Angel Face Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ANGEL FACE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Suzanne Forster

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0393-4

  A BERKLEY BOOK®

  Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  First edition (electronic): September 2001

  CHAPTER 1

  WHEN you had hands as good as Jordan Carpenter’s, you didn’t need much of anything else. What man wouldn’t want the ability to subdue a woman’s pulse to a gentle flutter with nothing more than a touch. Or to make her throat tremble like a kitten’s purr. It was said that he could whisper directly to the heart and make it do his bidding. And even if some of the claims were slight exaggerations, it was unquestionably true that he was gifted with “hand-mindedness.”

  People stood in line to experience his touch and to watch him perform. He wasn’t a masseur or a musician, although he’d always wanted to be the latter. His instruments were the scalpel and laser, and his stage the operating room. He was a mender of broken hearts, a master cardiothoracic surgeon, and the inventor of cutting-edge technology. And if his achievements hadn’t put him on the map, his gunmetal hair and high-contrast blue eyes probably would have.

  Carpenter had fallen into the hands of the mythmakers. But as flattering as their stories were, the notoriety had made him a target. Some of his colleagues were openly envious and suspicious of his medical advances and the media attention that dogged him. And fame hadn’t buffered him from the realities of everyday life, either. The eminent doctor had exactly the same problems every other bachelor did.

  His meddling kid sister, Penny, had dedicated herself to filling the void in his life by finding him the perfect woman, despite the fact that he was happy the way he was. His laundry was consistently tattletale gray, and the only thing he could cook was microwave popcorn. But none of those things compared to his immediate problem.

  The doctor was up to his eminent butt in bird shit.

  The yellow crested cockatiel his sister had foisted upon him was perched on the back of the kitchen chair where Jordan had thrown his workout clothes the night before. And even as the bird cocked her head at him and pretended total innocence, she lifted her tail.

  “No!” Jordan bellowed. There was already oyster white graffiti all over his favorite Lakers jersey. Feathers flew as he shooed the bird away and picked up the shirt with a look of abject male disgust.

  “This is sacrilege,” he whispered. “I could duct tape your scrawny ankles and use you as a feather duster. The SPCA wouldn’t touch me.”

  He grabbed a rag from the sink and worked at one of the spots but only succeeded in doubling its size. The shirt was totaled.

  “You know, they make explosives out of this stuff,” he informed the cockatiel as he stuffed his prized possession in the trash masher. “Maybe I should sell you to a munitions factory south of the border, huh? You’d like that?”

  Birdy was a fortieth birthday gift, another of his sister’s misguided attempts to find him the woman of his dreams. She’d rounded up Sunday school teachers, librarians, nurses—lots of nurses—and finally, in desperation, a twenty-something masseuse. So great was Penny’s frustration after a decade of strikeouts, that she’d walked in one day and plunked the cockatiel down, cage and all, on his kitchen table.

  “You need female companionship!” she’d cried softly.

  He’d accepted the bird under duress, foolishly hoping that Penny might leave him alone. But he’d never intended to keep Birdy. He even played around with the idea of setting her free, but when he opened the cage door, he discovered she couldn’t fly. Her wings had been clipped, and that realization had really gotten to him. He couldn’t imagine it. Poor damn thing needed someone to ferry her around.

  A year later, he and Birdy were still the odd couple, and he was still her main mode of transportation. She especially liked sitting on his head when he took a sauna in the bathroom he’d converted. Right now, she clearly wanted to hitch a ride on his person, even at the risk of duct taped ankles.

  “Get on,” he grumbled. She climbed aboard his index finger and began to sidestep her way up his arm, which brought a wince. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and sweatpants, and her claws were as sharp as fishhooks. Relief came when she reached his sleeve, got purchase in the soft, white cotton, and scuttled up onto his shoulder. She began immediately to nuzzle his hair and gently tap his skull with her beak.

  “I don’t have time for a house pet,” Jordan murmured, stroking her downy chest with his finger. “You know that, don’t you? And even if I did, I don’t like birds.”

  His insults sent Birdy into ecstasy. Or maybe it was his raspy morning voice. Something made her go nuts whenever he growled at her. He wished it worked that way with women . . . and maybe it did. He hadn’t growled at one in a long time.

  An open box of sunflower seeds sat atop the kitchen TV. Jordan picked it up on his way to the front room, where Birdy’s Victorian cage stood, door ajar, on a wrought-iron pedestal. Maybe if he put her to bed at night, she would stop redecorating the place. She wasn’t crazy about the cage, though. She preferred her bird station, a fake cedar log with leafy branches and a rope ladder made out of twigs that dropped to the floor. Another thoughtful gift from Penny. Somebody ought to get his little sister married. The woman had too much time on her hands.

