The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  Carey had thought about all of the ways and the times when this might happen, but somehow he had not imagined it would happen at the hospital. That was absurd, he realized. He spent ten or twelve hours a day in this building or in his office down the street. He had assumed that they would not want to arrest him in public, but why wouldn’t they?

  He spent a moment gathering his thoughts and then started off down the hallway. He slipped into the staircase to avoid the elevator, then went down two floors to the cafeteria. He saw Leo Bortoni and Sal Feinman sitting at a table together, but when Leo looked up and waved him over, he pretended not to see. He walked past the piles of cafeteria trays beside the hot table and stepped into the wake of a young man pushing a tall rack of dishes through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  He followed the rack through the food-preparation area. He had not been in the kitchen since he had taken a tour when he had accepted his appointment to the hospital staff. He had a vague memory that dishes were washed farther back somewhere, and that it was done by a big stainless steel machine with a conveyor belt that raised the water temperature above the level that any of the common microbes could survive. He heard lots of rattling dishes and water running on both sides, but he didn’t dare look.

  “Carey!”

  He turned and saw Lana McLiesh wearing her white lab coat and a hairnet over her blond hair, carrying the clipboard she always seemed to have. “Hi,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

  She pulled him aside and handed him a paper cap from her pocket. “Put this on. You’re not supposed to be back here, you know.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was on my way out, when it occurred to me that I didn’t order for my morning surgeries.”

  She squinted at her clipboard and flipped a couple of pages. “Miller, Reardon, Schwartz, right?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I think I signed it yesterday. Joy must have put the order in. How have you been?”

  “Terrific,” she said. “My cooking agrees with me. How about you?”

  “Same here.” He looked around him, pretending to be disoriented. He pointed. “I can get out that way, can’t I?”

  She looked a little uncertain. “You can, but that’s the way the garbage goes out. You might want to—”

  “No, it’s fine,” he said. He leaned closer. “There seem to be a lot of reporters around today, and I’m not really in the mood to answer questions about Richard Dahlman.”

  She winked. “Gotcha. Just watch your step. The floor back there is perpetually wet.”

  He stepped out onto the loading dock in the back of the hospital and resisted the temptation to jump to the driveway below. From here he could see his office building, so he turned to look. In the parking lot behind the building he could see the roof of a police car with the bar of emergency lights across the front. He supposed that if he had needed confirmation, that would have been it. He walked down the steps.

  Jane had made a foolproof plan for him, but he had no idea how he could get from the place where he now was to the place where the first steps of the plan began, at Jake Reinert’s house.

  He heard his pager go bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep. He reached to his belt and held it up to confirm his suspicion that it was the central desk trying to locate him for the police. But the number on the display was the emergency-room number. He heard a siren in the distance. It was an ambulance, and a moment later it pulled into the driveway and up to the emergency room.

  Carey turned off his beeper and began to walk quickly toward the street. He would duck into a restaurant a few blocks from here, call Jake Reinert, and ask Jake to pick him up. Even if they really needed an extra surgeon in the emergency room, he had seen Leo in the cafeteria, and Leo was a capable surgeon.

  Carey was almost to the street when he heard the second siren. He slowed his pace a little and listened. The siren cut off, but he heard the engine roar as it went up the drive. They never did that unless it was urgent and somebody had only a few minutes left. They usually slowed down at the entrance to the driveway. He stopped. He could hear other sirens now: two more, or was it three? Something terrible must have happened.

  He held himself as though he were balancing on a thin wire. His mind filled with Jane’s image. He had been so close to her, but now he could feel her slipping away. With her went all hope, all possibilities. He had been foolish to imagine that he could go off with her. He had been like a big, clumsy plow horse trying to jump the fence so he could run with the deer.

  Carey pivoted on his heel and ran up the lawn of the hospital. He reached the driveway just as Leo Bortoni came out on the loading dock, craning his neck to look for him.

  “Carey!” he yelled, and beckoned.

  Carey climbed the steps three at a time, and hurried through the kitchen beside him. “What is it?”

  “Don’t know much yet. Some kind of explosion at a factory. Lots of third-degrees, probably, and a lot of flying metal.”

  As Carey hurried across the polished floor of the cafeteria, he could see that Pankowski, the hospital administrator, was in the hallway saying something to two uniformed policemen. He turned his head as Carey and Bortoni reached the doorway. The two policemen brushed past Pankowski.

  One of them came close to Carey’s shoulder, but did not touch him. “Dr. McKinnon?”

  “Yes?”

  “As soon as you’re out of surgery, we’d like to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” said Carey. He glanced at the officer’s face. It was the face of a decent man, who was willing to gamble that his job didn’t require stopping a surgeon from saving somebody’s life. He was asking for a promise; if Carey didn’t make it, he would have to follow the order he had been given to arrest him now. Carey hesitated, then made the promise. “I won’t be going anywhere.”

