The Face-Changers (4 page)

All I ask is that you talk to him.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, ‘No, that isn’t all you ask’ and ‘No, I don’t want to talk to him.’” She said it without malice, preoccupied.

Carey’s head nodded slightly, and he closed his eyes, as though he were waiting for a pain to pass. “You’re right. I guess that isn’t all I wanted. And it was a bad idea.” He pushed off his desk and stood straight. “Well, I’d better go get ready to patch him up. If you’ll wait, I think I’d like to drive home together tonight.”

Jane was still motionless, her eyes staring at a little square of tile on the floor below him. Carey never did that, she thought. Even if they went out, they would come back to the hospital and pick up the second car before they went home. He was going to try to do something himself – slip this wounded man the keys to his car? She seemed to notice Carey only when his foot moved out of the square. “Wait.”

“What?”

“You still haven’t answered my question. What do you care?”

He winced. “A hundred reasons.” He seemed to search his memory for one. “Remember I told you how I was almost washed out of surgical residency?”

“When they left you to sew somebody up and instead you went in again and redid the operation?”

“That’s close enough. I saw signs that the patient was hemorrhaging internally, so I opened the sutures and stopped it. The surgeon I was assisting said I’d performed a procedure I wasn’t trained for, endangered a patient, and so on.”

“But this man saved you?”

“You know what he said? The charge that I wasn’t trained was absurd, because I had just watched an outstanding surgeon perform the operation. It didn’t work. Finally, he said if I went, he went.”

“So you feel you have to do something because you owe him?”

“I’m sure that’s partly true. I hope it is, anyway. But he didn’t do that to save me. He believed that my career wasn’t as important as somebody’s life – no surprise – but that his career wasn’t either.” Carey was silent for a second, then said,

“That’s part of it, anyway. I know he’s a good man, who certainly didn’t do this.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“I guess it’s a feeling I have… a hunch.” Carey’s brows knitted. “In the last few years he’s been doing research.”

“You mean he’s indispensable or something?”

“Nobody’s indispensable.” He paused. “This is going to be hard to put into words without sounding foolish. See all those?” He waved his arm at the collection of medical publications that lined the shelves over his desk. She recognized the familiar covers of the
New England Journal of
Medicine
and the
Lancet.

“Looks as though there’s plenty of research going on.”

“Right. The articles are short – just brief summaries of important things people discover in a month, doing medical research in a thousand places at once. It’s impossible to keep up with all of it in even one specialty. But if one person could somehow hold a fair portion of it in his head at once and make the connections between discoveries that seem unrelated, and had the skills, and had the power to put it all into play, we just might make the next giant step.”

“What giant step?”

He waved his arm in frustration. “That’s just it. We don’t know, exactly – can’t know until it happens. It’s like describing the wheel while you’re waiting for somebody to invent the wheel.” He glanced at Jane, then began again.

“What if somebody invented a method that causes normal tissue cells to replicate quickly – the way some cancer cells do, only faster – so that surgical incisions would heal in hours rather than weeks or months?”

“You tell me.”

“Surgeons like me could do things that we would never dare try now: virtually nothing would kill a patient if you could keep him alive for twelve hours. It might very well make procedures like kidney or heart transplants into historical oddities.”

“The man down the hall is the one who’s going to do that?”

“We don’t know if anyone will. He’s doing research in that area. It’s rare for a person like him to turn to basic research, so there’s been a lot of speculation, some tantalizing rumors. A few surprising early results have been published.”

“So he might?”

“All I’m sure of is that he’s something that seldom comes along. Twenty or thirty years ago, he was already one of the very best practicing surgeons in the country – the best hands, a temperament that was all concentration, an immediate understanding of the ways each technical advance could have been used to save the last patient, and how he would use it to save the next one. He’s still doing it, year after year after year, getting better at it. And he never forgets anything, so all of that knowledge has been building. He’s reaching a point now – a kind of peak – that hardly anyone ever reaches, because by the time you know that much, it’s too late. Right now, he has as much scientific knowledge as anyone, the experience of bringing thousands of patients through the most difficult surgery, and he’s so deeply respected that if he wants to try something, the money and the facilities will come to him. I don’t know of anybody else like that. If he’s lost – destroyed –

maybe nobody will be in that position again for fifty years.” Jane studied Carey for a moment. “And if he isn’t lost?”

