The Face-Changers jw-4 Read online

  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—not what had been done, but what paths had been rejected, what would have been tried next, and why—existed only in the brain of Richard Dahlman.

  Carey walked along trying to look unconcerned, but feeling his heart pounding. A very small, incidental part of this was up to him. He had to do what he could to help Jane carry this off. He had to become a disturbing, confusing element in the mixture, make a lot of noise, and appear to raise the hue and cry while really making a mess of it and adding to the delay. He had to buy Jane more time. If she was driving, a minute could put her a mile past a roadblock; if she was flying, it might get her off a plane and out the door of a terminal.

  He realized that he had been describing an urge of his own. He would like to be with her, running away, not stepping toward the bright lights of the hospital. He wanted all of this never to have happened—wished he had never been alert enough to know that if he didn’t ask the wife he loved to risk her life, then he deserved never to have been born.

  He studied the building as he approached it. Was he imagining that there were more police cars than before? He probably was. When he had arrived at five there had been none, and then he had seen two out the back window. These had undoubtedly been parked in front all evening, and he had not been looking in that direction when he had slipped out through radiology.

  He walked through the front door and stepped directly into a glaring light. “Dr. McKinnon?” said a female voice. “Can we talk to you?”

  He had thought he had gotten past the newspeople. Their vans had been parked in the back, near his car. He looked down at the short, pretty woman beside him, and he recognized her as the one he had seen this morning when he had turned on the television to find out about the weather. She was wearing the same awful blue suit, and he felt sorry for her. Could she have been working all this time?

  “I’m sorry,” he said apologetically. “I have a patient to see right now, but I’ll be around later.”

  The woman’s face seemed to lose muscular control and go flat. The professional demeanor of concerned commentator had vanished, and for a second she looked confused. Then the eyes widened with excitement. Carey saw the change, and hurried toward the elevator.

  “Dr. McKinnon!” she called, and he thought he heard her footsteps behind him. He went past the elevator toward the door to the stairwell, heard the elevator doors open, spun to step inside, and punched the CLOSE DOOR button.

  He pushed the button for the third floor and tried to collect his thoughts. They already knew Dahlman was gone, and the newswoman had assumed he had known too, at first. But he hadn’t wanted to let her be the one to tell him, and he knew he wasn’t a good enough actor to let her record his reaction on camera.

  He stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hall toward the room assigned to Dahlman. There were two men in sport coats, one gray tweed that matched the man’s gray, bristly hair, and the other a brown that looked a little like one Carey had that Jane never let him wear. The men had plastic wallets stuck in their breast pockets so they hung over to display badges, one gold and the other silver. Carey pretended not to see them as he walked to the doorway.

  The younger one in brown stepped into his path. “I’m sorry,” said the man. “This is a crime scene.” He studied Carey’s face, as though trying to verify that Carey had seen his badge.

  Carey turned his head to look in puzzlement at the older man, then back at the one in brown. “I understand. Dr. Dahlman is in custody, but I’m his doctor, and I’d like to see him.”

  The older man was holding a little spiral notebook in his hand and he consulted it. “You are Doctor …” He flipped a page. “McKinnon.” It wasn’t a question, but he said, “That right?”

  “Yes,” said Carey. He craned his neck to look in the doorway at the empty room, then looked at the policemen in surprise. “I operated on him earlier this evening, and he’s supposed to be in there. Can you tell me where he’s been moved?”

  “I’m Captain Folger,” said the man. “This is Detective Kohl. I wish I could tell you where he is. He’s missing. If you’ll come with me, you might be able to help us clear this up.” He was reassuring and calm, but not quite friendly.

  Carey knew it was time to start causing trouble. “What do you mean, ‘missing’?” Carey simulated the amazement he might have felt. “That’s crazy! He’s seriously injured and tranquilized. You’re trying to tell me he just got up out of bed? He was supposed to be restrained. And where were the policemen who were supposed to be watching him? We should be looking for him.”

  “We’ve already done that,” said the policeman. “But he’s not in the building anymore.” As the policeman stepped off down the hall, Carey almost smiled. Jane was out. She had done it. The policeman said, “I think you understand we’d like to ask you some questions—about his condition and so on.”

  “Of course,” said Carey. He followed the older policeman down the hallway, reminding himself that he couldn’t let himself get lazy now. He had to think. The man had said “Captain” Folger—a very high rank, the sort of policeman who was in charge of a station, not the sort who wandered around looking for people.