  The next night, Jane stepped to the newsstand on State Street, opened the Los Angeles Times and looked at the headlines, then moved her eyes down the page. Dahlman was not mentioned in the news anymore. She put the paper back in the pile and went to the set of cubbyholes by the wall where the out-of-state papers were sold. The newsstand didn’t carry the Buffalo News, but she saw the Chicago Tribune. She picked one up, opened it, and saw the article at the bottom of the front page. DOCTOR SUSPECTED IN DAHLMAN ESCAPE. She calmly folded the paper, walked to the little counter under the green awning, and handed it to the man with the unlit cigar in his mouth. She gave him a dollar and turned to walk up the street to her car. The newspaper in her hand was an object that felt both fragile and dangerous, like a firebomb or a poisonous snake.

  She sat behind the steering wheel and opened it again, feeling her heartbeat at the sides of her head. Her eyes swooped to the article, clutching phrases because she was too impatient to follow sentences: “taken into custody,” “questioned by the F.B.I.,” “could be charged.” She read that twice. If he could be charged, then he had not been charged. That gave her the momentum to relinquish the first page and move to the second. Charged with what? “Accessory to murder.” Her mind protested: Not a chance … not yet, anyway. But she saw it was just the culmination of a list. “Aiding and abetting an escaping felon, obstruction of justice, making false statements in a police report.”

  Jane closed the newspaper, tossed it to the floor in front of the passenger seat, and started the engine. There was no more time for waiting and watching and looking into the past, trying to gather a pile of evidence that Richard Dahlman was innocent. She was going to have to take a chance on Brian Vaughn.

  38

  Charles Langer went out to breakfast, as he often did. When he had still been Brian Vaughn he would not have dared show his face in a spot like the Santa Barbara Biltmore. Now Brian Vaughn’s face didn’t exist, and there was no disadvantage to showing Charles Langer’s. Since he had been in Santa Barbara he had seen four people who had known him when he was Brian Vaughn, and two of them had been at the Biltmore.

  The first time, he had been eating lunch at an outdoor table on
the patio. He had been staring past the tall cedar tree on the broad front lawn, beyond the shoreward rolling of blue, sluggish Pacific swells, at a squadron of tiny white sails just poised on the horizon so their hulls were invisible and their forward progress was almost impossible to detect. A shadow had unexpectedly fallen across the white linen in front of him, he had looked up, and standing over him was David Rollins.

  Langer had become flustered. He had been warned that moments like this might happen someday, but someday had always seemed far away. But Rollins had not said “Brian!” or even “Don’t I know you?” He had said, “Excuse me, but is anyone using these chairs?”

  Charles Langer had not dared use his voice. He had smiled and shaken his head. Rollins had taken two of the extra chairs to his table, said, “Thanks,” sat on one of the chairs, and picked up his menu. The other chair had been for Rona Pellham, apparently Mrs. Rollins now. Langer was sure that she would not fail to recognize him. As soon as she looked in his direction, he was going to have to say something false about not being who she thought he was, and bail out of Santa Barbara. But Rona had not appeared to even glance at him. It was a miracle. He had known her very well—actually made a serious attempt to Do the Deed with her once, with enough acquiescence so that he could knowledgeably judge the terrible things that time and gravity had done to the poor woman since then.

  Nobody had recognized Brian Vaughn looking at them from behind Charles Langer’s face, and the chance meeting had been wonderful for Charles Langer. He was liberated, giddy with power and license. He reminded himself of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, capering around and practically tweaking people’s noses with absolute impunity.

  He had stuck to all of the precautions they had taught him during the long period since he had needed to leave Massachusetts. But after seeing Rollins, these safeguards had come to seem like the old civil defense drills of his childhood, when he had dutifully crouched under his desk to escape bombs that never fell. He was now convinced that the only necessary precaution had been taken for all time. He was a brand-new man with nothing much to worry him.

  Langer finished his breakfast and walked on the beach for an hour. He liked walking away from Santa Barbara, below the big homes above the cliffs, toward the Montecito side. If he walked in the morning like this, he could often go for long stretches without seeing another human being.

  He came back up the beach just ahead of the incoming tide, got into his Miata, and drove toward his house. He would spend a little time cleaning the place and then go to the library before he went off for his golf game. That way he would have something fresh to read this evening.

  Many of the things he liked least about being the Invisible Man had gradually been mitigated. At first he had found it frustrating to live in a place where he could have golfed on almost any day of the year, except that he wasn’t able to join a club or even scare up a foursome. Now he simply went to the public course and told the starter he would fill in on any threesome who showed up. Most days it meant he would not have to wait as long as he would have with three partners. When Langer wanted to swim, he would pay for a day’s admission to the Coral Casino across the street from the Biltmore and share the best pool in town with a sparse gathering of ephemeral strangers who sat in cabanas, ordered a few drinks, and then moved on.

