The Face-Changers (9 page)

– probably great ones.”

He was silent for a moment, and she looked at him again.

She decided she had better tell him the worst of it at the beginning. She spoke more gently. “If they can’t take you under ideal circumstances, they’ll kill you. It’s not because they want to, but because they know that people like you seldom surrender.”

“I’m trying to tell you that it’s a mistake. All of it.”

“And I’m trying to tell you that it doesn’t matter. Don’t imagine that your credentials and accomplishments will convince people you’re innocent, or that you’re harmless.

Deep in the back of your mind you seem to have the notion that those things will make this come out all right – that the truth will save you. Maybe it will. But right now it won’t, and right now is reality. The future is just a theory.” Dahlman sat in silence for a full minute. A few times he looked as though some retort was on his tongue, but each time he decided not to speak. Finally, he said with exaggerated patience, “It’s just that you mentioned Pittsburgh. We could stop and see if we could get some help. I have friends there.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I just told you – ”

“Listen carefully, because this is important. You haven’t told me who was chasing you hard enough to make you run to Buffalo. But I know who has been chasing you since then, and I think I know who will join in the hunt. You came through several states and committed crimes in two.”

“What crimes?” His voice was irate.

“Fleeing to evade prosecution in Illinois and New York.

That’s if you didn’t do anything else, and nothing happened on the way – like breaking into your own office in the university to get things before you left.”

Dahlman was shocked. “That’s absurd.”

“That’s a federal crime. School break-ins are investigated by the F.B.I. Crossing a state line while you were running is enough for them, though.”

“I’m not some mad bomber. I’m a physician.” Jane sighed. There it was again. “They don’t know what else you are, and waiting isn’t a good way for them to find out.

In one sense, it would be good for you if the F.B.I, does come in. They would take a very close look at whatever evidence there is that you killed someone, and at every piece of paper you owned. If there’s anything that will clear you, they’re more likely to find it than anyone else is, and they have no reason to conceal it. But in the short term, they’re trouble, because they’re better at finding people than any local cops can be. They make stopping in with out-of-town friends and relatives a very bad idea, both for you and for the friends and relatives. Your friends can be charged as accessories if they so much as fail to turn you in. It’s hard to think of a friend you trust with your life but also don’t mind putting in that kind of fix.”

“I never intended to get anyone else in trouble. I was simply thinking of ways to make this easier.”

“What we want isn’t easier, it’s less predictable. There are experts chasing you now. They’re using this time to find out everything about you. You’re hurt, so where will you go?

Probably to a friend who is a doctor. I’ll bet you know a dozen who would take care of you for a month without turning you in. Good for you. But twelve is a tiny number for the F.B.I, to check, and if they’ve already been called in they’re busy tonight compiling the list of names and addresses. If you had them written down someplace when you left Chicago, the F.B.I, already has a list. They don’t have to waste time flying around the country to find these people, they just have to phone the agents already in the cities where they live. I’m sure you had money – bank accounts and retirement accounts and stocks and bonds. Unless you kept it in cash a distance from home or in offshore banks under a false name, then forget it.

The second you touch any of the accounts, bells and whistles will go off in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.” Dahlman glared at her angrily. “You’re trying to get me to give up, aren’t you? To go into some police station and turn myself in, because I’m going to be caught.” Jane looked into his eyes and held the gaze, unblinking, for a moment before she returned her eyes to the road. “No. I’m making sure you know at the outset what it costs when you decide to run. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t pleasant. And most of all, it isn’t a sure thing. If you want to survive, you have to change who you are. You don’t just get to run away from one bad incident in the past and keep the rest – the respect and gratitude you earned, the friends and family you love, the status you enjoyed. The past is what the police will use to find you. And I don’t know much about those two men at the hospital, but I wouldn’t want to make it too easy for them, either.”

Jane had managed to plant a few bits of the truth in his brain, and over the next few hours his mind would be working out the rest, whether he wanted it to or not. She hoped she had said enough to keep him scared, quiet, and docile for the next few hours, while the trail was still hot and any mistake could be fatal.