  Then Carey felt rather than heard something behind him: the younger one, Detective Kohl, was following a few paces behind them. Was he cutting off Carey’s retreat, or was his position simply the result of starting to walk after his boss had? Carey decided that, for the moment, he had better not assume anything was meaningless.

  Captain Folger opened the door to the conference room at the end of the hall, and to Carey’s surprise, he went in and closed it behind him. Detective Kohl stepped to Carey’s side. “Have you ever had a patient walk off before?” Carey decided he was trying to distract him.

  “Usually if they chicken out, it’s before I operate.”

  The detective seemed to think that was a very witty thing to say. He laughed, then said, “I guess he can’t have gone far.”

  Carey shook his head. “I’m amazed he went anywhere. He’s sixty-seven years old,
he’s lost blood, he’s been bruised by the impact of the bullet, he’s—”

  “Oh, yeah,” Detective Kohl interrupted. “I’ve seen it a few times, and I know what you mean. Whatever’s going through his mind, he hurts.” He said it with a satisfaction that reminded Carey that this man was no friend of his.

  The door opened, and Captain Folger beckoned and stepped aside. “Thanks, Doctor.”

  As Carey went past him into the familiar room, Folger began to recite names. Carey listened, aware that he should hold the names in his memory, but they were just words. “This is Officer Graley, Officer Wilchevsky, Mr. Marshall, and I’m Captain Folger, in case you didn’t catch it before.” Nobody stood to shake hands.

  As Carey had expected, the captain did the talking. “Dr. McKinnon, I should say at this juncture that we appreciate any help you can give us. If you would be more comfortable consulting an attorney before you say anything, we understand: there’s no way to predict whether you might open yourself up to some kind of malpractice litigation or other legal problems. It would cause delay that’s probably unnecessary, but after all, we do need to respect your rights, too. Because this is an official police inquiry, it can’t be off the record and could come out in court.”

  Carey admired the smooth, affable way the captain had spoken. It seemed to him that Folger had probably read him his rights and set a trap at the same time. If Carey was here to delay the police, Folger had offered him a simple way to do it. But that would confirm their suspicion that he was the enemy.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he answered. “Will it?”

  “I can’t give anybody legal advice,” said Folger. “And I don’t know anything about all these civil suits against hospitals and doctors. We just do the criminal stuff.” He paused. “Want to go ahead?”

  Carey nodded.

  “Our logs say officers brought Richard Dahlman in here at seven-fifteen this evening. The hospital records say you operated on him at eight-fifteen. Is that right?”

  So this was going to be about the subject of times. He didn’t want to talk about times. That would help them isolate exactly when Jane had slipped Dahlman out, and if they knew when, they would know where it had happened. People might remember having seen Jane there. He answered with names. “Yes, I operated. Dr. Shelton was anesthesiologist and Dr. Stern assisted. The surgical nurse was Mrs. Brooks.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “I removed fragments of a bullet from his left shoulder—five, I think. Very small—particles, really. The main projectile had expanded as it passed through, and glanced off a bone. That seems to have been what caused the pieces to come off. It also caused a fracture with bone chips, torn musculature, and damage to a major vein. The main artery was not severed, and there appeared to be no significant nerve damage.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “Not long. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five or fifty minutes at the outside.”

  Folger looked at his notes. “The anesthetist keeps a timed record. Did you know that?”

  “Of course,” said Carey. “That’s right. If you need exact times, you should get Shelton’s notes.”

  “We have.” He frowned, then handed the sheet of paper to Carey. “Is this his handwriting?”

  “I guess so,” said Carey. It said fifteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. “He usually keeps his own notes.” He handed the paper back.

  “Fifteen minutes. That seems like world-record speed.”

  Carey shrugged. “Faster than it seemed to me, at any rate.” He added, “No surgery is entirely without risk. We don’t keep a patient open any longer than necessary. When I was sure I had removed the foreign objects that had shown on the X-ray, repaired the damage to the vein to stop the bleeding, and sutured the muscles, I closed.”

  “What kind of risk are you talking about?”

  Carey cocked his head. “Infection, adverse reaction to anesthetics, shock and possible cardiac arrest, hemorrhage …”

  As Carey spoke, he was aware of each of the people in the room. Did the young woman’s squinted eyes and pursed lips mean she was trying to understand, or did she disbelieve something he was saying? How could she?

  Folger was looking down at his notes. “Why were you the one to operate?”

  Carey had not prepared for this question, and it astounded him that he had overlooked it. He constructed his response cautiously. “Dr. Leo Bortoni was the surgeon on duty at the time,” he said. “When the patient was brought into the emergency room, I was on my usual rounds, visiting my surgical patients. I knew Leo was in surgery at the time. The procedure is to phone one of the surgeons on call, but of course I was on that list, and was already there, so I stepped in.”

