by John Saul
“Okay, that’s it,” Lexie said, wiping the last of the butter from her lips. “I’m divorcing Dick and getting married again just so I can use Henrik.”
Risa laughed out loud, looked longingly at her tiny, unfinished salad, then covered it with her napkin and smiled at her best friend.
Lexie, she decided, was right.
Thanks to Henrik, everything was going to be perfect, and in the end even Alison would come around.
CONRAD DUNN GAZED at the marks he had drawn on Lucinda Rose Larson’s face. Lucinda Rose lay anesthetized on the operating table, draped with green sterile sheets, awaiting her annual tune-up. Today he was performing liposuction under her chin and along her jawline, a simple procedure, as well as taking a few tiny tucks on her eyelids. He’d drawn the dotted lines on her face earlier, when she was standing up, and now he tugged on the crepey skin around her eyes to gauge its elasticity. Although only fifty-seven, Lucinda Rose had inherited thin northern European skin, and too many sun-worshipping years on the Spanish Riviera had wrinkled her far beyond her years. An annual tune-up kept her at least comfortably fashionable among her peers, and Conrad was good enough that even though everyone always asked their friends who had done their work, no one ever thought Lucinda Rose had had anything done at all.
“Kate?” he asked, the rest of the question unnecessary.
“Vitals are stable,” the anesthesiologist replied. “She’s ready to go.”
“Music, please.”
Judy, who had been his scrub nurse long enough to know exactly what he wanted, turned on the MP3 player, and light strains of Stravinsky flowed through the room. Conrad felt himself relax into a mood of serene, utterly self-assured competency.
This was his world, his theater, and nobody anywhere was a better performer. In this room, Conrad Dunn truly was king of the world. “Scalpel,” he said, uttering the command, initiating the procedure that in the end would add a little more beauty to a far-too-ugly world.
Just the sound of the word sent a tingle of excitement through his body, but the hand he held out was rock steady.
Judy deftly and firmly placed a scalpel in his palm, and after a quick glance at the big clock on the wall, Conrad made the first cut along the black line above Lucinda Rose’s right eye.
“How are the wedding plans coming along?” Kate asked when she saw that Conrad had settled into his groove.
“Good,” he replied. “Risa had the final fitting on her dress today, in fact.”
“You’re a lucky man. She’ll make a beautiful bride.”
With tweezers, Conrad lifted a tiny strip of skin from Lucinda Rose’s eyelid and placed it on a square of gauze. “Not as beautiful as Margot.”
Startled, Kate and Judy glanced at each other.
“Don’t tell me you’re already planning to remodel her,” Kate said. “Can’t you at least wait until you’ve married her?”
Conrad chuckled. “Risa is just fine the way she is. She’s happy with her looks, and so am I. I have no surgical plans for Risa at all.” He matched the two sides of Lucinda Rose’s eyelid incision and began sewing them together with nearly invisible stitches. “I was just talking in the abstract. Even you have to admit that Risa doesn’t quite have either Margot’s perfect symmetry or her beauty.”
“Margot didn’t, either, when you first met her,” Kate retorted. “But it’s nice to know that even you have finally figured out that looks aren’t everything.”
“Still, they pay our bills,” Conrad reminded her. “And very handsomely, too.”
“I’m not arguing that point,” Kate said, scanning the monitors on the wall above Lucinda Rose’s head. “But look at Risa’s daughter. Alison’s a plain girl, but after talking with her for even a couple of minutes, you see what a lovely girl she is on the inside, and she becomes beautiful on the outside as well.”
Conrad tied off the last suture and blotted away the few drops of blood that leaked out. Satisfied, he repositioned himself to begin work on Lucinda Rose’s left eyelid. “It isn’t all about personality with Alison,” he said, receiving a clean scalpel from Judy. “She’s got a lot more than that. She has the bone structure.” He looked up at Kate. “The next time you see her, take a good look at her facial bones. The cheekbones, the jawline, even her chin.” He rested his hand on Lucinda Rose’s chest for a moment, visualizing Alison in his mind’s eye. He had studied her face for over a year now, and could picture it from every angle. He could even see the muscles under the skin and the bones beneath the muscle.
