by Thomas Perry
The premeditation, the ability to lie with conviction, the habit of looking at any new configuration of human beings as an opportunity, suggested something far more ominous than a simple mental breakdown. And Dahlman’s behavior since the killing was carefully calculated and self-preserving. He was not acting like someone who had lost control, but like someone who was exerting control of a very special sort. It was just possible that when Dr. Dahlman had constructed his little shrine he had not been gearing up for the killing: he had been coldly, rationally thinking about the risk that something might go wrong, and building himself a defense. It was the sort of thing a sociopath would do, and they usually had histories. They didn’t wait until they were sixty-seven. This train of thought led Marshall back to Kathy Sirini, the girl with the long dark hair who had rented this car.
He sighed. He could see that every part of the car that was covered with black fingerprint powder also had tape marks where the print had already been lifted. The forensic people were beginning to give one another inquiring glances.
“What do you say?” he asked. “Think you’ve found everything?”
The senior specialist, who would have been a fair match for Dale Honecker’s description of the woman in the gas station, said, “We’ve got about all we’re going to get. I guess we can release it now.”
“Better have the local police store it for the moment,” he said. “Somebody may want to look it over again later.”
“Later?” She cocked her head.
“If her body turns up.”
She nodded with no trace of surprise and turned away to take charge of the preparations. He could tell she had thought of the possibility that she wasn’t just verifying a sighting of a fugitive and looking for fibers from what he was wearing. If the next big rain washed Kathy Sirini’s body out of some hillside between here and Youngstown, the car would be evidence in a second murder trial. It was just possible that by the time this was over and enough of Dahlman’s history was known to make it coherent, there would be indications that there had been other bodies in other places.
17
The big stone house under the maple trees, where Carey McKinnon and his father and grandfather and all of the McKinnons since the 1790s had lived, built on land that before the McKinnons had arrived had belonged to her own relatives, the house where she had come to stay with him and be his wife, was now a prison.
Outside the front window one of the guards jogged past in a dark blue sweatsuit. The woman’s hair was gathered in a ponytail and in her ear was what looked like the earphone for a transistor radio, but there was no reason for a person to talk back to an AM station.
If Jane stood to the side of the front window she could just see the corner of the Water Department van parked two doors down the street. The day after she had come home the van had appeared; two men in coveralls had set up highway cones and reflectors and gone back inside. Each morning they had taken out their equipment—toolboxes, surveyor’s transits, even a compressor, and then done nothing.
Jane had spent the following two days cleaning. The microphone in the dining room attached to the underside of the antique sideboard was so amateurish that she was sure it was there to get her to take it out and assume there wasn’t another somewhere else. The ones in the living room were relatively good: nobody but Jane was likely to manipulate a hand mirror and a flashlight to see a microphone stuck to the inner wall of a chimney, and the funnel shape of the fireplace probably acted to amplify sounds. The one in the table lamp had not just been stuck there. The base had been taken off and the wire split, spliced, and reconnected so the house current powered the microphone.
That was ominous, because it meant the technicians had been warned of the possibility that the surveillance might continue beyond the life of a battery. The kitchen had been bugged the same way, under the ventilation hood, with a little rewiring.
Jane had not bothered to try to find the bugs in the master bedroom. She had instead devoted her energy to the least likely guest bedroom, at the end of the hall, and taken it apart. The lamps were clean, the bed was clean, the bathroom was clean. She had taken all of the drawers out of the dresser because the backs and undersides of drawers were a favorite location. She had unscrewed the heat registers and the hollow rails of the towel racks. Since the F.B.I. was probably involved, she had unplugged the telephone. Devices existed for picking up and amplifying the faint signals that still came down the wire when the receiver was in its cradle.
That night she and Carey had slept in the master bedroom as usual, with a tape recorder running. The next night she and Carey had undressed in the master bedroom and turned off the lights. Then Jane had turned on the tape recorder and led Carey down the hall.
On her seventh day at home, Jane wrote Carey a note. It said, “I need Cipro, tape, dressings, etc. Can you get them?” Carey scrawled “Yes,” and reached to crumple the paper, but Jane held his hand and shook her head. The noise would be recognizable. Later she lit it at a stove burner, dropped it in the sink, and ran the ashes through the garbage disposal.
On the eighth day, before Carey came home from the hospital, she prepared him a written list marked “August”:
Cherry Creek Powwow, Eagle Butte, South Dakota
Crow Creek Powwow, Fort Thompson, South Dakota
Rosebud Fair and Rodeo, Rosebud, South Dakota
Looking Glass Powwow, Lapwai, Idaho
Makah Festival, Neah Bay, Washington
Shoshone-Bannock Indian Festival and Rodeo, Fort Hall, Idaho
Chief Seattle Days, Suquamish, Washington
Omak Stampede Days, Nespelem, Washington
Grand Portage Rendezvous, Grand Portage, Minnesota
Ni-mi-win Celebration, Duluth, Minnesota
Land of the Menominee Powwow, Keshena, Wisconsin
Passamaquoddy Ceremonial, Perry, Maine
Ponca Indian Fair and Powwow, Ponca City, Oklahoma
Wichita Tribal Powwow, Anadarko, Oklahoma
Intertribal Indian Ceremonial, Church Rock, New Mexico
She randomly assigned dates to the August gatherings without regard to the real calendar. Then, to complicate everything, she added, “Remember, August is the month of the Green Corn celebration for all of us Hodenosaunee. I might make it to Cattaraugus, Tonawanda, Six Nations, Oneida, Onondaga, Akwesasne, Allegany, or Tuscarora near the end (30th or 31st). I’ll try to call.” She smiled. Just that list would give the F.B.I. plenty to sort out, and if they decided to keep an eye on her, they would have plenty of women with long black hair to look at. She stopped for a moment, and repeated the thought to herself: plenty of black-haired women.
