The Face-Changers

35

When Alvin Jardine saw her he happened to have his head back to drink the last sweet, muddy residue of sugary coffee at the bottom of his cup. He took in a breath and nearly choked. She was coming off a flight from San Francisco and her eyes scanned the way their eyes always did, then snapped straight ahead. Jardine shut his briefcase and stood to turn away while she passed, then decided that the briefcase might be a problem. He pushed it into a rental locker, dropped the quarters into the slot, and took the key. He didn’t need a Wanted poster or printed circular to remember that face. There was nothing in print on her anyway, and he knew he didn’t want to get close to her encumbered by baggage. He quickly walked to the big open portal toward the concourse.

This was just another piece of evidence to prove that life presented prizes that were better than anything anybody could wish for. Here he was, waiting for any one of two dozen small-time bail jumpers and parole violators to step off a plane and into his custody, when in walks a trophy as rare as the last damned whooping crane. And here is Al Jardine, one of probably twenty bounty hunters in the whole world who would have known what he was looking at or had the slightest idea what to do with it.

He watched her from two hundred feet back as he followed her down the crowded concourse. She still had that long black hair, and the rest of her was exactly the way he remembered—legs that looked as though they went on and on. They reminded him of the tricky nature of the task ahead. She was not entirely defenseless. He remembered that very clearly from the one time when he had happened to see her work.

Jardine had been waiting at the Los Angeles County lockup on Vignes Street, watching the door that opened once each day to emit a few prisoners. A man named Hayward was due to be released any day, and Jardine had a fairly strong opinion that he had been jailed and served ninety days under a name that was not his own. It was Jardine’s theory that Hayward had spent most of his life as Bobby McKay.

McKay was worth fifty thousand dollars to an armored-car company. He was also reputed to be big, violent, and uncomfortable without the weight of a pistol somewhere on his person. The best way in the world to take a man like that was at the jailhouse door. He couldn’t be armed and had no chance to prepare. If he proved to be too much for Jardine, then the sight of Jardine getting pounded into the sidewalk would bring cops from inside.

The steel door opened and the gate was sliding out of the way. That day’s excretion of rehabilitated citizenry was already streaming out into the sunshine. The sparse group of friends and relatives were pushing forward to meet them when Jardine became aware that a car had pulled up behind him. He turned and saw the tall, thin woman with black hair come around the car and open the passenger door. He saw a small, frail-looking woman with stringy blond hair separate from the rest and step toward the car, and he felt better, because that assured him the car wasn’t there for Hayward.

There was a sound that set Jardine on edge. It wasn’t loud—just the sound of feet moving fast on the concrete—but anything sudden or unexpected was out of place here.

Jardine had turned his head just in time to see a tall man in a suit arrive at the car and lean forward to lunge past the woman with long black hair to make a grab for the little blond woman in the seat. But the woman with the long black hair had heard him coming. Her elbow caught his face, and Jardine could still bring back the sound of it. He wasn’t sure if it had been the crack of some facial bone breaking, or if the blow had just clapped the man’s jaws together so the teeth clicked. But his head jerked sideways and his body reeled in approximately the direction she had sent his head. She spun counterclockwise. Jardine’s eye had taken it as a quick pivot to begin a retreat around the front of the car to the driver’s seat before the man could collect himself. It was more. As she turned, she was leaning her weight on the hood, swinging her right leg way too high. Her kick clothes-lined the man at about eye level, dropped him onto his back, and followed through. The momentum helped her roll over the hood of the car and land on her feet on the driver’s side. She was inside and accelerating away before Jardine fully appreciated what he had seen.

Jardine had instantly induced in himself an uncharacteristic concern for the welfare of the man in the suit. He had knelt and used his handkerchief to stanch the flow of blood from the man’s nose, muttering quiet bits of optimistic nonsense about his condition. He had helped him to his feet and driven him to the hospital emergency room.

It was at least an hour before he had managed to get any answers to his sympathetic inquiries about what had brought this poor man to Vignes Street and what had led this woman to drop him on the pavement like a sack of garbage. When Jardine had heard that the man was a bounty hunter from New York, he had begun to feel rather festive about the whole episode. Jardine had no love of outsiders who came into his city to hunt his game.

The blond woman, it seemed, had been doing exactly what Jardine had suspected Bobby McKay of doing. She had gone to jail on a disorderly conduct charge and spent thirty days picking up gum wrappers along the freeway while the people who had been chasing her wore themselves out.

