The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  What would he have wanted? He certainly wouldn’t have planned a crime that included dragging a dead—or even unconscious—woman from Weston, Massachusetts, to New York, then into an apartment building where people could hardly be expected not to see him. He would want the whole event to take place indoors at one address: but which address? He certainly would not want a woman he had raped to wake up in his house in Weston. He would want her to be in her own apartment in New York all evening, and wake up there not positive about the details of what had happened to her. Just waking up alone at home might make her feel that whatever had happened was over. After reflecting on what she remembered, and what she would have to face if she called the police, she might decide it was better if she didn’t. But she hadn’t been in New York, or even in Weston. She had been found in the place Vaughn was least likely to want her—in his car.

  Jane tried another version. Vaughn and the woman had spent the evening together in Weston. After making love, maybe he fell asleep and she couldn’t. She found sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet and accidentally overdosed because they weren’t hers, or took her own and got a bad reaction because she had alcohol in her system. He woke up and found her unconscious, then put her into the car to rush her to the hospital in Boston. On the way he saw she was dead. He panicked. No, that didn’t quite work. If someone was that sick, you didn’t drive them to Boston. You called an ambulance.

  What Jane had kept thinking all the time while she was listening to Jardine was that everything he had said was possible. But it was strangely neat. There was an odd perfection to the stories of all of the runners she had found on this trip. Vaughn was rich. He was used to having people provide expensive personal services for him. He seemed to have a history of offenses against women that might not be rape but were serious enough to require hush money. That was important too. He had bought his way out of serious trouble before. If a man like that got into this kind of trouble and happened to find his way to the face-changers, the face-changers would be lucky. What if they had picked him out and designed a particular kind of trouble just for him? It would look a lot like this.

  36

  The security technician had been introduced to Marshall only as Maggie, with no last name. “Maggie can piece the whole thing together for you,” the shift commander had said. Marshall didn’t feel comfortable calling the young woman by her first name, but he had waited until they were alone and said his name was John.

  He had been in the Los Angeles International Airport security control center for over an hour, and he was still feeling admiration for their new surveillance system. It was a simple extension of what had been done in lots of public places, but it was a generation past the old systems, and the money they had spent was all visible on the screen. Maybe he was just prepared to admire anything that gave him hope. He said, “Can you take it from when she gets off the plane?”

  “Sure,” said Maggie.

  Marshall watched the tired, bored passengers eagerly walking out of the boarding tunnel into the waiting area. Almost all of them seemed to be carrying full-sized suitcases and bags with things on hangers. He had noticed the change before, but he had not quite figured out when it had happened. One day people had simply decided they didn’t trust the airlines to take care of their baggage, and the airlines had tacitly admitted their incompetence by letting them cram it all into the overhead compartments.

  He watched the woman come out of the tunnel and take a quick look around to orient herself, just as the others did. Then she seemed to focus on something. “Can you freeze it for a second?”

  The image stopped moving, the woman’s head turned at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees. “Can you tell what she’s looking at?”

  “Not exactly. Here’s the other camera.” There was a refreshment area with twenty or thirty people sitting at tables, and behind it were the rest rooms and storage lockers. Between the woman and the lockers there were at least a hundred people. “I think it’s the man at the third table, drinking coffee.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  The woman began to move again. She walked quickly across the vast room, down the concourse, into a shop, then into the cafeteria, then down the escalator toward the baggage area and into the street. As she moved out of the range of each camera, Maggie picked her up on the next one.

  Marshall said, “Wait. Let’s look in the cafeteria.”

  Maggie pointed to the next screen. “There.” Jane walked in, got a tray, sidestepped along with the line of people sliding their trays along the shiny metal counter, taking plates of food and bottles and cans out of display cases. Jane took a pastry, then a cup of coffee, and put them on her tray. As she waited, she opened the purse hanging from her shoulder, and pushed things aside to reach for her wallet. Something fell out of her purse to the floor. She quickly bent her knees to duck down. Her right hand came up under the counter to steady herself while her left hand picked up the … he looked more closely … keys. The body pops up, the right hand stays where it is, which is now at belt level, then into her purse before it goes back to the counter. Why into the purse? The left hand was the one that should have gone into the purse, to get rid of the keys. But she had set the keys on the tray. Marshall couldn’t be positive, but he had a very strong suspicion that something had been in that right hand.

  Marshall watched the rest of the sequence of tapes patiently, this time looking at the people ahead of Jane, and behind her. If they had been using the airport as a drop, what could it be that they had left for her? Messages? Money? Maybe his mind was so bored with the sight of videotapes that it was inventing new images.

  Jane gets on the shuttle bus. Jane gets off at Lot C. Jane is approached by a man. Jane gets into a car with him and drives off into the night. “Any luck on the man yet?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “That was easy, because you can see the license number on the Lot C footage. His name is Alvin Jardine. He’s a private detective, officially.”

  “What do you mean, ‘officially’?”

  “That’s what his license says, but the L.A.P.D. said he’s basically a bounty hunter.”

