by Thomas Perry
It had taken him almost two years longer before he had learned enough to understand the rest of it. The suspect who was probably the most formidable, and the most capable of pulling a trick like that, was the one who would never have done it. That was what Phipps had been trying to tell him: that Marshall would keep him honest.
11
Jane drove west on Route 224 into the dark, flat Ohio countryside. For ten minutes she watched the pattern of glowing headlights behind her. Then, at the beginning of a long, straight stretch where she was sure she could see a mile or two ahead, she turned off the road and stopped until the line of cars had passed. She waited to be sure that none of the cars stopped farther down the road, watched her rearview mirror until there were no headlights, then accelerated onto the highway again. She was satisfied that she had not been followed.
“Are you up to talking?” she asked.
“I should be,” said Dahlman. “I don’t think I’ve slept this much since I was a child.”
“I need to know exactly how you got into this mess.”
“Why?”
Jane raised an eyebrow. This man had apparently spent a lifetime collecting and refining ways of being irritating. But she said patiently, “I think it will help. It might tell me all of the people who are searching for you, and that’s useful, because they all search in different ways, look in different places, ask different people. If I don’t know these things, I could take you right into someone’s path.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “That isn’t how this happened.”
“I know.”
He didn’t seem to be willing to accept even that. “How do you know? Presumably most people who kill someone say they didn’t either.”
“They would also be willing to use a gun to defend themselves from someone who is chasing them. In fact, most people would. But not you.”
“Oh. I suppose so.” He seemed to respond to logic, and that made Jane feel more hopeful. “It’s a very long story.”
“I expect it will be a very long night.”
Jane turned to look at him, and saw that his eyes were focused on a point in the distance. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, and that was something Jane did not want him to do. She didn’t want an account full of neat, clean summaries and judicious, erroneous conclusions. “Who do the police think you killed?”
“Her name was Sarah Hoffman. She was a friend and partner of mine for about ten years. She assisted me in surgery frequently. She was a fine plastic surgeon with her own practice, but at the time we started working together I was better known, and was being brought some cases that other people weren’t.”
“What sorts of cases?”
“Reconstructive surgery, mostly—usually people who had been terribly burned or injured. I was developing experimental methods for transplantation of tissue, and some post-op procedures that had brought promising results. It had struck me some time ago that these were the areas where the new developments could be made. We have thousands of surgeons who are now probably about as good at cutting as a human being will ever be. We have methods of magnification and nonintrusive monitoring and micro-instruments and lasers that make use of that dexterity in very sophisticated ways. But maybe seventy percent of the battle with restorative and plastic surgery involves allowing the body’s tissue to grow and letting it make up for what we can’t do with a blade—as well as repairing what the blade has done. Surgeons are the star quarterbacks of medicine: everything has been done to protect our part of the process and maximize its effectiveness. But at a certain level you do one after another. It feels like being a quarterback who throws a pass and is taken out of the game and put into another one before he even sees whether it’s been caught.”
“This isn’t what you taught at the university, is it?” she asked.
“I was a general surgeon,” said Dahlman. “For most of my working life, I probably performed more thoracic operations than anything else. The instruction I gave was almost entirely practical—in an operating room, teaching people who already were surgeons. I spent less time on post-operative work than most surgeons in private practice.”
“What happened?”
Dahlman seemed mystified by his memories, like a man leafing through photographs who kept finding ones he had forgotten and lingering over them. As his eyes stared ahead of the two funnel-shaped beams of the headlights, his face moved, taking on a look of happiness, then sadness, then puzzlement. “I had good hands. By the age of forty I was one of the eight or ten most accomplished traditional surgeons in the country. I had been practicing at the University Medical Center since residency, and was already the Goldsden-Meara Distinguished Professor of Medicine. I was so busy performing surgeries and teaching young doctors like Carey McKinnon that I paid little attention to anything else. At sixty I was forced to do some thinking.”
“Forced by what?”
“My wife died suddenly. An embolism. She was fine in the morning, and when I came home in the evening she was dead.”
“Did you have children?”
“Two,” he said. “My boy, David, was born the year we graduated from college. He was thirty-eight when his mother died, and living in California. My daughter, Terry, was thirty-six, married, and living in Paris. They both came home for the funeral, said the correct things to each other and to me, and went back to what they had been doing. When they were gone, I sat and thought, and looked around me. The kids were grown up and self-supporting in every sense of the word. They seemed to like me, but whatever emotional needs they ever had must have occurred during an earlier period, and my wife handled them while I was too busy to notice. So I was left with a lifetime appointment to an endowed chair, a series of vested pensions, paid-up life-insurance policies, and various savings accounts and investments that my prudent wife had accumulated for a rainy day she never lived to see. I found myself absolutely alone, with no real responsibilities, but no real connections either, and certainly no needs. That was a surprise. There were others.”
“What others?”
