by Thomas Perry
“Why?”
“She got an offer from a hospital in her hometown in Colorado. She had elderly parents there, and the job was, by any objective assessment, better than the one she had. We all advised her to take it. Working in a small clinical research facility like ours was rewarding, but it was also exhausting. We couldn’t pay her the way a major hospital could, and there was no better job we could promote her to. So we wished her well, and had a little party for her on her last day.”
“What then?”
“Nothing, for about a month. Then Dr. Wung left for a university hospital post in Boston and took his assistant with him. The final thing was that Sarah Hoffman was murdered.”
He was skipping over parts of the story that Jane suspected must be huge. She would have to bring him back to them, but for now she needed to keep him talking. “How was she murdered?”
“At first it looked like a burglary. She was in her office, apparently late at night. Nobody knows why. She seldom did that. It’s possible that she was trying to catch up on some paperwork because she hadn’t yet replaced Carol Flanders. Or maybe someone called her and asked to meet her there. She was shot several times, but nobody heard it. The office was torn up terribly—not as though someone was looking for something valuable to steal, but as though they wanted to destroy all of it—file drawers dumped in the middle of the floor and set on fire.”
“Did the police call you in to look at it?”
“No. The police came to me about a day later, because they wanted some idea of who might have done it, and why. By then they had decided it wasn’t a burglary. That night I called Carol Flanders in Colorado to break the news to her gently. I got no answer at the number she had given us. I tried to reach her through her parents. They told me she had been killed in a car accident a couple of weeks before. She had been driving to Colorado to start her new job, and had never made it.”
“Did it occur to you to call Wung?”
“Of course. His new university gave me a runaround. He didn’t have an office listing, because he was to start in the fall, and the fall directory hadn’t been printed yet. The personnel office in Boston at least knew who he was, but not where. I finally went to our university and talked to four people before I could get them to see that this was an emergency and to give me the emergency numbers he had put on his old personnel forms. The numbers were for relatives in Korea. I called his brother, and got another terrible shock. Koh was dead. I asked how, and all he would tell me was that he had gone on a vacation and died. His English was only slightly better than my Korean, and I don’t speak Korean. He did understand when I gave him my name and phone number, because an hour later his sister called. She was screaming at me. All I could sort out at first was that Koh had committed suicide. Somehow they got the impression that he had been fired from the University of Chicago, and the job in Boston was a step down. Since he had been working with me, I must have gotten him fired, and the shame made him kill himself. I couldn’t get the details—how they knew it was suicide, how it had happened—and asking again just infuriated her. I gave up.”
“What did you do then?”
“I realized that the most urgent thing was trying to warn Celia Rodriguez. I called the university in Boston again. It was the same story as Koh—she wasn’t supposed to start work until the fall, so they had no idea where she was, or even if she had arrived in Boston yet. I called Boston information, I even called Koh’s sister again to see if they had found her number in Koh’s effects. Nobody there had ever heard of Celia Rodriguez.”
Jane saw it immediately. If Carol’s accident and Koh’s suicide and Sarah’s murder had taken place in Chicago, the police would have jumped on them and initiated a search for Celia Rodriguez. But in Boston, nobody knew the connection, or that anything else had happened. She knew nobody there, so there was nobody to report her missing. Some murders got reported nationally, but not the suicides or car accidents of people who weren’t famous. “Were you afraid?”
“I was angry. I went to the police and told them what I knew—that within a period of about forty days, all four of my colleagues had met deaths that were, at the very least, suspicious. At first I thought they weren’t taking me seriously. Then, a couple of days later, two policemen came to my house.”
“To arrest you?” There was no question that he had been arrested at some point, but she knew she should verify each bit of the story that she could hold on to as a fact, and the order of events made a difference.
“No. They were from a special squad that protects people. They told me they believed I was in danger. We talked for some time.”
“Did you talk about who the criminal might be?”
“Yes. After some discussion, they agreed with me that Mr. Hardiston probably wasn’t Mr. Hardiston. He was someone who wanted to change his looks to escape prosecution for some crime. They were desperate for the photographs—any copies I had of the ones Sarah took. But I never had any, and now I’m sure they were all destroyed, along with the medical records, in the fire in Sarah’s office. The policemen tried to get me to describe the man. I’ve described him for you, as he looked before the surgeries and after. Could you find him?”
“I could find about a hundred of each in the next town.”
“Exactly. They called the station and explained the situation to some superior, then came back to say that they had a plan.”
“I’ll bet.”
“What?”
“What was their plan?”
“Since there was no way to identify the man, the safest way was to take me to a quiet place and hide me. I was to tell no one where I was going. I would have to live incognito for a time, and when the man surfaced I would have to reappear to identify him and testify in court. It would take lots of arranging, but if they didn’t do it this way, they would risk losing me too. I was the only living person who could point out the man.”
“You agreed to this?”