  Jordan filled the bird’s basin and then took a quick look around for his pager, which was always disappearing. He swore Birdy dragged it off and hid it every chance she got, although he had yet to catch her at it. Last night he’d left it on the coffee table. Naturally, it wasn’t there now. He had a backup at the hospital, but it was a different number, and the staff complained bitterly about having to call both. Not that he blamed them. It was frustratingly inefficient.

  He shook the couch cushions and gave up when the pager didn’t fall out.

  Dawn was misting the east windows of the roomy old house where Jordan had grown up. His parents had turned the place over to him when they’d retired and moved to Florida, and Jordan had changed nothing, except t
o add the bird furniture and, with Birdy’s help, generally mess things up. Sunflower seeds littered the carpet like rice after a wedding, and a bottle of beer was still tilting on the edge of the coffee table, where Jordan had set it before passing out from exhaustion last night. Five surgeries back to back had taken their toll, but that was his schedule lately.

  Birdy cocked her head and peered at the front door with her alert gaze, making Jordan wonder if someone was outside. He hesitated, waiting for a knock. A shadow crossed one of the front windows. Someone was out there. He grabbed his blue work shirt from the couch and quietly approached the door. His gut told him to be cautious, that something was up, but maybe it was just the early hour.

  He didn’t notice the figure lurking near the lilac bushes when he first opened the door. The rambling front porch appeared to be empty, but the hammock creaked as if someone had been lying in it. More likely, someone had bumped it, he realized.

  Jordan’s gut tightened. “Who’s there?”

  A tall, shadow-thin man in a nondescript gray suit stepped forward. Jordan quickly sized him up as something under six feet, whereas Jordan was just over, at six one. The other man was lighter, too, probably by twenty to twenty-five pounds. What struck Jordan was the soft brown felt hat he wore. It was pulled down so that it concealed his eyes and exposed only one side of his face, which was severely burned. The taut, shiny skin was ridged with waves that disfigured everything in their wake, including what Jordan could see of his mouth and nose.

  Inside the house, Birdy was echoing Jordan’s question: “Who’s there?”

  Jordan registered that as a milestone. Birdy had never spoken before. He hadn’t taught her how on the theory that less was more when it came to cockatiels.

  “Is there someone inside?” the other man asked.

  It was an intrusion, and Jordan’s narrowing gaze must have reflected that. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  The other man was polite but firm. “May I suggest we go inside, Dr. Carpenter? I don’t think you want your neighbors to hear this conversation.”

  He’d already flipped open a badge holder that identified him as a CIA agent, and Jordan’s first thought was that someone had died. But then, why would the CIA be notifying him?

  “We’ll talk here.” Jordan didn’t want the man inside the house. He had a bad feeling about this, but he took the badge, which looked authentic enough. It was pressed with the agency seal and identified the agent as Edwin Truitt, an officer of the CIA. Truitt’s picture revealed little beyond the badly burned profile Jordan had already seen.

  “Is there someone else in there?”

  “I distinctly remember asking what you want.” It would have been natural to be intimidated. Most people had a problem with authority figures, especially law enforcement, but Jordan was something of a figure himself, and he knew it was mostly image, mostly bluff. Everybody postured, even the CIA.

  From down the street, the squeal of bike brakes and the heavy slap of rolled newsprint told Jordan the morning papers were being delivered. The neighborhood was beginning to stir. Normally, this was his favorite time of day, the beginning. But he had a hunch this one would be a beginning like no other.

  The agent returned his badge to the place inside his coat where agents kept badges. When the man looked up, Jordan tried to get a glimpse of the other side of his face, which didn’t appear to be burned. He seemed to be deliberately exposing the scars, and Jordan wondered if it was because he wanted to repulse and frighten people. Nice guy.

  “The agency has a problem, Dr. Carpenter. We need your help.”

  “The CIA needs my help?”

  The agent’s focus tightened. He drilled Jordan with a look. This isn’t a joke, he seemed to be saying. He’d come on bona fide CIA business, a frightening thought if any of what Jordan knew about the agency was true. Again, gut instinct told him not to open this door, not even a crack, but he was curious by now, and he probably didn’t have a choice. “Go on,” he said.

  “Very well, but first I need to tell you that national security is involved, Doctor. Anything we discuss this morning has to be held in the strictest confidence.”

  Now Jordan was curious, and perhaps that was what the agent had intended. “Go ahead.”

  “Good, I’ll get right to the point. There’s a serial killer at large, and she’s targeting doctors—high-profile doctors like you. We’ve kept local law enforcement and the media out of it for the reason I told you, national security. That’s why I’m here instead of the FBI. This is not your typical serial killer case. Our suspect is running around with enough information in her head to start a third world war.”

  “And your suspect’s a woman. Did I hear that correctly?”

