The Face-Changers jw-4 Read online

  But the policemen seemed to miss it. The captain said, “Where were you this evening after the operation?”

  “I had dinner and went to a movie.”

  “What restaurant?”

  “I walked to Garibaldi’s on Merman Street.” He took out his wallet and read the credit card receipt. “It’s 597 Merman Street.”

  “I know that place,” said the captain. “What was the movie?”

  Carey said, “Finally Dead. I guess the title should have warned me, right?” He smiled. “It wasn’t very good. I didn’t want to hang around the hospital getting badgered by newspeople, so I thought I’d waste some time. I got my wish.”

  “What would have happened if something went wrong with the patient?”

  “What are you referring to?”

  “You know. The things you mentioned. Dahlman starts hemorrhaging and needs to be operated on again. That kind of thing.”

  “After Leo Bortoni’s shift, Arthur Hicks was on duty. He’s a good surgeon, and there are always others on call. In my judgment, the best surgeon in an emergency would not be the one who’s been working for fourteen or fifteen hours.”

  “But you wanted to be here. What for?”

  “To check on him. It was my responsibility to ensure that my patient was responding well: to see for myself, in other words.”

  Folger glanced down at his notebook and looked surprised. “I don’t think I have any more questions right now.” He looked directly at the man in the dark suit. “Do any of you?”

  The man in the dark suit was silent and motionless.

  Folger said, “Thanks very much, Doctor. I assume you’ll be going home from here?”

  “I suppose so,” Carey said. “Unless my patient turns up.”

  “We’ll let you know if he does.”

  “Thanks.” Carey stood up. The others remained seated, waiting for him to leave. He opened the door and stepped out, then turned around to close it. The last thing he saw confirmed his impression. The captain, the female detective, and the uniformed officer were all looking attentively at the man in the dark suit. The man in the dark suit was staring straight into Carey’s eyes until the door closed.

  Agent Marshall said quietly, “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  Captain Folger shook his head. “It’s hard to believe that a man like that would put himself in this kind of trouble.”

  Marshall sighed. “Have you ever read any medical books?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “There’s not much in them. You don’t learn to be a surgeon by studying. After medical school you do four years of surgical residency at some hospital, helping out and doing the easy ones. Then you go find yourself the best surgeon you can, and you spend the next three or four years finding out how he does it and trying to learn to do it too. Dahlman was the one McKinnon picked out. McKinnon owes him what he has, what he does, who he is.”

  “It’s a damned shame to see him paying off like this.”

  Marshall looked at the papers in the file in front of him and shook his head. “Fifteen minutes for a nine-millimeter round at twelve feet, and a sixty-seven-year-old is up and running. If I ever take a hit, McKinnon is the one I want to dig it out of me. He would have been, anyway.” He tossed the file on the table and rubbed his eyes wearily, then squared his shoulders. “All right. Can you spare two officers around the clock for McKinnon?”

  “I guess we’ll have to.” Folger turned to the policewoman.

  “I’ll put a team on it right away,” she said.

  “I’ll have them take care of the wiretaps in Washington. The phone company will set it up so his phones can be monitored from there.”

  “Thanks. That will save us some man-hours.”

  “We’ll do the lab work and print identification on whatever your people find here. Anything else you need, don’t be shy. The worst I can say is no, and you know in advance I won’t want to. I’d like to wrap this up in the next couple of days, but for now let’s act as though it’s going to get long and ugly.”

  8

  As Jane drove along Route 62, she began to feel the old habits of mind coming back to her. Years of experience had taught her that the decisions she made during the first few hours would determine whether her runner was safe or merely a step ahead.

  She was satisfied that she’d had no choice but to take Dahlman out of Buffalo tonight. The authorities would assume that a wounded man could not have gone far. They would look for him hardest in the immediate vicinity, and keep moving outward for a few days. They would knock on doors and interview everyone who could conceivably have seen or heard anything. For at least a month, it was going to be very difficult for a man in his sixties to show his face in Buffalo without getting a lot of inquisitive stares. If Dahlman so much as walked past a window, somebody might call the police. But if she could get Dahlman out of this part of the country, there was a good chance that wherever she took him, few people would have heard of him, and the local police would have their own fugitives to hunt.

  The police were the immediate threat, but what they did made sense, so they were predictable. Her mind kept returning to the two men at the hospital. When she had pulled into the parking lot in a police car, they had hidden their guns in the weeds, so there was no possibility that they had anything to do with any police organization.

  Who were they? She glanced over her shoulder at Dahlman. He was asleep on the back seat, so for the moment, she couldn’t ask him any questions. The sudden arrival of people Dahlman didn’t seem to have recognized, who were prepared to kill him in police custody, raised Dahlman’s problem to a new level.

  Jane had believed Carey when he had said that Dahlman had been framed for a murder. What that had meant to her was that some person who knew both Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman had killed her and hit on some unusually effective way of throwing suspicion in another direction. Jane had only temporarily suspended her disbelief enough to accept Carey’s statement that Dahlman would not be safe from the framer if he went to jail. It was possible. If Dahlman had something to say that the killer was worried about, it wasn’t that difficult to find a prisoner who could be paid to make sure he didn’t live to say it.

