Programmed for Peril

wishes of Queen of My Heart?” He dug under his collar with the tips of both fingers. He wriggled them under the sheer mask tissue. The movements of his left hand were sluggish. Trish remembered even her feeble blows had hurt that side. He was wounded. The police had said Tran’s pistol had been fired. The blood in the van matched Carson’s type. Yet this wasn’t Carson. Who was he?
    He turned his back to her. The star-spangled mask came off, some of it tearing to tatters in his uncertain grip. Heavy-footed, he moved to face her.
    There was no mistaking that meaty face. “Champ!” she shouted. “Champ. Carson’s brother!”
     

28
     
    “ ‘TRISH, CARSON, AND MELODY—TOGETHER FORever.’ Didn’t you remember I took that photo? You never tumbled?” Champ chuckled giddily.
    She stared at him. So many times she had read or recalled Carson’s promise of togetherness. And never dwelled on who had taken the photograph!
    Now she thought of another hint she hadn’t taken: the composite drawing done by the police artist. That hairy face had been close enough to Champ’s for her to make the leap of recognition. But she hadn’t. She had been wrapped up in trying to match the features to Carson’s. How could she have been so dense? “It was you who did all those things to hurt me and Foster.”
    “Most of them.” He chuckled.
    “You killed Tran!”
    He nodded. “The devious slant!”
    Trish remembered what lay decomposing under the bed. “And Nicholas!”
    He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
    Trish frowned. “Who did?”
    “Me,” Dino said. “I wore a Carson mask and took it off just before I choked him to death.”
    Trish stared wordlessly at him.
    He raised a hand, gripped a handful of curly hair, and pulled. The cunning hairpiece came away to disclose a closely cut red stubble. He spat heavily on his alligator tattoo. A rub of his shirtsleeve smeared away most of it. And a patch of skin tint. His complexion was bogus, too! Fingers to each eye in turn popped out contact lenses. When he looked at her his eyes burned with an all-too-familiar obsessive green fire.
    Trish wailed and staggered backward.
    “Carson. You’re Carson!”
    “How delightful that you never saw!”
    Melody cried out from the bed. “Daddy! You’re my daddy!”
    “No, Melody. He isn’t,” Trish said.
    She spun back to the man she had thought was Dino. Now—too late!—she saw what an expert job the murdered cosmetic surgeon had done. The bones of Carson’s face remained untouched. But the flesh had been redistributed. Long gone were the familiar acne scars. Even now it wasn’t all that easy to see it was he.
    Her legs threatened to betray her. She staggered back against the wall. Her mind swarmed with tangled thoughts of his obsession and his struggle with her for her soul. My devil! My dark mirror! Despite her shock and dismay she clung to one thought like a life preserver: She had come here to destroy him!
    She was speechless. But her head spun with evidence of her gullibility. Carson had opened his bakery three short blocks away right after PC-Pros got rolling. That he could bake professionally shouldn’t have misled her. He had always been a master in his own kitchen. He was a Renaissance man; he could do anything. She knew he spoke handfuls of languages. Why hadn’t she counted Italian and the nicely accented French of his Marseillaise?
    Also, she had missed all the unintentional hints Rocco had sent her. “Dino” had done all he could to make her selling out to her competitor a real temptation. Without PC-Pros he imagined she would be a big step closer to rejoining him. Hadn’t Rocco told her Dino was a crazy Vietnam vet—just as Carson was? She hadn’t made the connection!
    “Champ set me up when he chased those hoodlums away,” she muttered.
    Champ giggled again. “I found two homeless men, paid them well enough. I taught them their lines and their pratfalls. Carson did the rest.”
    She glowered at him. “And you stood outside the window in your Carson mask,” she said dully.
    Carson smirked. “I just couldn't catch him.”
    “When you blew away the relay equipment, Carson, it was deliberate!”
    “Of course. Nicholas was already getting in the way. That slowed him up. Too bad he didn’t leave well enough alone.” Champ said, “How nicely we muddied the waters of identity. We arranged some of my calls to be made when Carson was with you.”
    “Were you impressed when I drove off the