The Face-Changers (3 page)

“But the airport police don’t know I’m in danger.”

“Once you’ve checked your suitcase, go straight through the metal detectors. After that, whatever those men have in mind, at least it can’t involve guns or knives. Then duck into a ladies’ room and stay there until you hear the speaker announce that your flight is boarding. Walk directly to the gate and get on.”

Janet stared out at the driveway, watching for the shuttle bus, but that made each moment tick by and upset her. “I know this is none of my business, so you don’t have to answer.”

“If I can’t, I won’t.”

“What will you do next? If you’re in a hotel, you don’t live around here. Do you just get on a plane too?”

“The job’s not over yet.” The woman shrugged. “In a minute I’ll get back in the car and drive toward Baltimore. If they’re driving south toward the airport and see me coming in the northbound lane, there’s no way they can get to me, but they’ll think about it.”

“What will they think?”

“Either we didn’t go to the airport, and you’re still with me, or you’re already in the air. They’ll realize that either way, I’m the one to follow, so they’ll try, and fail.” Janet saw the shuttle van pull up and stop at the curb. As the driver jumped out, she could see three or four people already inside. He ran to the door and said, “Airport?”

“Yes,” said the dark woman.

The driver snatched the suitcase and hurried to the van.

Janet hugged the dark woman and whispered, “Thanks.”

“Go,” said the dark woman.

As Janet sat in the van beside a pair of elderly ladies, she could see the dark woman walking quickly toward the small green car to draw the killers away from her path.

As soon as the shuttle bus had safely made the turn onto the airport drive, the green car pulled away from the hotel. It moved along Dorsey Street for a half mile, then turned into the driveway of the Holiday Inn. The dark woman drove up to the front entrance, and two large men in their thirties got in.

The green car pulled away. As it passed under the Baltimore/Washington Parkway, the dark woman reached into her purse and produced a little Colt SF-VI revolver. She turned to the muscular man with blond hair sitting in the front seat beside her. “Get rid of this.” she said.

He took the pistol and put it into his coat pocket. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the bullet hole in the rear window.

“What was that for, anyway?”

“To give her nightmares.” She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the top of the dark, curly head of the second man, who was bent forward as he ran his hand along the back of his companion’s bucket seat. “Don’t bother looking for a bullet in here,” she said. “I packed the inside of the window with a couple of phone books before I did it.” She passed a sign that said “Patapsco Valley State Park,” then pulled over at a wooded picnic area, and all three got out of the car. The woman opened the trunk, took out the tire iron, and leaned over the right side of the car. She swung the tire iron against the rear window three times, pounding the glass around the bullet hole into the back seat. She looked at the bigger hole, nodded to herself, and tossed the tire iron back into the trunk. “I saw a body shop down the road from your hotel the other day. Get the window replaced before you leave for home. And don’t forget to tell them you’re paying cash, so they don’t waste a day writing up an inflated estimate for the insurance company.”

The shorter man with curly hair said, “Are you going to fly back?”

“I’m going to keep her apartment occupied for a while,” she said. “It’ll take about a month to get a loan against her condo. Once the check clears, and I’ve cleaned her safe-deposit box and maxed out her credit cards, I’ll turn up.” The blond man grinned, then sat on top of the nearest picnic table and lit a cigarette. “I’ve got to say, you kept us hopping. We actually lost track of you a couple of times.” She nodded. “Did you ever see Jane when she was getting somebody out?”

“See her? I thought somebody made her up. You mean there’s a real Jane?”

The dark woman walked back toward the car. “Probably not,” she muttered. “There used to be.” She got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “Come on. If we trade cars now, you may be able to get this one fixed today and leave.”

Jane McKinnon turned into the driveway, drove to the back of the big old stone house, and strolled up the flagstone path toward the back door. She would just have time to get dinner going and step into the shower before Carey finished his rounds and started home. The feel of the evening made her think of the ends of summer days when she was a child in Deganawida, the air still and humid, the crickets just beginning to compete with the faint calls of the red-winged blackbirds in the marshy fields between her parents’ house and the river.

