The Face-Changers (49 page)

She sat up and closed her eyes, trying to recapture the bits of the dream before they were dispersed by the sensory impressions that had come with consciousness. She was frustrated, because she kept catching herself thinking about Brian Vaughn. Then she realized that he wasn’t a distraction.

Their secret vulnerability was Brian Vaughn. And now he was her vulnerability too. But then, why had they picked him?

Because he was weak.

Jane carefully constructed her package. The videotape of Brian Vaughn and his apartment and his false identification she surrounded with crumpled newspaper before she put it into the box. The box was addressed to Alan Weems at Senior Rancho in Carlsbad, and she used the return address she had given the Rancho people for his daughter, Julia Kieler, so he would know it wasn’t a bomb.

She looked over her letter again. It began, “This is the tape of Brian Vaughn, the man you operated on. His address as of this date is 80.183 Padre Street in Santa Barbara, and he calls himself Charles Langer. The other person I found who had been fooled by the people who killed Sarah Hoffman is Janet McAffee. She is living as Christine Manon at 9595 Timon Street in Cleveland, Ohio. If you hear of my death, or are caught, give both of them up to the police.” The rest of the letter was more difficult. It was an attempt to put down everything she had learned about the face-changers in a logical, comprehensible way. As she read it over, it seemed to her that what she had described was a collection of three separate stories that had collided and begun to overlap very early. The face-changers seemed to have gone into business with Brian Vaughn, but hiding him had forced them to manipulate, and finally frame, Richard Dahlman. The face-changers had already taken on Christine Manon when Dahlman unexpectedly escaped from custody. They had to devote most of their time to searching for Dahlman, so they needed to put Christine in storage. They had made her wait in an apartment in Chicago while the boxes they had planned to ship to Brian Vaughn were still in the closet there. They had planned to move her to the apartment on Troost Avenue in Los Angeles, which was empty and new because they had undoubtedly just bought it with Brian Vaughn’s money.

Everything had affected everything else in small, incidental ways. She could only hope that each part would help to corroborate the others.

When Jane was satisfied that she had included every detail that she knew, she folded the letter, addressed it to Dahlman, and placed it inside the box with the tape. She had decided that the information belonged to him. If all of this misery ever resulted in a trial, then the name of the trial was most likely to be
The People
v.
Richard Dahlman.

She drove to the municipal parking lot, walked to the big post office on Santa Barbara Street, and waited at the counter to send the package by express mail. Then she walked to State Street to do her shopping. At the first stop she bought a battery-operated household intercom, and at the second, a new battery and a fresh tape for her video camera. She walked a little farther and bought a cellular telephone as a present for C.

Langer of 80.183 Padre Street and had the number activated immediately. The last purchase she made was at a store she had visited before. It was a small, sensitive tape recorder exactly like the ones she had hidden in Brian Vaughn’s house.

Jane spent the rest of the afternoon testing the equipment she had bought and looking out her window at the parking lot of the big hotel next door. Finally she could see that another whole row of cars had been gobbled up by the shadow of the long, low building, and the rear windows of the farthest row were glowing orange in the sunset. It was nearly time. She dressed and looked at the clock. It was Brian Vaughn’s dinner hour.

She put her purchases into her shoulder bag, went out, and drove to Brian Vaughn’s house, then slipped in through the bathroom window. She was not surprised that he had gone out.

It would be maddening to him to sit in this house alone, wondering whether each movement he made was being picked up on the tape recorders. One of them was under his oven, so he would be afraid to do any cooking.

Jane sat down on the couch and dialed the number of the house in Amherst where she had lived with Carey. The telephone rang four times before the answering machine took over. She had been gone so long that she had forgotten what the recorded answer was. Her own voice startled her. “I’m sorry. We’re not able to come to the phone right now. If you’d like to leave a message, begin when you hear the tone.” Jane gave a little sigh. She had hoped to hear Carey’s voice. But there was the beep.

