Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

Dr. Dahlman seemed to have no trajectory. He had succeeded at everything. He had maintained what appeared to be a loving marriage for over thirty years, until his wife’s death, and nobody had yet found any evidence that her death had been suspicious. He had raised a set of normal, or at least high-functioning, children, and had managed to gain the respect of a couple of generations of other doctors.

The evidence the police had found seemed to show that Dahlman had quietly developed some festering mental delusion that had led him to kill his partner. The strange little shrine to his secret hatred of his victim was standard, recognizable evidence of madness. There were the usual photographs, the little possessions like pens and notes that he could have taken without her missing them. That was what searches turned up when a killer heard supernatural voices and saw the act as sacrifice or fulfillment of some metaphysical destiny. But the killing itself didn’t fit the pattern. It should have been ritualized in some way, not faked as an interrupted burglary. That was what killers did when they wanted to collect on an insurance policy.

The premeditation, the ability to lie with conviction, the habit of looking at any new configuration of human beings as an opportunity, suggested something far more ominous than a simple mental breakdown. And Dahlman’s behavior since the killing was carefully calculated and self-preserving. He was not acting like someone who had lost control, but like someone who was exerting control of a very special sort. It was just possible that when Dr. Dahlman had constructed his little shrine he had not been gearing up for the killing: he had been coldly, rationally thinking about the risk that something might go wrong, and building himself a defense. It was the sort of thing a sociopath would do, and they usually had histories. They didn’t wait until they were sixty-seven. This train of thought led Marshall back to Kathy Sirini, the girl with the long dark hair who had rented this car.

He sighed. He could see that every part of the car that was covered with black fingerprint powder also had tape marks where the print had already been lifted. The forensic people were beginning to give one another inquiring glances.

“What do you say?” he asked. “Think you’ve found everything?”

The senior specialist, who would have been a fair match for Dale Honecker’s description of the woman in the gas station, said, “We’ve got about all we’re going to get. I guess we can release it now.”

“Better have the local police store it for the moment,” he said. “Somebody may want to look it over again later.”

“Later?” She cocked her head.

“If her body turns up.”

She nodded with no trace of surprise and turned away to take charge of the preparations. He could tell she had thought of the possibility that she wasn’t just verifying a sighting of a fugitive and looking for fibers from what he was wearing. If the next big rain washed Kathy Sirini’s body out of some hillside between here and Youngstown, the car would be evidence in a second murder trial. It was just possible that by the time this was over and enough of Dahlman’s history was known to make it coherent, there would be indications that there had been other bodies in other places.

17

The big stone house under the maple trees, where Carey McKinnon and his father and grandfather and all of the McKinnons since the 1790s had lived, built on land that before the McKinnons had arrived had belonged to her own relatives, the house where she had come to stay with him and be his wife, was now a prison.

Outside the front window one of the guards jogged past in a dark blue sweatsuit. The woman’s hair was gathered in a ponytail and in her ear was what looked like the earphone for a transistor radio, but there was no reason for a person to talk back to an AM station.

If Jane stood to the side of the front window she could just see the corner of the Water Department van parked two doors down the street. The day after she had come home the van had appeared; two men in coveralls had set up highway cones and reflectors and gone back inside. Each morning they had taken out their equipment—toolboxes, surveyor’s transits, even a compressor, and then done nothing.

Jane had spent the following two days cleaning. The microphone in the dining room attached to the underside of the antique sideboard was so amateurish that she was sure it was there to get her to take it out and assume there wasn’t another somewhere else. The ones in the living room were relatively good: nobody but Jane was likely to manipulate a hand mirror and a flashlight to see a microphone stuck to the inner wall of a chimney, and the funnel shape of the fireplace probably acted to amplify sounds. The one in the table lamp had not just been stuck there. The base had been taken off and the wire split, spliced, and reconnected so the house current powered the microphone.

That was ominous, because it meant the technicians had been warned of the possibility that the surveillance might continue beyond the life of a battery. The kitchen had been bugged the same way, under the ventilation hood, with a little rewiring.

Jane had not bothered to try to find the bugs in the master bedroom. She had instead devoted her energy to the least likely guest bedroom, at the end of the hall, and taken it apart. The lamps were clean, the bed was clean, the bathroom was clean. She had taken all of the drawers out of the dresser because the backs and undersides of drawers were a favorite location. She had unscrewed the heat registers and the hollow rails of the towel racks. Since the F.B.I. was probably involved, she had unplugged the telephone. Devices existed for picking up and amplifying the faint signals that still came down the wire when the receiver was in its cradle.

That night she and Carey had slept in the master bedroom as usual, with a tape recorder running. The next night she and Carey had undressed in the master bedroom and turned off the lights. Then Jane had turned on the tape recorder and led Carey down the hall.

On her seventh day at home, Jane wrote Carey a note. It said, “I need Cipro, tape, dressings, etc. Can you get them?” Carey scrawled “Yes,” and reached to crumple the paper, but Jane held his hand and shook her head. The noise would be recognizable. Later she lit it at a stove burner, dropped it in the sink, and ran the ashes through the garbage disposal.

On the eighth day, before Carey came home from the hospital, she prepared him a written list marked “August”:

Cherry Creek Powwow, Eagle Butte, South Dakota

Crow Creek Powwow, Fort Thompson, South Dakota

Rosebud Fair and Rodeo, Rosebud, South Dakota

Looking Glass Powwow, Lapwai, Idaho

Makah Festival, Neah Bay, Washington

Shoshone-Bannock Indian Festival and Rodeo, Fort Hall, Idaho

Chief Seattle Days, Suquamish, Washington

Omak Stampede Days, Nespelem, Washington

Grand Portage Rendezvous, Grand Portage, Minnesota

Ni-mi-win Celebration, Duluth, Minnesota

Land of the Menominee Powwow, Keshena, Wisconsin

Passamaquoddy Ceremonial, Perry, Maine

Ponca Indian Fair and Powwow, Ponca City, Oklahoma

Wichita Tribal Powwow, Anadarko, Oklahoma

Intertribal Indian Ceremonial, Church Rock, New Mexico

She randomly assigned dates to the August gatherings without regard to the real calendar. Then, to complicate everything, she added, “Remember, August is the month of the Green Corn celebration for all of us Hodenosaunee. I might make it to Cattaraugus, Tonawanda, Six Nations, Oneida, Onondaga, Akwesasne, Allegany, or Tuscarora near the end (30th or 31st). I’ll try to call.” She smiled. Just that list would give the F.B.I. plenty to sort out, and if they decided to keep an eye on her, they would have plenty of women with long black hair to look at. She stopped for a moment, and repeated the thought to herself: plenty of black-haired women.