Faces of Fear

Conrad pushed his newspaper aside. “Just the two of us,” he said. “Kind of nice, isn’t it?” Before she could answer, Conrad spoke again, only now he was looking at her the way he had when she was at Le Chateau, recovering from her surgery. “How are you feeling? No fever? Pain?”

“I’m fine,” she said. But instead of going back to his paper, Conrad continued to look at her, and suddenly she wanted to be out of the house.

Something, she was certain, wasn’t right.

She glanced at her watch.

“Oh, my God! I’m going to be late,” she said, though she still had almost thirty minutes before either her mother or Maria usually drove her down to school. She dug into her bowl of cereal, eating as fast as she could.

“Relax,” Conrad told her. “We have all the time in the world.”

Alison cast around in her mind for something — anything — she could use as an excuse to go to school early. “I have to go to cheerleader sign-ups this morning,” she said. “Maybe I’d better call Tasha and have her pick me up.”

“I’ll drive you,” Conrad replied. He reached for his coffee cup, then pulled his hand away. “Better not have any more of that,” he went on, his eyes fixing on Alison. “Big surgery today.”

“I’ll get my books,” she said, finishing the last of her own coffee. “Be back in a minute. Want me to meet you in the garage?”

Conrad hesitated, then smiled. “Perfect.”

Alison ran upstairs and threw her books into her backpack. She grabbed her cell phone and clipped it on, then looked in her closet for the green vest she always wore with her jeans and yellow silk tank top.

Not there.

Had Maria taken it to the cleaners?

No — her mom had borrowed it the other day when she went to lunch with Alexis.

Grabbing her backpack, she hurried down the hall to the master suite, went directly to her mother’s dressing room and began pulling open drawers until she found the vest. Pulling it on, she was about to turn off the light and head back downstairs when she saw her mother’s big Louis Vuitton bag sitting on the dresser next to the vanity.

The bag that her mother never left behind if she was working.

Never left behind, and never forgot.

Suddenly, the house seemed even emptier than when she’d gone into the dining room. A knot of fear began to tighten in her belly.

Where was her mother?

Maybe she’d just forgotten her bag.

But then when she opened the bag and looked inside, she found her mother’s cell phone, her appointment book, and her keys.

Without her keys, how had she gone? Could someone have picked her up? Alexis, maybe?

But her mother hadn’t said anything last night about an early appointment, and even if she’d had one, she would have come in this morning and said good-bye.

Wouldn’t she?

What was going on?

What had happened?

Something had happened — she was sure of it now.

Suddenly, every dark thought she’d ever had about Conrad came flooding back.

And she remembered the way he’d been looking at her.

And what he’d said:

Just the two of us…. We have all the time in the world.

What was happening? What was he up to?

Out!

She had to get out of the house and get away from Conrad, and she had to do it now.

But where could she go?

Her dad! All she had to do was call her dad and tell him to come and get her.

She turned away from the dressing room and started toward the bedroom door, fishing in her backpack. She was almost at the door when she found the phone, opened it, and speed-dialed her dad’s cell phone.

But before it even began to ring, Conrad Dunn was looming in the doorway, blocking her way.

“This isn’t the way I wanted this to go,” he said softly.

“Where’s Mom?” Alison demanded, her voice low. He moved toward her, and she backed away. “What did you do?” she yelled. “What did you do to my mother?”

Reacting to her shouts as if jolted by electricity, Conrad’s right arm shot out and his fingers closed on her wrist. He jerked her around, and the phone flew from her hand, hitting the wall four feet away and falling to the floor.

“I’ll show you,” he whispered, his voice so low and cold, the words filled her with a new terror.

“No!” she cried out, trying to jerk her arm loose from his grip. “Get away from me!”

But instead of letting go, Conrad’s arms enfolded her in a bear hug that felt as if it would squeeze the breath from her lungs, and no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t get even one of her hands loose to hit him or scratch him.

He pushed her against the wall, and one of his arms moved up around her neck and she felt the pressure of it.

“You need to go to sleep for a little while,” Conrad whispered in her ear. “And when you wake up, you’re going to be calm again, and I’m going to show you what’s going to happen, and you’re going to be beautiful. So beautiful…”

His words echoing in her mind, darkness swirled around the periphery of Alison’s vision, and with her terror becoming panic, she willingly gave herself over to the dark swirl.

• • •

MICHAEL SHAW WALKED OUT of the boardroom with his ears ringing, which told him his blood pressure was far past the point his doctor would call “critical.” Still, he wasn’t dead, nor was he about to take a fall for the legal team that had signed off on Tina’s special without anticipating the reaction from the TV audience. The reactions ranged from the threat of a lawsuit from a distant relative of one of the victims, who was claiming “severe trauma” due to her third cousin’s corpse being shown on television, to the threat of an injunction from the LAPD itself.

By the time the station’s owners had gathered in the boardroom, the finger-pointing had begun and the legal team, being lawyers, were already claiming they hadn’t signed off on exactly the show that had aired.

They claimed there had been changes made.

Michael finally called a ten-minute break, if for no other reason than to let his blood pressure settle down a little. He needed fresh air, fresh coffee — the hell with his blood pressure — and a fresh shot at getting Tina Wong herself into the boardroom. Maybe between them they could convince the suits that the ratings would be worth the trouble, and the increased advertising rates would more than make up for the cost of defending against the third cousin, whoever she was.

“Coffee, please, Jane,” he said as he passed his assistant’s desk on the way to his office.

“Scott is on line one for you.”

“Got it. And find Tina Wong and tell her to be here in ten minutes. Ten, not eleven. And I’m telling her, not asking her.”

He collapsed into the squeaky old chair that should have collapsed years ago but wouldn’t quite give up the ghost, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone. “Hi,” he said.

“How’s it going?”

He took another deep breath. “Don’t ask — it’s a nightmare around here. What’s up?”