Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“It proves I told the truth. I said I performed surgery on a man claiming to be James Hardiston. Any physician could examine this man and verify the plastic surgery. They might not be able to accurately describe every procedure we used, but there would be no argument about the fact of surgery. And I think the fellow’s fingerprints will prove he’s some kind of criminal living under a false name.”

“Yes,” said Jane. “But what kind?”

“That’s the job of the police—finding that out.”

Jane sighed. “He’s a runner. He spent a lot of money to get a new face and a solid identity and a lot of first-class treatment. Maybe his fingerprints will show that he’s done terrible things. Will they show he killed Sarah Hoffman?”

“Of course they don’t prove he did it personally. When she was killed he was still recovering from his last surgery.”

“Then what good are they to us?”

Dahlman slumped into a chair by the wall and closed his eyes. “I see.”

Jane stood and disconnected the cords from the television set and the wall and coiled them, then put the video camera back into her bag. She stood in silence for a few more seconds, then said gently, “We’ve come this far. Maybe we can make it the rest of the way.”

Dahlman shook his head. “At the moment I can’t conceive of how to do that.”

“The first step is to find out who he is,” she said. “Maybe after that we’ll know the second step.”

34

While Jane drove through the darkness up the coast toward Santa Barbara the optimism she had feigned for Dahlman faded. When she thought of Dahlman, her memory kept conjuring images of Carey, and she had to fight the urge to cry. He had labored at becoming a doctor, and then at being one, with a kind of intensity that was heartbreaking. The work had changed him, and changed the world he lived in. For any human being, seeing was not the eye receiving pictures of what was really there, but the brain reaching out to grasp what it needed. When Carey looked at a person he saw a biological entity, a marvelously intricate and interesting creature that was doing its best with what it had. He wanted to learn from the creature’s experience and impressions, and he wanted to help it. If he could no longer do that, he would be lost.

Jane had trained herself over the years never to let her mind go down this path. Thinking about the consequences of failure was like thinking about falling from a high place: it would distract her, weaken her, and make her afraid. For weeks she had concentrated on what she had to do, and not what would happen if she made a mistake. But tonight her tired mind could not fight off the fear she felt for Carey.

If she failed, it was almost certain that Carey was going to be convicted of a felony. She was not positive that this meant the state would revoke his license to practice medicine. Almost certainly it did, but the wording of some law wasn’t what mattered. It was hard to imagine a hospital that would grant surgical privileges to someone with a criminal record, or a company that would approve him for malpractice insurance. Surgery wasn’t something he could do by himself at home. He would be like Dahlman, sitting in a room somewhere with nothing to do. Or it could be much worse than that. If the police found enough evidence for the wrong kind of charge, and Carey drew the wrong kind of judge, he would go to jail for a very long time.

Jane felt the tears beginning to come. She gritted her teeth and shook herself, then stared hard at the dark highway ahead. She wasn’t going to keep those things from happening by crying. If she could prove that the man Carey had helped to escape was innocent, then Carey would be saved too.

As she wrestled her mind back to what she had to do, old methods and tricks began to occur to her. It was a few minutes later that she decided it was time to resurrect the Furnace Company. The Furnace Company was a genuine entity that had been incorporated in Illinois ten years ago. Its assets consisted of a post office box in a strip mall in Chicago and ten computer-printed receipts showing that it had paid its annual five-dollar fee for retaining its tenuous hold on existence. The only one of its officers who had ever breathed air was a woman named Mary Sullivan, and that wasn’t the name she had breathed it under.

Jane arrived at her hotel in Santa Barbara in the early morning. She checked her watch and dialed an 800 number she had used a few dozen times over the years.

A man’s voice answered, “Memory Publications, Manny.”

Jane said, “Manny, it’s Mary Sullivan at the Furnace Company.”

“Well, hello,” said Manny. “I haven’t heard from you lately. Tell you the truth, I thought you’d gone under, like half the country.”

“Gone under?”

“Yeah, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eleven, whatever. The business climate in this country is poisonous right now. You’ve got to be a big player, or you’re squashed under the weight of mailing costs and government regulations. You know anybody that’s making any money this year?”

“A few.”

“Then you know a better class of people than I do.”

“Maybe worse,” said Jane.

Manny chuckled. “I just remembered why I missed you, honey. What can I get for you today?”

“This is a bit out of your usual line. Did you ever publish a directory of alumni for Yale University?”

Manny’s voice turned sad. “No, honey. High school class reunion lists we do. Colleges, they don’t need Memory Pubs. They’ve got better printing facilities, and they got people keeping track of their graduates to hound them for money.”

“Too bad,” said Jane. “I could have used it.”

“What exactly do you need? Maybe I can find a different way there.”

“Yale, classes in the 1960s. It’s for a special direct-mail campaign. We want to sell nostalgia for New Haven in the sixties: sell them back their youth. When they’re twenty-two they’re inundated with souvenirs—class rings, yearbooks. But they’re in their fifties now.”

“Not bad,” said Manny. “This is when they’ve got the most money. Have you tried the college?”

“No help there,” said Jane. “They charge for the use of their name and logo. You ask, and they smell money. That’s what I hate about nonprofit institutions. They feel no guilt.”

“I hear you. What exactly will you offer?”

“What I’d really like to try is something with then-and-now portraits of each alumnus on it. You know, play straight for the ego.”

“Sounds depressing. Where does the ‘then’ come from?”

“Yearbooks.”

“That I might be able to get, but you’ll have to find out for yourself what the copyright situation is.”

“How can you get them?”

“That’s proprietary information.”

“Everything I’ve just told you is proprietary information.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Manny. “I’m just like your gynecologist. I see yours but only for your own good, and there’s no reason to show you mine. I’ve got a supplier who buys up yearbooks for me.”

“Old ones?”

“Sure,” said Manny. “He picks them up at garage sales, estate sales, and from printers if there’s an overrun. He pays just about nothing, and charges people like me like they were antiques. I only use the high school ones, but he gets thousands of them. He might have Yale. I’ll call him now.”

An hour later the 1965 Yale yearbook was in an express-mail pouch on its way to the Furnace Company’s post office box, and Jane was on the way to catch a flight to Chicago. When she arrived four hours later, she checked into a hotel near O’Hare Airport and slept until it was time to pick up her mail at the strip mall.