She said, “Hi. Some nasal-sounding woman just told me we can’t come to the phone. I knew I couldn’t, but I was hoping for a chance to talk to you. I’ve stopped off in Wisconsin, but don’t try to join me, because I’ll be gone as soon as this powwow’s over. I know that when you listen to this, you’re going to be feeling very alone. Remember I love you, and take care of yourself.” She hung up, then went to check the three tape recorders.

All three were still where she had left them, still had tapes and batteries and functioned when she turned them on. She left them turned off, then turned the fourth one on and carefully placed it behind a row of books high in the bookcase without disturbing the dust.

She plugged the intercom into the outlet beneath the headboard of Brian Vaughn’s bed, pressed TALK, then turned on the receiver. There was a squeak of feedback that was rapidly growing into a shriek, so she turned it off again. Then she took the receiver with her, and quietly slipped out the bathroom window and through the garden gate to the next street. When she was in her car she looked at her watch. It was eight o’clock. Brian Vaughn had told her that the face-changers would be at his door in three hours.

Marshall was back in the cafeteria on the concourse at the Los Angeles airport. This time he was carrying a tray of food to a table. He automatically picked the one where he had talked with Alvin Jardine, but only because he had spent some time there and found it acceptable. He had come here to pursue a worry, and he didn’t want to be distracted.

Jardine had been lying, which was what he would do if he were conspiring with Mrs. McKinnon. But Marshall was not comfortable with the theory that a woman like Mrs. McKinnon would know how to look for a man like Alvin Jardine and get help from him. It didn’t feel right. It also didn’t feel right that Jardine would pass up the chance to drag in a fugitive of the stature of Richard Dahlman.

Jardine had not seen Richard Dahlman. What he had seen was a pretty woman with long black hair coming through the airport. Yet he had instantly decided to follow her all the way to the distant long-term parking lot. Marshall had watched the airport security tapes again. The woman had definitely been walking toward a white Buick in the parking lot. She had reached into her purse, presumably for a set of keys. Then Jardine had come along, and she had gone off with him. What nagged at Marshall now was that the Buick had not yet disappeared from the parking lot.

The car raised a great many questions. He had put a pair of agents in the lot more than thirty-six hours ago to watch it for her return. She had not come back, and the car was still there.

He had been operating on the assumption that Alvin Jardine was some kind of ally of Mrs. McKinnon’s. It seemed clear from the tapes that she had thought so too. But that didn’t mean she had been right. It was just possible that Mrs.

McKinnon had miscalculated, and Alvin Jardine had killed her.

Marshall had not yet reassured himself on that point, but in the past few minutes things had grown more complicated.

Marshall had just come along the counter with his tray, intentionally dropped a fork, and bent down to pick it up in exactly the same way that Mrs. McKinnon had. He had found that he was not nearly as flexible as Mrs. McKinnon, but he had managed to put his right hand in the same place. The underside of the stainless-steel counter was plywood. There was a sticky residue of adhesive on the plywood in two rectangular strips about five inches apart. It was just as though something about that size had been stuck there with duct tape, and yanked off.

It had occurred to Marshall early in his inquiry that there was no obvious explanation as to why Mrs. McKinnon would have keys to a Buick registered to Gormby Boat Sales in Marina Del Rey, California. She had stopped to talk to no one from the time she had gotten off the plane until she had met Jardine. It was just possible that the F.B.I, should be more interested in how a set of keys to a clean, respectable car nobody was looking for got taped under a counter in an airport than in what had become of Richard Dahlman. For a decade there had been rumors that there were professional services that helped fugitives disappear.

The attractiveness of the idea was hard for a law enforcement officer to resist. Sometimes a person who should have been easy to catch seemed to vanish. But every time one of those fugitives surfaced, it seemed to Marshall that the fugitive had spent the time in plain view, hardly hiding at all.

One had run a popular restaurant in Seattle; another had moved to a resort town in upstate New York and told people he was a film producer.

Just as Marshall set his tray down and prepared to lose himself in cogitation, his pager began to beep. He looked at the tray with grim resignation. He had come here as a way to check the counter, but he had gotten used to the idea that he was going to get to eat the food.