He knew the anatomy of Alison’s face as well as he’d known Margot’s.
Kate again peered over her mask at Judy, who waited with a gauze square. Judy gazed back at Kate with one raised eyebrow.
“Vitals stable,” Kate reported, hoping to shake Conrad out of the reverie that had fallen over him.
“Yes,” Conrad said. He began the second incision. “Classic bone structure. She’s a plastic surgeon’s dream.” His fingers tightened on the scalpel just a little too tightly and the blade slipped through a centimeter more skin than he had planned.
Judy gasped.
Conrad glared at her. “It’s nothing,” he said as he finished the incision, then placed the small slice of skin onto Judy’s waiting square of gauze. “I can fix anything.” He took the sharp needle and began the fine stitch work, then looked up at Kate and smiled, although he knew she could not see his smile behind his surgical mask. “I could even make Alison Shaw beautiful.”
8
SLUTTY.
That was the only word Kimberly Elmont could think of to describe the pictures Tiffany Barton had taken of her only this morning. But the poses had seemed like such a good idea when Tiffany was setting them up. Oh, well…
She scrolled slowly through the rest of the photos she had uploaded from her camera and tried to decide which ones to post on her new MySpace page, since the ones Tiff had taken obviously wouldn’t do. A couple of the best ones were from last Christmas, but they seemed too cutesy, and while she was interested in meeting some new people online, she didn’t want to give the wrong impression.
Not too cutesy, but not too slutty, either.
Then she spotted one that seemed to strike a pretty good balance. It was from this morning, but Tiffany had taken it before she started posing her. Kimberly blew the image up and looked at it carefully. It was a profile shot. Hair tucked behind her ear, she was looking down at a book, pencil in hand. It had a nice, sort of contemplative look to it, and she named it “Thinking” and uploaded it to MySpace. Then she chose another that Tiffany had taken, of her leaning against a tree. It was the least slutty of all the shots Tiffany had set up, but it showed her whole body, and anybody cruising MySpace could see she wasn’t an elephant or anything. She cropped out most of the background, saved it as “Tree hugging,” and uploaded it.
A soft tap on her door made Kimberly jump, but then her mother’s voice settled her down again.
“Honey?” The door opened. “Dinner’s almost ready,” Janice Elmont said, coming over to stand behind her daughter. “What are you doing?” She peered over Kimberly’s shoulder at her computer monitor.
“Just uploading some photos to my MySpace page.”
Janice laid her hands on Kimberly’s shoulders. “Do you really think that’s a good idea? You don’t know what kind of people are out there looking for a pretty fifteen-year-old girl like you.”
Kimberly shrugged her mother’s hands away. “Come on, Mom. I know what I’m doing—I’m not stupid.”
“Of course you’re not, honey, but anybody can be fooled. I just don’t think you should be doing this.”
“Everybody on the planet is on MySpace, Mom,” Kimberly said. “At least everybody I know. Besides, I never chat with anybody I don’t know.”
Janice shook her head. “Have you seen that television show where those men show up to have sex with girls even younger than you?”
Kimberly rolled her eyes. “We’ve all seen that show. I’m
smarter than that. Trust me a little bit, will you?”
Janice hesitated, but then leaned over and kissed her daughter on the top of the head. “Okay, I’ll trust you to set up the page. But I’ll also trust you to consult me before doing anything that you think may be even the slightest bit questionable. Okay?”
Kimberly nodded.
“Deal?” Janice said, wanting to hear her daughter agree out loud. “Kimberly?”
“Deal, Mom.”
“Okay, sweetheart. Dinner in twenty minutes. You can come set the table.”
