The Face-Changers (16 page)

“Well, it had occurred to us.”

“How did he know about you?”

“That was one of the tilings that impressed me. His forms said he had been referred to us by a doctor in Maryland. The doctor was real, and highly respected.”

“Did you call him?”

“There was no reason to. He had simply told Mr. Hardiston that we would be the best specialists in the country for his needs. What was there to ask him – whether he meant it?

Afterward I learned that he had given Hardiston copies of some of our articles from medical journals.” Jane’s jaw muscles worked, keeping her mouth closed so she wouldn’t succumb to the temptation to point out that this, too, was a confidence maneuver: the con man arrives with a fistful of recommendations and credentials, but they’re all about the mark, not about him. “So you took him on.”

“Yes. We performed five procedures over a period of about eight months.”

“What exactly was wrong with him?”

“Nothing, really. He was healthy and had regular features.

But the net effect of his face was not what he wanted, and I couldn’t blame him: he had clearly never been considered attractive when he was young, and now his expression seemed forbidding, unlikable. And he was about fifty and looked older: lots of damage.”

“What kind of damage – scars?”

“Nothing like that. His nose had been broken at some point

– a souvenir of some adolescent football game – but the damage I meant was wear and tear. Some I would attribute to the sun, some to tobacco and alcohol and possibly other drugs, and the rest to age. He had some unflattering wrinkles that went with the sun damage – scowling and squinting.”

“None of that sounds like anything he couldn’t have had fixed on a slow afternoon die next time he was in Beverly Hills. What did you do?”

“We decreased the prominence of the brow and cheekbones and smoothed the skin with endoscopic surgery, performed rhinoplasty to make the nose thinner and slightly shorter, made the chin thinner and tapered it. In the process we did some traditional cut-and-tuck work here and there to remove wrinkles and sags, made the lips slightly fuller, and performed blepharo-plasty on the eyes. We used a carbon dioxide laser to remove small wrinkles and uneven pigmentation. It wasn’t the surgical procedures that interested him, it was the work we had done on induced healing and tissue regeneration. And it worked. When he left he looked like a different person – but that different person is a man about thirty years old.”

“Did you do anything to his body?”

“Liposuction to relieve him of a middle-aged slackening around the middle.”

“It sounds pretty good. I hope you’re still around when I need a little help.”

Dahlman’s head turned toward her abruptly, and the stare was almost hatred. “He destroyed us.”

“Did he?” Jane said evenly. “Tell me how.” His pause gave her time to amend it. “Tell me how you found out, step by step.”

Dahlman’s anger seemed to slowly change to something like amazement. “It was strange, like being eaten alive, bit by bit. There were five of us involved in his treatment: Sarah Hoffman; her nurse, Carol Flanders; me, of course; the anesthesiologist, Dr. Koh Wung; and his assistant, Celia Rodriguez. The first thing that happened was that Carol Flanders quit.”

“Why?”

“She got an offer from a hospital in her hometown in Colorado. She had elderly parents there, and the job was, by any objective assessment, better than the one she had. We all advised her to take it. Working in a small clinical research facility like ours was rewarding, but it was also exhausting.

We couldn’t pay her the way a major hospital could, and there was no better job we could promote her to. So we wished her well, and had a little party for her on her last day.”

“What then?”

“Nothing, for about a month. Then Dr. Wung left for a university hospital post in Boston and took his assistant with him. The final thing was that Sarah Hoffman was murdered.” He was skipping over parts of the story that Jane suspected must be huge. She would have to bring him back to them, but for now she needed to keep him talking. “How was she murdered?”

“At first it looked like a burglary. She was in her office, apparently late at night. Nobody knows why. She seldom did that. It’s possible that she was trying to catch up on some paperwork because she hadn’t yet replaced Carol Flanders. Or maybe someone called her and asked to meet her there. She was shot several times, but nobody heard it. The office was torn up terribly – not as though someone was looking for something valuable to steal, but as though they wanted to destroy all of it – file drawers dumped in the middle of the floor and set on fire.”