She heard the muffled sound of the telephone ringing inside the house and changed her walk to a trot. After two steps, the ringing stopped. Maybe she could still catch the call while the person talked to the answering machine. She reached the back porch with her key ready, unlocked the back door, flung it open, rushed through the little cloak room, across the kitchen, and snatched the telephone off the wall. She heard the dial tone. She took a deep breath, then blew it out through her teeth as she walked through the living room and into the den.

She pressed the button on the answering machine and heard her husband’s voice.

“Jane? It’s me. Can you meet me at the hospital as soon as you get home? Thanks.”

Jane reached for the telephone, then let her hand hover over it. He had not said where he was, and his voice had sounded rushed. That usually meant he was already on his way to the next patient’s room. If she called the main desk it would probably take them fifteen minutes to get him to a telephone, and she could drive there in twenty. It would probably strike him as a refreshing change if she simply did as he had asked.

The recording had sounded a bit like the voice of a man with car trouble.

She retraced her steps through the kitchen, swung her purse onto her shoulder, picked up her keys, locked the door, and backed die car out of the driveway. The drive to the hospital at this time of die evening was easy. The mild rush hour that Buffalo could manage was almost over, and the only heavy traffic that she could see was flowing out of the city toward her.

Jane pulled her car into the lot behind Carey’s office building, around the corner from the hospital, and walked up the street, feeling the warm, humid air wrap around her.

Winters in this part of die world were dark and fierce, but the summers were a sweet, guilty pleasure. Jane went around to the rear entrance of the hospital, so she could go up the elevator closest to Carey’s wing.

As she turned the comer of the building, Jane saw the two police cars beside the emergency-room entrance, not exactly parked, just stopped and hastily vacated. One of them had its door open and the radio still crackling over a woman’s voice chanting numbers and street names into the hot night air. Jane glanced across the parking lot at the row of doctors’ reserved spaces to verify that Carey’s black BMW was still there, and that no tow truck was hooked to it, then noticed the news vans beyond it. There were three of them, all with transmitter booms folded on their roofs. Beside one of them, a young man who looked like a carnival roustabout uncoiled a long double strand of electrical cord.

She kept walking without changing her pace, as though maybe she had always intended to take the long way around the building, or maybe she had noticed the police cars and simply decided that whatever the police were doing here, they probably would prefer not to have inquisitive civilians in their way.

It had been over a year since she had last been on the road, but she could not yet abandon any of the precautions: never stop walking in a place where there were policemen who had nothing to do but study faces; never stay in the vicinity of a camera crew long enough to risk having her face appear on a television screen.

The police had left their vehicles in a hurry without securing them, and the news vans meant that all three of the local channels had been monitoring their scanners and agreed that this was where the best story of the night could be had.

She guessed that probably a policeman had been shot. She caught a glimpse of men in dark blue uniforms through the glass of the emergency-room reception area. The time when they had been able to act, to move quickly and accomplish something, seemed to be over. Now they were just waiting.

She walked more quickly as she approached the glass doors and watched them slide apart automatically. As she stepped inside the lobby she held her head steady and walked purposefully toward the elevators. She veered to stay behind the man holding the video camera on a young, blond woman with a microphone.

“Hospital spokesmen have confirmed that the suspect has been shot, and they characterized his condition as ‘stable.’ The police officers we spoke to were only able to tell us that the injured man is a fugitive and he is believed to have been armed.”

Jane’s fingers found the button to close the elevator door, then the button for the third floor, and she felt the sudden amplification of gravity as the elevator rose. She tried to fight the growing sense of dread. This had nothing to do with her.

She was Jane McKinnon now, a respected surgeon’s devoted wife who sometimes came to pick him up in the evening when he finished his rounds. Jane Whitefield was a memory.