  But in Jane’s experience, lone killers were shy about the process. The killer had to go to an intermediary, negotiate a deal for the second murder, and then wait to see whether the other side delivered or turned him in. Her skepticism had triggered her reflex to construct alternative plans. She had decided to listen to Dahlman’s story as soon as possible, and then decide whether the threat was real. If she was sure that Dahlman was wrong, she would teach him to recite a plausible tale about why he had been scared enough to leave the hospital, then return to Buffalo and drop him off at the police station.

  When she had picked up the guns the two men had hidden in the weeds, her skepticism had been obliterated. In its place was mystification. Dahlman’s adversary wasn’t some solitary amateur who had killed Sarah Hoffman and shifted the blame onto him. He was being hunted by professionals. That raised the possibility that Sarah Hoffman had been killed by professionals, and that the frame had been constructed by professionals.

  What attraction would two doctors engaged in medical research have for people like that? Doctors had drugs. They tended to have money, houses and offices full of nice things, and cars that might interest thieves. Doctors engaged in research that had intriguing implications might excite a pharmaceutical manufacturer or a jealous rival. Sarah Hoffman might have had some secrets that Carey didn’t know about—a gambling problem or a boyfriend who called himself a “developer” or “investor” or “consultant” but was actually a gangster. No answer she could think of was more likely than any other. Until she had asked Dahlman all of the questions and listened to all of the answers, she would know nothing. She didn’t even know for sure whether Dahlman was innocent. Having armed men hunting him didn’t exactly prove he had not murdered Sarah Hoffman.

  Jane looked at Dahlman ag
ain. He was still asleep, so for the moment he was invisible to a casual glance from a distance, but if a policeman were to pull them over, he could hardly fail to notice that there was an old man lying there, and that he looked sick.

  Jane was only as far as North Collins when she noticed the headlights behind her. She watched and waited, hoping they would turn off in Lawtons, then Gowanda, Conewango, Clear Creek, but they stayed there, just far enough back so she couldn’t really see the car. When she slowed down, so did they. As she approached Jamestown she began to feel tense. Jamestown was big enough to have policemen who stayed alert at night, and the hour was half past eleven, when traffic was thin. If the ones behind were policemen, they could easily have called ahead and consulted with the local authorities. They would have asked them to pick a spot to set up a blind roadblock.

  Pulling over a suspected murderer was a delicate matter. They would want a big complement of policemen waiting, and Jamestown was the last city of sufficient size to have one. They would want to do it in a place where he couldn’t shoot bystanders, so it would be outside of town. No, she couldn’t even count on that. Since it was long after business hours, they might choose to divert him into a cul-de-sac in an industrial area where he would be surrounded on three sides by high walls lined with sharpshooters.

  Jane tried to decide whether her uneasiness was pronounced enough to make her turn off the highway onto another route. She studied the headlights in her rearview mirror for a few seconds. The car was still staying back a set distance—maybe a thousand feet on the long dark stretches and half that when she approached a town. It had done nothing suspicious, and that could be what was making her suspicious. Carey would have said she was driving like an old lady, but she had her reasons. What were theirs?

  After eleven, on an open country road in good weather, people got careless, drove too fast, got impatient waiting for a safe place to pass. The driver of the car behind her never did those things.

  Her tires made a new sound as she crossed a little bridge over Conewango Creek. She glanced over the rail at the quick flash of black water. If she remembered the route correctly, the road would cross the creek at least twice more. “Conewango” meant “in the rapids.” The rapids were south of here, where there had once been a village. It was just before Warren, Pennsylvania, where the creek emptied into the Allegheny River. Tonight the stream seemed higher and faster than the last time she had been here. It had been a rainy summer.

  She supposed it had always been a rainy summer. The Old People had a vast repertoire of procedures and medicines for success in war and love and curing disease and stopping whirlwinds, but she had never heard of one for making rain. They used to thank the Thunderers once a year for the plentiful supply. When European visitors of a literate sort visited Nundawaonoga in those days, they had all written descriptions of miles of fields growing tall with corn, bean vines twining up the stalks and squash beneath.

  Jane stared at the empty blackness ahead, but a growing glare began to sear her eyes. The car behind her was coming up fast, and the driver had switched on his high-beam headlights. She tilted her mirror to keep the light out of her eyes and watched the car in the side mirrors. If he was trying to tell her he wanted to pass, she would be glad. But first she had to be sure.

  She hugged the right side of the road and slowed down to let the car slip by safely. Then she watched. The car kept coming, moving a bit faster now.

  Finally it swung into the left lane, and as it came abreast she turned her head over her left shoulder to look behind the glare of the headlights at the driver. She saw his head in silhouette, but all she could make out was that it didn’t have the long hair of a woman, and it wasn’t wearing a hat. The car glided forward and everything changed and came into focus at once.

  A second head popped up from the passenger seat, the window started to come down, and she saw the face.

