Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

Jane looked around the room to be sure that she was leaving it undisturbed, then picked up the pistol in the nightstand and went to the living room to wait.

Just as she sat down she heard the Miata drive up and stop in front of the house. She heard the car door slam, and suddenly the sights she had seen began to come together into a suspicion. The Yale ring, the money he had spent on the furniture and the guns and the two cars, the photographs that looked a little bit like him were all wrong. Everything in this house was wrong. C. Langer wasn’t an ordinary runner.

Jane stood up and moved silently into the bedroom, replaced the gun, slipped into the bathroom, and opened the window. She heard the key in the front-door lock as she was slithering out the narrow opening, then heard the door swing open. Jane lowered herself to the ground and slid the window closed, then crouched beneath it. She heard his footsteps approach. She heard him urinate, then flush the toilet. She knew he was directly above her, his face inches from the window as he washed his hands at the sink.

After what seemed like a long time, she heard his footsteps receding. Jane found a spot for her home-made latch opener behind a low bush near the window and left it there, then slipped along the back fence and across two yards to her car.

The next morning Jane waited until C. Langer had gotten into the Miata and driven off before she climbed in the bathroom window with her video camera. She turned it on as soon as the window was closed, then walked through the rooms, one by one. She made images of the furniture, recorded the serial numbers of the two guns, made close-ups of the photographs on the piano, the jewelry, the class ring, then laid out the Frederick Waldman identification cards and recorded close-up shots of those too. Before she left, she made sure that nothing was out of place. Then she closed and latched the bathroom window from the inside and left by the front door. When C. Langer came home, he would put his key into the dead bolt and turn it. Unless he was very astute, he would not be sure that the key moved too easily for the dead bolt to have been locked.

As soon as Jane was outside, she felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to escape from this place. She wanted to get into the car and drive as fast as she could, away from Santa Barbara. She promised herself that she would do it, but not yet. There was still one thing she didn’t have on tape.

33

Jane placed the video camera on her car’s dashboard in front of the steering wheel, zoomed in on C. Langer’s doorway, and tossed a sweater over it so it wouldn’t be visible from a distance. She came back to the car two hours later, when the tape would be used up, and drove off with it.

When she reviewed the tape in her hotel room, she had shots of C. Langer leaving the house, then an hour later coming back. But someone had taught him well. He always wore the dark glasses, always moved as though he were in a hurry. When he approached the door he already had the right key in his hand, and his body was close to the door and his head down when he opened it. When he left, he moved out of frame just as quickly. She was beginning to understand why police surveillance tapes were always so appallingly bad.

Jane recharged the battery in her hotel room and went out to buy more blank tapes at the big drugstore on State Street. It occurred to her that the people watching Carey at home must know how to get a clear picture of a man’s face. But then she remembered that they were doing pretty much what she had—parked in front of the house and started the camera.

She had to get closer, and to do it at a time when the light was good. The next day, she studied his movements from a distance. There seemed to be no way to get close to him with a camera. If she followed him during his trips away from the house, it was hard to imagine a way to take a tape of him without being seen. When he had disappeared into the house for what Jane judged would be the last time, Jane went back to her car and drove up the street.

That evening she studied the tapes she had taken of C. Langer, running them over and over. But this time she was not looking at the male figure flashing across the camera’s field of view. She looked at the shapes that did not move. She held her eyes on C. Langer’s car, on the windows of the neighbors’ houses, on the shrubbery in C. Langer’s front yard.

As she watched, each object caused her to formulate a plan and dismiss it. The light fixture just above Langer’s door was in the perfect position, but it wasn’t quite big enough, and the glass globe was not transparent. No windows in the nearby houses were at the ideal angle and distance to afford the right view, even if she could have gotten inside. The shrubs that were thick enough to hide a video camera were too far from the door. The only plants near the door were the potted ones on the porch, and they were too sparse. She studied the pots. The biggest one, with a ficus in it, looked as though it might be plastic. She could enlarge the drainage hole in the bottom, bury the camera so the lens was pressed against the hole, and tip the plant so it looked as though the wind had blown it over. He would see it, squat or kneel close enough to the pot to tip the plant back up, and go inside. No, it was unlikely that he could see the hole and not see the lens.

She evolved a plan for C. Langer’s car. She could create a minor problem in the engine that would stimulate him to open the hood. The camera could be attached to the engine compartment low and just in front of the firewall, disguised to look like one of the electronic boxes that belonged there. He would fix the problem—replace the radiator cap, or re-attach the hose—then shut the hood, and drive off. She could open the hood and retrieve the camera the next time he parked the car. But Jane didn’t know anything about C. Langer. He might be one of those men who knew every nut and bolt in a car and would see the camera instantly, or he might be the other kind, who wouldn’t even open the hood. He’d call a mechanic to come and do it for him.

She watched the tapes again. The porch was where he was most visible, but there was nothing on it that she could use. It was a few minutes later when she realized that she had been staring at the solution all evening and failing to see it. She reminded herself that this was its most appealing quality, because C. Langer would look at it and not see it either.

Jane watched her tapes one more time to be sure. There was a small wooden square on the side of the porch that had to be an access hatch. Wooden porches felt solid and looked solid, but they were just platforms with boards laid over them and the sides enclosed. They were very dark inside. She prepared her video camera, then drove toward C. Langer’s house. On the way, she stopped at a drugstore and bought a copy of The New York Times .

It was four o’clock in the morning when Jane emerged from under C. Langer’s porch and replaced the hatch. Without stepping on the porch, she reached through the railing and placed the copy of the newspaper in exactly the right spot near the door, half on the doormat and half off. Then she went back to her hotel and went to sleep.

Jane waited until the next night to find out how her plan had worked. When she was sure the whole neighborhood was asleep, she drove back to C. Langer’s house. She parked on the next street, slipped between Langer’s house and the one beside it, crawled under the porch, and retrieved her camera.

When Jane returned to her hotel, she held her breath and played her tape on fast forward. There was a long pause, when the image was total darkness. It gradually lightened, until she could make out dim, blurred shapes of black letters between the sides of the hole she had widened in the porch floor. That was the newspaper. After thirty seconds, she stopped the tape and ran it at normal speed because she was afraid of missing something. Now she could hear the sounds the camera’s microphone had picked up. Birds were singing in the trees near the house, cars started, and doors slammed.