As he walked out of the cafeteria onto the concourse, he looked at the number on the pager: Grapelli. It must be time for him to fly back to Buffalo. It would be interesting to ask Mrs. McKinnon exactly why the keys to the Buick had been taped under the counter, and what she had talked about with Jardine.

He dialed the number and Grapelli said, “Hate to interrupt your dinner.”

Marshall said, “I take it she turned up?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I guess you can’t keep me from eating on the plane.”

“Be my guest. But all they give you on those short flights is a bag of peanuts. She’s not in Buffalo.”

“Where are they holding her?”

“There is no ‘they,’” said Grapelli. “And nobody is holding her. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. She called home. The phone tap recorded it and we traced it to a house in Santa Barbara. 80.183 Padre Street.”

“Can I hear it?”

“Standby.”

Marshall listened to the sound of Jane’s voice. He felt a little sorry for her, and a little ashamed to hear the words she had meant for her husband. But then he heard what he had been listening for. If she had said she was in Santa Barbara, he would have called it a feint of some kind to draw attention away from somewhere else.

“Okay,” said Marshall. “Good enough for me.”

“I’ll call ahead to get the Santa Barbara police to meet you at the airport.”

“You mind if we wait on that?” asked Marshall.

“Why?” Grapelli paused. “Are you afraid they’ll bust in on them before you get there?”

“They’ll do what they’re supposed to do,” said Marshall.

“They’ll put a big circle of plain-wrap cars around the neighborhood so nobody can get out and nobody can get in.

Including me.”

“That doesn’t strike me as a drawback.”

“I want to take a look at the place before we do anything irrevocable. If Dahlman’s there with her, then I’ll call them in myself.”

“So what are you worried about?”

“Once the neighborhood is surrounded, we’re committed.

We have whoever is inside it, and that’s all we have. If Dahlman’s with her, then the game’s over, and we’re still champions. But what if Dahlman isn’t there? She’s been traveling all over the place without him, so it’s not a sure thing.”

“Okay, so what if Dahlman isn’t there? She must know where he is.”

“Right. If we follow her, she’ll lead us to him eventually. If she’s in a cell, she’s not leading anybody anywhere. She’ll be just one more suspect who isn’t answering any questions.”

“You think she’ll hold out?”

“After what she’s done already, she doesn’t strike me as a person who panics under pressure,” said Marshall. “And the woman she used as a decoy started talking lawyers the second the door of her hotel room popped. These are not unsophisticated people. What her lawyer will tell her is to keep quiet.”

Grapelli sighed. At last he said, “All right. Let’s try this the easy way. Go take a look. The minute you’ve seen the place, you call me. But unless what you’ve seen is a good reason not to. what I’m going to tell you is to get a search warrant on the way to the police station, where you will pick up a few guys to kick down the door for you. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Jane packed all of her gear and her suitcase into her car, checked out of her two hotels, and then drove off. If Brian Vaughn got through the meeting, he would try to call her, and he would probably feel a moment of panic when she didn’t answer. But it would be only a moment, because within a few seconds she would be able to stand beside him and tell him there was nothing to worry about.

Jane glanced at her watch. She had timed this correctly.

The sky was dark, but it was still two hours before the face-changers were supposed to arrive. She would have all the time she needed to get herself set and make sure she got a videotape of them walking under the street lamp and up to Vaughn’s door.

She parked her car two streets away, moved into the little back yard through the garden gate, then stole along the back of the driveway to hide behind the garbage cans. She looked into the eyepiece of the video camera to be sure that she could see enough of the street to pick them up. Then she set it down, turned on her intercom, and listened.

A voice that wasn’t Brian Vaughn’s said, “If it’s what you want, I guess we could arrange it.”

They were here already. Jane’s heart began to beat faster.

She had come early, to see the house and hear what was going on inside before anyone could have expected her. They had come earlier. Since she had done it, she should have known that they would too. They knew what she knew.