  Jane stamped on the brake pedal, then turned the wheel to the left, toward the other car. She had predicted the other driver’s reaction correctly. He was alarmed by the sudden swerve and the squeal of tires. His foot touched his brake pedal for an instant, but then he realized he had miscalculated: if she wanted to ram him, then he wanted distance. His foot jammed down on the accelerator, and he shot forward again.

  Jane saw her hood slip behind the other car’s trunk, missing it by inches, then keep turning. She concentrated on gauging the spin of her car. For two full seconds it was in its own motion and out of her control, the rear end swinging around with a shriek of friction. Her seat belt tightened around her hips and chest and she heard her purse slap against the inside of the passenger door and fall to the floor.

  Finally, when it seemed as though the car could not do anything but keep spinning, the tires caught, the brakes held, and it came to a stop, rocking violently once, twice, but not tipping over.

  Jane looked over the seat. Dahlman had his arms and legs spread, gripping the door handle with one hand and clawing the fabric of the back seat with the other, his face set in an open-mouthed breathless grimace. She found the white line on the pavement leading into her door, saw the bright taillights of the other car still diminishing at high speed, and regained her sense of direction. She straightened the car and began to accelerate northward, the way they had come.

  “Who are they?” gasped Dahlman. “Police?”

  “No such luck,” said Jane. She watched the rearview mirror as she added speed. “It’s the two men we saw outside the hospital.” The other car was still going south, but then the taillights came on bright They were stopping.

  “How?”

  “Maybe they were at the airport when I rented the car. Maybe anything. We’re in trouble.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Run.”

  She stared in the mirror just as she entered the first curve, and the mirror showed a flash of the white side of the other car turning around to come after them, and then she could see only the empty darkness of the trees beside the curve. She tried to remember in reverse order all of the sights that had floated past her window on the way south. Whatever she did, it had to be soon.

  Her speedometer said fifty, sixty, seventy. At eighty-five, the big car was harder to keep on the right side of the white line, and each bump seemed to make it rise into the air and come down with a bone-jarring bounce. She knew she was putting some distance between them and the white car, but two men who had planned to walk into a hospital full of cops and shoot a patient who was already in custody probably had an optimistic view of the nature of risk. The fact that they were following her would add to their safety. All they had to do was get her taillights in view and keep them there. Any obstacle in the road might kill Jane and Dahlman, but the white car would have plenty of time to stop.

  She said to Dahlman, “How are you feeling?”

  “Rotten, but fortunately I was asleep when it happened, so I woke up on the floor and didn’t see enough to give me a heart attack.”

  “I’m afraid we have to do something. If you’re not up to this, tell me now and we won’t try.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “You’ve disarmed them. You have their guns, and they have nothing. You want to arrange an ambush and shoot them. I won’t permit that. I’ll let you off somewhere with the guns, and drive on by myself.”

  Jane fought her way through competing thoughts, each in its own way important, but distracting. She had left the guns in Jake’s car, because she had been trying to get on an airplane. Dahlman wasn’t very observant, but he was unexpectedly brave. He wanted to take all of the risk on himself and let her escape—a completely impractical idea. He also had been lucky enough to live in the world all this time without learning anything about criminal behavior. The pistols those men had been carrying at the hospital were throwaways: ones they could use on him, then drop in a trash can before they walked out. If they had not left others in their car, they would ne
ver have come after him now.

  Dahlman was naive and overconfident and insistent about matters he knew nothing about, but Jane supposed she should have felt glad. A man who would not use a gun to protect himself in a situation like this could be called many things, but he was certainly no murderer. Circumstances had presented her with the proof that she might have gotten around to wishing for later. Carey had been right about Dahlman, but it wouldn’t matter unless she could keep him alive.

  “You’re wrong about nearly everything, but we have less than a minute for talk, so I’ll do all of it. Those men aren’t unarmed, so don’t give them a target. Just do as I say.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “To have you do as I say.”

  “I thought I had an option. What if I can’t do this?”

  “Then you’ll die trying.”

  Jane turned the car quickly to the side and up a street in the little town. It ran along Conewango Creek a short distance, then reached a dead end. She parked the car between two others along the curb, got out, and hurried to the trunk. Dahlman stepped out stiffly and leaned on a taillight to watch her. She pushed the two small suitcases aside, then lifted the false floor of the trunk, pulled out the spare tire, tossed her purse into the trunk, and slammed it.

  “Come on.” She rolled the tire across the street and between two old brick buildings, then scrambled down a rocky bank onto a narrow muddy plateau. “Take my hand.”

  Dahlman let her help him down onto the mud and stared at her in confusion as she lifted the tire down beside them. She said, “I know you’re not in any shape to swim, but that’s what the tire is for. The rim is heavy, so it will float low, but it will hold you up. Cling to it. If you can’t, I’ll hold you.”

  Jane eased him into the cold, dark stream and placed his hands on the tire, then kept walking until the muddy bottom was no longer under her feet. She felt the current begin to pull them downstream. The momentum of the water tended to sweep them outward, away from the bank, but Jane resisted it, keeping her legs pumping steadily in a frog kick that didn’t risk breaking the surface.