by Thomas Perry
After Jane had hidden him, she had gotten in touch with his former clients. She had then dictated a treaty. The former Harvey Fisk would take his usual commission and return their money via the usual channels, which would then close forever. He would not engage in any illegal activity again. They need not worry that at some time in the future he would get caught and be tempted to trade information about them for a light sentence. In return, they would never search for him, bother him, or speak of him to a third party. Any infraction of the treaty by either party would result in Jane, the referee, giving sufficient information to the authorities to put the infringing party away.
Jane gave in to her curiosity. “How is he?”
“Oh, fine,” said Dahlman. “Excellent health for fifty-six. Good physical conditioning, muscle tone apparently from tennis and swimming. The appendix doesn’t really mean a thing.” He noticed her expression. “You didn’t mean that, did you?”
“No.”
“He lives like a king. And you know what? It didn’t seem like anything then, but now it seems like everything. He isn’t afraid.”
12
Jane drove through the dark country with tireless discipline. She kept her speed constant, changing lanes only when she needed to, never letting lines of cars build up behind her where a follower could hide.
The parts of Dahlman’s story that were most incomprehensible to him were clear to her. The two men who had pretended to be cops had done it so they could interview him at great length. The questions they had asked were the ones that killers needed to know: Were there any pictures of Hardiston, or any medical records that had survived the fire in Sarah Hoffman’s office? When Dahlman told his story, did it sound reasonable and rational, or disconnected and mad and unbelievable? If he had any witnesses they didn’t know about, any evidence that would lend credence to any part of his story, that evening was the time when he would have produced it. Since he could produce nothing, he was perfect.
They had put him in suspended animation on the farm, convinced that he should go nowhere and talk to no one. Then they had pocketed the keys he had willingly given them, and returned to his house. They took a whole week to search every inch of his house and destroy any evidence he had missed that might corroborate his story, then plant all the evidence they could invent that he had gone insane and spent months working himself up to killing his partner.
Their plan had been very well considered. There had been five doctors and nurses on the Hardiston case. If all five had suddenly died in Chicago, the police would have been in a frenzy. These killers had known that, so they had begun by culling the herd, luring the first three away and picking them off quietly. Even the order of the murders had been precise: the first was Dr. Hoffman’s nurse, who had a car accident on the way to Colorado. She was the safest because when it happened she had already been separated from the others. The second was Dr. Wung, in Korea. His death and that of the nurse could not be connected, even in the unlikely event that anyone heard about both—she had never worked for Dr. Wung. The third was almost certainly Dr. Wung’s assistant, Celia Rodriguez. As soon as her boss was dead, they had probably just grabbed her in Boston and buried her somewhere. Nobody would notice unless her body was found. She was a stranger in Boston. She had only moved because she was going to keep working for Dr. Wung, who wasn’t expected to arrive for at least a month. Even then, when the vacation and relocation period was up, the one they would have missed was Dr. Wung, not the assistant he had said he was bringing with him.
It was very neat. They had killed three people—one between Chicago and Colorado, one in Korea, and one in Boston—in three different ways, without having either the police or the two doctors who had stayed in Chicago know that anything had happened.
That left only the two doctors in Chicago, Richard Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman. If either were murdered, there would be an immediate investigation. There was no way to avoid it. When that happened, the authorities were likely to try to ask questions of the people who had once worked with the victim, and they were going to find that a statistically unlikely number of them had recently died. So what the killers had chosen to do was to trigger the investigation themselves, so that the questions weren’t asked until they were ready to hand the police a killer. They had made sure that before any question could be asked, the police had an answer.
If the investigation led the police to change the suicide or the accident or the disappearance into murders, they would not start looking for new suspects. They would already have in custody a proven killer who was clearly out of his mind, and who’d had as little reason to murder his partner as any of the others. The real killers must have planned the deaths in a hundred different ways, a hundred different orders to see which of the five should be killed when, and which would be left to serve as perpetrator.
The more Jane thought about it, the more sophisticated the plan they had chosen seemed. The one who would simply disappear had to be one of the three women, because that happened to young women fairly regularly in big cities, and hardly ever to middle-aged men. The one killed in the car accident had to be someone who could be fooled into traveling a long distance by car. That way there would be lots of chances to arrange it and the investigators who were stuck with it would have very little information. The supposed murderer would have to be one of the men, because men who went mad were more likely to do it that way than women were. Jane wasn’t sure about suicides, but she suspected men did more of that too, and an anesthesiologist was the best candidate because he carried the means with him in his bag.
“What’s our next stop?”
Jane remembered Dahlman. He had to be talked to. Human beings were terribly fragile. A person had to be kept informed, kept thinking and participating or he would begin to lose his connection with the herd, and that was the same as losing his connection with the world. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve been trying to think over everything you’ve told me so we’ll know what we should do.” She smiled apologetically. “It’s not very comforting stuff.”
