area.
She opened the door and reached in to turn on the light. The room was exactly as it had been before — though Conrad had told her he would have it dismantled, he obviously hadn’t. And as she gazed around at the pictures of Margot Dunn, she realized that Alison had been right: the resemblance to the composite image Tina Wong had created was definitely there.
Risa moved slowly around the museum, looking closely at each of the old photographs of Conrad Dunn’s first wife, and with each image she studied, the truth of it became clearer. It wasn’t that the features stolen from each of the dead women were different from Margot’s counterparts, but that Margot’s face had been shaped differently, the framework of her cheekbones and jaw and upper skull all combining to support each of her features at the best angle to show them off and meld them into the perfect beauty that had made Margot famous.
She scanned the images one more time. Yes, the resemblance, at least feature by feature, was uncanny. But what did it mean?
She turned away from the last one, the huge blow-up of the
It had been displaying the dress Margot wore for the
Except she saw that it wasn’t quite naked; there was something pinned to it.
A photograph.
Another photo of Margot?
Risa moved closer, reached out, and pulled the eight-by-ten loose, holding it so the light from Margot’s vanity fell fully upon it.
And she froze.
The picture wasn’t of Margot Dunn at all.
It was of Alison.
And the dress Alison wore in it was the black Valentino that had hung on the mannequin the last time she’d been in this room.
The room seemed to swirl around her, and she sank onto the velvet vanity stool, the photograph of her daughter clutched in her hand.
CONRAD OPENED the closet door in the dressing room adjoining his private office and found a clean shirt, fresh from the laundry. The clean one would betray no evidence of his visit to Danielle, and the one he was wearing would soon be burned in the furnace below his house. He shook the clean shirt out and unbuttoned the collar, but before he could change into it, the cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Frowning, he glanced at the caller ID.
The silent alarm in the room where all of Margot’s things were gathered had been set off by the motion detector.
Abandoning the clean shirt, he left his office and took the private elevator to the underground garage of Le Chateau. But instead of getting in his car and driving through the twisting streets that would get him up to his home, he unlocked a nondescript door that appeared to hide nothing more than a storage closet and turned on the lights.
Behind a sliding door at the back of the closet, a series of recessed lights illuminated a steep stairway that led directly up through a tunnel from Le Chateau to the private lab connected to the basement of his house.
The lab that only he and Danielle DeLorian had ever used.
Taking the stairs two at a time, he unlocked the laboratory door, switched on the lights, and looked quickly around.
Everything was as it should be. The tanks were undisturbed, the organs he’d harvested from Danielle floating in the gel exactly as he’d left them before he’d gone back to his office to change his shirt.
He moved through the laboratory and paused at the door that opened directly into the room where Margot’s treasures were on display.
He could see a line of light beneath that door.
Sighing tiredly, knowing what he would have to do, he opened the door.
RISA’S HEAD SNAPPED UP when she heard the sound of a door opening from behind the dressing screen in the back corner.
“Hello, Risa,” Conrad said softly as he stepped into the room.
She rose from the vanity stool, instinctively trying to hide the photograph of Alison behind her back, her mind racing.
“Are you looking for something?” Conrad asked as he approached, then stopped and frowned. “What’s that behind your back?”
“N-Nothing,” Risa stammered, staring at the spatters of blood on his shirt.
Conrad’s gaze flicked to the mannequin, and a slight smile came over his lips. “Ah! The picture of Alison. Doesn’t she look lovely in that dress?”
He stepped closer, reaching out as if to take the picture from her, and Risa took a step back.
Conrad’s smile faded. “She’s going to be beautiful,” he said. “Did you know that her face has the exact same bone structure as Margot’s?”
And in an instant the truth — the unimaginable truth — exploded in Risa’s mind.
She turned toward the door, but it was too late. In two strides Conrad was next to her, his right arm curling around her neck. “I’m going to show you something, Risa,” he whispered in her ear. “Something wonderful.”
The pressure on her neck grew, and though she could still breathe, she felt herself starting to black out.
“But you have to behave,” Conrad whispered. “Do you understand?”
As her vision began to fail her, Risa managed a slight nod.
The pressure on her neck eased slightly, and Conrad began to move her toward the dressing screen.
Even if she could scream, she knew no one would hear her. The house was empty, except for Alison, who was two floors away.
Without a struggle, Risa let him walk her through the door that lay behind the screen.
28
THE PRESSURE ON RISA’S NECK EASED JUST ENOUGH THAT SHE DIDN’T black out, and Conrad’s grip on her arm kept her from falling even though her knees were buckling.
Having moved her through the door behind Margot’s changing screen, he slammed it shut behind him.
Looking around, it seemed she’d sunk into a nightmare.
Everywhere she looked there were tanks filled with a greenish fluid, and objects floating in them.
Grisly objects.
Objects that looked as if they had been cut away from human corpses.
“My laboratory,” she heard Conrad say. “This is where I do all the truly
“Alison’s surgery,” he said, still moving her through the laboratory and into the operating room, where motion-sensitive switches turned on blindingly bright overhead lights.
Risa blinked in the sudden glare, saw the operating table, an IV stand, monitors, instrument trays already