Like many hunters, Jardine had always been a convivial companion and an avid listener to his colleagues’ stories of the chase. It was his main consolation in times when nothing seemed to work, and his best celebration of victory. But it also had a practical purpose, because the tales often carried information he could use. There had been times when he had heard things about a particular fugitive he had been chasing that had helped him make money, and other times he had heard things that had convinced him to turn his attention elsewhere. It was not a good idea to chase a fugitive who had once been convicted of something known to be the exclusive province of organized crime—large-scale gambling, or trafficking in stolen securities, for instance.

But along with the rest of the stories came rumors and tall tales. One of them he had heard several times was about a woman named Jane who made people disappear. He had not taken the Jane stories seriously, because they had always been about the one that got away. Some enormous payday had not come for some hunter, and here’s why it wasn’t his fault.

But on that day three years ago when the little blond woman had gotten away, he had begun to listen to the rumors, and to connect Jane with the names of fugitives who had not been captured. Maybe the stories weren’t all true. Any time there was a ready-made excuse for failure, most people would take it. But he was sure that enough of them were true to make this Jane woman worth some effort. If someone managed to put her in a cage, he’d have the aliases and addresses of all the people she had ever hidden.

Jardine was having a difficult time believing his good fortune tonight as he followed her down the concourse toward the escalators. His mind worked frantically. He had just seen her come off an airplane. She could not possibly be armed. If she even owned a gun, it could only be disassembled and the parts scattered around in some big piece of luggage she had checked in. If the baggage claim was where she was headed, then he would simply have to move in close before she had a chance to claim the suitcase and get it out of here into a private place.

Jardine’s gun was in his car, parked right across the street in the short-term lot, where he could get to it quickly. He would have no trouble with her if he kept the initiative and stayed a little bit ahead, so she wouldn’t figure what she should have done until that “should have” had been firmly built in. She had almost certainly never seen Jardine before except on that one day three years ago, when she’d had other things on her mind.

As he watched her he could see that she was working. She wanted to give an overeager pursuer a chance to move in too early and show himself. She stopped to stare into a store window. Then she went into another and came out the farther doorway. Alvin Jardine was not a novice. He didn’t want her in this crowded, brightly lit, heavily policed airport. He wanted to materialize in her path after she was alone out there in the dark.

He began to worry. She might be doing these things because she knew that someone else was following her that Jardine didn’t know about. Jardine stopped in front of a display of guilty-husband presents in a window: perfume, jewelry, stuff with flowers and hearts on it. He tried to keep Jane in sight while he let the crowd behind him go past. He picked out two men who were possibilities, then let them get ahead and watched.

One went into the rest room, and the other walked so fast that he caught up with her and passed her. Jardine was elated. He didn’t have to worry about having to fight over her. She passed the spot where the security people were herding passengers through the metal detectors, then stepped aside into the cafeteria. Jardine went past the doorway and loitered near the television sets where the schedules were posted so he could see which direction she would face when she sat down. She picked up a tray and got into the line of people sidestepping along in front of the food counter. About halfway through, she dropped something and squatted down to pick it up, and that gave her a chance to take a glance at the people behind her. Jardine had seen it coming, and looked away at the television screen.

He moved off while she paid for her food and went to sit in a booth at the wall so she could watch the doorway. Jardine waited on the other side of the wall, where he could see the doorway too. Watching her go through her precautions had made him feel eager. He had noticed before that sometimes people who were running seemed to have a vague premonition, to sense a change in the air that told them trouble was close, but not that the trouble was Jardine. Jane’s extreme caution validated his belief that she was worth having, and he knew that each feint or detour she completed was helping her silence her own intuition and prove to herself that she was safe.

Jardine slapped his back pocket to feel the two sets of plastic wrist restraints. He liked them so well that he had given up carrying handcuffs even on the occasions when he didn’t have to pass through a metal detector. They were quick and easy and gave a better fit, and getting out of them wasn’t a question of picking a lock: they had to be cut. He had to remember that this time he wasn’t going to be able to grab her and intone some meaningless words about warrants for her arrest. She would know that the words were meaningless as well as he did. He would be a fool if he didn’t use the second set of restraints on her ankles.

He saw her leave the cafeteria and move toward the escalator. He waited until she was descending and hurried to the elevator, then walked across the first floor to be outside before she was. He watched the long line of glass doors until she was out. His luck seemed to be getting better and better. She had not stopped in the baggage claim. She didn’t have a gun, and she wasn’t going to have one. She stepped to the island to join the half dozen people waiting for the shuttle bus to take them to the distant long-term lots.

