Angel Face

by Suzanne Forster

  “You still don’t get it, do you? This is your life we’re talking about. She’s going to kill you.”

  “She’s going to try.” He didn’t like being pushed, but he wasn’t reckless. He fully intended to free up his schedule, although he hadn’t figured out how to explain that to his coworkers at the hospital, and he knew there would be questions. Perhaps he could say Dr. Inada’s death had been a wake-up call, as it had.

  Firestarter broke into his thoughts. “If you want to be around to open more chests, be sure you have someone ready to replace you at a moment’s notice.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “Good, and so will we. You’ll have protection around the clock, starting now.”

  “I want protection for my bird, too.”

  “Your what?”

  Birdy’s yellow head popped up and swiveled around to peer at Jordan. She seemed to know she was being discussed.

  “My cockatiel.” Jordan wasn’t happy about having to declare himself in front of her. She might get the idea that she mattered. Nevertheless, he intoned, “If anything happens to the bird, I come after you.”

  Jordan zeroed in on the disconnect button and cut the agent loose. Now it was Birdy’s turn. He offered the cockatiel her usual boarding platform, his fingers. He had returned her cage to its place when he cleaned up the living room, but now he chauffeured her over to her perch. He didn’t want her anywhere near that wrought-iron death trap.

  “Don’t go thinking anything has changed,” he informed her as he deposited her on one of the branches. “I still don’t like birds.”

  He wasn’t sure she bought it, but that couldn’t be helped. He left her there, blinking at him, and went about his business. He had a female serial killer to catch.

  ANGELA opened her eyes to a sound unlike anything she’d ever heard. Her throat was raw and her jaw was painfully clenched. Who was making that terrible sound? It was all around her, the rattles and gasps of death. Someone was choking, clawing at the air, and she was on the floor of her bedroom, stumbling around on her hands and knees. She groped in the darkness, unable to see where she was or what she was looking for.

  Where was he, the man who was screaming? She had to get to him before anyone else did, her and only her. There was no one else who could save him. No one else who could silence him.

  Another wail ripped through her, but nothing came out of her mouth. It was all inside, all locked up inside. Her whole body spasmed, trying to keep the screams from erupting. If they got out, it would all be over. Everything would be destroyed.

  She rocked back and forth, unable to do anything else. Her spine would break before it would let her move. Her fists were icy, bloodless knots.

  Something terrible had just happened, but she had no idea what it was.

  The words didn’t work anymore. Dr. Fremont had taken them away.

  The words didn’t work!

  “SHE ’S highly selective in her choice of victim, and her strikes are meticulously planned rather than random. The modus operandi and crime scene are consistent from strike to strike, in this case, a medical setting.”

  Thank God she doesn’t kill just anybody, Jordan thought, aware that his humor had gone from irony to gallows. Literally. It was the little things that counted when you were making up a death list.

  He used a yellow marker to highlight the next sentence in the profile he was reading. “She is highly organized, highly intelligent, obsessively ritualistic, and therefore, extremely dangerous.”

  He kept reading, looking for the lust murderer part. The packet the agent had left made one thing abundantly clear. They weren’t dealing with an amateur in Angel Face. Jordan had also gone to the medical school library and checked out everything they had on serial killers. He wasn’t comfortable relying solely on the information he’d been given and wanted to weigh it against the scientific literature, but he hadn’t found any discrepancies in her profile so far.

  According to the research, she was a mission-type killer, and in that regard, she was as rational and laser-focused as he was. His mission was to fix hearts, and hers was to rid the world of certain heart surgeons, it seemed. But why this one? He still didn’t understand that.

  The agent had said she was looking for a doctor with the courage to stand up to her foster father, but when she discovered a flaw in her paragon, she felt betrayed and turned on him. What flaw had she discovered in Jordan Carpenter? He had so many, but the agent had mentioned Cathy Crosby.

  Jordan felt sick at the thought. That was twenty years ago, he told himself. No serial killer would wait that long, even if revenge was her motive . . . unless she was a child at the time, and had no opportunity to act. Still, there was no indication in the file that Angel Face knew Cathy or had ever had anything to do with her.

  His mind wanted to go there and grapple with that link until he could dismiss it, but he wouldn’t let himself. There were too many other possibilities to be explored. Angel Face could be someone he’d operated on or the loved one of a patient he’d lost. Many of Jordan’s procedures were experimental, and he had lost patients, but that didn’t explain why she went after the other doctors.

  He picked up her eight-by-ten glossy to study it and felt his gray matter immediately begin to liquefy. Her eyes pulled like the tides. They were gentle and hypnotic, and when he was caught up in them, he couldn’t seem to hold on to anything else, including the fact that she was a cold-blooded killer.

  He would have to work on that.

  Eventually, her file recaptured his attention, and he continued reading. The lust murderer references he’d been looking for described the condition as manifesting differently in males and females. Men were more likely to engage in sadism, brutality, and mutilation, whereas women were more likely to become delusional and infatuated with their victims or believe their victims were in love with them. Both engaged heavily in fantasies, the most common of which was gaining total control over their victims before they disposed of them.

