The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  “Mid-fifties.”

  Dahlman squinted, then nodded. “Yes. He could easily be in his fifties. Go back to the beginning.”

  Jane stopped the tape, rewound it, and started it again.

  “Get ready to stop it.”

  When the tape reached the figure of the man in the sailboat, Dahlman snapped, “Now.”

  Jane stopped the tape. The image quivered and lines of static rolled upward across the man’s face like passing shadows.

  “That’s him too,” said Dahlman. He was so excited that he stood and sidestepped back and forth. “You thought it was someone else, didn’t you?”

  Jane let the tape run again. “I thought it was supposed to be his father,” said Jane. “I thought Sid Freeman cooked it up.”

  “What’s that?” asked Dahlman as the image of the first pistol zoomed upward into focus.

  “His gun. I wanted the serial number, and it’s better than writing it down.”

  The second gun came on, and the tape reverted to snow and static. Dahlman looked disappointed, but Jane said, “Keep watching.”

  The camera was on the front of the house. The door opened and C. Langer walked out to his car. Dahlman frowned. “It’s so hard to see from that picture.”

  Dahlman clenched his jaw and watched. Each time the man with the dark glasses would come in or go out, there seemed to be less of him to see. He looked at Jane in confusion. “I think that’s the man, but he’s moving so fast, and he turns away, and those glasses—”

  “Keep your eyes on the screen.”

  There were a few seconds of darkness, then the printed letters of the newspaper, so close to the lens that they were difficult to make out. “What in the world is that?”

  Jane had no time to answer. There was the flash of light, and then the man standing up holding the newspaper.

  Dahlman waited impatiently until the moment when C. Langer bent over to pick up the coin and took off his sunglasses. “There!” Dahlman shouted. “That’s him!”

  Jane stopped the tape and pressed the rewind button. Dahlman grinned at her expectantly. “Where is he?”

  “At the moment he’s living in Santa Barbara. That may not be where he intends to end up, but it looked to me as though he was planning to stay put for a while. The house is pretty well chosen, and he’s put a lot into making it right. I don’t mean it’s expensive, although it is. I mean everything is consistent. He’s building an identity, a personality.”

  “Fine,” he said impatiently. “So how do we do this—give the tape to the police?”

  Jane looked at him apologetically. “I know you would like this to end. But I think that even if we could get the Santa Barbara police to hold this man and run his fingerprints—something I can’t imagine them doing—it probably wouldn’t solve your problem.”

  “It proves I told the truth. I said I performed surgery on a man claiming to be James Hardiston. Any physician could examine this man and verify the plastic surgery. They might not be able to accurately describe every procedure we used, but there would be no argument about the fact of surgery. And I think the fellow’s fingerprints will prove he’s some kind of criminal living under a false name.”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “But what kind?”

  “That’s the job of the police—finding that out.”

  Jane sighed. “He’s a runner. He spent a lot of money to get a new face and a solid identity and a lot of first-class treatment. Maybe his fingerprints will show that he’s done terrible things. Will they show he killed Sarah Hoffman?”

  “Of course they don’t prove he did it personally. When she was killed he was still recovering from his last surgery.”

  “Then what good are they to us?”

  Dahlman slumped into a chair by the wall and closed his eyes. “I see.”

  Jane stood and disconnected the cords from the television set and the wall and coiled them, then put the video camera back into her bag. She stood in silence for a few more seconds, then said gently, “We’ve come this far. Maybe we can make it the rest of the way.”

  Dahlman shook his head. “At the moment I can’t conceive of how to do that.”

  “The first step is to find out who he is,” she said. “Maybe after that we’ll know the second step.”

  34

  While Jane drove through the darkness up the coast toward Santa Barbara the optimism she had feigned for Dahlman faded. When she thought of Dahlman, her memory kept conjuring images of Carey, and she had to fight the urge to cry. He had labored at becoming a doctor, and then at being one, with a kind of intensity that was heartbreaking. The work had changed him, and changed the world he lived in. For any human being, seeing was not the eye receiving pictures of what was really there, but the brain reaching out to grasp what it needed. When Carey looked at a person he saw a biological entity, a marvelously intricate and interesting creature that was doing its best with what it had. He wanted to learn from the creature’s experience and impressions, and he wanted to help it. If he could no longer do that, he would be lost.

  Jane had trained herself over the years never to let her mind go down this path. Thinking about the consequences of failure was like thinking about falling from a high place: it would distract her, weaken her, and make her afraid. For weeks she had concentrated on what she had to do, and not what would happen if she made a mistake. But tonight her tired mind could not fight off the fear she felt for Carey.

  If she failed, it was almost certain that Carey was going to be convicted of a felony. She was not positive that this meant the state would revoke his license to practice medicine. Almost certainly it did, but the wording of some law wasn’t what mattered. It was hard to imagine a hospital that would grant surgical privileges to someone with a criminal record, or a company that would approve him for malpractice insurance. Surgery wasn’t something he could do by himself at home. He would be like Dahlman, sitting in a room somewhere with nothing to do. Or it could be much worse than that. If the police found enough evidence for the wrong kind of charge, and Carey drew the wrong kind of judge, he would go to jail for a very long time.

