“You agreed to this?”
“I felt it made no sense not to cooperate. They took me to a farmhouse that night, over three hundred miles from Chicago. I was allowed to pack only those items that nobody would know were missing—some clothes, a few items of little value. Then we left.”
“Where was it—the farm?”
“About ten miles outside a little town near Carbondale, called Hurst. I was there for three days.”
“Then what?”
“It was strange—like a dream. They were very considerate. They even had a newspaper delivered each morning. One morning I got up and walked down the long dirt road from the house to the mailbox on the highway to pick up my paper. On the bottom corner of the front page was a story that said the police wanted me for questioning.”
“How did you feel?”
“A bit disappointed, for one thing. The police had given me to understand that they were going to make my house look lived in, and if the killer made an attempt to break in, they would scoop him up. For some reason the deception hadn’t worked, and they had given up hope of that. Otherwise, the police would never have revealed to reporters that I was gone. I also had some trivial concern about how the story in the paper would look to other people. It sounded almost as though I were a suspect.”
“I take it the policemen had a key to your house?”
“Well, yes. As I said, they wanted to make it look as though I were still living there.”
“When did your small worry turn into a big worry?”
“Three more days passed. The policemen were to deliver more groceries once a week. I wondered when they would come. The next day I stayed indoors all day waiting. Finally, I left a note on the table and went for a walk. When I returned, there were police cars parked in front of the farmhouse—not plain ones like the ones they had used before, but real ones, black and white, with lights on the roofs. I was excited. I knew that they would never show themselves like that unless the waiting was over, and they had found the killer. They had: it was me.”
“Tell me about the arrest.”
“I ran up, they threw me on the ground on my face, handcuffed my hands behind my back, pushed me into the back seat of one of the cars, and set off for Chicago. I told the policemen everything. I asked them to call the Special Protection Squad and verify my story. They just listened, but they called nobody.”
Jane frowned. “What made them come after you?”
Dahlman threw up his hands. “I just told you that—”
“No,” she said. “Forget the hiding part. I haven’t heard anything yet that sounds like grounds for charging you with murder.”
“They said they had wanted to ask more questions, couldn’t find me at work, couldn’t reach me by phone, and became concerned. They got a warrant and broke into my house. They showed me pictures they took. I recognized the place, but it had been altered. My wife’s walk-in closet had been transformed into a kind of madman’s shrine. There were pictures of Sarah pasted to the walls—dozens of them, with steak knives stuck in some, and holes or burn marks in others. And strange scrawls about killing her. One said her time was coming, and others had captions like ‘Thief’ or ‘Betrayer’ on them.”
“When they showed you this stuff, did you have a lawyer present?”
“I had a lawyer. He had settled my wife’s estate, and made out our wills before that. He called a criminal lawyer for me who was supposed to be terrific. I’m sure the man was competent, but …” Dahlman’s voice trailed off.
“But he didn’t believe you.”
“He asked me questions like ‘Do you know what day it is?’ ‘What year?’ and then he said, ‘I’m here to help you, but the best help I can give you is to advise you not to hide anything.’ ”
“Did he listen to your whole story?”
“He’d already heard it when I met him. The police had apparently been recording it when I told them the first time.”
“No wonder he didn’t believe you.”
“I know. The idea that the police department had conspired to frame me for a murder seemed to be too much of a leap for his plodding intellect.”
Jane sighed wearily. She had been dreading this moment. “There’s a lot to be said for a plodding intellect.”
Dahlman was offended. “What, exactly, do you mean?”
“Well,” said Jane. “For starters, those two men who came to talk to you and then hid you weren’t policemen.”
“How could you possibly know?” He was furious.
Jane ignored his anger. “There are a lot of little things. One is that no city police department has anything called a ‘Special Protection Squad.’ Los Angeles and Chicago have both asked for money to begin protecting witnesses in gang-related trials, but so far, neither has gotten it. If the police want a witness protected, they don’t hide him on some farm alone. They protect him—put a cop with him, or keep him in custody. A criminal lawyer knows these things. And if policemen think you’re being watched and stalked by experts, they don’t use your phone to call their office and discuss their whole plan. These weren’t policemen.”
“Oh,” said Dahlman. Then he added, unnecessarily, “They were very convincing.”
“The real ones were the ones you saw when you went to the police station. How did you get away from them?”
Dahlman shook his head. “That was the one service my attorney provided for me.”
Jane frowned. “After all that creepy stuff in the house and the sudden disappearance to the farm, he got you out on bail?”
“No. The lawyer had them put me in a psychiatric lockup ward in the hospital for observation. I had worked in that hospital, and suddenly there I was—just like any other mental patient. The transformation was quite a feeling: a loss of identity, really. I was just another anonymous patient in institutional pajamas. Who I had been a week before meant nothing to them. I was there for observation, but I was given large doses of a powerful tranquilizer that would have made observing me a waste of time.”
“Would have?”
“I pretended to take the pills, but hoarded them for four days. I didn’t really have a plan yet, but I knew that if I took those pills, I never would have one. Then one day, an orderly turned up whom I’d known for some time. He used to work the surgical floors, but had transferred to the psychiatric wing because it paid better. We talked. He knew I wasn’t crazy, and that I certainly hadn’t killed my partner. He agreed to help me if I could keep him from looking guilty. So, we put the tranquilizer into his bottle of Snapple. I took his identification, keys, and clothes, then put him in a place they called the Quiet Room to sleep it off. I used his keys to get out of the ward, and used the money in his wallet to get on the bus to Buffalo to find you.”
“This is something I’ve been waiting to hear. How did you know about me?”
He shook his head slowly. “It was an odd circumstance. It was less than a year ago. I was at a conference in Road Town on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s.” He stared at her. “That’s something you must know all about. If you have a conference of surgeons, it has to be in some holiday period when very little surgery gets done. If it’s in the winter, it will draw better attendance if it’s held in a warm place. In fact, Carey might have been there.”
“Last year?” Jane shook her head. “Nope.” Since they had been married, Carey had gone to very few of these doctors’ conventions, and she was glad. She would have missed him, and she didn’t like to go with him. She had spent too much of her life in airports and hotels already, and whenever she was in another, she felt a quiet uneasiness that one of the people who had a reason to look for her would turn up.
“I seldom go either. I went because I was reading a paper on a few of the post-operative techniques we had developed. That part seemed to go well. Then it was New Year’s Eve, and I was scheduled to leave for home the next morning. I had developed a friendly relationship with a waitress.”
Jane considered saying nothing. She had almost asked whether Sarah had gone to the Virgin Islands with him, but had decided to wait. At some point she was going to have to ask exactly what their relationship had been, but not yet. She decided to prod him a little. She raised an eyebrow. “A waitress?”