  His search for something to fill the time after sunset had not been as satisfactory, but it was not painful. He now kept his days busy and active, lingered late over dinner at a pleasant restaurant, then spent the latter part of the evening reading the books he had borrowed from the public library.

  Langer had spent only a few months in this place, and already the social prospects were showing small signs of improvement. Several times at the golf course he had run into men he had played with before, and when they had seen him alone as usual, they hadn’t waited for the starter to form the foursome but had invited him themselves. There were also two young female librarians who made it a practice to smile and joke with him when he came in, and he had actually had a real conversation with the prettier of the two a week ago. At first he had been a little wistful and regretful when she had seemed to like him, but then he had remembered that he wasn’t fifty-five anymore. To her he looked about her own age. Maybe next time he would find out more about her so he could concoct exactly the right invitation to make her go out with him.

  As he drove up his street, he studied all of the cars parked at the curb, glanced at the windows of the houses nearby, and then stopped without taking the keys out of the ignition and looked again. The precautions they had taught him were all habits now, and each time he performed them he actually felt better. After all this time he would have noticed anything that was out of place.

  He got out of his Miata, walked up the sidewalk, unlocked his door, and slipped inside, then stepped directly to the corner window to ascertain that his arrival had not triggered any movement outside.

  He counted to ten, then stepped back, turned, and gasped. He felt the hair on his scalp bristle. A woman was sitting motionless on the couch, and at first his mind didn’t know what to do with her: ghost-burglar-accuser? Was his eye assembling shadows into a human shape?

  “I’m sorry to startle you,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, then realized he had said it wrong. He sounded scared and ridiculous. He had not missed the soft, melodious sound of her voice, and there was a little catch in it that was mildly erotic and appealing. He couldn’t see her very well because his glasses hadn’t adjusted to the dim light on that side of the room. The outline of her was long, lean, and feminine like a cat. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I had just sat down to rest. They called me in the middle of the night, so I had to take a redeye flight to get here.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry again.” She stood up and took a couple of steps where the light from the window reached her. He appraised the long black hair and the grace of her movements. “It seems that Santa Barbara is about to get too hot for you. I’m here to help you get out before the temperature takes its upturn.” She walked into the bedroom, where he had no choice but to follow. “I’ve already packed almost everything, and given the place a quick scrub for prints. Don’t touch any smooth surfaces in the house without wiping them off afterwards.”

  He saw his suitcase on the bed and walked toward it. He looked at it for a moment, then opened it and stared down at his clothes, his shoes. He could see she had even found the milk carton in the refrigerator, because the money and his next identity were tucked into the pocket.

  “Come on,” she coaxed from the doorway. “Don’t worry about what I’ve got. Worry about what I might have missed.”

  He turned and stared at her. “Who’s coming?”

  She was ready for the question. “There’s a man named Jardine in Los Angeles. He’s a bounty hunter who’s been asking a lot of questions about Brian Vaughn for months. Apparently last night he started asking questions about Charles Langer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She held her hands palms upward, then let them fall. “It means he probably asked the wrong person. But the fact that they called me in means that the problem isn’t solved.”

  Brian Vaughn sat on the bed. “Do you know a lot about me?”

  She sighed in frustration. “I know enough so I’ll be mixing my own drinks on this trip, thank you. Beyond that, I don’t care. I just came to get you out of here.”

  His voice carried quiet conviction. “I’m innocent. I didn’t give her the overdose, or drive her anywhere in my car. When I left her, she was in her apartment in New York.”

  “Fine,” said Jane. She was on her guard. Something was happening.

  “It matters.”

  Jane looked at him apologetically. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said. “But I’m sure you must know that my helping you isn’t contingent on my judgment of whether you did it or not. If
you could prove that, what would you need us for? We’re in a business. You pay, we take care of you. Now, my best professional advice is to get up, get into the car, and let me take you someplace safe.”

  “Where?”

  Jane had hoped this would not come up until he was in the car. “I’m supposed to get you back to Chicago. From there they’ll start you over again in a new place. Do you care?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I guess it was idle curiosity. I’m not going.”

  Jane’s muscles tightened. Chicago was where Christine had seen his boxes. He had spent months there getting his face changed, so she had guessed he would consider it home base. It was also the only place where she could turn him over to policemen who would know where he fit in the Dahlman case, but she was sure that was not what had made him refuse. It was something else. “I’m not particular. If you have another place in mind where you’ll be safe for now, I’ll drive you there and explain it later. But let’s get going before we have to fight our way out.”

  “You go,” he said. “Thank you for coming to my rescue, but I’m going to stay here. Since I’ve been here I’ve met several people who once knew me well, and they don’t now. I’ll probably be fine.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  He shrugged. “Then I’ll be dead, I suppose.”

  She leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “Suddenly, after all this effort, that doesn’t matter to you?”

  His face flashed an expression that began as a smile and ended as a frown. “I made a bad deal. I’ve done what I could to live with it, and begun making a comfortable life here. I’m through being ordered from place to place, and told how to look and act.”