Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

He had been in the Los Angeles International Airport security control center for over an hour, and he was still feeling admiration for their new surveillance system. It was a simple extension of what had been done in lots of public places, but it was a generation past the old systems, and the money they had spent was all visible on the screen. Maybe he was just prepared to admire anything that gave him hope. He said, “Can you take it from when she gets off the plane?”

“Sure,” said Maggie.

Marshall watched the tired, bored passengers eagerly walking out of the boarding tunnel into the waiting area. Almost all of them seemed to be carrying full-sized suitcases and bags with things on hangers. He had noticed the change before, but he had not quite figured out when it had happened. One day people had simply decided they didn’t trust the airlines to take care of their baggage, and the airlines had tacitly admitted their incompetence by letting them cram it all into the overhead compartments.

He watched the woman come out of the tunnel and take a quick look around to orient herself, just as the others did. Then she seemed to focus on something. “Can you freeze it for a second?”

The image stopped moving, the woman’s head turned at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees. “Can you tell what she’s looking at?”

“Not exactly. Here’s the other camera.” There was a refreshment area with twenty or thirty people sitting at tables, and behind it were the rest rooms and storage lockers. Between the woman and the lockers there were at least a hundred people. “I think it’s the man at the third table, drinking coffee.”

“Okay,” he said.

The woman began to move again. She walked quickly across the vast room, down the concourse, into a shop, then into the cafeteria, then down the escalator toward the baggage area and into the street. As she moved out of the range of each camera, Maggie picked her up on the next one.

Marshall said, “Wait. Let’s look in the cafeteria.”

Maggie pointed to the next screen. “There.” Jane walked in, got a tray, sidestepped along with the line of people sliding their trays along the shiny metal counter, taking plates of food and bottles and cans out of display cases. Jane took a pastry, then a cup of coffee, and put them on her tray. As she waited, she opened the purse hanging from her shoulder, and pushed things aside to reach for her wallet. Something fell out of her purse to the floor. She quickly bent her knees to duck down. Her right hand came up under the counter to steady herself while her left hand picked up the … he looked more closely … keys. The body pops up, the right hand stays where it is, which is now at belt level, then into her purse before it goes back to the counter. Why into the purse? The left hand was the one that should have gone into the purse, to get rid of the keys. But she had set the keys on the tray. Marshall couldn’t be positive, but he had a very strong suspicion that something had been in that right hand.

Marshall watched the rest of the sequence of tapes patiently, this time looking at the people ahead of Jane, and behind her. If they had been using the airport as a drop, what could it be that they had left for her? Messages? Money? Maybe his mind was so bored with the sight of videotapes that it was inventing new images.

Jane gets on the shuttle bus. Jane gets off at Lot C. Jane is approached by a man. Jane gets into a car with him and drives off into the night. “Any luck on the man yet?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That was easy, because you can see the license number on the Lot C footage. His name is Alvin Jardine. He’s a private detective, officially.”

“What do you mean, ‘officially’?”

“That’s what his license says, but the L.A.P.D. said he’s basically a bounty hunter.”

“Does he work the airport often?”

“I checked back for the last month, and he was here nearly every night. I don’t have anything earlier than that.”

“Is he here now?”

Maggie shook her head. “I already checked that too. I think he might have been the one she was looking at when she got off the plane, but I can’t be sure. I couldn’t be positive of the match, or even what her eyes were focused on—just the angle of her head. What about her? We were told you wanted her for questioning. Is she a suspect or a witness or what?”

Marshall stared at the screen. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know some of what she is, but I can’t put a name on it yet.”

The beep of his pager made them both jump. As he walked out into the airport to find a pay telephone where he could use his credit card, possibilities kept occurring to him. Maybe the bounty hunter had found Dahlman, and she had come to buy him off. Maybe she had some optimistic notion that Dahlman was innocent, and she was here to hire the worst possible person to find evidence to clear him. Novices often seemed to be drawn by some obscure law of nature to hire a fox to guard the henhouse.

He dialed the number on his pager and heard Grapelli’s voice. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, Marshall.”

“I wanted to find a pay phone.”

“Where are you?”

“L.A.X. They’ve been very cooperative. Mrs. McKinnon seems to have been here last night. She took a plane from Chicago to here, flew to San Francisco and back, met a man at a long-term parking lot, and drove off in the moonlight.”

“It’s not often you get to see such romance in this day of cynics and nihilists,” said Grapelli. “Where does that leave us?”

“Chicago could mean she had gone to look for evidence or witnesses in the Dahlman case. Or it could mean she just happened to change planes there. San Francisco is a mystery, because she was there for no more than an hour or two. Since nobody has turned up a suspicious prescription for Dahlman’s antibiotic yet, maybe she was making a black-market buy. L.A. could mean something.”

“L.A. means just about as much as Chicago,” said Grapelli. “Who’s the guy?”

“He’s a private detective–slash–bounty hunter. But since she wanted to meet with him, I have to assume he’s on her side.”

Grapelli’s silence had a sour sound to it. Finally he said, “Do we know what the hell it is that her side wants to accomplish?”

“I have a theory,” Marshall offered.

“Do you?”

“I think that she’s got part of this situation figured out pretty clearly. Her husband definitely had something to do with Dahlman’s escape, so he’s in trouble. Her house has been under surveillance for long enough so she knows that nobody’s going to write him off and go home. What’s her way out? I’m not saying it’s a safe way, or a smart way, just that it’s a way, and there aren’t any others.”

“Divorce the stupid bastard and claim she knew nothing?”

“I mean for both of them,” said Marshall. “Go out on her own and prove that Dahlman didn’t do it.”

“Give me a break,” muttered Grapelli.

“Think about it,” said Marshall. “If Dahlman stays out, does that help her and her husband? No. We’ll watch them until the end of time. If Dahlman gets caught, does that end it? No. It’s worse, because we’d have no reason to keep their home intact waiting for Dahlman to call or show up. They’d be subject to arrest. But what does get them off?”

“Very optimistic of her,” said Grapelli. “Only, if Dahlman does come in, even if he’s got absolute proof that somebody else killed that woman, the McKinnons are still guilty—aiding and abetting, obstruction of justice, and so on.”

“She’s blinded by love,” said Marshall. “Otherwise she’d know that you’re going to demand federal prosecution of a reputable surgeon and his beautiful wife who helped an innocent elderly doctor stay out long enough to solve our case for us.”