“Okay. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Kimberly turned back to her computer as soon as her mother had left. Someone had already seen the photos she’d posted and left her a message. His name was Dean, and in the thumbnail photo, his face was mostly in shadow. Very mysterious.
She opened the mail.
HEY. SEE YOU’RE IN THE VALLEY. WHAT SCHOOL DO YOU GO TO? I’M IN BURBANK.
Burbank! Sally Ann, Kimberly’s sister’s best friend, used to date a guy from Burbank. He was very cool, with his own car.
She clicked on Dean’s name and his MySpace page opened up. He went to Burbank High. She was hoping for more photos of him, but he had only posted the one. His page looked a lot like hers: under construction, with very little information on it yet.
The little green flashing icon said that he was online right now.
Kimberly felt her heart beat faster. Should she talk to him? Right after she’d told her mother she would only talk to people she knew? But what was the harm? This was just another kid.
A kid from Burbank.
But what if it wasn’t a kid?
She’d know—of course she’d know. She’d know just by the way he wrote his messages. Adults could never sound like kids—they were way too old even to know what kids were thinking about, let alone how they talked to each other.
She clicked Instant Message on Dean’s page and typed: HEY, DEAN. IT’S KIMBERLY. I GO TO DAILY HIGH IN GLENDALE.
His message came back only a few seconds later.
KIMBERLY! HEY, GLENDALE ISN’T SO FAR AWAY. WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?
Kimberly adjusted her chair and thought for a few moments before responding. She had to be cool. What was the coolest music she could mention?
Within moments their messages were flying back and forth as quickly as if they were talking to each other on the telephone. Dean was funny and nice, and it wasn’t long before all thoughts of dinner and setting the table were far, far away.
The soft sound of the computer’s beep reached the listening ears first, then echoed through the room, quickly dying away. But even before the sound deserted the ears, the legs and feet swiveled the chair around so the eyes could see the monitor.
SEARCH COMPLETED
FIVE MATCHES FOUND
The heart beat faster.
A single finger clicked on the mouse, and a window opened on the screen. Five small photographs appeared.
Five women, all young.
The arm moved; the finger clicked twice on each of the first four pictures. One by one each was expanded to fill the screen.
One by one the eyes scrutinized the pictures.
One by one, the mind rejected them and the finger on the mouse reduced them to their original tiny size.
Perhaps the parameters were incorrect.
Then the finger clicked the mouse twice more and the last photograph expanded.
The skin tingled with excitement.
This last one looked exactly right. The photograph showed the face in profile.
Young. Fresh. And with a perfectly shaped ear.
The heart beat faster.
The finger tapped again, enlarging the photograph further, for an even closer examination and detailed, professional analysis.
Yes! This was the one.
The finger tapped faster, enlarging the photograph again and again until the ear filled the entire screen.
A fingertip reached out and gently traced the shell-like contours of the girl’s pale pink ear.
Even the girl’s lobe—the most variable part of the ear—was a perfect match.
Perfect…all of it perfect.
The tongue licked the parched lips.
The fingers went back to work on the mouse.
The photograph was reduced to its normal size. A few more twitches on the mouse, and its source became clear.
The program had located the photograph on a MySpace page.
Perfect.
The finger tapped on the mouse once more, and the arm moved slightly so the mouse highlighted a single word on the screen.
SAVE
The first piece of the puzzle had been found, but there was still more to be done—much more.
Now the fingers abandoned the mouse to fly over the keyboard.
A new set of instructions was entered into the search program.
Centimeters, millimeters, geometric ratios, color scale.
The fingers moved back to the mouse.
The arm moved the mouse itself so the arrow on the screen hovered over a button at the bottom of the screen:
EXECUTE SEARCH
The finger clicked one last time, sending the program’s spider out to crawl the World Wide Web, searching inexorably for a perfect match to the precise parameters requested.
It would take time, but when the spider had found its prey, it would beep an alert.
For now, though, there were other things to do.
