A howl of fury and frustration rose in his throat. Without thinking, he seized the dressing screen, lifted it from the floor and hurled it at the image of Margot. As it shattered both the glass over the picture and the vanity mirror below, he saw what the screen had hidden.
A door.
He tried the knob.
Locked.
With both fists, he pounded on the door and howled his daughter’s name.
The door held, solid.
He looked around for something he could use to break it down, to burst through it, to smash it.
But there was nothing. Nothing but a flimsy floor lamp and an equally fragile clothes rack.
Then he remembered something.
Something he’d noticed but hadn’t thought about while searching in the vanity. He went back to the vanity, opened Margot Dunn’s jewelry box and began pulling out its drawers.
And there, in the bottom one, he found it.
A key.
A perfectly nondescript, ordinary key.
Could it really be this simple?
He picked it up, the spent adrenaline in his system making his hand tremble.
His heart racing, his breath ragged, he tried to slip the key into the lock.
It fit.
Not breathing at all now, he tried to twist the key.
It turned.
Suddenly wary, Michael paused to take a deep breath, then opened the door.
A dark vestibule lay before him, with another door beyond.
The second door was not locked.
A moment later he stood in Conrad Dunn’s laboratory, gazing through a glass wall at the masked figure of Conrad himself.
He was leaning over Alison, and he held a scalpel in his hand.
• • •
“I DON’T
“And what exactly is your relationship to Dr. Dunn?” the impersonal voice of the 911 operator asked.
Scott swore under his breath as the stream of traffic ahead of him on the San Diego Freeway slowed to a near stop. He was still two miles from the Skirball Center exit and now he was going to have to waste time trying to explain—
He swore out loud as a black Mercedes cut in front of him, then decided that breaking two laws wasn’t any worse than breaking one, and dropped over to the shoulder of the freeway. “Can’t you just send someone up there?” he pleaded with the operator as he drove on the shoulder. “Surely there’s got to be some way for you to get Conrad Dunn’s home address!”
“This is an emergency line, sir,” the operator explained with a patience that was starting to grate on him. “If you can’t give us any specifics at all, I can’t see how—”
“Fine!” Scott barked into the phone. “I’ll call you when I get there and know exactly what’s going on.” Snapping the phone shut and dropping it on the passenger seat, he pressed down on the accelerator and in less than a minute was pulling off the freeway.
And not a cop in sight, which he wasn’t sure was a blessing. At least an actual officer might have been willing to follow him up to Dunn’s place. Barely glancing to the left as Skirball Center Drive merged into Mulholland, he passed half a dozen cars before abruptly cutting back into the right lane to turn on Roscomare. Minutes later he pulled into the Dunn driveway and parked behind Michael’s car.
Though nothing looked terribly wrong, a chill still ran up his spine.
He retrieved his cell phone from the passenger seat, got out, and approached the front door.
He rang the bell a couple of times, then circled the house, searching for a way in.
On the back terrace, one of the French doors stood half open. He pushed it wide. “Michael?” he called out.
No answer. And the sound of his own voice had that oddly hollow note peculiar to empty houses.
“Anybody home?” he called out, stepping into the library. “Michael?”
Scott’s fingers tightened on the cell phone, and he opened it as he moved farther into the house.
“Michael! Risa! Alison!”
No answer.
He dialed 911 for the second time in less than fifteen minutes, and when the operator answered, knew he still couldn’t tell her exactly what the emergency was. But now at least he had an exact address, and a door that had been standing open at an apparently empty house.
A house Michael had been in fifteen minutes ago, and in front of which his car was still parked.
“Something is terribly wrong at the residence of Conrad Dunn,” he said, then gave the operator the exact address.
“What do you mean, ‘terribly wrong’?”
“I mean I got a call saying something was wrong and to call the police. Nobody would do anything because I didn’t have the address. Now I’m here and my friend is missing. His car is here, but he’s not. Nobody’s here. A door was left standing open and there’s no one here.”
“All right, sir,” the operator said calmly. “I’m sending a car right away. I don’t want you to do anything at all. Do not go into the house or anywhere else until the officers arrive, unless you are in immediate danger. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Scott said, but even as he folded his phone and dropped it into his pocket, he knew he wasn’t about to follow the woman’s orders. Michael was in trouble, and if there was anything he could do to help, he would do it.
And there was no telling when the cops would arrive.
Doing his best to make no sound whatsoever, Scott Lawrence made his way through the house.
Somewhere — somewhere not far away — Michael needed him.
Needed him right now.
He could feel it.
31
MICHAEL SHAW GAZED ABOUT HIM IN STUNNED CONFUSION. WHEREVER he’d thought the door behind the screen might lead, he’d never imagined the bizarre scene spread before him.
He was in a huge windowless room that was obviously underground.
It was some kind of laboratory, with stainless steel counters and sinks, all of it lit by the shadowless glare of the fluorescents that filled the entire ceiling. But even in the white brilliance of the lights, a large tank glowed a poisonous shade of green, as if it were filled with some kind of algae.
A pump was running steadily, and he could see some kind of gas being slowly forced through the green substance in the tank.
To the right, taking up nearly half the space in the laboratory, was what looked like an operating room, entirely enclosed by glass walls, with what looked like an airlock sealing off its interior from the rest of the laboratory.
Every wall of the operating room held a large flat-panel monitor, and both the monitors he could see
