money.
But who were they? There had been two men who had gone to Dahlman in Chicago after the death of Sarah Hoffman and posed as policemen. There had been two different men who had shown up at the hospital in Buffalo to kill him. They worked in pairs. That might be useful, too. At the very least, if she saw two men behaving suspiciously, she would know enough to get out of their way.
Runners had come to Jane because someone had told them that her kind of help existed, if they could only make it as far as her door. It had always been one person telling another—sometimes a social worker who had gotten tired of telling clients that the system had no way to protect them, or maybe the prisoner in the next cell, who had been whispering her name to himself like a mantra for years. Even if the face-changers had turned disappearing into a practical business, their operation could only work by quiet confidences and tips, too.
But the people who came to them needed to have money, and that made certain differences. If the word had simply gotten around among people who had troubles, then the face-changers would have to spend much of their time turning unacceptable runners away. That could go on for only a short time before one of the rejects got caught by the police and traded the face-changers for a lesser charge. No, someone must be doing an initial screening of the clients, maybe even recruiting them.
The screener had to be somebody who came into contact with potential clients. There had to be some place where this secret operation touched the surface, some person who met prospective clients and heard their stories, and then said, “If it’s that bad, and you have no defense and no way of getting past it, there may still be a way … if you’re willing to spend the money.”
Maybe it was a banker. There were certainly bankers who catered to people who had reason to expect that some day they might need to disappear: drug dealers, money launderers, gun runners, embezzlers. Or it could be a stockbroker, the one who invested and hid illicit money in the maze of electronic transactions that flashed from computer to computer each day.
It could even be a receptive, sympathetic bartender who worked in the right spot. People who stole a lot of money seldom did it so they could stay home in the evening and watch television by themselves. No, Jane realized, a bartender was wrong. There were bartenders who made extra money by trafficking in information and introductions; some would tell you where to place a bet or buy drugs, or would give a whore your room number. A few would even set up a meeting with a man who would kill your rival for you. But those were rare and unreliable sources of income—for the dishonest bartender, certainly, but even more so for the dealers and prostitutes and bookies, and the market for disappearances was much sparser than the market for drugs, sex, or gambling. The bartender would have to chat with thousands of people, each of them when the bar was empty or nearly so, before one of them asked him the right question. It might take a hundred years to meet three clients.
The screener had to be somebody who spoke privately with a lot of people whom he might expect to be in serious trouble at some point. They had to come to him and volunteer to tell him their stories, because if the trouble was public enough for a stranger to hear of it and approach them, then it would be too late to disappear. They had to tell him what the problem was, and that would require that they believe they could reveal it without getting in worse trouble. That sounded a lot like a lawyer.
The lawyer would be a specialist in criminal law. Judging from the sums that had been spent on Hardiston’s plastic surgery, it would probably be the sort of practice that didn’t take many small-time cases. Armed robbers got a lot of police notice and press attention and public concern. The only thing they didn’t get a lot of was money. They were, as a rule, not good candidates for disappearing. They were temperamentally unsuited for taking instructions, which was why their job prospects had narrowed down to showing up in places where cash changed hands in plain sight so they could grab it.
The people Sid Freeman had described sounded like white-collar criminals who had gotten away with serious money. In Jane’s experience, that kind of runner was easy to hide. In order to get that far, they must have taught themselves to lie and pretend to be something they weren’t for an extended period of time. They had to be smart enough to have worked themselves into positions of trust, where they could skim profits or take kickbacks or accept bribes or offer them. Before you could get into trouble for insider trading, you had to be an insider. And before you could be charged with tax evasion, you had to make enough to owe taxes.
The lawyer would have to be highly regarded—not just in the underground, but above the surface. People who were in the position to pay a couple hundred thousand to get the right plastic surgeon probably had millions. When a person like that got into trouble, his first impulse was to get himself the biggest, fanciest lawyer he could find.
Jane sensed that she was taking this too far. There was no evidence that it was a lawyer at all. She decided to put the screener out of her mind. The ones she had to face now were the pairs of men who weren’t sitting in offices somewhere. They had been out getting false identity papers made and transporting clients from place to place. They had also, when the job required it, had the stomach to kill people who had seen their client’s face, and had the cunning to frame one of the survivors for their murders.
They had not come from the world the clients inhabited. Just knowing that Sid Freeman existed put them in the category of people who had connections rather than credentials, and who bought their coats a little loose so the gun wouldn’t show. At least two pairs of them, and maybe more, had managed to operate in a coordinated, effective way in different parts of the country at once. Two of them were good enough to have convinced Dahlman they were policemen, and the other two had managed to anticipate the route Jane would take to get Dahlman out of Buffalo, which was better than the real police had done.
For the past few minutes a quiet, insistent alarm had been sounding in the back of Jane’s mind, and now she allowed herself to acknowledge it: these men had certain disturbing qualities. They had a comfortable working knowledge of where to obtain illegal commodities: good fake IDs, guns without histories. They had been up to carrying out a regular massacre on the medical staff at Dahlman’s clinic. They had been knowledgeable enough not to simply make Dr. Sarah Hoffman’s murder look like a botched burglary, but to make it look like the way an intelligent but inexperienced killer would go about making it look like a botched burglary.
They all worked undeviatingly to fulfill a fairly complex and delicate plan of action, which would indicate that they had received very specific orders from somewhere. They were as brutal and violent as anyone, but also unusually patient and organized. The foot soldiers acted with the sort of discipline that came only when failure carried a more convincing probability of reprisal than the legal system offered. And they worked with a benign and respectable above-the-surface screener, the friendly face who could make that crucial phone call and get you a favor. There was a lot about this that smelled as though Dahlman had fallen into the path of some small, fledgling enterprise of the Mafia.
As she thought more about it, she sensed that the framing of Dr. Dahlman didn’t feel like Mafia work. They were imaginative enough to concoct it, and professional enough to carry it off if they wanted to, but would they want to? They had thrived for five generations by keeping things simple. If they had wanted five people silenced, they would have swept through the clinic that day and killed all of them at once. Ornate, rickety constructions designed to throw suspicion in all directions—this wasn’t Mafia style at all. They never wanted to cast suspicion in other directions. The protection of all of their existing operations demanded that everyone know who had done it.
She considered the possibility that these men might have something to do with law enforcement. But no, that wasn’t right either. There were certain standard signs. When people like that needed arms that couldn’t be traced, they took them from the piles of confiscated weapons that had supposedly been destroyed. They didn’t need to go to anyone like Sid Freeman. And they didn’t need any false IDs from him, either. They had access to the equipment for making real ones in false names.
As Jane drove along the dark highway, following the Mississippi toward the north, she picked out the constellation the Old People had called the Loon, and began to navigate by it. The world had changed so much since then, and none of the changes had been anything that mattered. The foot trails had been straddled by wagon ruts, then covered over with asphalt. This stretch of land had always looked like this: flat prairies covered in the summer by long grasses.
The Grandfathers had come here regularly on foot in groups of three or four warriors. Just to get as far from Nundawaonoga as she was now, they needed to pass through the countries of enemies: the Eries, the Shawnees, the Miami, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Sauk, Fox, Mascouten, and Iowa. They had done it by moving in silence and covering their tracks carefully. They had followed a course parallel with the main trails but had stayed off them, just as she was doing now. When the Europeans came they called these little bands “skulking parties.”