  “Does he work the airport often?”

  “I checked back for the last month, and he was here nearly every night. I don’t have anything earlier than that.”

  “Is he here now?”

  Maggie shook her head. “I already checked that too. I think he might have been the one she was looking at when she got off the plane, but I can’t be sure. I couldn’t be positive of the match, or even what her eyes were focused on—just the angle of her head. What about her? We were told you wanted her for questioning. Is she a suspect or a witness or what?”

  Marshall stared at the screen. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know some of what she is, but I can’t put a name on it yet.”

  The beep of his pager made them both jump. As he walked out into the airport to find a pay telephone where he could use his credit card, possibilities kept occurring to him. Maybe the bounty hunter had found Dahlman, and she had come to buy him off. Maybe she had some optimistic notion that Dahlman was innocent, and she was here to hire the worst possible person to find evidence to clear him. Novices often seemed to be drawn by some obscure law of nature to hire a fox to guard the henhouse.

  He dialed the number on his pager and heard Grapelli’s voice. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, Marshall.”

  “I wanted to find a pay phone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “L.A.X. They’ve been very cooperative. Mrs. McKinnon seems to have been here last night. She took a plane from Chicago to here, flew to San Francisco and back, met a man at a long-term parking lot, and drove off in the moonlight.”

  “It’s not often you get to see such romance in this day of cynics and nihilists,” said Grapelli. “Where does that leave us?”

  “Chicago could mean she had gone to look for evidence or witnesses in the Dahlman case. Or it could mean she just happened to change planes there. San F
rancisco is a mystery, because she was there for no more than an hour or two. Since nobody has turned up a suspicious prescription for Dahlman’s antibiotic yet, maybe she was making a black-market buy. L.A. could mean something.”

  “L.A. means just about as much as Chicago,” said Grapelli. “Who’s the guy?”

  “He’s a private detective–slash–bounty hunter. But since she wanted to meet with him, I have to assume he’s on her side.”

  Grapelli’s silence had a sour sound to it. Finally he said, “Do we know what the hell it is that her side wants to accomplish?”

  “I have a theory,” Marshall offered.

  “Do you?”

  “I think that she’s got part of this situation figured out pretty clearly. Her husband definitely had something to do with Dahlman’s escape, so he’s in trouble. Her house has been under surveillance for long enough so she knows that nobody’s going to write him off and go home. What’s her way out? I’m not saying it’s a safe way, or a smart way, just that it’s a way, and there aren’t any others.”

  “Divorce the stupid bastard and claim she knew nothing?”

  “I mean for both of them,” said Marshall. “Go out on her own and prove that Dahlman didn’t do it.”

  “Give me a break,” muttered Grapelli.

  “Think about it,” said Marshall. “If Dahlman stays out, does that help her and her husband? No. We’ll watch them until the end of time. If Dahlman gets caught, does that end it? No. It’s worse, because we’d have no reason to keep their home intact waiting for Dahlman to call or show up. They’d be subject to arrest. But what does get them off?”

  “Very optimistic of her,” said Grapelli. “Only, if Dahlman does come in, even if he’s got absolute proof that somebody else killed that woman, the McKinnons are still guilty—aiding and abetting, obstruction of justice, and so on.”

  “She’s blinded by love,” said Marshall. “Otherwise she’d know that you’re going to demand federal prosecution of a reputable surgeon and his beautiful wife who helped an innocent elderly doctor stay out long enough to solve our case for us.”

  “Well, probably not,” admitted Grapelli. “But she can’t know that.”

  “What else has she got to think about?”

  “Very interesting theory, anyway,” said Grapelli. “One of your better ones.”

  “Thank you,” said Marshall. “It’s nice to feel that I’m growing as a theorist, especially in these times when I’m unable to actually put anything into practice.”

  Grapelli’s voice changed. It was lower and quieter, and the ironic edge was gone. “I’m afraid I wasn’t calling to check up on you, John. I was calling to tell you what’s going on here.”

  “About time,” said Marshall. He could tell it was something he was not going to like, and he could tell Grapelli knew it and felt he still had to do it. Marshall determined to keep his feelings to himself.

  “It’s time to bring her home. Since she seems to have a flair for going where she pleases without being picked up, I only know one way to do it.”

  Marshall reminded himself that he was going to keep the disapproval out of his voice. “I have no way to prove this, but I think we’re giving up on the strategy too early. But it’s your call, and I respect that.”

  “Thanks, John,” said Grapelli. “You want to come back to be there when she comes in?”

  Marshall thought for a moment. “If you need me, I will. But I have a few leads I’d like to check here. This bounty hunter she met ought to be interviewed, and if he gives the right answers, I might be able to follow her in. Somebody should try to see where she stops on the way home.”

  “We’ll call when she shows.”

  37

  Carey sensed that something had changed. There was an odd, charged feel to the air. While he was in the shower, he kept imagining that he heard not sounds, but parts of sounds coming from somewhere in the old house—doors opening but not closing, single footfalls that were not repeated.