  “Not the way you’re thinking, Doctor. Erase from your mind the concept of mother, sister, lover, or friend. She’s not that kind of female. They call her Angel Face, and I’ve never run up against anything quite like her. I’m not sure the agency has, either . . . .”

  He went on, and Jordan fell silent as his visitor began to untangle a macabre knot of dysfunctional family life. Curiosity held him, but it was a surreal experience. Outside the covered porch, which hid two total strangers from view, the summer sky brightened and the birds began to serenade. A neighbor’s back door slammed, and another newspaper thudded against a stoop. The world was awakening to a serene new day, and Jordan Carpenter was listening with a disbelieving heart to one of the darkest and most disturbing stories he’d ever heard . . . and as a doctor, he’d heard a few.

  According to the agent, the CIA had extensive background on their prime suspect, an exquisitely lovely twenty-seven-year-old grad student who was raised in a foster home by a small-town doctor. She was heartbreakingly beautiful, even as a small child, and the widowed surgeon was obsessed with her. He never molested or beat her, but his methods of control were diabolical. He would question her incessantly about boys and accuse her of leading them on before she was old enough to know what that meant. He would buy the things little girls dream of and then break them to punish her. When she didn’t jump to do his bidding, he would cause harm to innocent bystanders—his own elderly patients or her pets—and tell her it was her fault because she’d made him angry.

  He forbade her to date in high school, but she met a boy and fell in love. When they tried to run away together, a car accident put the boy in the hospital, gravely injured. He didn’t live through the operation, and she understood why the moment she saw the surgeon. Her foster father had operated on her boyfriend.

  She knew then that he would never let her go, and she became desperate to escape. A bizarre turn of events gave her the chance. One day she found him in the throes of a heart attack. He told her to use the defibrillator paddles, and when the first charge didn’t work, he ordered her to increase the voltage. She hesitated, and they both realized the balance of power in their relationship had shifted. He raged at her, threatening to destroy everything she loved, and it cost him his life. He had modified the machine for his own purposes, and when she spiked the voltage, it stopped his heart with a brutal jolt of electricity.

  That was when she knew she could kill. And perhaps that was when Angel Face was born.

  “She’s killed twice more since her foster father,” the agent told Jordan. “Both doctors and both by inducing heart attacks.”

  “With the paddles?” Jordan was appalled, but he was curious, too. “Why hasn’t she been apprehended, since you know so much about her?”

  “It isn’t that simple. She was once one of the intelligence community’s most valuable informants. Her source was a brilliant recluse who developed biowarfare applications and then attempted to sell them to the highest bidder. No one but Angel Face could get direct access to him, and once she did, he fell hopelessly under her spell, like everyone else. She’s lethal, Doctor. She looks like an angel, but she’s a fiend, a fiend with a heart-shaped face.”

  “Did she kill her source, too?”

  “How
did you guess that?” The agent gave him a sharp look. “Someone killed him, but the MO was different: poison.”

  Jordan rubbed the back of his neck, pondering what he’d just heard. There was a part of him strangely fascinated with the agent’s story, but he didn’t want to be.

  “What is it you want from me?” he asked.

  “We want you to help us flush her out.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You’re doctor number four. You’re next on her death list.”

  Jordan wanted to laugh, it was so absurd. Floorboards groaned under his feet. “Why would she want to kill me?”

  “Because she’s fixated on you, like she was on all the others. You have to understand that she grew up in a torture chamber. She was under the total control of one godlike doctor, who made her feel responsible for his heinous acts, even the ones he committed against her. She survived the way many POWs do, by fantasizing.”

  “Fantasizing about doctors?” Jordan asked. “It was a doctor who tortured her.”

  “According to our profiler, she dreamed up her own godlike doctor, one who was powerful enough to stand up to her foster father and rescue her from the hell she lived in. That sustained her when she was a kid, but as she grew older, the fantasy became more romantic, and this doctor not only rescued her, he fell in love with her.”

  “I still don’t see what that has to do with me.”

  “You will,” the agent said edgily. “Trust me, you will.”

  He drifted deeper into the shadows of the porch, talking as he went. “Her father had medical journals and magazines around, and she began to fixate on the doctors she read about. But as the abuse worsened and she grew sicker, her fantasies turned into delusions. They became more rigid and extreme. In time, her fantasy figure had to be perfect, flawless, a Christlike figure, and no one could live up to that.”

  He gave the hammock a push and sent it rocking. “When she came across someone like you, a media hero, she saved every scrap of paper she could find. But eventually, no matter who the doctor was, she would discover a flaw, and that’s when her fantasy turned paranoid. Her mind could only encompass extremes, and if her savior wasn’t perfect, then he must be evil like her father. There was nothing in between.”