“I suddenly realized, as though I were waking up, that I was sixty. What it meant was that the best work I would do with my hands either had been done, or shortly would be. I had to decide what to do next—how to use the next ten or fifteen years. I could spend the time training young surgeons, or use my name and reputation for medical causes—gradually do less medicine and more lobbying and fund-raising—or I could try to do some clinical research to solve the problems I’d noticed during the years of nonstop surgery.”
“I take it you chose research.”
“I found I didn’t need to choose. As it turned out, my name and a letter from me did more for medical causes than my presence. My personality seems to irritate people. So I let the institutions write the letters and signed them for a couple of hours each week. My best teaching was done in the operating room, so it took no exclusive time at all. I spent my afternoons taking on the work I was telling you about.”
“Where did Sarah Hoffman fit into it?”
“I selected her as my teacher. She taught me to perform plastic and reconstructive surgery, like an apprentice. When I was ready, I began to move ahead, and she followed. I learned from her that the surgery itself is more art than science—like being a sculptor. I became good at it, and my broader background in surgery gave me a wider range of techniques, familiarity with more of the situations that can come up, and so on. My credentials gave the universities and big drug companies an interest in keeping me abreast of the enormous amount of research they had been doing on various kinds of induced healing, artificial tissue, and so on. We both made great progress, became extremely productive. We published a number of articles, helped lots of patients.”
“Carey seems to think there’s more to the research than you’re saying.”
Dahlman smiled. “Carey.… He would see what it was instantly, and want it to happen right then, even if the others couldn’t imagine it. He was that kind of medical stud
ent—always asking why we can’t do better, asking for a finer instrument. He was right, of course. We were trying to reach the point where we could reliably induce rapid cell replication—persuade the body to do what it does anyway, but much, much faster and more completely.”
“Did you succeed?”
“We had some success, but nothing as dramatic yet as what we’re hoping—what I’m hoping for, and what Carey envisions. We understand a bit about the hormone that makes a human baby grow quickly during its first year of life. We know a bit about rapid cell replication in malignancies. There’s already work being done on giving the body more of what it needs—exposing it to hyperbaric oxygen to stimulate healing, and so on. But ultimately, what we’re talking about is speeding up time within the human body: an increased flow of blood to the wound, increased supply of oxygen and nutrients in the blood, a tremendously increased metabolic rate.”
“How close were you to doing it?”
“We were just beginning. We weren’t simply doing theoretical research. We were physicians trying to help the human beings who came to us, and that meant that most of our time with each patient went to applying the proven methods we had. When something was both promising and safe, we would get a patient’s permission to try it.”
“So what went wrong?”
“We took on a case of a sort that we seldom did—purely cosmetic. It was a man who simply wanted to improve his appearance. He came through Sarah’s office, and she did all of the interviewing and so on at the beginning. The paperwork was handled by her nurse, Carol. Sarah used to take her own photographs, so that was done there too. Normally, whatever we had done together was paid for by the patient’s insurance. Since this was purely elective surgery, it would be paid for by the patient. Normal procedure is to alert the insurance company anyway, in case there are complications. Records were created. That’s an important fact. Then Sarah brought him to me.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did she bring him to you instead of doing it herself?”
“We usually worked together on particularly difficult cases. This one wasn’t difficult, medically. But it was a patient who had certain requests, and one of them was my involvement.”
“You just said you were concentrating on using your last years as a working surgeon efficiently. Surely there must have been somebody—some kid with a birth defect or something—that fit better. Or was using a healthy patient better for the research?”
Dahlman waved the question away. “I don’t know that it makes any difference. Our motives aren’t really the issue.”
He was hiding something. “So tell me anyway.”
“It was a combination of things. One was that Sarah had already made up her mind when she brought him to me. She was my partner. I owed her a lot. What was called for was a safe, familiar sequence of procedures. The difference between performing them on a patient who had no physical limitations and a patient who had suffered disfigurement was really only a question of the quality of results. And it would demonstrate the applicability of the methods we had learned in our reconstructive work to another whole category of—”
“He offered you a lot of money.”
Dahlman slumped in his seat. “Yes.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.”
“I thought you were set for life, and didn’t need money.”
Dahlman squinted, as though he were still trying to fathom what had been in his own mind, and having little success. Jane could tell that this part of the story was an irritant. “I didn’t need money. Sarah was younger—I believe thirty-eight or thirty-nine. I could work for free; she couldn’t. We had always assumed that she would naturally, gradually take over more of our joint work until I retired. The clinic and our research would revert to her. But at this stage the research was enormously expensive, and even the surgeries we did increased the deficit—sometimes because we took on the very sort of patient you mentioned. We had to give some thought to how Sarah would manage to continue the work without me. Two hundred thousand wasn’t much, but it would help.”
“You didn’t like the decision, did you?”