His answer wasn’t a snap, the way it had been earlier. It was quiet and regretful. “You said you wanted to figure out who was chasing us. Did you figure it out?”
“The police in Chicago are interested, of course. Most of the time, getting out of Illinois would do a lot to solve that problem. When there’s a murder, the local police keep looking hard, but everywhere else you’d just be a name among thousands of others. The people who set you up took care of that. They’ve made it look as though you’re unpredictable and dangerous, so for the moment you’re probably near the top of the list everywhere. Since there are plenty of grounds for the federal authorities to come in, we have to assume that just about everyone in the country who hunts people for a living is looking for you.”
“You think I should turn myself in and take my chances at trial, don’t you?”
Jane shrugged, and slowly blew out a breath. “It’s a hard question. Most of the time, if someone is wrongly accused of a crime, I would say yes. If there’s evidence of your innocence that I haven’t heard, I would still say yes. Is there?”
“Not evidence in the sense you mean. A lifetime of decent behavior doesn’t seem to qualify.” He was silent for a moment. “How do you think I would do at a trial? Be honest.”
She squinted ahead at the road. “You’ve already been arrested. They got you a lawyer, everyone listened to your story two or three times, and they sent you to have your head examined. This is not a verdict, of course, but I think it’s pretty consistent with what you could expect next time. Since you’re clearly able to understand what’s said to you, I would also guess that it was done as a necessary formality. You would be declared sufficiently sane to participate in your defense, and would stand about a seventy- to eighty-percent chance of being convicted.”
“How can you put a percentage on it?”
“That’s about how the average defendant does in a murder trial in this country. Your chances are ac
tually a bit worse, but it’s unrealistic to guess how much worse.”
“Why would mine be worse?”
“A lot of reasons. One is that you’ve been made to look very clever and sneaky. You can’t deny you escaped from a mental lockup by drugging someone, or that you slipped out of the hospital in Buffalo. Juries don’t like that kind of defendant, because they assume he’s a liar. Judges don’t like them either, so the close calls would go to the prosecution. The people who framed you have already had weeks to clean up any loose ends, and the police have had more weeks to examine the faked evidence, so I can’t hold out much hope that the frame will fall apart of its own weight.”
“I can’t live with this kind of injustice,” said Dahlman. “I can’t let them get away with what they’ve done.”
Jane sighed. “Then maybe the best thing to do isn’t to disappear, and I’m not the person you need right now.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not in the business of ensuring that justice is done. I’m just one small person, not smart enough to assume I always know what justice is, let alone imagine that I can make things happen that are neat and symmetrical enough to qualify as fair. What I do is take people who are about to be killed and move them to places where nobody wants to kill them. If you want to disappear, you come to me. If you want something else—revenge, keeping your enemies from hurting someone else, peace of mind, justice, I’m not interested.”
Dahlman was silent for a long time. Finally, he said, “I’m convinced that justice is a positive, verifiable, obtainable goal. I need you to keep me out of jail, but I’m not going to give up. I won’t lie to you about that.”
“Fine. Just don’t imagine that you and I are going after these people ourselves.”
“If that’s necessary, I’ll do it.”
“Really?” said Jane. “Then I guess you’d better do as much weighing and measuring in advance as you can.”
“What do you mean?”
“The authorities aren’t looking for the people who framed you. That leaves only you to do something about it. But if you see any of them again, they’ll be armed and trying to kill you. Will you let them?”
“Well, no,” he said. “The last time it happened I was under the mistaken impression that you wanted me to help ambush and shoot them. Naturally, I refused. But letting them kill me doesn’t serve justice. I would try not to let them do it.”
“Would you try with a gun?”
“I would certainly be reluctant, but if there were no other way to preserve my life—and what I know—then maybe I would.”
Jane shook her head. “The ‘no other way’ argument doesn’t work in real life. When it happens, you don’t have ten hours to work through each alternative to predict whether it will necessarily result in your death. You don’t have ten heartbeats. You see them and shoot, or they see you and shoot. It’s not about good and evil; it’s about who gets to feel the eleventh heartbeat.”
He nodded. “I suppose it could happen that way. There could be circumstances—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “There could. And while you’re preparing for them, you’d better start working on the most likely of the circumstances.”
“What’s that?”
“There are—how many?—maybe five evil men searching for you. They’re not using magic. They’re probably watching TV to find out where you turn up next so they can go there too. The TV reporters get their information from the police. What that means is that the next person to aim a gun at you probably isn’t going to be some slimy, conniving criminal who helped murder four of your friends. It’s going to be some kind of cop. A good guy: in fact, the best of the good guys, because he not only hasn’t done anything evil, he’s taking a risk to protect people. And he believes in justice as much as you do. What are you going to do about him?”
