Faces of Fear Read Online Free PDF Page B

overlooking the sea, and sat down on it.
    A hundred or so feet below, the surf pounded at the base of the cliff, spray shooting high into the air as the waves exploded against the rocks of the shoreline.
    A few hundred yards offshore, a sailboat was cruising southward, its foredeck crowded with people.
    Beautiful people.
    The world belonged to the beautiful people, and nobody understood that better than she did.
    She rose to her feet and stepped to the edge of the precipice. She gazed down upon the rocks thrusting up from the ocean floor.
    The rocks that would be her salvation.
    If Conrad couldn't, or wouldn't, fix her face, the rocks would.
    She stood a little straighter, closed her eyes, and raised her arms in embrace of her final act.
    Then she took a deep breath and dove, headfirst—face-first—into oblivion.
    * * *
    MICHAEL SHAW SCANNED the news release about a group of disabled veterans opening a new restaurant for no more than three seconds before scrawling BR on the top with a red felt pen. The story would be perfect for Barry Rivers's first week on the job—if he was the kind of reporter who wrote off human-interest stuff as fluff beneath their reportorial standards, better to find out about it right now. Dropping the release into his out-box, he picked up the next one from the stack that just seemed to keep on growing, no matter how often he attacked it.
    "Michael!"
    Tina Wong's voice startled him as much as her sharp rap on the door. How was it possible that a woman who could produce perfectly modulated tones on the air always sounded like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard in real life? And why could she never—not once in the five years she'd worked for him—wait for even an acknowledgment of her presence before wading into his office, let alone an actual invitation? But here she was, already changing the video input on one of his monitors and stuffing a DVD into the player on his credenza.
    "The Starbucks manager who was murdered in Encino?" she began. "The kid who opened the store and found the body shot some footage with his cell phone before the cops got there." The screen that normally monitored CNN went blank, and a moment later, shaky, poorly lit images came on the screen: a bathroom mirror, a sink, some stall doors.
    Then a woman's body.
    She lay sprawled on the floor, her clothes torn away, her torso ripped open from the groin almost to her throat.
    The organs that should have been inside her body were now strewn across the floor around her, black blood pooling on the tiles of the floor and seeping into the grouted cracks between them.
    Flies had already found the corpse, and seemed to be creeping everywhere.
    The carnage was so complete that there was no way of telling what color the woman's clothes might have been. The camera slowly panned the grisly scene. Whoever took the footage had even knelt down and shot under the wall of one of the stalls. For a moment Michael didn't understand the point of the shot, but a second later saw it. There was an almost shapeless mass of bloody tissue lying near the base of the toilet, which he realized had once been the woman's heart. Then the camera moved in on the young woman's face. Impossibly, it was utterly unblemished, and unmarked by even a single spatter of blood.
    "Jesus," Michael Shaw whispered.
    "The kid wants ten grand for the footage," Tina Wong said, her voice betraying no emotion in response to the carnage on the television screen.
    "Tina, I can't authorize—"
    "Of course you can," she cut in. "And you not only can, you have to. If we don't buy this, he'll only sell it down the street. And we have"—she glanced her watch—"exactly seven minutes left to make up our minds."
    Michael stretched his neck, buying a few seconds.
    Did he want Risa to see this?
    Worse, did he want Alison to see this?
    No way.
    "If it bleeds, it leads," Tina said, reading Michael's hesitation and punching the remote control to show the twenty-second clip again. "Who