The Face-Changers (17 page)

These weren’t policemen.”

“Oh,” said Dahlman. Then he added, unnecessarily, “They were very convincing.”

“The real ones were the ones you saw when you went to the police station. How did you get away from them?” Dahlman shook his head. “That was the one service my attorney provided for me.”

Jane frowned. “After all that creepy stuff in the house and the sudden disappearance to the farm, he got you out on bail?”

“No. The lawyer had them put me in a psychiatric lockup ward in the hospital for observation. I had worked in that hospital, and suddenly there I was – just like any other mental patient. The transformation was quite a feeling: a loss of identity, really. I was just another anonymous patient in institutional pajamas. Who I had been a week before meant nothing to them. I was there for observation, but I was given large doses of a powerful tranquilizer that would have made observing me a waste of time.”

“Would have?”

“I pretended to take the pills, but hoarded them for four days. I didn’t really have a plan yet, but I knew that if I took those pills, I never would have one. Then one day, an orderly turned up whom I’d known for some time. He used to work the surgical floors, but had transferred to the psychiatric wing because it paid better. We talked. He knew I wasn’t crazy, and that I certainly hadn’t killed my partner. He agreed to help me if I could keep him from looking guilty. So, we put the tranquilizer into his bottle of Snapple. I took his identification, keys, and clothes, then put him in a place they called the Quiet Room to sleep it off. I used his keys to get out of the ward, and used the money in his wallet to get on the bus to Buffalo to find you.”

“This is something I’ve been waiting to hear. How did you know about me?”

He shook his head slowly. “It was an odd circumstance. It was less than a year ago. I was at a conference in Road Town on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s.” He stared at her.

“That’s something you must know all about. If you have a conference of surgeons, it has to be in some holiday period when very little surgery gets done. If it’s in the winter, it will draw better attendance if it’s held in a warm place. In fact, Carey might have been there.”

“Last year?” Jane shook her head. “Nope.” Since they had been married, Carey had gone to very few of these doctors’

conventions, and she was glad. She would have missed him, and she didn’t like to go with him. She had spent too much of her life in airports and hotels already, and whenever she was in another, she felt a quiet uneasiness that one of the people who had a reason to look for her would turn up.

“I seldom go either. I went because I was reading a paper on a few of the post-operative techniques we had developed.

That part seemed to go well. Then it was New Year’s Eve, and I was scheduled to leave for home the next morning. I had developed a friendly relationship with a waitress.” Jane considered saying nothing. She had almost asked whether Sarah had gone to the Virgin Islands with him, but had decided to wait. At some point she was going to have to ask exactly what their relationship had been, but not yet. She decided to prod him a little. She raised an eyebrow. “A waitress?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped. “The week in that hotel was frustrating. Most guests dealt with the manager and got nothing they asked for. I now believe he was the evil wayward son of some aristocratic family. Or they spoke with the concierge, who seemed to be there because she looked good behind the desk, but was utterly brainless. But this waitress would listen and get what was wanted. So I overtipped her and treated her with courtesy. That is all.”

“She told you about me?”

“No. She knocked on my door at three A.M. and said there was a medical emergency. The hotel was full of surgeons, but in her eyes they had all disqualified themselves. Some had been drinking. I didn’t drink. Some had come with wives and children, and I had come alone. Some had simply never noticed her, or had not struck her as approachable. So I was the one. She took me to a house. It was enormous, a villa of the sort you might expect to see on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t. The owner was ill, and apparently there was some problem about finding a surgeon who would admit him to the local hospital on New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was true, and maybe it was just an excuse for drafting me. But I could tell the man had a hot appendix. We moved him to the hospital, I operated, and he was fine. It’s a simple procedure. Medical students do it all the time. But he was grateful. He wanted to reward me. I refused. It’s one thing to perform emergency surgery in a foreign country, but another to take pay for it. But he didn’t mean money.”

“He was positive that I had come to Tortola with a suitcase full of cash to hide in a bank down there. I said it was a medical conference, and he said that the reason they held conferences during the holidays was because the customs force was thinner and lazier then, and that’s when American doctors and lawyers and politicians came to make deposits. I couldn’t convince him. He just kept looking at me with a patronizing, knowing smile. The man was clearly a criminal, and the idea that someone else could be honest seemed never to have occurred to him. Finally he wrote down your name and address and handed it to me. He said that since I was evading taxes, I might one day find myself in trouble. I said I wasn’t.

He said there were a million reasons why one day a person –

any person – might need to disappear. I was to memorize your address and destroy the paper, and when my time came I should go there and ask for you. I destroyed the paper, of course, but the words he had written never seem to have left my mind. It was such an odd evening, and I’d never met anyone like him before.”

“When the Buffalo police spotted you, you were on your way to my house?”

“Yes. I got as far as the bus station in downtown Buffalo. I was going out to find a cab, but I guess I looked suspicious, so two policemen approached me and asked to see identification.

I ran a few steps, they called for me to stop, and that brought me to my senses. When I reached into my coat to produce my stolen wallet, they thought I had a gun. That was something George Hawkes hadn’t told me about.”

If he was still calling himself George Hawkes, Jane thought, then his luck was holding. When she had met him he had made his living as a travel agent for money, taking it on trips from a jewelry wholesale operation in California through Panama to banks in the Netherlands Antilles to front corporations in Europe, and then back. One afternoon seven or eight years ago, he had been raided in Los Angeles by policemen who thought he was a drug dealer. But he had managed to see the signs just in time: the van that had been parked down the street, which occasionally wobbled a little, as though a person were moving around inside, and then the large, plain cars arriving from different directions all at once.