“What do you mean?”

“I assume this process or formula or whatever would be patented, so we’re talking about a lot of money? Nobel Prize, that kind of thing?”

Carey shook his head. “I know him. He’s the one I picked to learn surgery from. I spent four years following him around from morning until night, listening to everything he said, watching everything he did. He makes decisions to keep people alive, and when he does, nothing else matters to him: money, egos – his or anyone else’s.”

“What if somebody got in his way – this other doctor threatened to make the giant step impossible? What if all the thousands of people he might save would be lost unless he sacrificed the life of one single person? Would he do it?” Carey shrugged. “It’s an impossible situation. For one thing, that kind of act would require that he believed he was the only one in the world who could ever make the next step.

To believe that, you’d have to ignore what’s in all those medical journals – tiny contributions that add up. What I was telling you is that I have a feeling that he might provide a short-cut, and it would be a shame if we missed it.” Jane considered for a moment. “So we have a special man, who did you what’s probably the biggest favor of your life, arid who might be on the edge of inventing the cure for just about everything.”

“I know,” said Carey. “Why does a person like that need to disappear? An investigation will show he didn’t do it, or a trial will, anyway. But he’s convinced that whoever planted the evidence that he’s a murderer has that figured out, and won’t let it get that far.”

Jane shrugged. “If there is such a person, that’s probably what he would want. It’s easy to get somebody killed in prison, and hard to keep a frame from falling apart. But if there is no such person, then he’s as safe in police custody as he would be anywhere. Running is what you do if nothing else will keep you alive.”

“I’m convinced that he can’t be wrong about the existence of the framer. The police in Illinois didn’t just pull him in for questioning. They arrested him and showed him a lot of manufactured evidence.”

Jane stared at Carey for a long moment, then straightened.

Her eyes had changed. They were quick and alert now. She began to pace. “We’d better get started. I’ve taken too much time with this. You know how rescue crews try to get a person to the hospital in the first few minutes – what do you call it –

when you can still do something?”

“Golden time.”

“Well, this is his.”

“You’ve decided to take him out without talking to him?” She looked at him in surprise. “This isn’t between him and me. When you asked me, you made the decision. That doesn’t mean I’ll succeed, or that when it’s over, you won’t wish you hadn’t asked.” She walked past him to glance out the window.

“Is there a policeman on guard with him right now?”

“Yes,” said Carey. “They have him handcuffed to the bed in pre-op. He’s been arrested.”

“How bad is the wound?”

Carey shrugged. “Not life-threatening, but I don’t have the pictures yet. He’s lost some blood. The bullet passed through, but I’m guessing it left bone fragments. And he’s not young.”

“How ‘not young’?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Healthy sixty-seven or weak sixty-seven?”

“Healthy.”

“He’d better be. Describe him.”

“I told you. His mind is – ”

“Not that,” she interrupted. “His looks.”

“Maybe a bit over six feet. A hundred and sixty-five. Gray hair.”

“Beard or mustache?”

“No. It makes your mask hot and itchy. He’s a surgeon.”

“Is the anesthetist someone you can manipulate a little?”

“Within limits. It’s Shelton. He won’t do anything illegal.”

“He doesn’t have to. You’ll just have to give him good enough reasons to do what you want.”

“Maybe I can get him to do that. He respects Dahlman, and if Dahlman tells him I’m right, he’ll go along.”

“Dahlman. Is that the patient?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s going to be in the operating room besides you and Shelton?”

“Darlene Brooks will be surgical nurse. Shelton will have one of his people. Sylvia Stern will assist me.” Jane stared at the wall to avoid being distracted. “How long will the operation take?”

