The Face-Changers (44 page)

Other little details made Jardine’s story seem right. If the police were playing Vaughn carefully, trying to lure him home, they might behave as Jardine had said. Vaughn had been in a very difficult position. The police had not charged him, but they would certainly keep quietly looking for him until they found him, so he couldn’t go anyplace where people would recognize him. He also had to worry about how many people like Jardine might be looking for him. The only solution had been to stop calling himself Brian Vaughn, and stop looking like Brian Vaughn.

What had not struck Jane as right was the story Jardine had told her about the crime, but she had to take into account that it had probably been of little interest to Jardine. The dead girl had been found in Brian Vaughn’s car. She tried to imagine how that could have happened.

One possibility was that Vaughn had picked her up in New York and taken her to his house in Weston. He had drugged and raped her, then realized that he had given her so much sedative that she had died. He had loaded her body into his car, intending to take her back to her apartment in New York.

He had somehow been trapped – had mechanical trouble, run out of gas, gotten stuck in snow or mud – and had seen no alternative to abandoning the car. Maybe he had thought he was leaving temporarily, to walk to a gas station or something, but the police found the car before he could get back. But the story had to account not just for what had happened but for what Brian Vaughn had wanted to happen.

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.

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 me 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 Francisco 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.”

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.