Skin Deep

90

“Aaron Monks. The cosmetic surgeon. I don’t know what I’ve got, but I want to talk to him.”

“Where are you?” Dacey asked.

“On my way to my wife’s.”

“I’ll call for backup.”

“Let me check first. What you can do is find his receptionist. I think she’s a Filipina woman with a long last name beginning with m. Also, I need to know who manages the building his clinic is in.”

“No problem, but I think you might want to call Chief Reardon.”

It was Saturday afternoon, and Reardon was probably playing golf somewhere.

Hi, Chief. Sorry to interrupt your game, but seems we got a serial killer who goes after redheads who all had plastic surgery and who look like my wife, who just got some work done by Dr. Aaron Monks, surgeon of the stars. Just want to break into his office and look around.

Steve made it to their house in less than fifteen minutes.

What bothered him was that the outside lights, including the driveway floods, were on. And it was two in the afternoon, which meant that either Dana had forgotten to turn them off when she went to bed last night, or she hadn’t come home yet. The other possibility was that she didn’t want to return to a dark house.

But what set off an alarm was that her car sat in the garage. Someone had again picked her up. Maybe the guy in the limo.

He let himself in through the back door. The kitchen lights were on, so was a lamp in the living room and family room. The only sound he could hear was the refrigerator. He called out her name. Nothing. A single wineglass sat on the counter by the sink. It had been rinsed out. A tiny puddle of water remained at the bottom. He picked it up and felt a shudder that took him back to that night in Terry Farina’s apartment.

He made a fast check of the downstairs rooms. No Dana, and all was in place. He bounded upstairs, calling her name again. Their bedroom was to the right at the top of the stairs. The door was open and the interior was dark. He said a little prayer that Dana was under the blankets.

The bed was flat and empty. He flicked on the lights, his fingers slimed with perspiration. He checked the guest bedroom, then their offices.

No Dana.

He dialed her cell phone. Once again he got her voice mail and left an urgent message to call him no matter what time.

“Shit,” he said aloud.

Her desk calendar lay open with no entries for the last several days, but last Wednesday she had scribbled “checkup.” He didn’t know if that was for a regular medical exam, her dentist, or Monks.

He went back into the master bedroom then to the bathroom. He flicked the switch, ducked his head in, then flicked it off, thinking about calling colleagues at Carleton High. He started out of the bedroom toward the stairway, when he stopped in his tracks. Like the afterimage of an old television set something lingered in his mind. He shot back inside and moved to her vanity.

On it sat a color photograph.

For a moment all he could feel was numbness as his brain processed what he was looking at. Then a bolt of horror shot through him. It was a computer portrait of Dana.

His first thought was of James Bowers. The forensic anthropologist.

But that didn’t make sense. He opened his briefcase and found the projection image Bowers had given him. It had the same digitalized flatness, the same Photoshop fabrication, except in the printout Dana had red hair.

Then it hit him.