  “And you met with the patient.”

  “I went to the emergency room to examine him.”

  “What was his condition?” Folger’s eyes weren’t on Carey’s. He seemed to be glancing at the man in the dark suit across the table. What was his name again?

  Carey sensed that some kind of trap was being prepared. “He had a bullet wound in his left shoulder. As I said before.”

  “Yes, but I was wondering if there was anything else. I mean, was he unconscious, delirious, anything like that?”

  “He was weak, and in quite a lot of pain. The wound had bled profusely, but the E.R. doctors had it pretty well stopped by the time I arrived. He was conscious. He’s a surgeon, so he was acutely aware of his condition and knew already that he would need to undergo a surgical procedure.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “You were alone with him for a time, right? And you knew him personally. All of a sudden he shows up with a bullet wound. You didn’t ask him how that came about?” So there it was. They already knew.

  “Well, no,” said Carey. “He told me that much. He said he had been wanted for murder and the police—one of the officers who brought him in—had shot him.” Carey thought about it, and decided that if there was a record being made, then there was no reason he could not use it to preserve Dahlman’s denial. “He said the whole thing was a terrible mistake. He had not killed anybody, and the person who had done it had framed him. I couldn’t imagine Richard Dahlman as a murderer.”

  “Why?” This time Carey was sure. The captain was watching the man in the dark suit for a reaction, maybe for unspoken instructions of some kind.

  “He’s a distinguished surgeon and teacher of other surgeons who has never in the past committed a crime and, as far as I know, never lied about anything. I admit I haven’t seen or heard any of the evidence against him. I assume it’s pretty compelling, or we wouldn’t all be here. But I think when you look into it, you’ll find he didn’t do it.”

  The captain was watching the man in the suit throughout Carey’s answer. But who was he? Had Folger said “marshal”? Carey had a vague notion that marshals were the people who transported prisoners, or took them into formal custody in court or some such thing. But why would a police captain be deferring to somebody like that?

  “Do you know this building well?”

  Was he just giving Carey a chance to lie about something? “I ought to. I was born here,” said Carey. “When I finished my residency I came back. I’ve been here nearly every day for a couple of years.”

  “Do you know how he got out of the building?”

  Carey stared at the grain of the wood of the table. This was the question, he thought. It was best to ignore the implication, to pretend the word “know” had not been used. “If I were to guess, I would guess that he didn’t get out: that he hid somewhere in the building and found himself too weak to go on, or fell asleep.” It occurred to Carey that he might very well have made a terrible mistake. What if that had been Jane’s plan? It would explain why her car was still parked behind Carey’s office. It made perfect sense to put him in bed in another unoccupied room, slip a different bracelet on his wrist, and let him rest until
the police had left the hospital. They had told him they’d searched, but why should they tell him the truth?

  The captain shook his head. “No, that was what we thought too. But Mr. Pankowski’s staff took officers into every room, every broom closet and storeroom in the building. We even searched every laundry bin and garbage can big enough to hold a man. He has definitely left the building. It’s too bad you weren’t here when it happened. They were beeping you, but—”

  Carey was ready for this one. “They were?” He took out his pager and looked at it. He flipped the switch off and on a few times. “I wonder how …”

  The man in the dark suit leaned forward and held out his hand. “I’m pretty good with those. Can I see it?”

  Carey slid it toward him. The man picked it up, worked the switch, examined the display, opened the little hatch at the end, and took the battery out. He put the battery back. “You had the battery in backwards, with the poles reversed.” He closed the hatch and flipped the switch with his thumb. The beeper went bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep. Carey watched him studying the display. He pressed the button twice more. Carey realized that he had been outsmarted again. The man was looking to see if other numbers besides the hospital’s appeared. Then the man looked up at Carey, and his eyes carried an unexpected message. They said, “I know.” But the eyes didn’t look triumphant or reproachful; what the man seemed to feel was sadness, a mixture of sympathy and regret.

  Carey’s heart beat faster, and he tried to calm himself. The man had convicted Carey in his mind, but at least he was not writing a number down. That meant that Jane hadn’t called. She was safe. Carey accepted his pager. “Thanks, Mr.…” He frowned. “I’m sorry. Too many names at once.”

  “Marshall. You’re welcome.”

  Carey knew he had to say something. “What a dumb thing to do,” said Carey. “It must have been that way all day.” Then his mind scurried to see if he had made a mistake. They could probably check the paging service to see when he had answered his last beep.