  It was the methods by which they gained control that had Jordan a little concerned. He had never performed certain exotic sexual acts at gunpoint—or any sexual acts, for that matter—and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  He glanced at her picture as he read, trying to fix in his mind that the innocent he was looking at had done the things he was reading. If there was evil in that fawnlike expression, and it seemed there had to be, he would spot it if he looked long enough.

  When he finished the dossier, he took a book from the pile he hadn’t read and leafed through it, Serial Killers, the Insatiable Passion. But eventually he gave up. Even the profiler admitted that Angel Face didn’t fall neatly into any of their categories. Most female serial killers were motivated by money, or much more rarely, by deviant sexual drives. This one had a mission to rid the world of evil doctors, and she was motivated partially by romantic obsession. There was another name for that—erotomania—but erotomaniacs didn’t normally kill their victims. They stalked them and occasionally threatened or killed the people who attempted to block them from the victims.

  Jordan stretched out on the couch and draped one leg over the back, his favorite veg position. He was still enmeshed in curiosity about her rituals, but he’d moved on to the woman herself. Her image was now fixed vividly and permanently in his head. He no longer seemed to have the option of hitting the Power button and letting the screen go dark, but he wouldn’t have wanted that right now, anyway. He had too many questions, all kinds of questions, some of them intimate. He wondered what her tastes were, what kinds of food she preferred and if she slept normal hours and did normal things.

  Did she brush her teeth before going to bed, say her prayers?

  Why would he think that? But he had the strangest feeling she did.

  It was probably natural that he was also wondering about the more personal rituals, too, the ones women performed when they were all alone that were mysteriously feminine and sensual. Did she pluck her eyebrows? Shave her legs? Were
there secret things she did that no one knew about, like use scent in private places? And the question that had begun to plague him above all others—

  Was she as soft and luminous in the dark as she was in the light?

  Of course, every once in a while he wondered why he didn’t despise her for the monstrous things she did.

  Yes, he would have to work on that. God, yes.

  The bird she destroyed was in a baggie in his freezer. He’d saved it for evidence, and when he decided whether or not he trusted Firestarter, maybe he would turn it over to him. Meanwhile, he would have to make periodic visits to the ice box to remind himself what heinous acts she was capable of.

  As for what she wanted with him, besides to kill him, he would ask her that when the opportunity presented itself. And if he had his way, that would be soon.

  * * *

  ANGELA briskly toweled off all evidence of the hot shower she’d just taken. Her skin was still pink and smarting from the brush she’d used to scrub her flesh, but she was calmer now and much more herself. At least daylight had brought with it some sense of control.

  She exchanged the wet towel for a dry one, which she tucked around her as she brushed her teeth and examined herself in the mirror. Her face was pale and pinched, her eyes shadowed with red. Maybe it was good that she had a busy day ahead of her. It would be like any other day, she’d decided, except that she would be continuing her field research instead of going into the lab.

  There were thirty subjects in her study, and she’d hoped to do three to four interviews a day, but already she’d run into problems. Peter had E-mailed the subjects’ addresses and their appointment times, which he’d had his assistant arrange. Angela was supposed to go to their homes to interview them, but two of the four subjects had already been no shows, and one of the others hadn’t followed the instructions. Twice he’d missed taking the brain cocktail that activated the sites under observation, which would probably invalidate his responses.

  Angela struggled with whether or not to report the situation to SmartTech. The last time she’d checked her voice mail, there’d been a message from Sammy, which she hadn’t returned because she didn’t want to be yanked off the interviews before she’d even started them. This was her chance to prove she could handle whatever they threw at her.

  She wanted to design and run her own studies one day, have them published in some of the scientific journals that she read by the stack—and make a difference. She also owed Peter a debt she could only pay back by doing well. He had faith in her, and she couldn’t disappoint him. That was her reason for pressing on—that and the fact that she was interviewing Alpha Ten today.

  CHAPTER 8

  “MS. Monahan, I’d like you to meet Dr. Benson, Teri Benson, one of our most gifted surgical residents. Dr. Benson is your woman, so to speak.”

  Judy Monahan gripped Teri’s hand and gave it a good shake. “Dr. Carpenter tells me you’re going to make me run like new, and I told him I’d rather have you than him, anyway. He’s pretty, and probably handy with a saw, but can he sew a decent satin stitch?”

  That brought some chuckles, which eased the tension in the small private room where Judy Monahan and Jordan had been discussing her choices. Jordan had advised Teri to stay close, just in case, and that had turned out to be the right call. His fiftyish patient was a successful mutual fund manager, a staunch believer in equal opportunity for women, and Jordan had just given her the chance to demonstrate her faith.

  They were dealing with a smart, gutsy woman in Judy Monahan, which both reassured Jordan and increased his concern that everything go well. Judy was having a bypass, and it felt as if his patient’s faith was at stake, alongwith her left anterior descending coronary artery. He stepped back to let Teri and Judy get acquainted, aware that it was still difficult to let go. He doubted it would get any easier over the next week or two, as he entrusted more of his caseload to other doctors’ care.