“I felt it made no sense not to cooperate. They took me to a farmhouse that night, over three hundred miles from Chicago. I was allowed to pack only those items that nobody would know were missing—some clothes, a few items of little value. Then we left.”
“Where was it—the farm?”
“About ten miles outside a little town near Carbondale, called Hurst. I was there for three days.”
“Then what?”
“It was strange—like a dream. They were very considerate. They even had a newspaper delivered each morning. One morning I got up and walked down the long dirt road from the house to the mailbox on the highway to pick up my paper. On the bottom corner of the front page was a story that said the police wanted me for questioning.”
“How did you feel?”
“A bit disappointed, for one thing. The police had given me to understand that they were going to make my house look lived in, and if the killer made an attempt to break in, they would scoop him up. For some reason the deception hadn’t worked, and they had given up hope of that. Otherwise, the police would never have revealed to reporters that I was gone. I also had some trivial concern about how the story in the paper would look to other people. It sounded almost as though I were a suspect.”
“I take it the policemen had a key to your house?”
“Well, yes. As I said, they wanted to make it look as though I were still living there.”
“When did your small worry turn into a big worry?”
“Three more days passed. The policemen were to deliver more groceries once a week. I wondered when they would come. The next day I stayed indoors all day waiting. Finally, I left a note on the table and went for a walk. When I returned, there were police cars parked in front of the farmhouse—not plain ones like the ones they had used before, but real ones, black and white, with lights on the roofs. I was excited. I knew that they would never show themselves like that unless the waiting was over, and they had found the killer. They had: it was me.”
“Tell me about the arrest.”
Jane frowned. “What made them come after you?”
Dahlman threw up his hands. “I just told you that—”
“No,” she said. “Forget the hiding part. I haven’t heard anything yet that sounds like grounds for charging you with murder.”
“They said they had wanted to ask more questions, couldn’t find me at work, couldn’t reach me by phone, and became concerned. They got a warrant and broke into my house. They showed me pictures they took. I recognized the place, but it had been altered. My wife’s walk-in closet had been transformed into a kind of madman’s shrine. There were pictures of Sarah pasted to the walls—dozens of them, with steak knives stuck in some, and holes or burn marks in others. And strange scrawls about killing her. One said her time was coming, and others had captions like ‘Thief’ or ‘Betrayer’ on them.”
“When they showed you this stuff, did you have a lawyer present?”
“I had a lawyer. He had settled my wife’s estate, and made out our wills before that. He called a criminal lawyer for me who was supposed to be terrific. I’m sure the man was competent, but …” Dahlman’s voice trailed off.
“But he didn’t believe you.”
“He asked me questions like ‘Do you know what day it is?’ ‘What year?’ and then he said, ‘I’m here to help you, but the best help I can give you is to advise you not to hide anything.’ ”
“Did he listen to your whole story?”
“He’d already heard it when I met him. The police had apparently been recording it when I told them the first time.”
“No wonder he didn’t believe you.”
“I know. The idea that the police department had conspired to frame me for a murder seemed to be too much of a leap for his plodding intellect.”
Jane sighed wearily. She had been dreading this moment. “There’s a lot to be said for a plodding intellect.”
Dahlman was offended. “What, exactly, do you mean?”
“Well,” said Jane. “For starters, those two men who came to talk to you and then hid you weren’t policemen.”
“How could you possibly know?” He was furious.
Jane ignored his anger. “There are a lot of little things. One is that no city police department has anything called a ‘Special Protection Squad.’ Los Angeles and Chicago have both asked for money to begin protecting witnesses in gang-related trials, but so far, neither has gotten it. If the police want a witness protected, they don’t hide him on some farm alone. They protect him—put a cop with him, or keep him in custody. A criminal lawyer knows these things. And if policemen think you’re being watched and stalked by experts, they don’t use your phone to call their office and discuss their whole plan. These weren’t policemen.”
“Oh,” said Dahlman. Then he added, unnecessarily, “They were very convincing.”
“The real ones were the ones you saw when you went to the police station. How did you get away from them?”
Dahlman shook his head. “That was the one service my attorney provided for me.”
Jane frowned. “After all that creepy stuff in the house and the sudden disappearance to the farm, he got you out on bail?”
“No. The lawyer had them put me in a psychiatric lockup ward in the hospital for observation. I had worked in that hospital, and suddenly there I was—just like any other mental patient. The transformation was quite a feeling: a loss of identity, really. I was just another anonymous patient in institutional pajamas. Who I had been a week before meant nothing to them. I was there for observation, but I was given large doses of a powerful tranquilizer that would have made observing me a waste of time.”
“Would have?”
