Faces of Fear

Almost, but not quite.

“We can neither confirm or deny—” McCoy began, but Sands interrupted him.

“We can give you the answer to that one,” he said, the last trace of sarcasm vanishing from his voice. “What have you got?”

“If she was missing her thymus and adrenals, the same thing happened last year to Caroline Fisher.”

She waited for a reaction from either cop but got none.

“Hello?” Tina said. “Is anybody home? Do I have to spell it out? Does the term ‘serial killer’ mean anything to you two?”

“There isn’t any reason—” McCoy began, but now it was Tina who cut him off.

“Come on,” she snapped. “Obviously you hadn’t connected Caroline Fisher and Kimberly Elmont yet, so at least let me have some credit for giving you that.”

Evan Sands eyed her speculatively. “Which means you’ve got more?”

Tina weighed her options. “I do. But unless Fisher and Elmont are connected, the rest of what I have doesn’t pertain to Elmont. So make up your minds.”

Sands picked up a doughnut and bit into it. “Okay,” he finally said after he’d munched through half the sticky ring of pastry. “According to the coroner, those glands were gone. So you’re right — unless we have a copycat —”

“Copycats don’t wait a year,” Tina Wong cut in. “And there are two others, fifteen years ago.” As McCoy and Sands stared at her, she snapped open the locks on her briefcase and brought out two sheets of paper, laying them on the table. “One in San Diego and one in San Jose. Girls slashed open and their adrenals and thymuses taken. Same M.O., same killer, right?”

“Holy Christ,” Sands breathed, picking up the summary of the San Diego case and starting to scan it as Tina Wong kept talking.

“He’s a serial killer, he’s back, and he’s in Los Angeles now,” the newswoman said. “So how much of Elmont can I report on?”

“Similarities,” Sands said slowly, passing the San Diego report to McCoy in exchange for the one from San Jose. “Don’t give the details about the glands — we’d just as soon not tip too much to the wackos who are going to start ’fessing up the minute they hear it’s a serial.” He looked up at Tina. “And you didn’t hear anything from me. Take all the credit for seeing the similarities yourself.”

Tina snapped her briefcase shut and picked it up from the table. “Thank you, gentlemen — a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Not so fast,” McCoy said, holding up the San Diego report. “What are you planning to do with this stuff?”

Tina smiled sweetly. “The public has a right to know,” she said. Then she opened the door and walked out, leaving them still reading the reports.

If she hurried, she could film her noon update and still be in San Diego before lunch.

ALISON SHAW FOUND her way back to her locker after the final hour of the day, her head still spinning from the differences between Santa Monica High and the Wilson Academy. Aside from the fact that the academy was on a small campus nestled in the hills above Westwood Village, and the buildings looked more like mansions than school buildings, the classes were far smaller than any she’d been in before, and the dining hall was more like a restaurant than a cafeteria. Even the lockers were different — built carefully into the walls, each with a mahogany door with a student’s name engraved on a small brass plaque. Hers was on the first floor of the Science Building, and now, as she stood staring at all her new textbooks, she wondered if she could leave any of them in her locker overnight.

“Mrs. Morgan is always the priority,” someone behind her said.

Alison turned and saw Tasha Rudd and Dawn Masin, the two girls she remembered from her mother’s wedding.

“Literature,” Alison groaned.

“Don’t you just hate it?” Tasha asked. “You have to actually read the material, and God help you if you’re late with a paper.”

Dawn Masin nodded. “She’s the worst.”

“Okay, at least I know,” Alison said, and pulled the heavy literature book off the stack.

“So you made it through your first day,” Tasha said as Alison added her history book to her backpack.

“Well, I survived it, anyway,” she replied. “In fact, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Then you should celebrate,” Dawn said. “We’re all going up to Tasha’s. Come with us.”

Alison hesitated — neither of the girls had been this friendly at the wedding; in fact, they hadn’t spent more than five minutes with her. So why were they inviting her along now?

“You need to meet some people,” Tasha said, reading the uncertainty in her expression. “Come with us. It’ll be fun.”

“And if you don’t come, my dad will think we didn’t invite you, and I’ll be grounded for a week,” Dawn added.

Alison gaped at her. “Your father told you to invite me?”

Dawn nodded. “But it’s no big deal — if we didn’t want you to come, we would have just lied to our folks. Plus which, Trip says you’re really good in trigonometry, and Tasha and I can’t do it at all, so we’re going to need you to help us. Okay?”

Alison found herself laughing. “Are you always this honest?”

“You’ll get used to it,” Tasha said as Dawn only looked vaguely puzzled by the question. “So come on, okay?

“I need to check with my mom,” she said, still uncertain whether they wanted her to come with them.

“So call her,” Tasha countered. “We’ll wait.”

Two minutes later Alison closed her phone, added her trigonometry book to the two others already in her backpack, then closed her locker. “Let’s go!”

Five minutes later Tasha beeped open her silver BMW roadster, which was parked between a Mercedes coupe and a Saab convertible.

“This is yours?” Alison asked, her eyes taking in the row of glittering automobiles as she pulled open the passenger door of the BMW. She knew one person at Santa Monica High who had a BMW, but it was five years old, and most of the students’ cars had been at least ten. Nor were most of them Mercedes and Saabs and BMWs.

“Got it for my birthday,” Tasha said. She put the car in gear and led a caravan of three other cars full of kids up Roscomare Road to Mulholland Drive, where she turned right and wound her way along the crest of the hills for a mile before turning right through a pair of electric gates and down a steep driveway to a large parking area and garage in front of her family’s house overlooking Stone Canyon.

Tasha parked in the garage, the other cars parked behind her, and then almost a dozen kids piled out, streaming around the house itself and down the stairs to the pool house.

“Let’s go dump our stuff in my room,” Tasha said, leading Alison to the front door. “Then we’ll find you a suit in the cabana.

Two boys — Alison thought they were Cooper Ames and Budge Phelps — were already splashing in the pool by the time she and Tasha arrived at the huge terrace containing not only the pool and a “cabana” that was bigger than the house in Santa Monica had been, but an outdoor kitchen around a huge barbecue.

When they went into the dressing area in the cabana, half a dozen naked girls were rummaging in the drawers full of different size swimsuits. Suddenly, she felt like she was back in gym class.

“Here,” Tasha said, pulling a purple striped two-piece suit out of a drawer and handing it to her. “This should fit you.”

Tasha casually stripped off her clothes and got into her own pink bikini with white piping, then adjusted it in front of the mirror.

Alison, self-conscious, hesitated, but finally took off her own clothes and pulled the bathing suit on. At least it wasn’t a full bikini, and the bottom sort of fit — it was a bit tighter than anything she’d ever worn before, and her thighs and waist bulged a bit over the spandex.

She told herself it wasn’t too bad.