“A half hour to four or five, depending on whether there are bone fragments, or if vessels need to be tied off or if I find nerve damage.”

“All right,” she said. “Here’s what you do. Go in while they’re prepping the patient, get rid of the cop and the handcuffs. Whatever you have to say, say it.”

“No problem with the handcuffs, and the police don’t go into the O.R. when we operate on a prisoner. But they do wait outside.”

“Then Shelton. Have him order the full-dress general anesthetic, then change it to something else after you’re in there.”

“Something else?”

“This is your field, not mine. Say what doctors say – you’re worried about his age, or something. Put him out for a half hour, do what you need to, then wake him up.”

“I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to do what needs to be done by then.”

“And I can’t guarantee anything will happen afterward either. Just make sure he’ll live. If he’ll be in terrible pain, shoot some local painkillers into him, but nothing that dulls his brain.”

“I’ll do my best. Then what?”

“Give the cops a little preparation. Tell them he’s going to stay unconscious and the cops will contaminate his wound or hamper his recovery if they bother him before morning. Tell them where he’s going to be afterward. Where would that be?”

“The recovery room.”

“No good. We need to send him someplace else. Where would that be?”

“Intensive care – ”

“Someplace where there won’t be a million nurses watching him.”

“His room, I suppose. I’m sure the police would like it if he were in an isolated place where he wouldn’t attract attention.”

“It will have to do. Work it out so that one of the staff talks to the orderlies and has him taken there. Then send her on an errand or something so somebody else talks to the cops. Don’t do either thing yourself.”

Carey held up his hand. “Wait. I’ll work out the details and excuses. Just tell me what you want to happen.” She spoke patiently. “Get rid of the cuffs and get the cop to wait outside. Do your work in a half hour, and get him sent to his room. You keep everyone else assuming he’s still in the recovery room until, say, two hours are up. The longer the better. Now, what’s his room number?”

“It’s 3205. But how are you going to wheel him out of the hospital?”

Jane shook her head as though she felt sorry for him.

“There are cops and reporters in the lobby with nothing to look at but each other. If they see any patient being moved from this hospital tonight, they’ll be all over him. He has to do what nobody thinks is possible. He has to walk out of here under his own power.” She frowned. “Can you get me one of these surgery outfits with the mask and headgear?”

“Sure.” He opened the door and went outside, then returned with a bundle of green cloth and plastic under his arm. “These should fit you.” He put them into a plastic bag and handed them to her.

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, men threw her arms around his neck and kissed him again, harder. “I’ll get word to you somehow. But don’t expect to see me for a couple of weeks. I’m going to try to buy him enough time for the police to straighten it out and drop the charges. Now go tell him about me, so he has time to think it over.”

“I don’t have to.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?” Carey shrugged. “He remembers me. He knew that I was on the staff of a hospital in Buffalo, but not specifically this one. Anyway, he didn’t come to Buffalo to get shot and admitted to a hospital. He was trying to make it to Deganawida. He was looking for Jane Whitefield.”

Jane Whitefield McKinnon climbed the stairs and emerged on the fifth floor. She had chosen the fifth because that was where they put the cardiac patients, and it seemed to her that they would provide the greatest proportion of men over fifty. She walked with an air of certainty, as though she knew exactly where she was going, but as she passed each open door she flicked her eyes to the left to study the room. In the first two rooms the patients were impossible to see, because there were visitors standing around the beds. In the third, the curtain was closed because a nurse was doing something to the patient.

She turned the corner, and was in the blind spot from the nurses’ station.

The fourth door was closed. There was a sign on it that said, “Positively No Admittance.” That was what they did when somebody died. Jane opened the door quietly and slipped inside. They had not moved the body yet: the bed nearest the door was empty, but the bed beside the window was covered with a sheet. There were intravenous bags and feeding tubes on a tall metal stand, oxygen equipment, and several kinds of electronic monitors on carts, but none of them was connected to anything. On the stand near the bed were a pair of glasses and an open magazine with a picture of a hooked bass jumping out of a stream the way bass never did.