Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

He saw her and hurried up the hallway toward her, but he didn’t pause. His arm came around her waist and he spun her gently and pulled her along with him. He didn’t let go, and she allowed his hand to guide her while she quickened her pace to match his.

“Got to talk to you,” he whispered. His brows were knitted, and the sharp brown eyes seemed to be searching her face for something.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “Is there a transplant patient who needs something I’ve got?”

“I love you,” he said.

“You’ve already had everything that will get you,” she murmured. “Anything else, you’ll have to get me in the mood.”

“Let’s go in my office.” As he led her into the tiny room, her eyes settled on familiar things: his briefcase, his coat. She watched him close the door and push in the button to lock it, then stop and lean against his desk. She felt the smile fading from her lips and became watchful.

He folded his arms across his chest, and she suspected she was seeing him as his patients saw him, just before he told them something that they wanted desperately not to hear.

Carey said, “I’ve got a patient and in fifteen minutes I’ve got to go in and repair a bullet wound in his shoulder. I want you to talk to him.”

Jane stared into his eyes. She could see that Carey was making an enormous effort to keep his eyes on hers, unwavering, unblinking. She felt an unaccustomed chill, and when she identified it, she resisted the knowledge that came with it. He was building distance between them, trying to make her look at him the way a colleague or a patient would. That was why he was standing across the little room from her, not holding her or even reaching out to touch her hand. She recognized the stance with the arms folded in front of him. It was an unconscious gesture, using the arms to protect the midsection, where the guts and lungs and heart were. I don’t expect to be attacked, it said, but I’m prepared for the possibility.

She felt a strong impulse to fold her arms too, to hug herself to ward off the hurt. This is my husband, who loves me. Why is this happening? “Why do you want me to talk to him?”

Carey sighed. It was coming. “He’s in trouble.”

She said, “What do you care?”

“I know him. He’s a doctor. A surgeon. He was one of my teachers. There’s some kind of crazy misunderstanding, and the police think he killed another doctor. I knew her too—when I was a resident in Chicago, she was a couple of years ahead of me. The whole thing is insane.” Carey’s eyes softened, and he held up his hands in a gesture of despair. “I know,” he said. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly know he didn’t do it. I can’t make that judgment.”

“No, you probably can,” she said. “I’m just wondering how you can be sure nobody else can. Cops, judges, and district attorneys are better at telling who’s guilty than people think they are. And when they just want to close the books on a case, the one they pick to hang it on isn’t somebody like a surgeon. It’s some loser with the right kind of criminal record and no money for lawyers.” She gently put her hand on Carey’s shoulder. “If you want to do something for him, let’s start making some calls and get him some terrific legal help.”

“What he’s worried about isn’t that he’ll get convicted. It’s that he won’t get to court.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know much. He’s coherent, but we didn’t have much time alone. He was agitated, in pain. He said something about being framed. He thinks there are people within some police department who are in on it, and whatever they put in their bulletin about him was designed to get him shot.”

Jane tilted her head, as though she had heard an odd change of pitch. “The police here don’t shoot unless somebody is in danger. Running away isn’t enough.”

“He’s not lying about the bullet hole.”

“I didn’t say that. I mean something’s missing, left out.”

“Everything is missing. Everything is left out. I don’t even have time to tell you what I know, let alone piece together what I don’t know. I have to operate on him in a little while. 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?”