Adult males had always been the most difficult kind of runner to guide. All of that self-reliance and aggression that they had painfully developed as survival characteristics got in the way and made their impulses foolish. It was true: women stopped and asked for directions, and men didn’t. Even the way they looked was against them. Their hair was almost always too short to change much, the differences between the kinds of clothes they wore were minuscule. As she thought about Dahlman, what came to mind was a list of ways in which he was the worst ever. He was wounded and weak, and could easily get worse instead of better. If he did, she couldn’t even take him to a doctor, because apparently in that closed, limited world, he was famous. And he was older, more brittle, and attached to his own habits of mind.

It struck her as odd that she had used the comparative:

“older.” Older than whom? Not just older than the usual male in trouble. Older than Carey. She admitted to herself that the worst mental habits that Dahlman had were familiar to her, because her husband had a milder, less irritating case of them.

Dahlman never let a statement of fact go unquestioned and unexamined. Is it a fact? How do you know? Doesn’t that contradict this other fact?

That was Carey, and so was the casual, unconscious assumption he had picked up in medical school that he was one of the good guys, so nobody would wish to do him harm.

It was one of the qualities that she had always loved about Carey. It made him cheerful, pleasant, and self-assured enough to look goofy once in a while without getting defensive. He moved through the world smoothly, telling people what was good for them and quietly smiling through their irrational protests and retaliations like a parent waiting for a tantrum to end. She loved it now, when he was thirty-four. Would she love it in thirty years, when he had earned the kind of adulation and status that Dahlman had, when more confidence was heaped on top of the conviction and it started to sound a whole lot like arrogance?

As she drove along the dark highway all she could think about was Carey. The questions she had been holding in the back of her mind for hours tumbled into view. Carey had been adamant that Jane must never again drive along a dark highway with a fugitive in the seat beside her. The reasons had been carefully assembled and calmly presented. But all of the arguments had been made on me assumption that runners were certain kinds of people. Some had caused their own problems, and others were victims. The victims were usually women and children. There were people besides Jane Whitefield who would be willing to take the risks to save them. All Jane had to do was keep a list of those quasi-illegal organizations who hid abuse victims and make a call or two, and the person would be picked up. The ones who weren’t exactly victims, just people who had acquired enemies but had not done anything bad enough to deserve to die just yet, could be handled differently.

Carey had grudgingly conceded that if Jane felt it was justified, she could give a person like that a set of false papers left over from the old days, a handful of hundred-dollar bills, and a half hour of advice before she sent him on his way.

Carey was very good at constructing fair, logical solutions to other people’s problems.

She glanced at Dahlman. He was staring ahead, motionless.

She looked at him longer and harder, waiting for him to blink.

Was it possible he had just…

He said, “Don’t worry. I’m not dead. I was just daydreaming.”

Jane pulled the car onto the shoulder of the dark road. “Get in the back and stretch out. Maybe you’ll be able to sleep a little.”

He climbed out and lay down in the back seat. “Might as well. Not that it will be easy, now that you’ve convinced me I’m homeless, penniless, and friendless.”

“Not friendless,” said Jane. “You’ve got me.” She didn’t like the way that sounded. Maybe some reassurance would help him sleep. “The police and the F.B.I, will be working hard on building a case against you, and it would be a very unusual frame that could stand up to that kind of attention. All they have to do is detect some flaw that proves one piece of evidence against you is faked. If it’s faked, the killer faked it, and that can’t be you.”

“Then all I’ll have to worry about is a pair of men I’ve never seen before coming in the night to kill me.”

“If the frame fails, killing you afterward won’t put it back together,” said Jane. “Those men will have other things to do –

like making sure they’re not caught” She forced a smile. “We just have to keep you out of sight a little while and let the police straighten it out.”

As she drove along the dark road in silence, she wished that she were as sure as she had sounded.