  Jane felt the tears beginning to come. She gritted her teeth and shook herself, then stared hard at the dark highway ahead. She wasn’t going to keep those things from happening by crying. If she could prove that the man Carey had helped to escape was innocent, then Carey would be saved too.

  As she wrestled her mind back to what she had to do, old methods and tricks began to occur to her. It was a few minutes later that she decided it was time to resurrect the Furnace Company. The Furnace Company was a genuine entity that had been incorporated in Illinois ten years ago. Its assets consisted of a post office box in a strip mall in Chicago and ten computer-printed receipts showing that it had paid its annual five-dollar fee for retaining its tenuous hold on existence. The only one of its officers who had ever breathed air was a woman named Mary Sullivan, and that wasn’t the name she had breathed it under.

  Jane arrived at her hotel in Santa Barbara in the early morning. She checked her watch and dialed an 800 number she had used a few dozen times over the years.

  A man’s voice answered, “Memory Publications, Manny.”

  Jane said, “Manny, it’s Mary Sullivan at the Furnace Company.”

  “Well, hello,” said Manny. “I haven’t heard from you lately. Tell you the truth, I thought you’d gone under, like half the country.”

  “Gone under?”

  “Yeah, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eleven, whatever. The business climate in this country is poisonous right now. You’ve got to be a big player, or you’re squashed under the weight of mailing costs and government regulations. You know anybody that’s making any money this year?”

  “A few.”

  “Then you know a better class of people than I do.”

  “Maybe worse,” said Jane.

  Manny chuckled. “I just remembered why I missed you, honey. What can I get for you today?”

  “This is a bit out of your us
ual line. Did you ever publish a directory of alumni for Yale University?”

  Manny’s voice turned sad. “No, honey. High school class reunion lists we do. Colleges, they don’t need Memory Pubs. They’ve got better printing facilities, and they got people keeping track of their graduates to hound them for money.”

  “Too bad,” said Jane. “I could have used it.”

  “What exactly do you need? Maybe I can find a different way there.”

  “Yale, classes in the 1960s. It’s for a special direct-mail campaign. We want to sell nostalgia for New Haven in the sixties: sell them back their youth. When they’re twenty-two they’re inundated with souvenirs—class rings, yearbooks. But they’re in their fifties now.”

  “Not bad,” said Manny. “This is when they’ve got the most money. Have you tried the college?”

  “No help there,” said Jane. “They charge for the use of their name and logo. You ask, and they smell money. That’s what I hate about nonprofit institutions. They feel no guilt.”

  “I hear you. What exactly will you offer?”

  “What I’d really like to try is something with then-and-now portraits of each alumnus on it. You know, play straight for the ego.”

  “Sounds depressing. Where does the ‘then’ come from?”

  “Yearbooks.”

  “That I might be able to get, but you’ll have to find out for yourself what the copyright situation is.”

  “How can you get them?”

  “That’s proprietary information.”

  “Everything I’ve just told you is proprietary information.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Manny. “I’m just like your gynecologist. I see yours but only for your own good, and there’s no reason to show you mine. I’ve got a supplier who buys up yearbooks for me.”

  “Old ones?”

  “Sure,” said Manny. “He picks them up at garage sales, estate sales, and from printers if there’s an overrun. He pays just about nothing, and charges people like me like they were antiques. I only use the high school ones, but he gets thousands of them. He might have Yale. I’ll call him now.”

  An hour later the 1965 Yale yearbook was in an express-mail pouch on its way to the Furnace Company’s post office box, and Jane was on the way to catch a flight to Chicago. When she arrived four hours later, she checked into a hotel near O’Hare Airport and slept until it was time to pick up her mail at the strip mall.

  When she returned to her hotel, she sat down on the bed, opened the express-mail envelope, and pulled out the book. She slowly opened it, then began to leaf through it.

  It was full of black-and-white pictures of various groups and activities and buildings, things she sensed would have been resonant to somebody who had been in that place at that time. She was an intruder who couldn’t know what the people in the pictures would feel if they looked at them. It occurred to her that she knew immeasurably more than these people between eighteen and twenty-two years old knew, because she knew what was going to happen in the next thirty-odd years. But then, all of these bright, cocky kids with smooth, unlined faces were in their fifties now, and they knew it too.

  She reached the section where the rows of head shots were arranged alphabetically. She turned a handful of pages at once, first to the Ms, then to W, then back a few pages to the Vs. There were not many names that began with V. His picture was the first one her eyes settled on.

  In those days he had been Brian Reeves Vaughn, from Weston, Massachusetts. He had worn his blond hair fairly short, considering the year. Then she scanned the pictures of other boys in the class, and discovered that her assumption had been wrong. A few had hair in curly halos around their heads, and a couple had straight, stringy hair to their shoulders, but only a couple. She had once heard somebody say that the sixties began in 1968, and she got the impression that she was holding evidence that it was true.