She walked down the hallway, past the rooms where Carey’s patients of the last day or two were recovering, learning to live without whatever he had cut out of them or sleeping off their anesthetic hangovers. As she came in sight of the nurses’ station and began to crane her neck to look for Carey, she saw a door open near the end of the corridor. The first figure to appear made her take in a little breath. There were Carey’s long legs and big feet, and his long arms below the short sleeves of the green surgical shirt. He still wasn’t dressed to leave, but that was all right.

He couldn’t know that there was something downstairs that made her impatient to get away.

He saw her and hurried up the hallway toward her, but he didn’t pause. His arm came around her waist and he spun her gently and pulled her along with him. He didn’t let go, and she allowed his hand to guide her while she quickened her pace to match his.

“Got to talk to you,” he whispered. His brows were knitted, and the sharp brown eyes seemed to be searching her face for something.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “Is there a transplant patient who needs something I’ve got?”

“I love you,” he said.

“You’ve already had everything that will get you,” she murmured. “Anything else, you’ll have to get me in the mood.”

“Let’s go in my office.” As he led her into the tiny room, her eyes settled on familiar things: his briefcase, his coat. She watched him close the door and push in the button to lock it, then stop and lean against his desk. She felt the smile fading from her lips and became watchful.

He folded his arms across his chest, and she suspected she was seeing him as his patients saw him, just before he told them something that they wanted desperately not to hear.

Carey said, “I’ve got a patient and in fifteen minutes I’ve got to go in and repair a bullet wound in his shoulder. I want you to talk to him.”

Jane stared into his eyes. She could see that Carey was making an enormous effort to keep his eyes on hers, unwavering, unblinking. She felt an unaccustomed chill, and when she identified it, she resisted the knowledge that came with it. He was building distance between them, trying to make her look at him the way a colleague or a patient would.

That was why he was standing across the little room from her, not holding her or even reaching out to touch her hand. She recognized the stance with the arms folded in front of him. It was an unconscious gesture, using the arms to protect the midsection, where the guts and lungs and heart were. I don’t expect to be attacked, it said, but I’m prepared for the possibility.

She felt a strong impulse to fold her arms too, to hug herself to ward off the hurt. This is my husband, who loves me. Why is this happening? “Why do you want me to talk to him?”

Carey sighed. It was coming. “He’s in trouble.” She said, “What do you care?”

“I know him. He’s a doctor. A surgeon. He was one of my teachers. There’s some kind of crazy misunderstanding, and the police think he killed another doctor. I knew her too –

when I was a resident in Chicago, she was a couple of years ahead of me. The whole thing is insane.” Carey’s eyes softened, and he held up his hands in a gesture of despair. “I know,” he said. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly know he didn’t do it. I can’t make that judgment.”

“No, you probably can,” she said. “I’m just wondering how you can be sure nobody else can. Cops, judges, and district attorneys are better at telling who’s guilty than people think they are. And when they just want to close the books on a case, the one they pick to hang it on isn’t somebody like a surgeon. It’s some loser with the right kind of criminal record and no money for lawyers.” She gently put her hand on Carey’s shoulder. “If you want to do something for him, let’s start making some calls and get him some terrific legal help.”

“What he’s worried about isn’t that he’ll get convicted. It’s that he won’t get to court.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know much. He’s coherent, but we didn’t have much time alone. He was agitated, in pain. He said something about being framed. He thinks there are people within some police department who are in on it, and whatever they put in their bulletin about him was designed to get him shot.” Jane tilted her head, as though she had heard an odd change of pitch. “The police here don’t shoot unless somebody is in danger. Running away isn’t enough.”

“He’s not lying about the bullet hole.”

“I didn’t say that. I mean something’s missing, left out.”

“Everything is missing. Everything is left out. I don’t even have time to tell you what I know, let alone piece together what I don’t know. I have to operate on him in a little while.