The Face-Changers (53 page)

The man gave him a look that was friendly, but not quite a smile. “I’m Lieutenant Harris. I’ve been assigned to help out.” Marshall nodded. In a town the size of Santa Barbara it was hard to imagine a case that would distract them much from this one. Every detective they had would be engaged for at least a few days.

“I’ve got a couple of things in the car you might want to take a look at.”

Marshall walked with him to the curb. There would be lots of conversations like this in the next day or two. They would want him to resolve inconsistencies in what their eyes were telling them, and he would try, and fail. He accepted the plain manila envelope the lieutenant handed him, and looked inside.

There were several enlarged photographs. The first two were pictures of the two men he had shot in the alley, but now they were lying in a morgue. There were two small x’s marked on each picture in a random pattern over each man’s torso.

“What’s that?” asked Marshall. “The marks.” Lieutenant Harris looked at him mysteriously and pulled the two photographs away to reveal the next two. The two bodies had been photographed with their shirts off.

Marshall looked at the lieutenant. “Bulletproof vests?” he asked. “They were wearing bulletproof vests?”

“That’s right,” said Harris. “And not some cut-rate piece of trash that won’t stop a bean-shooter, either. This is regular police-issue body armor.” His friendly expression tightened into a conspiratorial smile. “The x’s are your hits. Two each.

They must have hurt like hell – staggered them – but I’ll bet you wondered why they didn’t fall down. Kind of disconcerting.”

“Yeah,” said Marshall. “I was disconcerted out of my wits.”

The detective chuckled, but his face was more sympathetic than amused. The pictures reminded him of his own vulnerability. “That’s why you went for the head shots, isn’t it?”

Marshall shook his head. “I took what I could see.” He put the photographs back into the envelope, but he noticed there were others. “What are the rest of them?” Harris nodded toward the house. “Those are him.” He frowned. “Now, there’s another mystery.”

“What do you mean?”

“His driver’s license says his name was Charles Langer.

But it seems his prints don’t match the ones the D.M. V. has on file.”

Marshall said, “So it’s a false ID.”

“Not the kind we usually see. His face matches the picture they have of Charles Langer. It’s not often you see somebody who lets the state take his picture but goes to a lot of trouble to give them the wrong prints.” Harris shrugged. “I’m not even sure how he did it.” He looked at the house as though he could see through the wall. “And he’s had some surgery.”

“Plastic surgery?”

Harris nodded.

“How do you know?”

Harris smiled again. “I confess I didn’t see it right off. I’ve been a cop in this part of the world for a long time, so I ought to be able to see it. But the coroner picked it up. There are a couple of spots with faint scar tissue, but you wouldn’t notice even if the hair hadn’t covered it. Then he did an X-ray that proved it. There’s evidence of bone sculpting. The clincher is that when they do a face-lift, they put a couple of tiny titanium pins right up here above the temple to stretch the skin on. They take them out afterward, but it leaves a mark.”

“Lieutenant?” The voice came from the front steps behind Marshall. One of the officers searching the house was holding something in a plastic evidence bag. Marshall followed Harris to the steps.

The officer said, “We found another tape recorder stuck behind some books in the bookcase. This one had tape in it, and it was still turned on.”

Jane stepped off the plane in Rochester, Minnesota, and paused for a moment in front of a shop that sold newspapers, then walked on toward the car-rental counters. It was too soon for anything about what had happened in Santa Barbara to have reached print, and if there were any articles about Carey or Richard Dahlman or Janet McAffee she should not read them. She could do nothing now but what she was doing, and any distraction would weaken her.

She rented a Toyota Camry and drove up Route 52 toward Minneapolis. It seemed to her that a lifetime had passed since she had driven to Minneapolis with Richard Dahlman, and nearly that long since she had come back to watch Sid Freeman’s house.

As she drove on the dark highway, she could not help composing versions of what she was going to say. “I don’t know why you didn’t kill me while I was in your house.

