His eyes narrowed as though he were in pain. “It’s amazing, when I look back on it. I thought about the way she died, and of course it had occurred to me that it was an intentional setup. But I thought it had to be someone who hated her—after all, I wasn’t the one who was killed. It could be some enemy of hers I knew nothing about. Then I thought it could be someone who hated me, or wanted her and was jealous. But it wasn’t. It was someone who wanted money and knew that if I were made desperate and miserable enough, I could pay and pay.” He stood up. “I’m through.”
Jane said, “Sitting tight and refusing to budge isn’t likely to be your best strategy.”
“I understood your threat,” he said. “You didn’t help me because I was in trouble. You caused the trouble so I would pay you to keep solving it. And now I have no choice but to keep paying.”
Jane took a deep breath and let it out. Now was the time. “That’s the idea, but I think you have a choice.”
“I do,” he agreed. “You can tell them that I’m going to make sure that if anything happens, the police know everything I know.”
“I wouldn’t advise waiting until something happens.”
“Whose side are you on?”
Jane said, “I have my own side. And I’m going to make you an offer. If you want me to, I will risk my life to save yours. I can’t make anything that has already happened go away. I can keep you alive long enough so you can tell your story to cops who will know what you’re talking about, and who might think it answers questions that are on their minds. I can also produce two people who suddenly developed problems just as unlikely as yours and were both offered solutions. That’s the best offer you’re ever going to get, and it won’t come again.”
“If that’s what you wanted to do, why haven’t you already done it?”
“Because I didn’t have the one piece of evidence that turns a couple of suspects’ wild claims into one story that makes perfect sense.” When she looked at him, her gaze was so intense that he wanted to turn away. “I didn’t have you.”
Jane watched him walk past her into the living room. He stood and looked down at the piano, then walked to the pile of books on the antique table near the door. His eyes rose to the gold-rimmed mirror on the wall above them. He said, “This is probably the part that I hate them for most.”
“What is?”
“My face.”
“I got the impression that it was an improvement.”
He kept his eyes on the reflection before him. “It is. I look twenty-five years younger than I looked before. My imperfections are gone. But I look like a different person.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
He sighed. “It sounded like a wonderful idea. I didn’t really understand what it meant. People say that by the age of forty you wear the face you’ve earned. The scars and wrinkles and marks are supposed to be the punishment, and maybe the warning to other people. But the alternative isn’t exactly a fresh start. It’s being fifty- five, looking in the mirror, and seeing a young face that has nothing in it you recognize. You have to study that face, and try to be what he seems to be. If you don’t change, conform to the mask’s contours, then you’ll be discovered. It was a brilliant thing for them to do to me. I can’t walk into a police station and tell my story, because my own face proves I’m a liar. Because I let them do this, they’re safe.” He turned to look at her and smiled, and the smile was winning, confident, and utterly false. In a few seconds, he let the muscles go slack. “I can’t do what you ask.”
Jane urged him. “I think you have very little choice.”
He shook his head. “I can’t tell the police I’m an innocent victim, a person who was duped. I’m a man who escaped from the authorities before they started looking, and then changed my face. How could they believe me?”
“They won’t if you’re alone—if the only story they hear is yours. But I have other stories, other victims.”
“Who?”
“One is Richard Dahlman.”
“Dahlman … the surgeon?”
“After he finished your surgery, all of the people who worked with him and saw your face were killed. Then they did to Dahlman exactly what they did to you. They made him scared, then offered him a way out that made him look guilty.”
“A man like him? It’s …”
“Unbelievable? Alone, neither of you gets anywhere. But together, you’re pretty convincing. His story that the reason his friends all died off was that they helped him perform plastic surgery on a mysterious fugitive looks a bit better if the fugitive shows up. Your story of getting framed for a murder and talked into running looks a bit better if you know they did the same to him.”
“I would be taking an incredible risk.”
“It’s a chance. If you wait until he’s gone, you’ve got nothing. A man who volunteers to tell the police a story sounds better than one who tells it after they catch him.” She paused. “And if you’re killed, your side of the story never gets told.”
He sat down on the edge of the couch and stared into the fireplace. Jane sensed that it was time to let him alone to think, so she moved back into the bedroom and waited. After a long time, she heard movement in the other room, and he appeared in the doorway.
“Before I walk into any police station, I’m going to need something better than a similarity to other people who make more convincing victims,” he said. “I’m going to need proof.”
“What sort of proof?”
He took a deep breath, and she could hear a shivering in it, as though he were afraid even to say it. “Tape recordings. I can get them to come here. If I say the right things, maybe I can get them to admit out loud that I didn’t know anything about any murders—Amanda or the people at the clinic.”
Jane frowned, then paced. “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like the idea.”
“I can do it.”
“They have no reason to trust a person they’ve harmed. If they hear a wrong tone in your voice, a question they don’t think you ought to be asking, you’re going to die—not later, after they’ve had time to mull it over—right then, right there.”
He said, “I know that. If they killed other people, then I’m no different. You want me to take a risk. All right, I will. But it has to be this one.”
“It’s much bigger.”
“If I can get through five minutes of the right kind of conversation, I win everything. They go to jail, I go free, and I can be myself again. Five minutes of acting. Not five years of telling the same story over and over to hostile cops and judges and juries, and every minute of it being just as vulnerable as I am now. No, more vulnerable, because everyone in the country will have seen this new face.” He gave her a pleading look. “If I turn myself in now, I’ll never get another chance.”
Jane stared past his clear, honest thirty-year-old face and into his eyes. “I hate the idea,” she said.
“I’m not asking your advice,” he said. “I’m going to do this, regardless of what you think.”
Jane held her gaze on his eyes. He was perfectly serious. He was going to try to clear himself, and there was very little she could do to stop him. She couldn’t hope to drag him all the way to Chicago at gunpoint, and even if she could, he wasn’t going to be of much use to Dahlman unless he told his story. “If you have to do it, I’ll try to show you how to do it right.”
39
Marshall walked into the American Airlines waiting area carrying a manila envelope under his arm. Jardine was sitting exactly where the camera had shown him, in front of the row of lockers and between the two rest rooms, at a table where he could watch the gates.
