The Face-Changers jw-4

by Thomas Perry

  Marshall closed the briefcase. “So what happened?”

  “I was wrong. I got to the C lot, pulled up, got out, and she looked straight at me. I had come too close to get out of it without saying something. She looked startled, so I was afraid she was going to scream or mace me or something. I said I mistook her for somebody, and was about to move on. Then she said she couldn’t find her keys. Would I give her a ride?”

  “A ride to where?”

  “To her motel.”

  Marshall’s face was expressionless. “Did that strike you as odd?” The eyes never seemed to blink. “The next shuttle bus would have come along in five minutes and taken her to the airport. She could have stepped out of it and walked ten feet to a cab.”

  Jardine felt hot and panicky. He had let himself get overconfident again, while he had described a procedure he had used many times. Spotting fugitives was a chancy business, so he had spent many evenings trying to get a second, closer look. He had gone too far. No woman with more brains than a ham sandwich who saw a stranger pull up in that parking lot at night would ask him for a ride. It had never happened, could never happen.

  He had to get out of this hole. The F.B.I. knew who she was, but he couldn’t let them know he did. “I was just getting to that,” he said. “I thought, ‘This isn’t right.’ ” He glanced at the eyes to see how he was doing, and he judged that he wasn’t out yet. “I thought maybe I ought to get out of there. Maybe she was one of those decoys that get you someplace dark and then a big guy with a tire iron cracks your skull and goes through your pockets.”

  “But you didn’t leave.”

  Jardine shrugged. “It occurred to me that there were other possibilities. I thought it could be that she was another kind of decoy.”

  “What kind?”

  “She didn’t seem surprised enough, or in the right way. Maybe she knew who I was, or at least what I had been doing at the airport, and came through first to get my attention and lead me away before somebody else came through.”

  Marshall’s face showed Jardine nothing, but he knew that Marshall had to be considering it. The only reason the F.B.I. would be interested in Jane was that they knew what she did for a living, and that was what she did. Marshall asked, “Did you figure it out?”

  He shook his head. “I still haven’t. I took her to the motel, drove off, and waited around outside for half the night for somebody to come to meet her. Just before dawn, I had to rethink the whole thing. It was going to be daylight, and you can’t sit in a car she’s ridden in and expect her not to remember it. If she was just trying to distract me, I might as well admit she had succeeded. If she just wanted me out of the airport or out of the parking lot, she had done it. There was nothing I could do to change it. If she was just a regular woman who thought I had the face of a gentleman—” He grinned comically. “Well, now how could anyone argue with her?”

  “That’s it?” asked Marshall. “You gave up?”

  Jardine looked at him, puzzled. Maybe he should have told the truth. That woman deserved to have the F.B.I. hunting her for what she had done to him. But he still had to hope that some night he would get another chance to trap her and turn her into money. As it always did, the thought of money gripped his consciousness and left no room in it for rancor. “I was curious, but I’m afraid that I’ve got to be in business for money. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine a way to make any out of her.”

  Marshall set a business card on the table and waited while Jardine looked at it, picked it up, and put it into his pocket. “Call me if you see her again.” Then he stood up and walked away.

  Jardine picked up his briefcase and tried to decide whether or not he should feel safe. It was possible that they had watched the rest of the evening’s tapes and found something that made what he had said impossible. But the business card was his assurance. He could hardly see her and call Marshall if he was in jail. He stood up and walked out of the cafeteria. There were no other agents waiting for him, so he supposed he had done well enough. If he had guessed wrong, he had probably done no worse than put himself out of business. It was a lousy business anyway.

  40

  Jane finished testing the three voice-actuated tape recorders she had hidden in Brian Vaughn’s house. The first one had gone into the heating duct in the living room. The second was hung on the wall above the door of the bedroom closet, so a person would have to step inside and turn around to see it. The third was in the drawer under the oven behind a couple of pans, with the microphone cord running up the back of the range to the inside of the control panel. A video camera was too risky for this meeting. If the face-changers said something useful, the words would be enough. If they saw a lens, Brian Vaughn was through.

  She turned to him. “If you have any doubts about doing this—”

  He interrupted: “I’m sure. I’m going to do it.”

  She sighed. “All right. Here’s how it works. You just need to turn on the recorders as soon as you’ve made the call, and then forget them. They’re voice-actuated, and you don’t need to be anywhere in particular when you have the conversation. One of the microphones will pick up what’s said anywhere in the house. If you don’t feel right at any point, don’t pursue it. Bail out of the conversation.”

  “You mean give up?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “This isn’t all we’ve got, so don’t take risks to get more. The police do this kind of thing all the time, and sometimes it takes them a dozen tries to get anything useful.”

  “You think I’m going to fail, don’t you?”

  Jane shrugged. “I’d rather you didn’t take the chance, but I can see why you would want to. All I can do is show you how it’s done and let you make your decision.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “Don’t turn it into a confrontation, because that’s the way to get hurt. You’re just not feeling as safe as you thought you would in this little town, and you want them to move you again. You’re afraid that if somebody is curious about you, they’ll know your new face.”

  “What do you think they’ll say to that?”