Maybe you’re so crazy that you forgot.” Sid would protest. “Janie,” he would say. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t have anything to do with these people except what I told you that night to your face.”

Jane would say, “I saw Quinn.”

He would be silent, trying to work out all of the implications in an instant but not able to, and she would hear him breathing through his mouth. Maybe he would say,

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” She would answer, “I don’t do that kind of work. Kill yourself.” The last words she would say were, “Better get packed, Sid. The police will be here in five minutes.” She amended it:

“three minutes.” That would be enough time for him to get frantic, but not enough time for him to scrape up twenty years’

accretion of incriminating evidence and make it into a fast car.

She would wait until she could actually see the black-and-whites speeding along the lake road.

She thought through the conversation in so many variations that she almost failed to notice when she was getting too close to the lake road. She turned off at the next corner, circled the lake on the hillside high above Sid Freeman’s house, then parked her car on the street two blocks from the house where she had rented her room.

It was after midnight when Jane walked along the top of the hill above Sid Freeman’s house, among the tall old trees.

She held the cellular telephone in her hand, but carried nothing else. She could have driven to the bank in Chicago, opened the safe-deposit box, and taken out the Beretta Cougar nine-millimeter pistol she stored there with a few spare identities.

Maybe she would be making that trip sometime soon, and maybe in a few minutes she would wish she had done it tonight. If she did, the feeling of regret would probably last only a second or two before darkness came. She knew that tonight it was not a good idea for her to have in her hand the means of killing Sid Freeman. He had gotten very adept at taking away people’s whole lives and changing them into something that they did not want to be. His final act on earth was not going to be taking away Jane Whitefield.

Jane was afraid of the people who lived in that fortified house. She was in awe not of Sid Freeman but of his craziness.

The strange, uncivilized teenagers he had brought in were one manifestation of it; his extreme premeditation was another.

She could picture him sitting in that dim library, working all of it out as though the world outside were some enormous chessboard. As she walked along, a lot of sights and sounds that had struck her as little surprises came back to her.

Sid had said he had been watching television and reading newspapers and magazines and had not run across some runner who had come to his house. In the old days, Sid had never paid the slightest attention to published news. He had gotten all of the information that interested him from the people who came up the path to his house – and from Quinn.

That was what had made it seem true: Quinn was dead.

She had bought without question the statement that Quinn was dead. It had seemed inevitable, even overdue. Selling commodities and services to criminals was a risky activity. Sid had stayed in that house in Minneapolis with lookouts and armed guards, while Quinn, and sometimes Christie, had traveled the country foraging for things that could be had only from people who didn’t care about laws, and delivering them to people who used them to commit crimes. All transactions had been in cash. When Jane had heard they were both dead, she had been only mildly surprised.

Of course they would be dead – if not now, then next week, or next year. The only part of the announcement that had even held her attention was that she had trouble imagining Sid without them. When she had tried to bargain with him, she had been surprised that the one who left the bigger void was not Christie. Christie had always floated in the background like some weird wraith, the only constant in Sid’s fortress, where everything was always in motion and even Sid couldn’t hold onto one identity for long. But now it seemed to Jane that Christie must just have been a young woman who had gotten some kind of titillation out of the excitement that surrounded Sid’s repulsive person.

It was Quinn that Jane had kept missing. She had kept thinking of him while Sid was talking, catching herself glancing suddenly into the shadows and expecting to see him.

It occurred to her that he probably had been in the house that night. She had somehow sensed it – maybe smelled some subtle personal scent that human beings gave off, or heard him in another room whispering to Sid’s kids, just below the level of conscious hearing.

That made her wonder why Sid had not told Quinn to kill her. That was the way it would have been done. Quinn was the permanent second in command, the junior partner. He had always made her tense and careful, not because he wouldn’t do as Sid asked, but because she had never seen him experience a moment of reluctance. It had been as though his craziness had been worse than Sid’s, and Sid’s deliberation and physical torpor had held it back from its natural excesses.