She spent most of her time studying the police. Each morning the policewoman would put on her running suit and jog past the house at the same hour. The shift changed right after that, so no doubt she went home for her shower. The new shift included two men who followed Carey to work at 6:30, and two men to putter around the Water Department truck and monitor the bugs. Jane began to experiment with these two to see what happened when she left the house.
The answer was not unexpected. If Carey was already at work, then one man followed and the other stayed in the van to monitor the bugs. If she drove to the market, or drove to the river and jogged five miles, or went out, drove around the block, and came back, as though she had forgotten something, one man followed and the other stayed in the van.
She had been half-expecting that when she left, the man in the truck would head for the house to read their mail, but if they worked for the F.B.I., she supposed they would have read it before it was delivered. And the men obviously felt that hearing a live call from Dahlman instead of listening to it on tape ten minutes later was critical, but searching the house periodically to get evidence on Carey was not. That was a good sign.
Jane began to introduce variations on the routine in order to get them bored and overconfident. Sometimes she was in a big hurry, heading straight for the Thruway just above the speed limit. Once she
drove to the airport, but that didn’t seem to make the follower nervous. Once she left late at night, and still the chase car kept its distance. The only way she could get them to add a second car was to pick up Carey and drag his follower along with hers.
On the ninth day she opened the newspaper and read the headlines: LAWMAKERS CAUGHT IN F.B.I. STING. There had been yet another patient, quiet effort to offer bribes to a group of congressmen, but judging from the article, the F.B.I. had become more sophisticated in the past few years, and played the game the way it was normally played. They had not dressed up like visiting Middle Eastern potentates. They had not had sleazy bagmen hand over briefcases full of cash in motel rooms. Instead they had gotten the cooperation of four genuine lobbyists, who had gone to congressional offices during business hours and offered checks made out to congressmen’s campaign funds in exchange for their explicit promises to sell their votes. The F.B.I. had then waited until a bogus law had been introduced and the congressmen’s votes recorded. It was good, but it wasn’t good for Jane. The old stings had been more vivid, and drawn more attention.
She looked down the page. There was a train crash near Boise, Idaho, the murders of three policemen in New Jersey. On the second page there were a few hot local issues, including a chemical company caught dumping waste in Lake Erie at night. Pages three and four ran the international stories that were probably important but didn’t sell newspapers. The second section of the paper had human-interest stories and what amounted to free publicity for various events arranged by public-spirited groups. She kept turning the pages and searching, but there was not a word about Richard Dahlman.
That afternoon she went to the public library on Main Street in Deganawida. A few minutes after she had gone to the corner to search the newspapers of other cities, Amy the librarian appeared at her shoulder. “Jane …”
Jane looked up and smiled. “Hi, Amy.”
Amy took off the silver spectacles that she wore only when she was working. “I know this is going to sound crazy …”
“Really?” asked Jane. “Then I’d love to hear it.”
Amy’s eyebrows tilted apologetically. “There’s this man who pulled up across the street just after you came in.”
Jane said, “Tall, kind of cute, like a young prizefighter with dark, curly hair?”
Amy put on her glasses again and looked over them at Jane. “I thought he was a little creepy.”
Jane shrugged and looked back down at her San Francisco Chronicle. “He’s waiting for me, all right. He’s not a creep, though. He’s a policeman. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring, and with the hours he keeps I don’t think he’s married.”
“But you are, you bad thing.”
“I was offering him to you. It’s not social. He’s got me under surveillance.”
Amy was shocked. “Why?”
“It’s nothing, really. Carey operated on that man a couple of weeks ago. You know, the one who was supposed to be a murderer?”
“Well, of course I knew that. But why are the police …” Then her eyes widened. “It was a woman he killed. Did he threaten you or something?”
“No. I never met him,” said Jane. “But Carey used to know him. I guess they think he’s dangerous.”
“You didn’t even ask them?”
Jane shook her head. “The one out there isn’t bothering me, and if there’s any chance we really are in danger, it would be nice to have our own family cop.” She stared into Amy’s eyes. “Of course, you wouldn’t mention this to a soul, right?”
Amy said, “Of course not.” After a few seconds she drifted off toward her desk to pretend she wasn’t studying the police officer in the parked car. Jane was satisfied. Unlike most people, Amy actually wouldn’t volunteer anything about it, but if anyone happened to notice it, she would feel she had to explain. Jane was glad that the explanation made a better rumor than anything so familiar as a woman cheating on her husband.