  Fortunately, they’d been able to reschedule Judy’s surgery for the following morning, and when Teri was finished chatting with her and answering her questions, Jordan suggested a cup of coffee in the surgeon’s lounge. He was starting to feel the fatigue of his chaotic night, and he wanted to talk with Teri and then catch a nap before the only surgery that day he hadn’t rescheduled, an intricate valve repair. Jordan’s plan was to turn his more routine procedures over to Teri as time went on, and it was important that he get a sense of how she would handle the pressure.

  They were barely out of Judy’s room when Teri stopped him. He sensed that she was trying to contain her excitement, but her hand was trembling as she touched his arm.

  “I don’t know what made you change your mind about me,” she said, “but I won’t let you down. This is so important to me. More than you can ever know. Thank you.” A fierce note crept into her voice. “Thank you.”

  Jordan couldn’t find an encouraging smile anywhere inside him, but maybe that was the exhaustion. He remembered the exhilaration of his first solo surgery. He’d been ecstatic at the news, but there had been fear, too, and that had turned out to be the leavening agent. Whether it was your first surgery or your thousandth, it was never about a career milestone. There was too much at risk.

  That was what he didn’t detect in Teri Benson, he realized. The one humbling emotion that told him she understood a beating heart did not mean success, it meant life. Fear. He didn’t detect any fear.

  * * *

  “BOMBS away!”

  Jordan dropped the book he was reading and sprang up from the couch. The crazy bird was off on a new jag. She piped up with that warning every time she had a nature call—and sometimes when she didn’t. Jordan was certain she did it just to watch him jump.

  “They’re building new munitions factories in Mexico as I speak.”

  The gestapo-like menace in his tone was totally wasted. Birdy had already turned her back on him and was sharpening her beak on her cuttlebone.

  At least she’d gotten his attention. Nothing else had been able to. He’d been immersed in serial killer lore since he got back from the hospital that morning. Other than a short nap before the valve repair, he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours.

  Jordan stretched while he was up and rolled his neck. He still couldn’t fathom what it was about this macabre situation that had him so transfixed. He’d been the object of media attention throughout his career. He’d even been stalked at one point by a hypochrondriacal patient. But nothing had ever dragged him away from his work for more than moments. Those things had been distractions, as this should be.

  So why was it haunting him so?

  Or was it her haunting him?

  He walked to the front door and opened it wide. The breeze that ruffled his storm-gray hair was fresh and damp from a spring shower he hadn’t even noticed. Steam rose from the black asphalt street in front of his house. It was mid-June, and the wet season should have long since passed southern California by, but maybe they were having a late spring this year. Jordan hadn’t noticed that, either. Somewhere along the way, saving lives had become more important than living life.

  He stared at the lilac bushes that bordered the old front porch. The clusters were drooping like lace gloves, heavy with white and lavender buds. Soon they would burst, and the perfume would stream up your nostrils with enough sweetness to make you physically dizzy. All a man wanted to do when that happened was pick a bunch and give them to a woman, hoping to make her dizzy, too.

  Jordan felt a clutch of physical longing at the thought. God.

  What the hell was going on?

  It generally soothed him to wander outside and feel part of the environment he’d grown up in. Things had changed very little over the years, except that he and the trees were a bit taller, and cable lines had replaced the television antennas. There was comfort in the continuity. But the familiar sights and sounds weren’t enough today.

  He was getting sucked into something he didn’t understand, and maybe that was the powerfu
l appeal of it. He wasn’t running this operation. He wasn’t doing the planning and orchestrating. He was the patient instead of the surgeon. Someone else was calling the shots.

  She was calling the shots. That was it. For once it wasn’t him playing the fiddle. It was her, and he either danced or he died. She had him doing things no one else ever had dared. No one.

  But not out of fear, out of simple wonderment.

  That was worth a moment of his time, yeah.

  That amazed him. It totally amazed him.

  Jordan was about to shut the door when a car pulled up and stopped across the street. Curious, he watched as a woman let herself out of the driver’s side. She visually checked the nearest house numbers, comparing them to a note she held. When she saw Jordan’s number, she tucked the paper in her coat pocket and started across the street.

  Jordan had felt a flash of recognition the moment he saw her. He closed the door and stepped back, his mind on fire. She hadn’t seen him, he was reasonably sure of that. And she didn’t know that he’d seen her—not only seen her, but would be ready for her. Swiftly he made his way through the house to the kitchen and slipped out the back door without a sound. Fortunately, there were six-foot laurel hedges between him and the nearest neighbors, so no one could spot him sneaking around to the front of his own home.

  The woman was climbing the front porch steps, completely unaware of him as he came around behind her. He watched her steal a look through his living room window, notice her own reflection, and rearrange the dark knit cloche that concealed her hair. Her black raincoat fell nearly to her ankles and had a hood reminiscent of a medieval cloak. Finally she rang the doorbell. She was carrying a briefcase and perhaps a clipboard, but that was as much as he could make out.

  Fortunately, the steps didn’t creak under his weight as he crept up them. He didn’t want to alert her or anyone else. Firestarter had promised protective surveillance, and if Jordan was being watched, he didn’t want some CIA shadow jumping out of the bushes now. He wanted to get this woman in the house, where he could deal with her.