  “It doesn’t matter very much. If they agree to the premise, then we’ve got about all we can hope for. But I think they’ll quote you a price, and they’ll want to know who’s making you nervous.”

  “If you’re right about them, won’t I be putting somebody in terrible danger?”

  “Yep,” she said. “You will. That’s why it’s me.”

  He frowned. “That doesn’t sound smart.”

  She walked across the kitchen toward the side door. “I’m the only candidate they’ll take seriously. One of them has seen me already, and they know I’m looking for them. If you tell them something they already know, then whatever else you say will seem more likely.”

  Jane opened the kitchen door a half inch and looked out at the cars parked along the street, then stepped to the window and scanned the neighborhood. “When they leave, wait ten minutes and then call me at the number I gave you. I’ll be waiting to get you and those tapes out of here.”

  She took a last look at Brian Vaughn, and touched his arm. “Remember, if you decide it’s not such a good idea after all, I agree with you in advance. I’ll take you out, and I’ll make sure Dr. Dahlman shows up to tell what he knows.”

  Vaughn took a deep, shuddering breath. It looked to Jane as though in the brief time it took to fill his lungs, he was assessing his whole life. He let out the air in a scared puff. “No,” he said. “That wouldn’t be enough. I have to try.”

  “All right,” said Jane. “Just call and I’ll come.” She slipped out the back door, across the yard, and out the garden gate.

  Brian Vaughn stared at the gate for a full minute, then went to the living room and sat down on the couch with the telephone at his elbow. He stared at it, collecting his thoughts, then put them into words and repeated them silently. He picked up the telephone, then put it back down and considered what he was going to do. Finally, with the air of
a man stepping to the edge of a cliff, he rapidly dialed the telephone and waited for the ring.

  A half hour later, Jane sat in her room at the hotel trying not to look at the telephone. When it rang, it startled her. As it rang the second time, she realized that she had been hoping that this call would not come.

  “Yes?” she said. She listened carefully to be sure there was no click of a second extension. She had given him the number so he could dial directly, and she would not hear the sound of the hotel operator hanging up.

  “It’s me,” said Brian Vaughn. “They can’t be here until tomorrow night at eleven.”

  “All right,” she said. “Call me when it’s over.”

  She hung up the phone and began to prepare. She had already rented a second room, at the hotel next door to this big, sprawling place. She had asked for a room on the southwest corner, so she could watch the parking lot of this hotel.

  She went out through a side door, quickly stepped across the lawn to the sidewalk, then walked down Cabrillo Boulevard as though she were taking an evening stroll along the ocean. After ten minutes, she came back to the second hotel and entered her room. She sat for a long time watching the parking lot next door, until she had assured herself that nobody was searching for her car. After that she went to sleep, and began to dream.

  Once again Jane walked out onto Cabrillo Boulevard. This time she turned south, and stepped along the narrow path beside the green pond in the park they called a bird sanctuary. It was different from the way it had looked to her while she was awake. The glassy surface of the pond was empty and undisturbed, as though the ducks and coots and shorebirds had suffered some kind of sudden kill-off. She left the path and turned up, away from the ocean.

  Jane kept walking but had no sense of the pressure of the ground on the soles of her feet. The unchanging, bright sunshine lit every object she saw so that the surface shone, outlined against the shadows, but she felt no warmth from it.

  She knew the streets of the city because she had been here a few times, but she felt none of the comfort that familiarity usually brought her in cities she visited. The scenery was beautiful, like the pictures in magazines meant to lure people from cold northern places for midwinter vacations, but it seemed flat and impervious as a photograph. There was no place to enter the picture and hide. The tall eucalyptus and palm trees grew fifty feet of trunk before they leafed out at the top, so they were like bare pillars down here where she walked. All the doors of the buildings were bolted and the gates were locked.

  Jane knew where her steps were taking her. She heard herself say, “I don’t want to go there,” but as soon as she had said it, she was walking up the slight incline onto Ocean View Avenue. She walked directly to the apartment building at the end on the left. The last time she had been here, she had thought about what a good spot it had seemed to place a man like Harry—the street wasn’t one that any casual visitor would be likely to notice, because it didn’t connect with any of the long, straight ones that crossed the town. By the time she had come here for the first visit all that was to be seen of Harry was a big, dark bloodstain on the cheap yellow shag carpet in the living room.

  In the logic of her dream, she felt relieved that old blood never really came out of carpets. The landlords would have replaced the carpet years ago, before they could rent the apartment to some unsuspecting tenant who’d arrived in town after the talk of the murder had subsided. The group memory about unpleasant events wasn’t very good in places like Santa Barbara anyway. The bad things happened to strangers—transients and tourists. The victims were assumed to have brought both the causes and the perpetrators with them into the quiet town, and when they were dead the trouble went with them.

  Jane knew it wasn’t enough to walk past the building and say to herself, “This is the place where John Felker brought a knife across the throat of Harry Kemple and watched him bleed to death on the floor,” like some tour guide. She was not an outsider.

  She felt her hand on the cold iron railing and listened as her feet touched each of the short slabs of roughened concrete that formed the steps. She remembered the way footsteps made the railing vibrate and hum a little.