Jane went through ten newspapers from major cities. Most of them had headlines about the congressional scandal. A few had pressing local issues that bumped the Washington story to the bottom of the page. Not one ran anything about Richard Dahlman in the front section, and only four mentioned him at all. He was old news. She had no illusion that the F.B.I. would let him be entirely forgotten. If they had to, they would probably release a negative progress report just to get a few lines of print.
For the next few days, their spokesmen would be kept busy with the congressional sting. It was clearly an instance when they had fearlessly done what they were supposed to do, and done it superbly, so they would have to devote the week to weathering the publicity. They had enough experience to know that the network news shows would run with the scandal, and that they would never devote two segments to interviews with the same F.B.I. men on the same night. It wasn’t good TV.
Jane smiled at Amy as she left the library. Amy glanced again at the police officer’s car, and returned Jane’s smile conspiratorially. Jane felt a little guilty. Amy wouldn’t have smiled if she had known that the cop had no purpose parking this close unless his car was equipped with a directional microphone that would pick up the vibrations of speech on the big front windows of the library.
Jane’s time under surveillance with Carey was like a play in which nothing ever happened. At breakfast each morning they spoke about the probable temperature and the likelihood of rain while they held hands and caressed each other gently and soundlessly. In the late morning when Carey was out of surgery, he would call her on the telephone and say it was because he had forgotten to tell her what time he would be home for dinner, or ask her if she had paid the electric bill, or say that he had run into someone at the hospital who had sent her regards. He never said it was because he wanted to hear her voice, and knew that very soon she would be gone and he might never hear it again.
In the evening, she would sometimes drive to the hospital to take Carey out to dinner and then wait for him in his office down the street while he made his rounds of his patients’ rooms. During the long nights they would be entwined in each other’s arms with their eyes open, not daring to speak for fear their jailers would hear and know they were in the wrong room.
During the day, Jane made her movements erratic, her routes unpredictable, and her destinations dull and quotidian. If she wanted to shop, she drove to a shopping center on the Youngmann Expressway or the New York State Thruway, got off at the wrong exit and then drove back, parked in the lot for one store and walked to another. If she wanted to go to a restaurant, she would go in the front door and leave through the back. When she drove out to the reservation to visit her old friends Violet and Billy Peterson, she parked on Sandy Road and walked through the chestnut grove to come out across from their house under the big hemlock.
Three times, Jane left the house just as a shift of watchers was about to be relieved by a fresh team. Nothing she did seemed to disconcert them. They operated on a series of situational models that they all knew, so no unexpected movement caused them to hesitate or confer. The person nearest to a car, from whatever shift, went after her. That officer followed her until she stopped, and then that person was replaced. The one time she made her move when there happened to be two people from different shifts in the same car, they both went after her.
On the tenth evening, Jane posted her bogus schedule on the bulletin board beside the telephone and called to make a plane reservation for a morning flight to South Dakota in the name Violet Peterson. She pulled her car out to the street, parked, put a suitcase in the trunk, and went back into the house.
Before long, the surveillance team saw Dr. and Mrs. McKinnon leaving the house. This time Mrs. McKinnon wore a light blue summer dress and carried a large canvas shoulder bag. A single car with two team members followed the black BMW to a small Italian restaurant on Main, then remained outside to watch them through the front window.
The directional microphone picked up little that seemed reportable. The subjects of the surveillance s
aid they loved each other. This was not news. The male said that he wished he were accompanying the female on her trip. The female said she wished it were possible too, but that his job was to keep cutting open unsuspecting patients and removing things until he had paid for her trip. The ironic tone she used was familiar to the listeners, and the topic only confirmed for the team what they had already learned from the wire tap and the stationary observation vehicle: the female subject had made a flight reservation under the pseudonym Violet Peterson, packed a bag, and left it in her car on the street.
The team then followed the McKinnons to a large shopping plaza where they had followed Mrs. McKinnon before, and watched them enter a large movie theater complex called Cinema 12. It was observed that, after studying the marquee where the times and titles were posted, the female subject picked Theater 5, where a British-made film that was reputed to be romantic was about to begin. The male purchased two tickets, and the couple entered the big lobby and walked to the set of doors with a number 5 above it in blue neon.
One of the watchers, Officer David Foalts, bought a ticket for Theater 5, went in during the opening credits, and sat alone in the back row. The second, Sergeant Roger Horowitz, stayed in the chase car to watch the door and the BMW and monitor the radio.
After the film began, Mrs. McKinnon stood and walked up the aisle. Officer Foalts’s training told him that he had options. He could remain where he was and assume that Mrs. McKinnon would go to the ladies’ room or the snack counter and return. Ordinarily he might have gone out to the lobby and verified the obvious while keeping his eye on the only nonemergency door to Theater 5, then followed her back in. But the standing order was to watch Dr. McKinnon at all times, while Mrs. McKinnon’s situation was not quite as clear.