John Saul - Faces of Fear

“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.

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—