“I pretended to take the pills, but hoarded them for four days. I didn’t really have a plan yet, but I knew that if I took those pills, I never would have one. Then one day, an orderly turned up whom I’d known for some time. He used to work the surgical floors, but had transferred to the psychiatric wing because it paid better. We talked. He knew I wasn’t crazy, and that I certainly hadn’t killed my partner. He agreed to help me if I could keep him from looking guilty. So, we put the tranquilizer into his bottle of Snapple. I took his identification, keys, and clothes, then put him in a place they called the Quiet Room to sleep it off. I used his keys to get out of the ward, and used the money in his wallet to get on the bus to Buffalo to find you.”
“This is something I’ve been waiting to hear. How did you know about me?”
He shook his head slowly. “It was an odd circumstance. It was less than a year ago. I was at a conference in Road Town on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s.” He stared at her. “That’s something you must know all about. If you have a conference of surgeons, it has to be in some holiday period when very little surgery gets done. If it’s in the winter, it will draw better attendance if it’s held in a warm place. In fact, Carey might have been there.”
“Last year?” Jane shook her head. “Nope.” Since they had been married, Carey had gone to very few of these doctors’ conventions, and she was glad. She would have missed him, and she didn’t like to go with him. She had spent too much of her life in airports and hotels already, and whenever she was in another, she felt a quiet uneasiness that one of the people who had a reason to look for her would turn up.
“I seldom go either. I went because I was reading a paper on a few of the post-operative techniques we had developed. That part seemed to go well. Then it was New Year’s Eve, and I was scheduled to leave for home the next morning. I had developed a friendly relationship with a waitress.”
Jane considered saying nothing. She had almost asked whether Sarah had gone to the Virgin Islands with him, but had decided to wait. At some point she was going to have to ask exactly what their relationship had been, but not yet. She decided to prod him a little. She raised an eyebrow. “A waitress?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped. “The week in that hotel was frustrating. Most guests dealt with the manager and got nothing they asked for. I now believe he was the evil wayward son of some aristocratic family. Or they spoke with the concierge, who seemed to be there because she looked good behind the desk, but was utterly brainless. But this waitress would listen and get what was wanted. So I overtipped her and treated her with courtesy. That is all.”
“She told you about me?”
“No. She knocked on my door at three A.M. and said there was a medical emergency. The hotel was full of surgeons, but in her eyes they had all disqualified themselves. Some had been drinking. I didn’t drink. Some had come with wives and children, and I had come alone. Some had simply never noticed her, or had not struck her as approachable. So I was the one. She took me to a house. It was enormous, a villa of the sort you might expect to see on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t. The owner was ill, and apparently there was some problem about finding a surgeon who would admit him to the local hospital on New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was true, and maybe it was just an excuse for drafting me. But I could tell the man had a hot appendix. We moved him to the hospital, I operated, and he was fine. It’s a simple procedure. Medical students do it all the time. But he was grateful. He wanted to reward me. I refused. It’s one thing to perform emergency surgery in a foreign country, but another to take pay for it. But he didn’t mean money.
“He was positive that I had come to Tortola with a suitcase full of cash to hide in a bank down there. I said it was a medical conference, and he said that the reason they held conferences during the holidays was because the customs force was thinner and lazier then, and that’s when American doctors and lawyers and politicians came to make deposits. I couldn’t convince him. He just kep
t looking at me with a patronizing, knowing smile. The man was clearly a criminal, and the idea that someone else could be honest seemed never to have occurred to him. Finally he wrote down your name and address and handed it to me. He said that since I was evading taxes, I might one day find myself in trouble. I said I wasn’t. He said there were a million reasons why one day a person—any person—might need to disappear. I was to memorize your address and destroy the paper, and when my time came I should go there and ask for you. I destroyed the paper, of course, but the words he had written never seem to have left my mind. It was such an odd evening, and I’d never met anyone like him before.”
“When the Buffalo police spotted you, you were on your way to my house?”
“Yes. I got as far as the bus station in downtown Buffalo. I was going out to find a cab, but I guess I looked suspicious, so two policemen approached me and asked to see identification. I ran a few steps, they called for me to stop, and that brought me to my senses. When I reached into my coat to produce my stolen wallet, they thought I had a gun. That was something George Hawkes hadn’t told me about.”
If he was still calling himself George Hawkes, Jane thought, then his luck was holding. When she had met him he had made his living as a travel agent for money, taking it on trips from a jewelry wholesale operation in California through Panama to banks in the Netherlands Antilles to front corporations in Europe, and then back. One afternoon seven or eight years ago, he had been raided in Los Angeles by policemen who thought he was a drug dealer. But he had managed to see the signs just in time: the van that had been parked down the street, which occasionally wobbled a little, as though a person were moving around inside, and then the large, plain cars arriving from different directions all at once.
He had slipped out through the crowded produce market next door, carrying a great deal of money with him. Walking out ahead of the raid instead of getting caught in it did not, however, have the desired effect. His clients, who were innocent of drug dealing but deeply involved in the business of making unauthorized copies of feature films and selling them in foreign markets, had interpreted the facts in their own way. They felt he had absconded with their money. He had come to Jane.