Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“Yes,” he said.

The man gave him a look that was friendly, but not quite a smile. “I’m Lieutenant Harris. I’ve been assigned to help out.”

Marshall nodded. In a town the size of Santa Barbara it was hard to imagine a case that would distract them much from this one. Every detective they had would be engaged for at least a few days.

“I’ve got a couple of things in the car you might want to take a look at.”

Marshall walked with him to the curb. There would be lots of conversations like this in the next day or two. They would want him to resolve inconsistencies in what their eyes were telling them, and he would try, and fail. He accepted the plain manila envelope the lieutenant handed him, and looked inside. There were several enlarged photographs. The first two were pictures of the two men he had shot in the alley, but now they were lying in a morgue. There were two small x’s marked on each picture in a random pattern over each man’s torso.

“What’s that?” asked Marshall. “The marks.”

Lieutenant Harris looked at him mysteriously and pulled the two photographs away to reveal the next two. The two bodies had been photographed with their shirts off.

Marshall looked at the lieutenant. “Bulletproof vests?” he asked. “They were wearing bulletproof vests?”

“That’s right,” said Harris. “And not some cut-rate piece of trash that won’t stop a bean-shooter, either. This is regular police-issue body armor.” His friendly expression tightened into a conspiratorial smile. “The x’s are your hits. Two each. They must have hurt like hell—staggered them—but I’ll bet you wondered why they didn’t fall down. Kind of disconcerting.”

“Yeah,” said Marshall. “I was disconcerted out of my wits.”

The detective chuckled, but his face was more sympathetic than amused. The pictures reminded him of his own vulnerability. “That’s why you went for the head shots, isn’t it?”

Marshall shook his head. “I took what I could see.” He put the photographs back into the envelope, but he noticed there were others. “What are the rest of them?”

Harris nodded toward the house. “Those are him.” He frowned. “Now, there’s another mystery.”

“What do you mean?”

“His driver’s license says his name was Charles Langer. But it seems his prints don’t match the ones the D.M.V. has on file.”

Marshall said, “So it’s a false ID.”

“Not the kind we usually see. His face matches the picture they have of Charles Langer. It’s not often you see somebody who lets the state take his picture but goes to a lot of trouble to give them the wrong prints.” Harris shrugged. “I’m not even sure how he did it.” He looked at the house as though he could see through the wall. “And he’s had some surgery.”

“Plastic surgery?”

Harris nodded.

“How do you know?”

Harris smiled again. “I confess I didn’t see it right off. I’ve been a cop in this part of the world for a long time, so I ought to be able to see it. But the coroner picked it up. There are a couple of spots with faint scar tissue, but you wouldn’t notice even if the hair hadn’t covered it. Then he did an X-ray that proved it. There’s evidence of bone sculpting. The clincher is that when they do a face-lift, they put a couple of tiny titanium pins right up here above the temple to stretch the skin on. They take them out afterward, but it leaves a mark.”

“Lieutenant?” The voice came from the front steps behind Marshall. One of the officers searching the house was holding something in a plastic evidence bag. Marshall followed Harris to the steps.

The officer said, “We found another tape recorder stuck behind some books in the bookcase. This one had tape in it, and it was still turned on.”

44

Jane stepped off the plane in Rochester, Minnesota, and paused for a moment in front of a shop that sold newspapers, then walked on toward the car-rental counters. It was too soon for anything about what had happened in Santa Barbara to have reached print, and if there were any articles about Carey or Richard Dahlman or Janet McAffee she should not read them. She could do nothing now but what she was doing, and any distraction would weaken her.

She rented a Toyota Camry and drove up Route 52 toward Minneapolis. It seemed to her that a lifetime had passed since she had driven to Minneapolis with Richard Dahlman, and nearly that long since she had come back to watch Sid Freeman’s house.

As she drove on the dark highway, she could not help composing versions of what she was going to say. “I don’t know why you didn’t kill me while I was in your house. Maybe you’re so crazy that you forgot.”

Sid would protest. “Janie,” he would say. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t have anything to do with these people except what I told you that night to your face.”

Jane would say, “I saw Quinn.”

He would be silent, trying to work out all of the implications in an instant but not able to, and she would hear him breathing through his mouth. Maybe he would say, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” She would answer, “I don’t do that kind of work. Kill yourself.”

The last words she would say were, “Better get packed, Sid. The police will be here in five minutes.” She amended it: “three minutes.” That would be enough time for him to get frantic, but not enough time for him to scrape up twenty years’ accretion of incriminating evidence and make it into a fast car. She would wait until she could actually see the black-and-whites speeding along the lake road.

She thought through the conversation in so many variations that she almost failed to notice when she was getting too close to the lake road. She turned off at the next corner, circled the lake on the hillside high above Sid Freeman’s house, then parked her car on the street two blocks from the house where she had rented her room.

It was after midnight when Jane walked along the top of the hill above Sid Freeman’s house, among the tall old trees. She held the cellular telephone in her hand, but carried nothing else. She could have driven to the bank in Chicago, opened the safe-deposit box, and taken out the Beretta Cougar nine-millimeter pistol she stored there with a few spare identities. Maybe she would be making that trip sometime soon, and maybe in a few minutes she would wish she had done it tonight. If she did, the feeling of regret would probably last only a second or two before darkness came. She knew that tonight it was not a good idea for her to have in her hand the means of killing Sid Freeman. He had gotten very adept at taking away people’s whole lives and changing them into something that they did not want to be. His final act on earth was not going to be taking away Jane Whitefield.

Jane was afraid of the people who lived in that fortified house. She was in awe not of Sid Freeman but of his craziness. The strange, uncivilized teenagers he had brought in were one manifestation of it; his extreme premeditation was another. She could picture him sitting in that dim library, working all of it out as though the world outside were some enormous chessboard. As she walked along, a lot of sights and sounds that had struck her as little surprises came back to her.

Sid had said he had been watching television and reading newspapers and magazines and had not run across some runner who had come to his house. In the old days, Sid had never paid the slightest attention to published news. He had gotten all of the information that interested him from the people who came up the path to his house—and from Quinn. That was what had made it seem true: Quinn was dead.

She had bought without question the statement that Quinn was dead. It had seemed inevitable, even overdue. Selling commodities and services to criminals was a risky activity. Sid had stayed in that house in Minneapolis with lookouts and armed guards, while Quinn, and sometimes Christie, had traveled the country foraging for things that could be had only from people who didn’t care about laws, and delivering them to people who used them to commit crimes. All transactions had been in cash. When Jane had heard they were both dead, she had been only mildly surprised.