“Did the police call you in to look at it?”

“No. The police came to me about a day later, because they wanted some idea of who might have done it, and why. By then they had decided it wasn’t a burglary. That night I called Carol Flanders in Colorado to break the news to her gently. I got no answer at the number she had given us. I tried to reach her through her parents. They told me she had been killed in a car accident a couple of weeks before. She had been driving to Colorado to start her new job, and had never made it.”

“Did it occur to you to call Wung?”

“Of course. His new university gave me a runaround. He didn’t have an office listing, because he was to start in the fall, and the fall directory hadn’t been printed yet. The personnel office in Boston at least knew who he was, but not where. I finally went to our university and talked to four people before I could get them to see that this was an emergency and to give me the emergency numbers he had put on his old personnel forms. The numbers were for relatives in Korea. I called his brother, and got another terrible shock. Koh was dead. I asked how, and all he would tell me was that he had gone on a vacation and died. His English was only slightly better than my Korean, and I don’t speak Korean. He did understand when I gave him my name and phone number, because an hour later his sister called. She was screaming at me. All I could sort out at first was that Koh had committed suicide.

Somehow they got the impression that he had been fired from the University of Chicago, and the job in Boston was a step down. Since he had been working with me, I must have gotten him fired, and the shame made him kill himself. I couldn’t get the details – how they knew it was suicide, how it had happened – and asking again just infuriated her. I gave up.”

“What did you do then?”

“I realized that the most urgent thing was trying to warn Celia Rodriguez. I called the university in Boston again. It was the same story as Koh – she wasn’t supposed to start work until the fall, so they had no idea where she was, or even if she had arrived in Boston yet. I called Boston information, I even called Koh’s sister again to see if they had found her number in Koh’s effects. Nobody there had ever heard of Celia Rodriguez.”

Jane saw it immediately. If Carol’s accident and Koh’s suicide and Sarah’s murder had taken place in Chicago, the police would have jumped on them and initiated a search for Celia Rodriguez. But in Boston, nobody knew the connection, or that anything else had happened. She knew nobody there, so there was nobody to report her missing. Some murders got reported nationally, but not the suicides or car accidents of people who weren’t famous. “Were you afraid?”

“I was angry. I went to the police and told them what I knew – that within a period of about forty days, all four of my colleagues had met deaths that were, at the very least, suspicious. At first I thought they weren’t taking me seriously.

Then, a couple of days later, two policemen came to my house.”

“To arrest you?” There was no question that he had been arrested at some point, but she knew she should verify each bit of the story that she could hold on to as a fact, and the order of events made a difference.

“No. They were from a special squad that protects people.

They told me they believed I was in danger. We talked for some time.”

“Did you talk about who the criminal might be?”

“Yes. After some discussion, they agreed with me that Mr.

Hardiston probably wasn’t Mr. Hardiston. He was someone who wanted to change his looks to escape prosecution for some crime. They were desperate for the photographs – any copies I had of the ones Sarah took. But I never had any, and now I’m sure they were all destroyed, along with the medical records, in the fire in Sarah’s office. The policemen tried to get me to describe the man. I’ve described him for you, as he looked before the surgeries and after. Could you find him?”

“I could find about a hundred of each in the next town.”

“Exactly. They called the station and explained the situation to some superior, then came back to say that they had a plan.”

“I’ll bet.”

“What?”

“What was their plan?”

“Since there was no way to identify the man, the safest way was to take me to a quiet place and hide me. I was to tell no one where I was going. I would have to live incognito for a time, and when the man surfaced I would have to reappear to identify him and testify in court. It would take lots of arranging, but if they didn’t do it this way, they would risk losing me too. I was the only living person who could point out the man.”

“You agreed to this?”

“I felt it made no sense not to cooperate. They took me to a farmhouse that night, over three hundred miles from Chicago.

I was allowed to pack only those items that nobody would know were missing – some clothes, a few items of little value.