Carey McKinnon walked along smartly, conscious of the sound of his shoes on the concrete sidewalk. Instead of worrying about his wife, he tried to review in his memory an article by an orthopedist decrying the effects of shoes that forced the foot to strike with high impact on the calcaneus at each step and the further skeletal deterioration caused by leather soles and hard rubber heels.

But there was little in the article that had surprised him, so he couldn’t keep his mind on it for more than a few seconds.

He turned the corner and saw the hospital building looming ahead, dominating me whole next block. He had never thought of the hospital as “looming” before. He raised his head, straightened his spine, and lengthened his strides. He had spent as much time away as he could possibly justify, and now he had to walk in, head for the third floor, and pretend to be the one who discovered that his patient was missing.

Everything he did during the next few hours would have to be deceptive and misleading. He had to delay the police, divert their attention, send them in the wrong direction, if possible.

Jane was risking everything. From the second Carey had heard Dahlman say, “I came to find a woman named Jane Whitefield,” he had wished he could throw himself in front of her.

He wanted to hide her, deny she existed, and let the faceless, invisible threat take him instead.

Even as the words had formed in his mind, he had known that he could not do it. For most of his life he had been learning to believe passionately in human expertise. Nearly every day he detected the approach of someone’s death and asked himself, “What is the best strategy to fight this? Who is the very best one to do it?” Sometimes he would clear his own schedule to prepare for the surgery, and sometimes he would instead make a telephone call to a superb practitioner of a particular procedure, an expert in a narrow specialty, and ask him to save the patient. When Carey had seen this patient –

Dahlman – handcuffed to a gurney in the emergency room, he had known. Dahlman needed a specialist, not some clumsy amateur who would get him killed. Dahlman needed Jane.

He fretted as he walked toward the hospital. He worried that in the rush and the anxiety, he had not really explained to Jane who Dahlman was. Jane had a right to know everything, and Carey had the impression that what he had told her must have sounded incoherent. He found himself rehearsing what he should have told her.

Dahlman was truthful. Dahlman was no more knowledgeable than Carey about things that criminals did, but he had all of his faculties, and knew that he hadn’t killed Sarah Hoffman. He was certainly capable of knowing that someone had planted evidence that he had killed Sarah Hoffman. No, Carey had told Jane that much.

What he had not told her was why a rational person – any rational person who happened to be nearby when this happened – should feel that saving Dahlman was worth enormous risks. That was more difficult. In a way, it was absurd that there had to be an excuse for saving a life. People, sometimes thousands of them in a single day, unhesitatingly threw themselves into battles to preserve the lives and privileges of degenerate kings and corrupt politicians.

Dahlman was something that Carey could not have said aloud, even to Jane: he was a man who might be worth more to humanity than all the kings and presidents who had ever lived.

Carey could say the easy, verifiable part: Dahlman had already saved thousands of people in his operating room and had personally trained a few hundred of the best young surgeons now in practice. But the part that Carey was torn about was an assertion with no proof. He believed that Dahlman might be this generation’s standard-bearer. Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman’s quiet clinical research on post-operative regeneration of external epithelial tissue had produced results promising enough to attract the attention of a few nonspecialist journals. But what only Carey and a few dozen others who had read the scientific articles had understood was that Dahlman wasn’t just looking for a way to help surgeons produce evenly healed, aesthetically pleasing incisions.

The doctors who knew Dahlman, who knew the way he thought and were used to the understated, terse way he spoke, knew that the articles were hints. Working on the skin was almost inevitable because a researcher could see it and touch it. But the outer skin and the membranes of internal organs were both epithelial tissue. Dahlman was after game so big that even a whisper of it did not belong in a scientific article. It was nothing less than a way of making all surgery a minor procedure. Ultimately, maybe in another generation or two, it might provide a way of treating everything from heart disease to cancer. Huge sections of damaged tissue could be removed, and the body stimulated to replace them. And if Sarah Hoffman was already dead, then the seeds of that research –