Jardine knew not only where she was, but where she was going. He hurried across the street to the short-term parking structure, ran up the stairs, and got into his car. He pulled out of the space and quickly made the first circuit of the parking structure to the ground floor, then stopped to look at the island. The shuttle bus pulled up to the stop and the people began to get in.

Jardine idled his car and watched to be sure she actually climbed aboard. Then he pulled forward out of the shelter of the parking structure and up to the kiosk to pay. In a few seconds he was on the long circular drive, following the shuttle bus. It stopped several times in front of other terminals to pick up passengers, but she never got off. When the bus finally passed the last stop and left the airport, Jardine could feel his lungs expanding in his chest. He drove far behind the bus, giving it plenty of space.

When the bus pulled into its special entrance at Lot C, Jardine drove on to the public entrance, took his ticket from the machine, and waited for the arm to lift to let him in. He drove slowly on a straight course down the middle aisle of the huge lot, watching the shuttle bus going back and forth in front of him, stopping every two hundred feet to let passengers off.

Slowly the bus emptied; people put suitcases into the trunks of cars and drove toward the exit. Jardine’s luck seemed to be growing at every turn the bus made. She was going to be one of the last people out. That meant the others would be on their way home, and the empty bus would go back to its bus stop to wait for its next run to the airport. She would be virtually alone.

Finally the bus stopped and she got out. She walked along an aisle with few cars in it, staring around her as though she had remembered the row, but not the space where she had left hers. Jardine tugged the ends of the plastic restraints out of his pocket so he wouldn’t have to dig around for them when the time came. She had found the car. She reached into her purse as she walked up to it. He could see she was going to have the keys ready when she got there. He sped up, turned abruptly, and stopped a yard away from her. He was out of the car and moving when she turned to him.

Her arm came up to her waist, and her white teeth glowed blue from the overhead light as she smiled.

“Hello,” she said. She held a small black shape in her hand. He couldn’t see much in this light except that the muzzle seemed to be lined up with his chest.

He tried letting some of the surprise and outrage he felt escape his lips. “What is this?”

She was not susceptible to doubt. “Be quiet and listen,” she said. “I don’t have any desire to kill you, so you won’t need to do anything desperate.”

“What do you want?”

“Just a ride.”

“The key’s still in the ignition. Get in and take it.”

She moved around the back to the passenger side. He could see that she was giving him a few seconds to look around him. His inability to detect any other human beings in the vast parking lot was not comforting now. If he ran, he might get as far as the nearest parked car before she shot him, but he had nothing that would keep her from coming there after him, and reaching the first one wouldn’t get him to the shelter of the next one. If he did as she said, he might be able to get his gun out from under the dashboard. She didn’t seem to have any idea who he was.

Jardine climbed into his car and started the engine, glanced at her, and felt his jaw drop. He had given her too long alone in his car. The gun she was holding now was his. He said, “Look, I don’t know you, but I’m sure you don’t want to get in any worse trouble than—”

“Nice try, Alvin,” she said. “I know you, and you know me. I knew you would be at the American Airlines terminal. I knew you would recognize me and follow. So here we are.”

“Mind telling me how you got a gun in past airport security?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Before I flew out this morning, I left it on the other side of the checkpoint.” She looked at him in mock sympathy, then at his gun in her hand. “I guess you forgot to do the same.”

He reached the parking lot exit, his mind churning, trying to catch up, while she read his mind aloud. “You’re trying to convince yourself that you never heard of me killing anyone, so I probably won’t shoot if you try to get help at the gate.”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

“You don’t know me that well.”

He handed his ticket and his money to the attendant at the gate and took his receipt, then drove out of the lot toward Century Boulevard. She let him get a few blocks, then said, “Take La Tijera.” He turned onto the long, straight road. When they approached a small, dirty-looking motel she said, “Pull in over there.”

He stopped the car in the motel lot where part of the low pink stucco building shielded it from the street. Jardine turned off the engine and tried to settle himself. He had felt intense shock when he had seen the gun, but in his experience, if the trigger didn’t get pulled within the first few seconds, the danger went away. The story of how she had managed to walk out of an airport carrying a gun made him uneasy. She was a bit too wily for Jardine’s taste. He reminded himself that these were just little potholes on the approach to his triumph. She had picked exactly the sort of place he would have, where the odd sound now and then wouldn’t make anyone nervous because every ten seconds a jet plane came over so low you could see passengers’ faces in the windows.

She said, “Room eleven.” He got out and walked toward the door, listening for the sound of her feet behind him. He couldn’t hear them, so he was not sure how far away she was—not sure enough. He stopped at the door and she reached around him and held out the key. She was close enough, but he could feel the barrel of the gun against his back. “You’ll open the door, turn on the light, and step in where I can see you. Don’t turn around.”

