Faces of Fear

Her entire face was blooming with the spirit of Christ. Her hair was perfect, her smile attractive and welcoming.

But even her mother — who had taken the picture, for heaven’s sake! — had said that if she was going to attract a man, she shouldn’t post a picture of herself in a choir robe. Men wanted to see what she had to offer, and would be afraid she was hiding something beneath the flowing gown. But Natalie still thought it was the right picture; after all, she didn’t want to attract just any man. She wanted God to send her a good Christian who would appreciate both her and her faith.

She clicked twice more on the photo to enlarge it further.

The hint of lipstick that the choir director put on her lips just before the service actually looked good — not slutty at all. Her mother always said her lips were her best feature, even insisting that they looked just like those of some famous supermodel whose name Natalie couldn’t remember.

Margot something-or-other.

She had never actually bothered to find out if her mother was right, but even if she was, it hadn’t seemed to matter. It was starting to look like no matter what photo she put up on any matchmaking site, no man was ever going to want her.

She was almost thirty.

It was about time she stopped all the wishful thinking and accepted that spinsterhood was going to be her lot in life.

Steve rang the bell at the front door, waving to her as she buzzed him through, and Natalie barely managed to close the Web browser before he could see what she was doing. She briefed him on what little activity had taken place over the last eight hours, then finished her Diet Pepsi, swapped her stethoscope for her purse in her locker, and walked out into the mild Los Angeles night.

Ten minutes later she pulled her secondhand Toyota into the dark carport behind her apartment building, reminding herself for what had to be the fifth time to tell the manager about the burned-out bulb tomorrow morning, and knowing even as she reminded herself that by then she would have forgotten all about it.

Not that it mattered, really, since she’d chosen the apartment three years ago because it was in the middle of the safest neighborhood in Studio City, and still was.

She got out of the car, grabbed the tote bag full of clothing that she was gathering from deceased residents to donate to the poor, and locked the car behind her.

But as she took a step toward the doorway leading to the stairwell up to her second-story apartment, icy tendrils of fear crawled up the back of her neck.

Something was wrong.

She was not alone.

“Hello?” she called out, her voice sounding oddly hollow as it echoed off the concrete walls of the carport.

There was no answer, and she told herself to stop being an idiot by letting her imagination run away with her.

Still, the carport didn’t feel right, and the goose bumps on her skin weren’t going away.

Refusing to give in to her fear and glance over her shoulder, she made herself walk toward the stairwell and the safety of her little studio apartment, where tonight’s scripture lesson on tape was waiting for her.

She reached out to pull open the door between her and the bright light of the stairwell, but just before her fingers closed on the doorknob, an arm snaked out of the darkness, slid around her throat, and jerked her backward.

The bag of clothing flew from her hand, and she watched it arc across the carport as if in slow motion. And then she was flailing against her assailant, but before she could escape the imprisoning arm, she lost her balance and sank to the floor.

A knee pressed down on her right arm.

“Please,” Natalie gasped, her voice barely even a whisper. “Take whatever you want. Just please don’t hurt me.”

Then she felt the point of a knife at her throat, and knew she was about to die.

Die right here in her own carport, only a few feet from the safety of the building.

She tried to think of the peace of death and the wonder of meeting Jesus, but somehow no prayers came to her mind.

All she could do was listen to her own heart hammering inside her chest.

Then, out of the darkness and through her terror, she heard a voice.

“All I want,” it said, “are your lips.”

My lips, she thought. Why would someone want my—

Before she could finish the thought, the knife sliced across her throat, and as blood spurted from her aorta and she felt her life draining away, rough fingers grabbed her lips and she felt the knife sink into her flesh once more.

Finally the prayers she wanted to utter came back to her, and she tried to move her lips to form the words.

But her lips were gone, and the words were lost in the blood gushing from her neck and then—

— and then it didn’t matter, for Natalie Owen could pray no more.

18

TINA WONG FINISHED CLIPPING THE LAVALIERE MICROPHONE TO THE collar of Jillian Oglesby’s blouse and asked her to say a few words so Pete Biner could get a volume level, then picked up the glass of water that Jillian’s mother had provided — complete with an obviously hand-crocheted doily to protect the bird’s-eye maple coffee table from being stained — and went over her notes for the interview.

“I can’t really tell you anything,” Jillian said in a soft, apologetic voice that Tina knew would tug at the heartstrings of everyone who heard it, let alone saw the pictures of Jillian’s ruined face. “I didn’t see anybody. He hit me from behind, and when I woke up, I was already in the hospital.”

“That’s okay,” Tina said, searching for a way to turn this into something more than just video footage of a girl with scars where her eyebrows had once been, and a mother who was doing little more than weeping and wringing her hands. She had already had to talk the girl into washing off the makeup she’d used in a monumentally unsuccessful attempt to hide the skin graft scars, penciling in a pair of eyebrows that were neither even nor symmetrical. Now Jillian at least looked as pathetic as she sounded, but Tina knew that the big trick was to find a way to stretch the interview out long enough for the audience to truly appreciate the carnage she was displaying for them.

“We’re good, Tina,” Pete said.

“Okay! Showtime!” Tina smiled brightly at Jillian. “Deep breath.”

As Jillian self-consciously filled her lungs with a big breath — and her mother wiped perspiration from her own upper lip, ignoring the beads of sweat covering Jillian’s face — Tina’s cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out.

Michael Shaw. She flipped the phone open. “Yes?”

“There’s been another murder,” Michael said, wasting no words at all. “This time he took the girl’s lips.”

The inventory clicked through Tina’s mind like cards on a Rolodex: lips, ears, eyebrows, breasts. “What about the glands?” she asked, forcing herself not to look at either Jillian Oglesby or her mother.

“Given the carnage, it looks like he took all the usual stuff.”

Tina glanced inquiringly at Pete, and when she spoke, her question was as much for the cameraman as her boss. “Can we go live right now?”

Pete nodded, having already set up a satellite link to connect the truck parked in the Oglesby driveway to the studio in Los Angeles.