Preparations to be made.
9
ALISON SHAW SAT VERY STILL AND TRIED TO BE PATIENT AS SCOTT stroked shadow onto her eyelids. He had turned her away from the mirror while he worked on her makeup, but not being able to see herself hadn’t kept her from taking in every detail of the suite she was in at the Hotel Bel-Air. The bellman had told her it was the Princess Grace suite, where Grace Kelly herself had stayed whenever she was in Los Angeles after she moved to Monaco. It had two bedrooms flanking a large living room with a fireplace that was itself flanked by two pairs of French doors that opened onto a large walled garden with a fountain.
They were at the end of the hotel closest to Sunset Boulevard. She couldn’t remember how many courtyards they’d walked through yesterday afternoon before they finally came to the door to this suite. She and her mother had stayed here last night, and tonight her father and Scott would occupy the master bedroom, since her mother and Conrad Dunn were flying to Paris right after the reception. Now, as Scott worked on her face, Alison tried to commit every detail of the suite to memory so she could tell her friends about it on Monday morning.
But how long was her makeup going to take? And what on earth was Scott doing to her? With every new pencil, brush, or pot of color he used, her fears increased. All she ever used was maybe a stroke of blush on her cheeks and a little lip gloss, and even that only occasionally—most of the time she didn’t bother with anything at all. But Scott had started at least an hour ago with all kinds of things she sort of knew about but had never tried before.
Exfoliating, moisturizing, applying a foundation…
And even though he’d kept up a running commentary about what he was doing, all she could think was that she would end up looking like some kind of gargoyle.
And for her mother’s wedding, for God’s sake!
As if reading her mind, her father, who was lounging in a chair watching Scott work, winked at her. “Stop worrying about what he’s doing and just be glad you don’t have to pay him. Last time he worked on Sandra Bullock, he got five hundred an hour, plus expenses.”
“Which were at least twice my fees,” Scott said through the handle of the brush he was clenching between his teeth.
Alison tried to focus her eyes on him and failed. “Really?”
“Actually, she was easy,” Scott went on, taking the brush out of his mouth and eyeing her carefully. “You’d be surprised how many hours I’ve spent right here in this suite, turning some very strange-looking women into the be
auties you see in the magazines.” He stood back to gauge the overall effect of his work. “I even worked on Clint Eastwood.”
“He wears makeup?” Alison gasped.
“For a movie!” Scott retorted. “All that blood and all those scars and wounds don’t come naturally, you know. And just in case you’re still worrying, I’m doing my best not to put any scars on you.”
“Relax, honey,” Michael said. “Scott’s been doing this for a lot of years.”
“More years than I’ll admit in public,” Scott said. “Now close your eyes.”
Alison took a deep breath, praying she wouldn’t look like she was wearing stage makeup. “Just…just don’t overdo it,” she said as he touched her eyelashes with the brush.
“Overdo it?” Scott said, standing back to appraise her one last time. “This is Hollywood, honey. Nobody holds back on anything.” He rummaged through the suitcase that served as his makeup kit and came up with an eyebrow pencil. “Besides, my job is to make people look how they want to look, and I always know what they want a lot better than they do. More to the point, I also know how to do it so it doesn’t look like anyone’s wearing anything at all.” He sharpened the pencil and stroked it lightly across her eyebrows. “You need to have your brows arched, Alison. Not much—just a little. I’ll do it another time. We can’t have pluck marks today.”
“I like my eyebrows,” she protested.
“Everybody likes caterpillars,” Scott said, “but they like butterflies better. And wait until you meet the kids at Wilson Academy. You’ll want to know every trick I can teach you.” He brushed her eyebrows to blend the strokes. “If they’re anything like their mothers—and you can bet they are—half of those girls have already had work done by your new stepfather, and the other half are planning some.” He looked her square in the eyes. “All you have to do is keep in mind that those girls are as phony on the inside as they are on the outside, and you’ll be fine.”