Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

The boy was confused. “But I wasn’t sure.”

“I understand the way you felt. But I’ve known a lot of cops over the years. They like getting called out for nothing a lot better than they like working around bodies.”

The boy’s unlined face seemed to elongate. “It was for self-defense.”

Marshall’s eyebrows knitted and his dark eyes looked apologetic. “I sympathize with you. There are so many decisions in a situation like this. One of the problems is that armed killers don’t react the way you want them to. If you pull out a gun and say, ‘Freeze,’ they hardly ever do. They try to shoot you. They don’t hesitate, but you do. Or they turn and run, and you have to decide. Maybe this is just some guy, running because a gas station attendant suddenly pulled a gun on him, and he has no idea he resembles some wanted killer. But maybe he’s a killer running to get behind something and open up on you. If he’s guilty, you can’t let him reach cover. He knows you recognized him, and he knows you’re alone late at night, and that the next thing you’re going to do is call the police. If you make it to the phone, his chances will go from so-so to zero.” Marshall rapped on the wallboard beside him and listened. “This wall won’t stop a bullet.” He seemed to remember something. “And in this case, you’ve got this woman to figure out.”

“To figure out?”

“Well, who could she be?”

“I don’t know.”

“That puts you in a hard place. You saw on TV that the man is suspected of being a killer, but there wasn’t anything on the news about her. It could be she’s a hostage.”

“He let her come in to pay. She couldn’t be.”

“Maybe he’s got her month-old baby lying on the back seat. Maybe she’s a hitchhiker he picked up, who knows nothing about any of this.” Marshall gave him a moment to assess the possibilities and dream up a few of his own. “On the other hand, it could be she’s an armed killer too. Before guns come out you’ve got to make a decision about her. Either protect her, or kill her—it’s hard to do anything in between, because all a gun can do is put holes in people. Will you put one in her?”

The boy was lost, floundering. His blue eyes squinted, blinked, but this time it didn’t seem to clear his mind.

Marshall pressed him. “Suppose you were in that position right now. What would you do about her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Make your best choice. Now.”

“I don’t know!” He was sweating, frustrated, angry. “What? What’s the right answer?”

“You fired a round. Did you know what you were shooting at?”

“I fired through the door. I heard bangs, and I thought they were shooting at me.”

“Who was?”

“Whoever was shooting.”

“And what they really were doing was nailing the door shut. Right?”

“I guess so … well, yeah.”

Marshall nodded and thought for a moment. “You’ve worked in a gas station for a while. You must know that firing blind through a door in the direction of the pumps is a little risky. You must have thought you were saving your life. In that half second you had a brief, clear vision of what you were shooting at. Was it him, or was it her?”

“Mmmmm.” The boy was straining, trying to see it and feel it again.

“Who?”

“Him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Him. I was afraid of being killed, and he was the killer. I saw him right there a few seconds before, coming out. I wasn’t thinking about where she was. When I heard the bangs, I fired at him.”

“But not her.”

“Not her.” He was full of indignation and shame. “Who is she?”

Marshall shrugged. “You’re the only one who’s seen her. When you thought your life depended on it, what you guessed was that she wasn’t the problem. So for the moment, she’s a woman he picked up who doesn’t watch much TV.”

“But I’m not sure of any of it.”

Marshall said, “No, but one thing we know is, if they’re both hardened killers, neither of them is any great shakes at it.”

“Why?”

“All they had to do was look at the hole in the men’s-room door, and fire eight or ten rounds at it. Then you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Marshall stood in the lot at the Reliable rental agency in Akron and watched the forensics team going over the car again. The preliminary notes were in his hand, and he knew that what the two women and two men were doing now was wasting time. In his twenty-two years as an agent he had watched this ritual hundreds of times. The F.B.I.’s big edge was in lab work. If there was something in the car that they had missed the first time—really, the first four times, because there was only room in the car for one person to search—then it was probably a sample that wasn’t big enough for the lab to analyze.

The car had a few hairs left by unidentified people, none of whom happened to be a female with long dark hair or a gray-haired male over fifty. There were fingerprints of the sales agent who had moved the car to the cleaning area, the man who had vacuumed it, hosed it off, and wiped the chrome and windows, then filled the gas tank and parked it in the ready space. It had a few prints on the hood latch, the air filter cover, and the gas door from the man’s colleagues in Youngstown.

The part about Youngstown had brought its own complex of worrisome facts. The car had been rented in Youngstown by a woman named Kathy Sirini, whose credit card bills went to a P.O. box in New York City. Someone had turned the car in at Akron, fifty miles west of Youngstown and a day later. Marshall’s experience told him that things didn’t look good for Kathy Sirini. Someone—presumably Kathy Sirini—had been seen at a gas station, heading west in this car with a man suspected of killing another woman. The car was left in the rental lot at the airport, but Kathy Sirini hadn’t bought a ticket. She hadn’t rented another car. She hadn’t made any new charges with her credit card, although it had been three days since then and she was far from home.

The New York office was trying to find her apartment now, but the P.O. box made it difficult. A lot of young single women in New York lived with roommates or boyfriends who had signed the lease—or in rent-controlled apartments in the names of people who had moved on decades ago. It was possible that whoever cared about Kathy Sirini wasn’t going to report her missing until she was a week late at the end of her vacation, or she missed the family reunion in Nebraska. Kathy Sirini was almost certainly dead.

The case had begun with the kind of disorder that most undermined Marshall’s sense of well-being. The death of a young woman doctor was disturbing: it seemed to have exacerbated the sense of waste that he always felt when he came close to a killing. The probability that she had been murdered by a man like Richard Dahlman made Marshall feel jumpy and unsettled. The case seemed to want to force its own conclusion on the investigator, and the conclusion was that sanity was only a fragile and temporary balance in the human organism, like perfect tuning. At any second, any human being might subtly, invisibly change and start coldly, methodically butchering his friends and neighbors. It was not inconceivable that such a thing could happen, and a good many people close to the case seemed to have accepted it already. But from the beginning, Marshall had been turning up facts that didn’t fit, and didn’t go away.

Richard Dahlman was the wrong kind of man for the sudden, self-destructive kind of murder. The ones who did this were younger—fifty at the oldest. They were rarely successful in life, and seldom well-educated. They were modern society’s casualties: men who kept getting dead-end jobs and then losing them, getting connected with some woman and then losing her too, because the failure or the bitterness or the accumulating evidence that the future was never going to be any different drove her off. Each time one of them loaded all of the clips for his assault rifle and barricaded himself in his apartment, the newsmen would say it was totally unexpected, and it was. But after the investigation had been completed, Marshall always found a list of incidents—threats that got more and more specific, outbursts that were more and more violent—that retroactively charted a kind of downward trajectory.