  He turned the handle and heard nothing but the last of the water falling from the showerhead and making tiny pops as each drop shattered on the tile near his feet. He dressed quickly. He was sure now that he had picked up some alteration that was too subtle to be identified, and his own mind had supplied the explanation that it must be a sound.

  Carey went from room to room, not sure whether he was doing this to verify that the police had not come into his house or because of his growing suspicion that his time had run out. That was it: he had given it a name. He was looking into each of the rooms in the house where he had grown up because he was afraid he might never see them again. He glanced at his watch. It was all right, he decided. If this was the day, then he had done it. If it wasn’t, then let this serve as the last look. He would not need to look again.

  He walked down the staircase to the small foyer and through the living room and the dining room to the big old kitchen to make his breakfast. As he was taking out the eggs and the frying pan he suddenly stopped. Somehow he had a feeling that this morning he should leave the kitchen spotlessly clean, with no dishes in the dishwasher and nothing out of place.

  He went out the back door and locked it, then to the old carriage house in the back that his grandfather had been the first to call “the garage,” and glanced at the yard. The two gigantic maple trees behind the house that shaded the windows of the master bedroom reminded him of the day he had shown Jane the revised deed. It now said Carey McKinnon and Jane McKinnon. She had chuckled at the idea, and he had asked her why. She had said, “Because I love you and because people are so funny.”

  “Funny? Why?”

  She had left him standing in the back entry and run the sixty or seventy feet to the trunk of the taller maple tree. She had called, “Look at me.” The trunk was nearly four feet wide at the base, and at this distance he could use her height as a measure and count upward ten times to the tallest branches. It had been big and old before his grandparents were born. He had walked out to stand ten feet from her.

  She had bent back to look up at the huge, thick limbs, some of the lower ones wider around than her body, and his eyes had followed hers. “See?”

  He had nodded. “So what’s funny?”

  She had raised an eyebrow. “Do you think it knows that I own it?”

  Carey got into his black BMW. The car was perhaps his only idiotic purchase. It had cost too much, but he decided he was glad about that too. Even if this was the last time he drove it, and it had to be sold while he was in jail, it hardly mattered now. There was no sense in having a few more dollars for a retirement he and Jane would never reach, or for children who would never be born.

  He pulled out of his driveway and watched the car behind him to see whether the policemen did anything differently. They stayed the usual two blocks behind him, drifting along near the curb because he was close to the median stripe. The other cars nearby weren’t familiar and didn’t seem to have policemen in them, but he knew that such impressions meant nothing.

  He drove to the hospital by the usual route, introducing no changes. He certainly didn’t want to behave erratically and precipitate some action they were only contemplating. If they were already committed, then he would gain no advantage by letting them know that he suspected.

  He parked in his reserved space, then walked into the hospital with his head up and his eyes ahead. He went into his office in the surgical wing and sat down to review the files of the three patients he would be operating on today. He was glad they were fairly routine: Mr. Reardon’s gall bladder, a hernia repair for Don Schwartz, and Mrs. Miller’s partial colostomy.

  Today might be his last day as a surgeon, and that made him concentrate harder on the X-rays he had in the viewer on the wall. He knew that no matter how the day ended, he was going to need to tell himself that this part of it had ended well.

  He put the files back on his desk and stood up. It was time to scrub. As he closed the door behind him, he left inside all of the thoughts about
his life and his personal worry. He thought about the specific movements his hands would need to perform to make Mrs. Miller’s trouble go away.

  Four hours later, when he was leaving the operating room for the last time, his mind seemed to awaken. It was saying, “What’s next?” and the answer settled on him.

  He showered and dressed in a state of passive receptivity. Nothing came to startle him. He carefully made his way out of the wing through the recovery room and then slipped into the first empty room he came to. He went to the window and looked out at his car in the parking lot.

  The three vans that had been there the night he had operated on Richard Dahlman were back. The long booms on their roofs had been extended, and there were men and women in jeans inside doing something technical. He looked at the other vehicles in the lot. There were no regular police patrol cars, as there had been that night, but he could see two large, plain American cars with audio antennas above their rear windows and little emergency lights inside over the back seats. He walked to the bed and pressed the remote control for the television set high on the wall.

  There was a cartoon mouse swinging a meat cleaver down toward a cat’s head. The cat leaped into the air, spun around, and shot off like a bullet. Carey pressed the channel button and let the television set cycle through flashes of channels until he found a picture of the hospital. The Channel Four Noon News woman was saying, “—have said they would be making an official announcement concerning the mysterious disappearance of murder suspect Dr. Richard Dahlman in just a few minutes.” Carey turned off the television set and left the room.

  Jane had said it would begin without much warning, but that he would see it coming if he looked. “There will be people you haven’t seen before,” she had said. “They don’t like to burn a surveillance specialist by having him scoop up the likes of you on television. There won’t be guns in sight, because they know you’re not dangerous. You have to see the signs, and then you have to move before they’re ready.”