Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“How much is the girl’s family offering?”

“A hundred grand. I added him to my list when I heard about it. I figured if he was in Europe, his smartest move wouldn’t be to fly into Logan Airport or Kennedy. It would be to stay in Europe until somebody gets around to losing some physical evidence or they arrest somebody else for something similar. But if he got homesick, he’d fly in at L.A., where nobody’s expecting him.”

Jane nodded. “We only have about five minutes left. The police haven’t charged him. If you saw him, you couldn’t grab him and drag him to a station. You couldn’t handcuff him and take him on a plane to Boston. Just what were you supposed to do for a hundred thousand?”

“Detain him.”

“Detain him for whom?”

“For whoever is willing to pay me the hundred thousand.” He fidgeted. “Now, can I go?”

“Which was it? Were you supposed to do it yourself, or tie him up and call somebody?”

His eyes shifted wildly. He looked at the door, he looked at her, then at the door again. “The hundred was for killing him. If I could keep him alive long enough for the girl’s father to fly out here and blow his brains out, that was two hundred.”

Jane sighed. She glanced at her watch and stood up. “All right,” she said. “You’ve got thirty-three minutes to go save your house and your spotless reputation.”

She held the gun on him as she walked close to the bed and used her pocketknife to slice the wrist restraint.

Jardine stood up. In the back of his mind was a reckless urge. He had insurance on the house, and his equity in it was less than forty thousand anyway. Having her in his hands would be like having millions. What was in the house, anyway? Cheap clothes, furniture that was ten years old and had stains on it from things that had gotten spilled, and … oh, yes. Heroin.

He took a step toward the door, then went back to the bed and picked up the picture of his mother, and his eyes met hers. “I won’t forget this.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean next time I see you I might just kill you.”

Jane shook her head. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t take the chance that I might be worth money.”

Jardine stared at her and heard his breath hiss in and out through his teeth. He half-formed a plan to stop at a phone booth and call someone to break into his house while he waited for her outside. His friends and colleagues paraded through his mind, but each face had something hidden behind it—maybe greed, maybe the suspicion of unspoken malice. He turned, rushed out, and ran across the little parking lot toward his car. As he flung the door open he heard distant sirens. He muttered, “Don’t let that be a ten-car pileup on the freeway.” To whose ear he had spoken, or why he had taken three precious seconds to say it, he had no idea.

Jane waited until she had seen Jardine drive as far as the freeway entrance, then walked out of the building and down the street to her car. When she had started the engine and was almost to the same freeway entrance, she allowed herself to feel relief. For some reason, the part she felt most relieved about was a tiny detail. She was glad that he had chosen to move in when she had wanted him to—when she was walking up to a car she had never seen before in the middle of a deserted parking lot and pretending it was hers. Once he was standing in front of her, she had been too busy to feel afraid.

As she drove north toward Santa Barbara, her thoughts turned to Brian Vaughn. Jardine had insinuated that the family had been supplying him with money since he had disappeared. Certainly he had spent more than he could have carried with him. The face-changers had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep protecting him afterward. They would only do that if they thought the money was going to keep on coming and they couldn’t get their hands on it all at once.

Other little details made Jardine’s story seem right. If the police were playing Vaughn carefully, trying to lure him home, they might behave as Jardine had said. Vaughn had been in a very difficult position. The police had not charged him, but they would certainly keep quietly looking for him until they found him, so he couldn’t go anyplace where people would recognize him. He also had to worry about how many people like Jardine might be looking for him. The only solution had been to stop calling himself Brian Vaughn, and stop looking like Brian Vaughn.

What had not struck Jane as right was the story Jardine had told her about the crime, but she had to take into account that it had probably been of little interest to Jardine. The dead girl had been found in Brian Vaughn’s car. She tried to imagine how that could have happened.

One possibility was that Vaughn had picked her up in New York and taken her to his house in Weston. He had drugged and raped her, then realized that he had given her so much sedative that she had died. He had loaded her body into his car, intending to take her back to her apartment in New York. He had somehow been trapped—had mechanical trouble, run out of gas, gotten stuck in snow or mud—and had seen no alternative to abandoning the car. Maybe he had thought he was leaving temporarily, to walk to a gas station or something, but the police found the car before he could get back. But the story had to account not just for what had happened but for what Brian Vaughn had wanted to happen.

What would he have wanted? He certainly wouldn’t have planned a crime that included dragging a dead—or even unconscious—woman from Weston, Massachusetts, to New York, then into an apartment building where people could hardly be expected not to see him. He would want the whole event to take place indoors at one address: but which address? He certainly would not want a woman he had raped to wake up in his house in Weston. He would want her to be in her own apartment in New York all evening, and wake up there not positive about the details of what had happened to her. Just waking up alone at home might make her feel that whatever had happened was over. After reflecting on what she remembered, and what she would have to face if she called the police, she might decide it was better if she didn’t. But she hadn’t been in New York, or even in Weston. She had been found in the place Vaughn was least likely to want her—in his car.

Jane tried another version. Vaughn and the woman had spent the evening together in Weston. After making love, maybe he fell asleep and she couldn’t. She found sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet and accidentally overdosed because they weren’t hers, or took her own and got a bad reaction because she had alcohol in her system. He woke up and found her unconscious, then put her into the car to rush her to the hospital in Boston. On the way he saw she was dead. He panicked. No, that didn’t quite work. If someone was that sick, you didn’t drive them to Boston. You called an ambulance.

What Jane had kept thinking all the time while she was listening to Jardine was that everything he had said was possible. But it was strangely neat. There was an odd perfection to the stories of all of the runners she had found on this trip. Vaughn was rich. He was used to having people provide expensive personal services for him. He seemed to have a history of offenses against women that might not be rape but were serious enough to require hush money. That was important too. He had bought his way out of serious trouble before. If a man like that got into this kind of trouble and happened to find his way to the face-changers, the face-changers would be lucky. What if they had picked him out and designed a particular kind of trouble just for him? It would look a lot like this.

36

The security technician had been introduced to Marshall only as Maggie, with no last name. “Maggie can piece the whole thing together for you,” the shift commander had said. Marshall didn’t feel comfortable calling the young woman by her first name, but he had waited until they were alone and said his name was John.