He had slipped out through the crowded produce market next door, carrying a great deal of money with him. Walking out ahead of the raid instead of getting caught in it did not, however, have the desired effect. His clients, who were innocent of drug dealing but deeply involved in the business of making unauthorized copies of feature films and selling them in foreign markets, had interpreted the facts in their own way.

They felt he had absconded with their money. He had come to Jane.

After Jane had hidden him, she had gotten in touch with his former clients. She had then dictated a treaty. The former Harvey Fisk would take his usual commission and return their money via the usual channels, which would then close forever.

He would not engage in any illegal activity again. They need not worry that at some time in the future he would get caught and be tempted to trade information about them for a light sentence. In return, they would never search for him, bother him, or speak of him to a third party. Any infraction of the treaty by either party would result in Jane, the referee, giving sufficient information to the authorities to put the infringing party away.

Jane gave in to her curiosity. “How is he?”

“Oh, fine,” said Dahlman. “Excellent health for fifty-six.

Good physical conditioning, muscle tone apparently from tennis and swimming. The appendix doesn’t really mean a thing.” He noticed her expression. “You didn’t mean that, did you?”

“No.”

“He lives like a king. And you know what? It didn’t seem like anything then, but now it seems like everything. He isn’t afraid.”

Jane drove through the dark country with tireless discipline.

She kept her speed constant, changing lanes only when she needed to, never letting lines of cars build up behind her where a follower could hide.

The parts of Dahlman’s story that were most incomprehensible to him were clear to her. The two men who had pretended to be cops had done it so they could interview him at great length. The questions they had asked were the ones that killers needed to know: Were there any pictures of Hardiston, or any medical records that had survived the fire in Sarah Hoffman’s office? When Dahlman told his story, did it sound reasonable and rational, or disconnected and mad and unbelievable? If he had any witnesses they didn’t know about, any evidence that would lend credence to any part of his story, that evening was the time when he would have produced it.

Since he could produce nothing, he was perfect.

They had put him in suspended animation on the farm, convinced that he should go nowhere and talk to no one. Then they had pocketed the keys he had willingly given them, and returned to his house. They took a whole week to search every inch of his house and destroy any evidence he had missed that might corroborate his story, then plant all the evidence they could invent that he had gone insane and spent months working himself up to killing his partner.

Their plan had been very well considered. There had been five doctors and nurses on the Hardiston case. If all five had suddenly died in Chicago, the police would have been in a frenzy. These killers had known that, so they had begun by culling the herd, luring the first three away and picking them off quietly. Even the order of the murders had been precise: the first was Dr. Hoffman’s nurse, who had a car accident on the way to Colorado. She was the safest because when it happened she had already been separated from the others. The second was Dr. Wung, in Korea. His death and that of the nurse could not be connected, even in the unlikely event that anyone heard about both – she had never worked for Dr.

Wung. The third was almost certainly Dr. Wung’s assistant, Celia Rodriguez. As soon as her boss was dead, they had probably just grabbed her in Boston and buried her somewhere. Nobody would notice unless her body was found.

She was a stranger in Boston. She had only moved because she was going to keep working for Dr. Wung, who wasn’t expected to arrive for at least a month. Even then, when the vacation and relocation period was up, the one they would have missed was Dr. Wung, not the assistant he had said he was bringing with him.

It was very neat. They had killed three people – one between Chicago and Colorado, one in Korea, and one in Boston – in three different ways, without having either the police or the two doctors who had stayed in Chicago know that anything had happened.

That left only the two doctors in Chicago, Richard Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman. If either were murdered, there would be an immediate investigation. There was no way to avoid it. When that happened, the authorities were likely to try to ask questions of the people who had once worked with the victim, and they were going to find that a statistically unlikely number of them had recently died. So what the killers had chosen to do was to trigger the investigation themselves, so that the questions weren’t asked until they were ready to hand the police a killer. They had made sure that before any question could be asked, the police had an answer.

If the investigation led the police to change the suicide or the accident or the disappearance into murders, they would not start looking for new suspects. They would already have in custody a proven killer who was clearly out of his mind, and who’d had as little reason to murder his partner as any of the others. The real killers must have planned the deaths in a hundred different ways, a hundred different orders to see which of the five should be killed when, and which would be left to serve as perpetrator.

The more Jane thought about it, the more sophisticated the plan they had chosen seemed. The one who would simply disappear had to be one of the three women, because that happened to young women fairly regularly in big cities, and hardly ever to middle-aged men. The one killed in the car accident had to be someone who could be fooled into traveling a long distance by car. That way there would be lots of chances to arrange it and the investigators who were stuck with it would have very little information. The supposed murderer would have to be one of the men, because men who went mad were more likely to do it that way than women were. Jane wasn’t sure about suicides, but she suspected men did more of that too, and an anesthesiologist was the best candidate because he carried the means with him in his bag.

“What’s our next stop?”

Jane remembered Dahlman. He had to be talked to. Human beings were terribly fragile. A person had to be kept informed, kept thinking and participating or he would begin to lose his connection with the herd, and that was the same as losing his connection with the world. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve been trying to think over everything you’ve told me so we’ll know what we should do.” She smiled apologetically. “It’s not very comforting stuff.”

His answer wasn’t a snap, the way it had been earlier. It was quiet and regretful. “You said you wanted to figure out who was chasing us. Did you figure it out?”

“The police in Chicago are interested, of course. Most of the time, getting out of Illinois would do a lot to solve that problem. When there’s a murder, the local police keep looking hard, but everywhere else you’d just be a name among thousands of others. The people who set you up took care of that. They’ve made it look as though you’re unpredictable and dangerous, so for the moment you’re probably near the top of the list everywhere. Since there are plenty of grounds for the federal authorities to come in, we have to assume that just about everyone in the country who hunts people for a living is looking for you.”