  She reached the door at the top and touched the handle. When it turned she released it, but it was too late. The door was open six inches and she knew she was supposed to go in. She stepped inside and closed the door.

  She looked down at the place on the floor where Harry had died, but she could not see anything different about it, so she lost her certainty that it was the right place, and tried to line it up with the window she had looked through that night.

  She watched Harry step into the space on the floor where the bright afternoon sunlight beamed in through the window and illuminated the tiny specks of dust floating in the air. He didn’t deflect them from their courses at all. He said, “I hate it here.” Then he added apologetically, “But I’m a troubled spirit.”

  “The unquiet dead,” she said. “That’s you, Harry.”

  He made his familiar gesture of tugging at his collar, and she could see the seam that the undertaker had sewn to close his neck. That was the reason. She realized that the wound was bleeding again, little droplets seeping out where the needle had not closed the skin, as though being here made the blood flow. Jane stared down at the carpet, to look away from it.

  Harry touched the toe of his worn, scuffed shoe on the carpet. “This is where I died. Did you know that?”

  “Of course I knew that,” she said impatiently, but seeing him staring down at it like this caused tears to blur her vision.

  “I mean right here, where I’m standing now. They only replaced this little square—about five by five—and combed the shag over the seams so it would look the same.” He raised his eyes and stared at her intently. “It’s happening again, Janie.”

  She was held by his eyes. “How can it be?”

  “Nothing lasts, but nothing really changes. The replacement is what it replaces. The brothers still stalk each other, and then they fight to the death. Over and over.”

  Jane waited, trying to understand.

  Harry said, “They’re so good at it that for a long time they’ve been able to read each other’s minds. The Right-Handed Twin, the Creator, was born exactly as strong as the Left-Handed, the Destroyer. They both know it, but each one has a secret vulnerability, so he can’t help thinking about it. Hanegoategeh, the Destroyer, thinks the truth, but Hawenneyu, the good one, thinks a lie.” He paused. “Ever wonder why it isn’t the other way around?”

  “Because it never was a game,” she said. “It’s a war.”

  He nodded. “Anybody who doesn’t live by his wits, doesn’t live. Death is always a surprise.” He held her in his melancholy gaze for a moment, and she could tell he was letting her think about what had happened here. The way you cut a throat was by using the right hand to bring the blade edge across from behind. First you had to get him to turn his back by making him believe you were a friend.

  She said, “It’s all going wrong, isn’t it? I missed something else.”

  He said, “You know everything they know. And they know everything you know. You both know that, too.”

  Jane awoke suddenly, shocked to be in the light. Her head jerked to the side to search for something familiar, because she couldn’t remember where she was. Her eyes settled on the clock radio beside the bed, and she read the digits: 5:55. She supposed the dream had been cut short by a sound. She heard a hotel maid moving her cart up the hallway.

  She sat up and closed her eyes, trying to recapture the bits of the dream before they were dispersed by the sensory impressions that had come with consciousness. She was frustrated, because she kept catching herself thinking about Brian Vaughn. Then she realized that he wasn’t a distraction. Their secret vulnerability was Brian Vaughn. And now he was her vulnerability too. But then, why had they picked him? Because he was weak.

  41

  Jane carefully constructed her package. The videotape
of Brian Vaughn and his apartment and his false identification she surrounded with crumpled newspaper before she put it into the box. The box was addressed to Alan Weems at Senior Rancho in Carlsbad, and she used the return address she had given the Rancho people for his daughter, Julia Kieler, so he would know it wasn’t a bomb.

  She looked over her letter again. It began, “This is the tape of Brian Vaughn, the man you operated on. His address as of this date is 80183 Padre Street in Santa Barbara, and he calls himself Charles Langer. The other person I found who had been fooled by the people who killed Sarah Hoffman is Janet McAffee. She is living as Christine Manon at 9595 Timon Street in Cleveland, Ohio. If you hear of my death, or are caught, give both of them up to the police.”

  The rest of the letter was more difficult. It was an attempt to put down everything she had learned about the face-changers in a logical, comprehensible way. As she read it over, it seemed to her that what she had described was a collection of three separate stories that had collided and begun to overlap very early. The face-changers seemed to have gone into business with Brian Vaughn, but hiding him had forced them to manipulate, and finally frame, Richard Dahlman. The face-changers had already taken on Christine Manon when Dahlman unexpectedly escaped from custody. They had to devote most of their time to searching for Dahlman, so they needed to put Christine in storage. They had made her wait in an apartment in Chicago while the boxes they had planned to ship to Brian Vaughn were still in the closet there. They had planned to move her to the apartment on Troost Avenue in Los Angeles, which was empty and new because they had undoubtedly just bought it with Brian Vaughn’s money. Everything had affected everything else in small, incidental ways. She could only hope that each part would help to corroborate the others.

  When Jane was satisfied that she had included every detail that she knew, she folded the letter, addressed it to Dahlman, and placed it inside the box with the tape. She had decided that the information belonged to him. If all of this misery ever resulted in a trial, then the name of the trial was most likely to be The People v. Richard Dahlman.