“No. I didn’t. But I couldn’t deny the problem. We discussed it in very specific, practical terms that day. The question was, would we interrupt our real work to do forty tummy tucks and nose bobs, or do one complete, ambitious makeover for a rich patient who would serve as a demonstration for others?”
Jane said, “Tell me about the patient.”
Dahlman said, “I never knew much about him. Sarah told me he wanted not only to have the best medical services available but to be of help. The fee was his idea, and we were to consider the excess a contribution. He had signed a standard agreement to let us publish whatever we learned in the course of his treatment.”
Jane tested a suspicion. “Including pictures?”
“Including pictures. Of course.”
Jane had guessed wrong, but she sensed that she shouldn’t let Dahlman gloss over the patient. “Where did the money come from? What made him rich?”
“Sarah mentioned that he was the heir to the Hardiston fortune.”
“Was his name Hardiston?”
“Yes. James Hardiston.”
Jane still couldn’t be positive: there probably were some living Hardistons. There was no way for her to verify her suspicion while she was driving along a deserted road in the middle of the night, but this was the first part of the story that seemed to sink when she put weight on it. Hardiston was a word that everybody knew: Bulova, Piaget, Timex, Cartier, Rolex, Omega, Hardiston. One of them was printed on your watch, and ten times a day, when you looked to see what time it was, you couldn’t help reading it. Hardiston was undoubtedly the best of the bunch, because nobody could be named Timex, and half the school classrooms in the country had those big Hardiston clocks over the blackboard. Kids sat at their desks watching it out of the corners of their eyes. At three o’clock the red second hand reached the twelve, the minute hand clicked backward a half-step, then forward to the next minute, and the dismissal bell went off.
It was a con game as old as the Industrial Revolution. You just took some brand name that had started out as a surname and told the mark you were the great-grandson. If you could convince somebody your name was Pillsbury or Hilton or Doubleday or Kellogg or Hardiston, they thought they’d already done all the checking they needed to, and they started to get light-headed from the smell of money. “And you—or Sarah—thought the two hundred thousand might be only the beginning.”
“Well, it had occurred to us.”
“How did he know about you?”
“That was one of the things that impressed me. His forms said he had been referred to us by a doctor in Maryland. The doctor was real, and highly respected.”
“Did you call him?”
“There was no reason to. He had simply told Mr. Hardiston that we would be the best specialists in the country for his needs. What was there to ask him—whether he meant it? Afterward I learned that he had given Hardiston copies of some of our articles from medical journals.”
Jane’s jaw muscles worked, keeping her mouth closed so she wouldn’t succumb to the temptation to point out that this, too, was a confidence maneuver: the con man arrives with a fistful of recommendations and credentials, but they’re all about the mark, not about him. “So you took him on.”
“Yes. We performed five procedures over a period of about eight months.”
“What exactly was wrong with him?”
“Nothing, really. He was healthy and had regular features. But the net effect of his face was not what he wanted, and I couldn’t blame him: he had clearly never been considered attractive when he was young, and now his expression seemed forbidding, unlikable. And he was about fifty and looked older: lots of damage.”
“What kind of damage—scars?”
“Nothing like that. His nose had been broken at some point—a souvenir of some
adolescent football game—but the damage I meant was wear and tear. Some I would attribute to the sun, some to tobacco and alcohol and possibly other drugs, and the rest to age. He had some unflattering wrinkles that went with the sun damage—scowling and squinting.”
“None of that sounds like anything he couldn’t have had fixed on a slow afternoon the next time he was in Beverly Hills. What did you do?”
“We decreased the prominence of the brow and cheekbones and smoothed the skin with endoscopic surgery, performed rhinoplasty to make the nose thinner and slightly shorter, made the chin thinner and tapered it. In the process we did some traditional cut-and-tuck work here and there to remove wrinkles and sags, made the lips slightly fuller, and performed blepharoplasty on the eyes. We used a carbon dioxide laser to remove small wrinkles and uneven pigmentation. It wasn’t the surgical procedures that interested him, it was the work we had done on induced healing and tissue regeneration. And it worked. When he left he looked like a different person—but that different person is a man about thirty years old.”
“Did you do anything to his body?”
“Liposuction to relieve him of a middle-aged slackening around the middle.”
“It sounds pretty good. I hope you’re still around when I need a little help.”
Dahlman’s head turned toward her abruptly, and the stare was almost hatred. “He destroyed us.”
“Did he?” Jane said evenly. “Tell me how.” His pause gave her time to amend it. “Tell me how you found out, step by step.”
Dahlman’s anger seemed to slowly change to something like amazement. “It was strange, like being eaten alive, bit by bit. There were five of us involved in his treatment: Sarah Hoffman; her nurse, Carol Flanders; me, of course; the anesthesiologist, Dr. Koh Wung; and his assistant, Celia Rodriguez. The first thing that happened was that Carol Flanders quit.”