Then we left.”

“Where was it – the farm?”

“About ten miles outside a little town near Carbondale, called Hurst. I was there for three days.”

“Then what?”

“It was strange – like a dream. They were very considerate.

They even had a newspaper delivered each morning. One morning I got up and walked down the long dirt road from the house to the mailbox on the highway to pick up my paper. On the bottom corner of the front page was a story that said the police wanted me for questioning.”

“How did you feel?”

“A bit disappointed, for one thing. The police had given me to understand that they were going to make my house look lived in, and if the killer made an attempt to break in, they would scoop him up. For some reason the deception hadn’t worked, and they had given up hope of that. Otherwise, the police would never have revealed to reporters that I was gone.

I also had some trivial concern about how the story in the paper would look to other people. It sounded almost as though I were a suspect.”

“I take it the policemen had a key to your house?”

“Well, yes. As I said, they wanted to make it look as though I were still living there.”

“When did your small worry turn into a big worry?”

“Three more days passed. The policemen were to deliver more groceries once a week. I wondered when they would come. The next day I stayed indoors all day waiting. Finally, I left a note on the table and went for a walk. When I returned, there were police cars parked in front of the farmhouse – not plain ones like the ones they had used before, but real ones, black and white, with lights on the roofs. I was excited. I knew that they would never show themselves like that unless the waiting was over, and they had found the killer. They had: it was me.”

“Tell me about the arrest.”

“I ran up, they threw me on the ground on my face, handcuffed my hands behind my back, pushed me into the back seat of one of the cars, and set off for Chicago. I told the policemen everything. I asked them to call the Special Protection Squad and verify my story. They just listened, but they called nobody.”

Jane frowned. “What made them come after you?” Dahlman threw up his hands. “I just told you that – ”

“No,” she said. “Forget the hiding part. I haven’t heard anything yet that sounds like grounds for charging you with murder.”

“They said they had wanted to ask more questions, couldn’t find me at work, couldn’t reach me by phone, and became concerned. They got a warrant and broke into my house. They showed me pictures they took. I recognized the place, but it had been altered. My wife’s walk-in closet had been transformed into a kind of madman’s shrine. There were pictures of Sarah pasted to the walls – dozens of them, with steak knives stuck in some, and holes or burn marks in others.

And strange scrawls about killing her. One said her time was coming, and others had captions like ‘Thief or ‘Betrayer’ on them.”

“When they showed you this stuff, did you have a lawyer present?”

“I had a lawyer. He had settled my wife’s estate, and made out our wills before that. He called a criminal lawyer for me who was supposed to be terrific. I’m sure the man was competent, but…” Dahlman’s voice trailed off.

“But he didn’t believe you.”

“He asked me questions like ‘Do you know what day it is?’

‘What year?’ and then he said, ‘I’m here to help you, but the best help I can give you is to advise you not to hide anything.’”

“Did he listen to your whole story?”

“He’d already heard it when I met him. The police had apparently been recording it when I told them the first time.”

“No wonder he didn’t believe you.”

“I know. The idea that the police department had conspired to frame me for a murder seemed to be too much of a leap for his plodding intellect.”

Jane sighed wearily. She had been dreading this moment.

“There’s a lot to be said for a plodding intellect.” Dahlman was offended. “What, exactly, do you mean?”

“Well,” said Jane. “For starters, those two men who came to talk to you and then hid you weren’t policemen.”

“How could you possibly know?” He was furious.

Jane ignored his anger. “There are a lot of little things. One is that no city police department has anything called a ‘Special Protection Squad.’ Los Angeles and Chicago have both asked for money to begin protecting witnesses in gang-related trials, but so far, neither has gotten it. If the police want a witness protected, they don’t hide him on some farm alone. They protect him – put a cop with him, or keep him in custody. A criminal lawyer knows these things. And if policemen think you’re being watched and stalked by experts, they don’t use your phone to call their office and discuss their whole plan.