“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped. “The week in that hotel was frustrating. Most guests dealt with the manager and got nothing they asked for. I now believe he was the evil wayward son of some aristocratic family. Or they spoke with the concierge, who seemed to be there because she looked good behind the desk, but was utterly brainless. But this waitress would listen and get what was wanted. So I overtipped her and treated her with courtesy. That is all.”
“She told you about me?”
“No. She knocked on my door at three A.M. and said there was a medical emergency. The hotel was full of surgeons, but in her eyes they had all disqualified themselves. Some had been drinking. I didn’t drink. Some had come with wives and children, and I had come alone. Some had simply never noticed her, or had not struck her as approachable. So I was the one. She took me to a house. It was enormous, a villa of the sort you might expect to see on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t. The owner was ill, and apparently there was some problem about finding a surgeon who would admit him to the local hospital on New Year’s Eve. Maybe it was true, and maybe it was just an excuse for drafting me. But I could tell the man had a hot appendix. We moved him to the hospital, I operated, and he was fine. It’s a simple procedure. Medical students do it all the time. But he was grateful. He wanted to reward me. I refused. It’s one thing to perform emergency surgery in a foreign country, but another to take pay for it. But he didn’t mean money.
“He was positive that I had come to Tortola with a suitcase full of cash to hide in a bank down there. I said it was a medical conference, and he said that the reason they held conferences during the holidays was because the customs force was thinner and lazier then, and that’s when American doctors and lawyers and politicians came to make deposits. I couldn’t convince him. He just kept looking at me with a patronizing, knowing smile. The man was clearly a criminal, and the idea that someone else could be honest seemed never to have occurred to him. Finally he wrote down your name and address and handed it to me. He said that since I was evading taxes, I might one day find myself in trouble. I said I wasn’t. He said there were a million reasons why one day a person—any person— might need to disappear. I was to memorize your address and destroy the paper, and when my time came I should go there and ask for you. I destroyed the paper, of course, but the words he had written never seem to have left my mind. It was such an odd evening, and I’d never met anyone like him before.”
“When the Buffalo police spotted you, you were on your way to my house?”
“Yes. I got as far as the bus station in downtown Buffalo. I was going out to find a cab, but I guess I looked suspicious, so two policemen approached me and asked to see identification. I ran a few steps, they called for me to stop, and that brought me to my senses. When I reached into my coat to produce my stolen wallet, they thought I had a gun. That was something George Hawkes hadn’t told me about.”
If he was still calling himself George Hawkes, Jane thought, then his luck was holding. When she had met him he had made his living as a travel agent for money, taking it on trips from a jewelry wholesale operation in California through Panama to banks in the Netherlands Antilles to front corporations in Europe, and then back. One afternoon seven or eight years ago, he had been raided in Los Angeles by policemen who thought he was a drug dealer. But he had managed to see the signs just in time: the van that had been parked down the street, which occasionally wobbled a little, as though a person were moving around inside, and then the large, plain cars arriving from different directions all at once.
He had slipped out through the crowded produce market next door, carrying a great deal of money with him. Walking out ahead of the raid instead of getting caught in it did not, however, have the desired effect. His clients, who were innocent of drug dealing but deeply involved in the business of making unauthorized copies of feature films and selling them in foreign markets, had interpreted the facts in their own way. They felt he had absconded with their money. He had come to Jane.
After Jane had hidden him, she had gotten in touch with his former clients. She had then dictated a treaty. The former Harvey Fisk would take his usual commission and return their money via the usual channels, which would then close forever. He would not engage in any illegal activity again. They need not worry that at some time in the future he would get caught and be tempted to trade information about them for a light sentence. In return, they would never search for him, bother him, or speak of him to a third party. Any infraction of the treaty by either party would result in Jane, the referee, giving sufficient information to the authorities to put the infringing party away.
Jane gave in to her curiosity. “How is he?”
“Oh, fine,” said Dahlman. “Excellent health for fifty-six. Good physical conditioning, muscle tone apparently from tennis and swimming. The appendix doesn’t really mean a thing.” He noticed her expression. “You didn’t mean that, did you?”
“No.”
“He lives like a king. And you know what? It didn’t seem like anything then, but now it seems like everything. He isn’t afraid.”
12
Jane drove through the dark country with tireless discipline. She kept her speed constant, changing lanes only when she needed to, never letting lines of cars build up behind her where a follower could hide.
The parts of Dahlman’s story that were most incomprehensible to him were clear to her. The two men who had pretended to be cops had done it so they could interview him at great length. The questions they had asked were the ones that killers needed to know: Were there any pictures of Hardiston, or any medical records that had survived the fire in Sarah Hoffman’s office? When Dahlman told his story, did it sound reasonable and rational, or disconnected and mad and unbelievable? If he had any witnesses they didn’t know about, any evidence that would lend credence to any part of his story, that evening was the time when he would have produced it. Since he could produce nothing, he was perfect.
They had put him in suspended animation on the farm, convinced that he should go nowhere and talk to no one. Then they had pocketed the keys he had willingly given them, and returned to his house. They took a whole week to search every inch of his house and destroy any evidence he had missed that might corroborate his story, then plant all the evidence they could invent that he had gone insane and spent months working himself up to killing his partner.
Their plan had been very well considered. There had been five doctors and nurses on the Hardiston case. If all five had suddenly died in Chicago, the police would have been in a frenzy. These killers had known that, so they had begun by culling the herd, luring the first three away and picking them off quietly. Even the order of the murders had been precise: the first was Dr. Hoffman’s nurse, who had a car accident on the way to Colorado. She was the safest because when it happened she had already been separated from the others. The second was Dr. Wung, in Korea. His death and that of the nurse could not be connected, even in the unlikely event that anyone heard about both—she had never worked for Dr. Wung. The third was almost certainly Dr. Wung’s assistant, Celia Rodriguez. As soon as her boss was dead, they had probably just grabbed her in Boston and buried her somewhere. Nobody would notice unless her body was found. She was a stranger in Boston. She had only moved because she was going to keep working for Dr. Wung, who wasn’t expected to arrive for at least a month. Even then, when the vacation and relocation period was up, the one they would have missed was Dr. Wung, not the assistant he had said he was bringing with him.
It was very neat. They had killed three people—one between Chicago and Colorado, one in Korea, and one in Boston—in three different ways, without having either the police or the two doctors who had stayed in Chicago know that anything had happened.
That left only the two doctors in Chicago, Richard Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman. If either were murdered, there would be an immediate investigation. There was no way to avoid it. When that happened, the authorities were likely to try to ask questions of the people who had once worked with the victim, and they were going to find that a statistically unlikely number of them had recently died. So what the killers had chosen to do was to trigger the investigation themselves, so that the questions weren’t asked until they were ready to hand the police a killer. They had made sure that before any question could be asked, the police had an answer.
