John Saul - Faces of Fear

Conrad’s name and phone number glowed on the small screen.

After a moment’s hesitation, she answered. “Conrad?”

“Margot, where are you?”

“Palos Verdes.”

“P-V? What are you doing way out there?”

“Just…taking a day,” she said.

The pause before Conrad spoke again was a little too long, and when he finally did speak, she could hear the worry in his voice.

“Are you okay?”

Margot considered the question, and found the one answer that would not only ease his worry but was absolutely true as well: “I’m fine.” Another hesitation, but not nearly as long. “Should I worry about you?” Margot felt her lips curl into a wry smile. There was nothing for anybody to worry about. Not anymore. Not ever again. “Not at all, darling.” “Okay, then. I’ll be home at the usual time.”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Love you, too,” she said, then clicked off the phone before the emotion in her chest made it to her voice. “I love you so very, very much,” she whispered, holding the phone to her cheek, pressing it against the scars.

What had that woman in the restroom said? Something about snapping Conrad up if he ever came back on the market?

She dabbed a tissue at the moisture leaking from her damaged right eye, then opened her phone again and pressed the MEMO button.

“I’m so sorry, Conrad,” she said, her voice soft. “I can’t go on this way and I can’t subject you to my misery for the rest of your life. Please give Ruffles to Danielle — she’s never had anyone to love her. And you take good care of yourself. Never forget that I love you.” Checking off items on a well-rehearsed mental list, Margot phoned the police to report an abandoned, locked Lexus parked at Vanderlip Park with a dog inside. She rolled down the window far enough so Ruffles would have plenty of cool ocean air but not enough so he could wriggle out. She set her cell phone on the dashboard, then got out of the car, pressed the button on the key that would lock the doors, and dropped the keys back into the car, through the slightly opened window, to the floor behind the driver’s seat.

The ocean breeze lifted strands of her hair as she looked out to sea, walked to the bench overlooking the sea, and sat down on it.

A hundred or so feet below, the surf pounded at the base of the cliff, spray shooting high into the air as the waves exploded against the rocks of the shoreline.

A few hundred yards offshore, a sailboat was cruising southward, its foredeck crowded with people.

Beautiful people.

The world belonged to the beautiful people, and nobody understood that better than she did.

She rose to her feet and stepped to the edge of the precipice. She gazed down upon the rocks thrusting up from the ocean floor.

The rocks that would be her salvation.

If Conrad couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fix her face, the rocks would.

She stood a little straighter, closed her eyes, and raised her arms in embrace of her final act.

Then she took a deep breath and dove, headfirst — face-first — into oblivion.

MICHAEL SHAW SCANNED the news release about a group of disabled veterans opening a new restaurant for no more than three seconds before scrawling BR on the top with a red felt pen. The story would be perfect for Barry Rivers’s first week on the job — if he was the kind of reporter who wrote off human-interest stuff as fluff beneath their reportorial standards, better to find out about it right now. Dropping the release into his out-box, he picked up the next one from the stack that just seemed to keep on growing, no matter how often he attacked it.

“Michael!”

Tina Wong’s voice startled him as much as her sharp rap on the door. How was it possible that a woman who could produce perfectly modulated tones on the air always sounded like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard in real life? And why could she never — not once in the five years she’d worked for him — wait for even an acknowledgment of her presence before wading into his office, let alone an actual invitation? But here she was, already changing the video input on one of his monitors and stuffing a DVD into the player on his credenza.

“The Starbucks manager who was murdered in Encino?” she began. “The kid who opened the store and found the body shot some footage with his cell phone before the cops got there.” The screen that normally monitored CNN went blank, and a moment later, shaky, poorly lit images came on the screen: a bathroom mirror, a sink, some stall doors.

Then a woman’s body.

She lay sprawled on the floor, her clothes torn away, her torso ripped open from the groin almost to her throat.

The organs that should have been inside her body were now strewn across the floor around her, black blood pooling on the tiles of the floor and seeping into the grouted cracks between them.

Flies had already found the corpse, and seemed to be creeping everywhere.

The carnage was so complete that there was no way of telling what color the woman’s clothes might have been. The camera slowly panned the grisly scene. Whoever took the footage had even knelt down and shot under the wall of one of the stalls. For a moment Michael didn’t understand the point of the shot, but a second later saw it. There was an almost shapeless mass of bloody tissue lying near the base of the toilet, which he realized had once been the woman’s heart. Then the camera moved in on the young woman’s face. Impossibly, it was utterly unblemished, and unmarked by even a single spatter of blood.

“Jesus,” Michael Shaw whispered.

“The kid wants ten grand for the footage,” Tina Wong said, her voice betraying no emotion in response to the carnage on the television screen.

“Tina, I can’t authorize—”

“Of course you can,” she cut in. “And you not only can, you have to. If we don’t buy this, he’ll only sell it down the street. And we have”—she glanced her watch—“exactly seven minutes left to make up our minds.” Michael stretched his neck, buying a few seconds.

Did he want Risa to see this?

Worse, did he want Alison to see this?

No way.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” Tina said, reading Michael’s hesitation and punching the remote control to show the twenty-second clip again. “Who taught me that, Michael?” He sighed heavily, knowing the decision was already made, but still wishing he could turn his back on the carnage that riveted his eyes to the screen. “I know, I know.” He’d taught that phrase himself, not only to Tina, but to every young reporter who came to work for Channel 3.

“Well, this bleeds,” Tina said, setting the remote down on his desk. “This bleeds more than anything since Nicole Simpson, and I want it to lead the noon news. In fact, I want to break into regular programming with it in”—she checked her watch again—“ten minutes.” “We’re not interrupting programming for a murder in Encino,” he said.

“Noon news, then?” Tina countered, and Michael understood too late that her asking him to break into the schedule had been no more than a bargaining ploy.

He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Tina Wong had already come to the attention of every other station in Los Angeles, as well as the network headquarters in New York, and he’d been told more than once, and in no uncertain terms, to keep her happy. But in the long run he knew there was no way of keeping her happy. She would eventually make a career move, and everyone wanted it to be up the line to national, and not to a competing network.

She was valuable because she knew her stuff, worked eighteen hours a day, and both looked and sounded great on camera. Plus, she had instincts; she knew what made a story and how to present it. And, perhaps most important, she never missed an opportunity to ask the hard questions and keep at them until she got answers.