Faces of Fear

skin and muscle from just below her breastbone to just above her groin. Her blood was flowing freely now, and she knew that soon — but not soon enough — she would fall into the unconsciousness that would come just before death. So here, tonight, in the emptiness of her own home, Conrad was doing what she knew she would not have found the strength to do herself.

Now she felt his hands plunging into her, tearing at her, pulling at her guts, ripping at her organs.

“They won’t even recognize you,” Conrad was saying now, but finally his voice was fading, seeming to come from somewhere far away. And the pain, the searing, unbearable torture as he ripped at every nerve in her body, was fading, too. “All they’ll find is whatever I choose to leave. Scraps, Daniel. That’s all that will be left — all you ever were is what I made you, and now I’m taking it all back.”

The last of the pain was dying away now, and suddenly she felt herself rising out of the body she had hated for so long, the body she had tried to mold, tried to change to fit the spirit she knew was truly hers. Oddly, the ears still seemed to work, and the eyes as well. Yet as she watched Conrad Dunn rip the glands from her body, tear out her adrenals and her thymus, and knowing exactly the purpose to which he was going to put those precious organs, she no longer felt any pain at all.

And now the sound of Conrad’s voice was dying away, and so, too, was the carnage that lay on the floor below her. She was floating now, floating upward and away. Away from the body she’d always hated, from the house that had always felt empty, from the life that had never felt right.

Without knowing it, Conrad Dunn was finally giving her peace….

CONRAD DUNN GAZED down into Danielle DeLorian’s eyes and knew it was over. There was a blankness in them that told him she was dead, and the flow of blood that had gushed from her vessels only a moment ago had already slowed to a mere trickle.

Yet in his mind he could still hear her voice, whispering to him as if she were right behind him. They were never your secrets, Conrad. You remember, don’t you? I made the compounds that made it all possible. I taught you how to make everything perfect. Smarter than you, Danielle’s voice finally whispered. I always was, and I always will be.

Tearing the last scraps of useful tissue from the corpse on the floor, Conrad Dunn closed his ears to the terrible words.

Danielle was gone and would never be back, and had never been his greatest creation at all.

His greatest creation had been Margot.

And Margot, he knew, would be back.

27

RISA HAD PICKED UP THE REMOTE CONTROL FIVE TIMES TO SHUT OFF Tina Wong’s special on what she’d dubbed “The Frankenstein Killer,” and five times she put it aside, and felt a small wave of shame each time she set the remote down. Now, as grotesque images of Molly Roberts filled the screen — some of them so blurry they were barely recognizable as having once been a human being, but others so vivid that she had to turn her head away — she knew she wasn’t going to turn the TV off.

She was going to watch it through to the end.

Then maybe she’d call Michael and ask him why he’d agreed to put the show on at all. Or maybe she wouldn’t, since she already knew why he’d okayed it — ratings. And the ratings, she was sure, would be just as high as Michael expected.

The section on Molly Roberts came to an end a few moments later, and Tina Wong, her expression a careful mask of concern for the victims that didn’t quite succeed in concealing the triumphant gleam in her eyes, was now recapping the cases one by one, giving her an opportunity to show the worst of the carnage yet one more time. Risa pulled a light silk throw over her knees to quell the chill she felt, and drank the last of her wine.

And then, in the last minutes of the show, an oval-shaped frame containing nothing inside appeared on the screen. “What, then, is the Frankenstein Killer trying to make?” Tina Wong asked. “Why is he selecting the women he’s chosen? What is it they have in common? Certainly not their age or their looks. The youngest was in high school when he attacked, the oldest in her mid-thirties. Physically, they were all different, but he took certain things from all of them. The adrenal and thymus glands. All of them were mutilated, but from each he also took a facial feature. Is he is collecting parts to construct a new face? This reporter, at least, believes that that is exactly what he is doing. But what does this face look like? Who is the woman he is trying to put together? Let’s see what she looks like.” As Tina Wong continued to talk, naming each of the victims and identifying which of their features had been taken, each feature appeared in the oval, and a face began to emerge.

And as the face took shape, Risa found herself leaning forward, her head cocked as she gazed at the image on the screen.

“Who is she?” Tina Wong asked as the last of the features appeared and some kind of computer animation filled in eyes and melded all the features smoothly together into a face. “Or should I ask, ‘Who was she?’ because it is highly likely that the woman he is trying to re-create is dead. So, then, who was she? His wife? His sister? Perhaps his mother as he remembers her from his boyhood?” Hair now appeared on the face that filled the screen, framing the features, but arranged so none of them, including the ears, was obscured.

And finally the face was finished. It was recognizable as human, but there was something wrong with it — it hardly seemed a face at all. Though the features struck Risa as individually quite nice, the whole seemed oddly to be less than the sum of the parts. The face had no personality; it was the kind of face you’d never see in a crowd and would never be able to describe later. And yet, as Tina Wong began exhorting her viewers to try to identify the woman whose face had been constructed out of the features torn from other women’s faces, Risa had the odd sensation that she had indeed seen the face before.

But where?

“Who is the woman that this modern-day Frankenstein is trying to create?” Tina asked as the camera cut to her sitting on a stool in front of a wall-sized rendition of the assembled face. “If you know who this woman might be — if you recognize her as someone you once knew — call the police. Maybe together we can stop this monster before he kills again. But if we don’t stop him, we know he will kill again. Maybe someone in your neighborhood. Maybe someone in your family.” She fell silent for a perfectly timed moment, then: “Maybe even you. I’m Tina Wong. Thank you for watching.”

A computer commercial came on, and Risa finally clicked off the television, but the memory of the strange composite face stayed with her. The face had reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on who it might be.

Maybe an old client?

But already the image was fading from her mind. Not that it mattered, really. Those artists’ renditions never wound up looking like the person anyway, and there had been nothing particularly memorable about this face to begin with.

She folded up the throw and laid it across the arm of the sofa, took her empty wineglass to the kitchen, then headed upstairs, turning most of the lights out as she went, but leaving enough on to offer Conrad a welcome when he came home.

Alison’s light was still on, so she knocked softly on the bedroom door and went in.

Alison was at her desk, textbooks open in front of her, her fingers flying over her computer keyboard.

“Hi, honey. It’s getting late.”

“I know,” Alison said. “I’m almost finished.” She turned in her chair to face her mother, and Risa was relieved to see that her daughter didn’t look nearly as depressed as she had at dinner. “So how was Tina’s special?”

“Actually, it was even worse than I expected. The charming Ms. Wong went way overboard, but I’m sure she’ll get the ratings she was looking for. I suspect your father can hardly wait for her to move on.”

“So what was the worst part of it?” Alison asked.

Risa’s brows arched. “Probably Tina’s hypothesis that whoever’s killing all these women is trying to re-create someone by using other women’s body parts.”