Jane still wasn’t sure why Sid had not killed her. He had sent the two teams of men all over the country looking for Dahlman. She sensed that she had missed something, so she tried to remember events in order. After that night, the men had not come close to Dahlman. Maybe they had stopped looking. As soon as Sid had seen that Dahlman was in Jane’s hands, he had quit. Was that what he had wanted? Yes. He had, maybe on the spot, decided he liked the idea of having Dahlman disappear. It was much better than having him dead.

If Dahlman was killed, then the police could not escape the conclusion that someone must have done away with him, and wonder who. If Dahlman just vanished, then the only killer was Dahlman.

Jane reached the vantage point that she had been looking for, and stared down at Sid Freeman’s house. The high, dark brown building looked different, and at first she wasn’t sure why. She moved her eyes along the row of upper windows.

There were no lights, no shades. Usually it was possible for her to pick out the room where the lookout with the spotting scope was stationed, because it would be the only room on the floor with no lights. She looked at the ground-floor windows.

There was the usual dim glow of inadequate, old-fashioned ceiling fixtures. Sid had never been good about changing bulbs.

She moved closer to get a better look, her heart beating a little faster. She studied the front of the house. The steel-mesh security door was slightly ajar. It wasn’t squared with the jamb, so the lock was not engaged. She had known it was possible that Quinn would simply have driven to the nearest telephone to tell Sid it was time to stop being Sid and get out.

During her flight she had put that notion aside, because it was a thought that could lead to no possible change in her actions.

She had to come here.

She could not leave him alone and let him use her name to fool helpless runners into giving him whatever money and freedom they had left. And she couldn’t go back to being Mrs.

McKinnon knowing that some night she might wake up next to Carey and hear the sound of Quinn cocking the hammer.

Jane had to see. She kept to the land above the house and behind it. She approached it from the corner so she would not be directly in front of any window. She walked with such care and silence that she could not hear her own footsteps, and she stayed in the deepest shadows with her back to a stand of trees up the hill. She kept moving until her hand touched the cold, damp brick apron along the side of the house.

She barely breathed as she slowly edged along the stonework that was taller than she was. It had been designed so that if Sid was standing, no bullet from outside would pierce the siding and take off his head. Jane felt no indecision about where she should go. Sid was nocturnal, and the room he used for his work was the library to the left of the foyer. If he had not left, that was where he would be.

She stepped close to the window. Had it always had bars on it? She had never seen them before, because the shutters were kept closed. Why were they open now?

She moved her left eye close to the corner of the window and looked in, then pulled back quickly, her back pressed against the cold stones. She studied the image she had brought away with her. The body on the floor seemed to be genuine. It was not some other big man in late middle age who had been turned into a corpse so Sid could be presumed dead. This seemed to be Sid. The open blinds and the unlocked door made sense. If the little monsters had turned on him, they wouldn’t bother to lock up. Jane began to step toward the front of the house. She would have to go inside and get a look at his face in the light. She heard a faint sound: the window latch.

Jane dived away from the side of the house just as the arm jabbed out between the bars and fired a pistol down into the ground directly below the window. The arm swung upward like a pendulum, firing a shot every yard or two along the stone siding, as rapidly as the finger could pull the trigger. The sound of the pistol with its suppressor was like the strike of a snake, so the ring of the brass ejected against the stone was almost as loud.

At the end of the swing, in the instant when the arm reached horizontal, Jane leapt. She pinned the forearm to the wall with her left shoulder and hammered the fingers with her right fist.

The yelp was Quirtn’s. He yanked his arm back and dropped the pistol so he could get his hand back through the bars quickly. Jane picked up the gun, ducked behind the trunk of a tree, and waited.

“Jane?” She could hear his position as though she could see him. He was under the window, where no bullet could reach him through all that stone. He wanted to hear where she was.