  She turned back to the Vs and looked again at Brian Reeves Vaughn. He didn’t look naive, exactly, just young. She tried to see the picture of the boy who stared back at her as happy. After all, three decades later the man he would become had walked away from his home, whatever family he had, even his name, but he had kept the ring that would remind him of those days at Yale. He didn’t look happy. He looked a little bored, maybe just tolerating the photographer who was taking his picture.

  She guessed that the assessment he must have arrived at that those days were the ones he wanted to remember had come in retrospect. That was normal, she supposed. For a runner, it was almost inevitable. No matter what a normal life had felt like at the time, it had certainly been better than whatever happened that could goad a person into trying to disappear, and it was also better than the experience of running.

  She looked at Brian Vaughn more closely. He didn’t seem to be the type to go misty-eyed about his days at Yale, when the whole world had seemed bright and limitless. He might be the type who felt sorry for himself and got secretly bitter. Secretly bitter, she repeated. That was what seemed wrong.

  Keeping a class ring with his initials on it was stupid. She knew almost nothing about him, but she knew something about Yale. They didn’t admit people who were stupid. This picture was taken in Brian Vaughn’s senior year. If he had gotten that far, presumably he was as intelligent as he needed to be for most practical purposes.

  She began to move backward through the rows of portraits. When she found the Hs, she understood. There, in the middle of the top row, was James Walter Hardiston. Vaughn had not invented him. He had gone to school with him. He had probably known him, picked up details about him and his family that had made the impersonation convincing. The class ring wasn’t a sentimental souvenir. It was part of the disguise he had used to fool Sarah Hoffman and Richard Dahlman.

  Jane picked up the telephone and started to call Dahlman in Carlsbad, then set it down again. What she had learned wasn’t worth telling him. She knew what B.R.V.’s name had been, and she knew why he had been so good at impersonating a Hardiston. But she didn’t know why he had wanted to.

  The next morning she arrived at the big public library at ten, when the doors opened, and began to move backward in time. Christine Manon had seen the face-changers shipping C. Langer’s belongings to Santa Barbara about two months ago, and that must have been shortly after the man impersonating James Hardiston had become C. Langer. When had he chosen to become James Hardiston? Richard Dahlman had said the series of surgical procedures he had performed on James Hardiston had taken about eight months. So the transformation to James Hardiston from Brian Vaughn must have taken place at least ten months ago, and possibly as long ago as a year. If Brian Vaughn had begun to worry about being recognized a year ago, then his problems must have begun before that.

  Jane couldn’t be sure how long it had taken Vaughn to get that worried, so she decided to begin with two-year-old stories and work forward to a year ago. She started by eliminating the possibility that he had been involved in something that had made national news. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature would tell her if he had been the subject of a magazine article. He had not.

  She tested the theory that if an old Yale graduate was accused of a serious crime, or simply disappeared, it would be considered local news in New Haven. She slowly worked her way forward through a year of the New Haven Register and found no mention of Brian Vaughn.

  Brian Vaughn’s entry in the yearbook had said he was from Weston, Massachusetts, and that meant the big regional journals were the Boston papers. By the time she had scanned the local and domestic sections of a year’s issues of the Boston Globe it was evening. She was too tired to look at anything that had print on it, so she ate dinner and lay on the bed in her hotel. Whatever trouble had come to Brian Vaughn, it had not been the sort that sold newspapers.

  Jane sank into a fitful sleep, and when she saw the empty sky around her, she was afraid. She was standing high above a wide river on the top of the steel arch of a bridge. She had never gone to see the bridge in Wash
ington that her father had been building when he died, so this one looked like the Peace Bridge over the Niagara River to Canada. She cautiously turned her eyes to the south, because she was afraid that if she moved she would fall. She saw the river widen to become the endless expanse of Lake Erie. She tried to look in the other direction, and felt herself tottering, so she crouched and clung to the steel arch. Below her she could see the wide, blue river moving away from her toward the north.

  The wind was strong up here, and she could feel it tugging at her hair. With her head down, she could see the concrete blocks where the bridge supports were anchored. They were shaped like boats with their prows pointed upstream toward Lake Erie, and from here she could see a wake of eddies downstream as though it were the bridge that was moving. Each block was as big as a house when you were down there on the river, but now the white gulls that glided high above the eddies looking for fish were so far down they were just specks of white moving against the deep blue.

  Then a long, black shadow passed over her and she had to look up. There he was, standing on a steel I-beam. There were thick, twisted cables on the ends, and an enormous crane was moving him across her field of vision toward the bridge. She recognized his blue jeans, the yellow hard hat, and the bright red flannel shirt.

  “Daddy!” she called, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her from so far away in this wind. He was so tiny and alone, surrounded by the blue sky with nothing but the blue water below him. He held one of the cables with his right hand, and raised his right arm to wave, but she knew he wasn’t waving at her. He was giving some signal to the crane operator. She could barely hear her own voice as she said, “Please, please don’t die.”

  But the cable that held the I-beam snapped, as it always did. The big piece of steel tilted, then slipped out of the loop on the other end and dropped. He was free of it now, and falling more slowly because his arms and legs were away from his body and moving, and the resistance seemed to hold him back a tiny bit, the sleeves of his red shirt fluttering and flapping.