terror, Alison's face slowly morphed into a perfect replication of Margot Dunn.

"You see?" Conrad said, his glistening eyes fixed on the monitor. "That is what God intended, and that is what I am going to do."

Risa's belly churned, and for a moment she thought she might throw up.

"It's going to be quite simple," he went on. He pressed the remote again, and Alison's face reappeared, this time with black ink marks around her eyes, her nose, and her lips. "And her ears, of course," he said. "All the soft tissue. That's the wonderful thing about Alison—her underlying bone structure is perfect. The moment I met her, I knew. It was as if I could see right through her flesh to the perfection of her bones."

Risa struggled against the surgical tape that bound her to the chair. "No," she whispered, her voice hoarse. "Not Alison. I'm not going to let you—"

"
Let
me?" Conrad cut in, wheeling around to face her, his eyes glittering as they bored into her. "You should be thanking me!"

Risa gazed up at him, no longer recognizing the man she'd married. It was as if Conrad had become someone else, someone gripped in an obsession she'd assumed was only a fading memory.

Margot.

He was consumed with her, and she was dead, and now he was going to re-create her.

And make Alison—her daughter—disappear.

Risa scanned the room, looking for a weapon.

If she could knock him out—if she could get out of the surgery and the lab and call the police—

"You'll thank me," Conrad said. "And so will Alison."

"No," Risa said again, struggling harder against her bonds. "I won't—"

"You won't do anything," Conrad said, as if instructing a child. "It's too late for that now. It's not up to you. It's up to me."

Now all the doubts she'd ever felt about Conrad flooded back.

The night in Paris, when he'd called her Margot.

The shrine in the basement that no woman would ever have built to herself.

His careful seduction of Alison, until she actually wanted him to cut into her body, to make it different.

To make it
beautiful.

And she'd let it happen.
She
—not Alison—had let it happen. She never should have married Conrad, never should have moved into his house, never should have let him so much as look at her daughter, let alone touch her.

Cut her.

Change her.

"No!" she screamed now, her guilt coalescing into pure fury. With a sudden lunge, she tore free from her bindings, her rage lending her more strength than she could have imagined. She hurled herself toward the tray of surgical instruments, reaching for a scalpel or a pair of scissors or anything else that came to hand.

Cut him!

That's what she had to do.

Cut him, as he was going to cut Alison.

Cut him,
before
he could cut Alison.

Cut him, and kill him, and—

The chair, still bound to her right leg, caught on the corner of one of the cabinets, and she lost her balance. She felt herself plunging forward and threw out her arms to break her fall, and—

—Conrad's arm was once again around her neck, and he was squeezing. Once more the blackness gathered around her, and once more she tried to force herself to stay calm, to do whatever she had to do to save Alison.

Too late.

The blackness closed in, and she felt herself slipping away.

"Alison," she whispered. "I'm so sorry…so very sorry…."

CONRAD SWITCHED OUT the last of the lights in the laboratory. It had been a long, complicated day, and he could feel the exhaustion in his bones.

He needed sleep.

A good night's sleep, given the surgery he would perform tomorrow.

A few minutes later he gently opened Alison's bedroom door and peered inside.

A pink nightlight softly illuminated the girl's young, elastic skin. Her breathing was slow and regular, and he knew that her strong young body would easily withstand the many grueling hours of surgery ahead.

It would be worth it.

Worth it for her, and worth it for him.

Alison Shaw would be more beautiful than she had ever imagined she could be.

And finally, Margot would once again be his.

"Tomorrow, then, my love," he whispered.

Closing the door, Conrad Dunn went to bed.

ALISON FELT THE DIFFERENCE THE MOMENT SHE ENTERED THE DINING room the next morning. Somehow, it seemed larger and emptier than usual. Conrad sat at the head of the long table, and the morning sun was bright on the garden outside the French doors. But there was no sign of her mother, nor did Maria appear with her orange juice as she always had. Then, as she slipped into the chair at her usual place, she noticed that her mother's place wasn't set for breakfast.