one. They all had the technical expertise, the experience, and the nerve to plant a bug to eavesdrop on their boss and then shove the recording in his face. At this hour of the morning he wasn’t in the mood to piece together the train of thought he had used, but he had reached a conclusion.
The one who had planted the bug was somebody who wanted to remind him that the ones who would judge him weren’t the directors and assistant directors up the line, or the endless parade of ignorant and venal politicians who passed by somewhere above the directors. The people he had to satisfy were much closer to him, the ones whose lives would depend on decisions Grapelli made. The one who had planted it was the one who knew what thought processes the tape would set off—that he would spend some hard hours thinking about each of the agents in his section and not be able to find one who couldn’t have done it, then appreciate the effectiveness of the tool that had been placed in his hands. It had to be Phipps.
It had taken him almost two years longer before he had learned enough to understand the rest of it. The suspect who was probably the most formidable, and the most capable of pulling a trick like that, was the one who would never have done it. That was what Phipps had been trying to tell him: that Marshall would keep him honest.
11
Jane drove west on Route 224 into the dark, flat Ohio countryside. For ten minutes she watched the pattern of glowing headlights behind her. Then, at the beginning of a long, straight stretch where she was sure she could see a mile or two ahead, she turned off the road and stopped until the line of cars had passed. She waited to be sure that none of the cars stopped farther down the road, watched her rearview mirror until there were no headlights, then accelerated onto the highway again. She was satisfied that she had not been followed.
“Are you up to talking?” she asked.
“I should be,” said Dahlman. “I don’t think I’ve slept this much since I was a child.”
“I need to know exactly how you got into this mess.”
“Why?”
Jane raised an eyebrow. This man had apparently spent a lifetime collecting and refining ways of being irritating. But she said patiently, “I think it will help. It might tell me all of the people who are searching for you, and that’s useful, because they all search in different ways, look in different places, ask different people. If I don’t know these things, I could take you right into someone’s path.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “That isn’t how this happened.”
“I know.”
He didn’t seem to be willing to accept even that. “How do you know? Presumably most people who kill someone say they didn’t either.”
“They would also be willing to use a gun to defend themselves from someone who is chasing them. In fact, most people would. But not you.”
“Oh. I suppose so.” He seemed to respond to logic, and that made Jane feel more hopeful. “It’s a very long story.”
“I expect it will be a very long night.”
Jane turned to look at him, and saw that his eyes were focused on a point in the distance. He seemed to be collecting his thoughts, and that was something Jane did not want him to do. She didn’t want an account full of neat, clean summaries and judicious, erroneous conclusions. “Who do the police think you killed?”
“Her name was Sarah Hoffman. She was a friend and partner of mine for about ten years. She assisted me in surgery frequently. She was a fine plastic surgeon with her own practice, but at the time we started working together I was better known, and was being brought some cases that other people weren’t.”
“What sorts of cases?”
“Reconstructive surgery, mostly—usually people who had been terribly burned or injured. I was developing experimental methods for transplantation of tissue, and some post-op procedures that had brought promising results. It had struck me some time ago that these were the areas where the new developments could be made. We have thousands of surgeons who are now probably about as good at cutting as a human being will ever be. We have methods of magnification and nonintrusive monitoring and micro-instruments and lasers that make use of that dexterity in very sophisticated ways. But maybe seventy percent of the battle with restorative and plastic surgery involves allowing the body’s tissue to grow and letting it make up for what we can’t do with a blade—as well as repairing what the blade has done. Surgeons are the star quarterbacks of medicine: everything has been done to protect our part of the process and maximize its effectiveness. But at a certain level you do one after another. It feels like being a quarterback who throws a pass and is taken out of the game and put into another one before he even sees whether it’s been caught.”
“This isn’t what you taught at the university, is it?” she asked.
“I was a general surgeon,” said Dahlman. “For most of my working life, I probably performed more thoracic operations than anything else. The instruction I gave was almost entirely practical—in an operating room, teaching people who already were surgeons. I spent less time on post-operative work than most surgeons in private practice.”
“What happened?”
Dahlman seemed mystified by his memories, like a man leafing through photographs who kept finding ones he had forgotten and lingering over them. As his eyes stared ahead of the two funnel-shaped beams of the headlights, his face moved, taking on a look of happiness, then sadness, then puzzlement. “I had good hands. By the age of forty I was one of the eight or ten most accomplished traditional surgeons in the country. I had been practicing at the University Medical Center since residency, and was already the Goldsden-Meara Distinguished Professor of Medicine. I was so busy performing surgeries and teaching young doctors like Carey McKinnon that I paid little attention to anything else. At sixty I was forced to do some thinking.”
“Forced by what?”
“My wife died suddenly. An embolism. She was fine in the morning, and when I came home in the evening she was dead.”
“Did you have children?”
“Two,” he said. “My boy, David, was born the year we graduated from college. He was thirty-eight when his mother died, and living in California. My daughter, Terry, was thirty-six, married, and living in Paris. They both came home for the funeral, said the correct things to each other and to me, and went back to what they had been doing. When they were gone, I sat and thought, and looked around me. The kids were grown up and self-supporting in every sense of the word. They seemed to like me, but whatever emotional needs they ever had must have occurred during an earlier period, and my wife handled them while I was too busy to notice. So I was left with a lifetime appointment to an endowed chair, a series of vested pensions, paid-up life-insurance policies, and various savings accounts and investments that my prudent wife had accumulated for a rainy day she never lived to see. I found myself absolutely alone, with no real responsibilities, but no real connections either, and certainly no needs. That was a surprise. There were others.”
“What others?”
“I suddenly realized, as though I were waking up, that I was sixty. What it meant was that the best work I would do with my hands either had been done, or shortly would be. I had to decide what to do next—how to use the next ten or fifteen years. I could spend the time training young surgeons, or use my name and reputation for medical causes—gradually do less medicine and more lobbying and fund-raising—or I could try to do some clinical research to solve the problems I’d noticed during the years of nonstop surgery.”
“I take it you chose research.”
“I found I didn’t need to choose. As it turned out, my name and a letter from me did more for medical causes than my presence. My personality seems to irritate people. So I let the institutions write the letters and signed them for a couple of hours each week. My best teaching was done in the operating room, so it took no exclusive time at all. I spent my afternoons taking on the work I was telling you about.”