She waited a few seconds while Dahlman tried to sort it out. Then she said, “I’ve been hoping all we had to do was keep you out of sight for a while, and let the police clear you. Now I don’t know if that’s going to work. All I can promise is that I’ll try to keep you alive. I can’t make things come out even.”
It was two in the morning when Jane pulled off the highway into a gas station and stopped beside the row of pumps. The attendant in the little lighted building stood and stared out from behind his counter, and Jane studied him. He was probably nineteen or twenty years old, with a three-day growth of beard that had taken him much longer to grow, and a tattoo on the back of his left hand that he was going to live to regret someday. The only feature of it that she could see clearly was a spiderweb.
Jane said to Dahlman, “Sit tight while I pump the gas. Look away from him while I open the car door, because the light will come on.”
She started to open the door when Dahlman said, “Wait.”
She closed it again. “What?”
“I’d like to go to the men’s room, since we’ve stopped. How do I get the key?”
“I’ll get it for you.” She kept her eyes on the gas station attendant. He seemed to be unconcerned now; he had gone back to watching the television set behind the counter, having reassured himself that he wasn’t about to be robbed. “Anything else you want—a soft drink, candy? Tell me now, before the light goes on again.”
“No,” said Dahlman. “No, thank you.”
Jane walked to the little building and pulled the door open. She could hear the television above the hum of the big refrigerator beside the door: “Los Angeles pulled a game ahead of the Padres in the West with a one-hit shutout at Dodger Stadium …”
She placed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and said, “I’m at pump number five. And do you have a key to your men’s room?”
The boy pointed to a key attached to a board on the wall above her head. She took it and turned to leave. She kept her eyes on the glass door of the refrigerator and watched his reflection. His head and chest were visible above the counter, and his eyes now fixed on her and remained on her as she walked away. She reminded herself that this was not a customs official in a foreign airport. It was a normal teenaged boy whose interests were limited to cars, music, and what he was staring at right now.
When Jane reached the car, Dahlman got out; she handed him the key and turned her attention to filling the gas tank while she watched the boy over the roof of the car.
The boy seemed lost in some kind of cogitation. He had stopped staring at the television. She hoped he was just waiting out a commercial, but then she saw that wasn’t it. He came around the counter with a mop in his hand. Jane’s mind worked on him. He was not the sort of person who had a mania about cleaning: there were packages of gum and cigarettes in the rack on the counter that would stay there forever because they had a film of dust on them. If his boss had told him to mop the floors, he would do it at the end of the shift, and that was not likely to be between two and three in the morning. It would be at six or seven.
She watched him closely. The boy left the cubicle and walked toward the men’s room with his mop. He had no bucket. Jane turned off the pump, capped the tank, and moved quickly toward the lighted building.
Inside the cashier’s station she worked frantically. She pulled the telephone cord out of its socket and stomped on the plastic connector, then jammed the wire back in. Then she stepped through the inner door into the mechanic’s shop and gazed around her hungrily for anything she could use. There was a set of tire chains hanging on the wall. She took it, then hurried outside.
Dahlman was just coming out the men’s room door. The boy edged past him with the mop. As soon as he was inside, Jane slipped the tire chain over the doorknob and clasped the other end of it around the upright pole that supported the overhanging roof.
Dahlman stopped, shocked. “Are you insane?” he hissed.
Jane seemed not to hear him as he followed her back into the shop. “How can he fail to suspect something if you lock him in the men’s room?” Jane picked up the hammer on the workbench. Th
ere were wrenches of various sizes hanging from nails on the wall. She used one of them to pry out the nail it had been hanging from, then the two beside it.
“Give me the men’s room key,” she said, and snatched it out of his hand. “Is there a window in there?”
He shook his head. Jane rushed past him, knelt beside the door of the men’s room, and began to pound a nail through the door and into the frame. As she raised the hammer for another swing, she heard a loud bang, and there was a hole in the door a few inches above her head. She sidestepped away from the door. She had thought of the possibility of a gun when she had seen that there was no weapon hidden under the cashier’s counter, but she had rejected it. Now the kid was scared and trying to save his life.
She hurried toward the car, but Dahlman wasn’t in it. She ran back and found him inside the cashier’s station, staring at the television. The image on the screen was his own face looking back at him. “I’m on television,” he said. “They’re saying incredible things about me …” He looked at her in disbelief. “I’m a serial killer.”
“I wasn’t able to tell you by the time I realized what he must have seen,” she said. “When I came in, I could hear something about baseball scores. After I was outside I realized that it couldn’t be a game at this hour. It had to be the news.”
Jane looked inside the shop again. The vehicle parked in there was a tow truck. She hurried to it and saw the toolbox in the back under the winch. She opened it, and found the precious object she had been hoping for. It was home-made, just a foot-long strip of sheet metal that had been notched about a half inch from the tip. She took it, the hammer, and a screwdriver, and closed the box.