He wanted nothing so much as to be indoors and out of sight with the door locked before he made his move, so he obeyed. In a few seconds, things would begin to go his way.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Lie on the bed on your back.”

He sat and swung his long legs up onto the bed. “This could be a night to remember.”

She raised the pistol a little so it pointed at his chest and stood at the foot of the bed, where he couldn’t get at her.

“Just a little joke,” he muttered. “What do you want?”

“Take one of the wrist restraints out of your back pocket.”

His eyes widened. How had she known? He had let them hang out because he had wanted them to be ready, and then forgotten. Fool. “You don’t need those.”

She said, “It’s for your safety. If I know you can’t reach me, I might not get startled and shoot you. Put it around the bed frame and your left wrist.”

As he connected his wrist to the steel frame, he was already trying to work out the way to free himself. He could lift the frame off the slot in the headboard and slide the restraint to the end, but to do it, he had to get his weight off the bed. Maybe she would have to use the bathroom. “There. Satisfied?” He tried to sound patronizing.

She said, “I’m going to try to make this quick and simple. You know who I am, and I know who you are, so we won’t waste any more time on that.”

“What are we going to waste time on?”

“Tell me about Brian Reeves Vaughn.”

He smiled. “If you tell me about Rhonda Eckerly.” He studied her face for a reaction. “Or about Mary Perkins, or Coleman Fawcett, or Ronald Sitton.”

She frowned and shook her head. “Silly me. I forgot to tell you how this works.”

She took out of her purse a small silver picture frame and tossed it to him.

It was the photograph of his mother taken on her eightieth birthday. He was outraged. “You’ve been in my house.”

“I found that on the mantel in your living room, and it looked as though it might have sentimental value. I figured you might want to keep it, so I brought it … just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

She looked at her watch. “It’s now one-thirty. You can usually drive the speed limit at this time of night. If you do, you can make it from here to your house in twenty-eight minutes.”

“So?”

“At two-thirty, the electric timer on the coffee maker in your kitchen will turn it on. The pot is filled with gasoline, and the heating element under it is covered with black powder. I’m betting it won’t burn the whole house down before the fire department gets there.”

“What if it does?”

“Then I will have wasted a lot of money on the heroin that’s in your bedroom. But that’s okay. There’s some in the garage too.”

She was bluffing. She had to be bluffing. But the picture of his mother staring him in the face reminded him: she had been there. He smirked. “You telling me you flew in with heroin, too?”

The way she shook her head gave him a sinking feeling. “No,” she said. “I didn’t know where to buy it in L.A., but Artie Macias did.”

“Artie Macias?” It was a grave injustice. Maybe when he had taken Artie Macias in, he had been rougher with him than he’d needed to be. But Jardine wasn’t the one who had jumped bail. And Gary the bondsman had offered to pay extra if an example got set for the rest of his customers.

“Yes,” she said. “When I told him who it was for, he couldn’t do enough. He said to make sure you knew who got it for you.”

He stared at the ceiling. He had thought this was his lucky night. “So if I don’t tell you what you want to know, you don’t let me go in time to get there by two-thirty. My house burns down, and the firemen find a lot of heroin.”

Her eyes were steady and unblinking. “Then you get to see what it’s like to be a runner instead of a chaser.”

He stared at the ceiling again, the muscles in his jaw working. He hated her. He wasn’t sure whether he was going to kill her tonight, but he sincerely felt he should. He knew that was absolutely the wrong way to think. She knew things that could make him rich in a day. He would give maybe ten thousand dollars for the pleasure of breaking her skinny neck. Ten million was too much to waste on one night of pleasure. He had to keep her alive, so he would have another chance. In fact, he admitted to himself, he had to do what she said or he was in trouble.

“The time is going by,” she reminded him.

He looked at her, beginning to feel the seconds now. He had to do this and get out of here. “I don’t know where he is.”

“I didn’t ask,” she said. “I want to know why he’s running.”

Jardine’s brain began to work again. “He came to you, didn’t he? He wants you to hide him.”

Jane said, “If we both answer questions, it’s going to take twice as long.”

Jardine took that as a confirmation. Brian Vaughn had run out of ideas on his own, and somebody was about to cash in on him, so he had inquired about hiring professional help. It was actually funny. She wasn’t sure he met her standards. “You don’t even know who he is?”

“This is a lot of trouble to go to if I know,” said Jane.

“Why did you pick me?”

“Because of the way you work. Most bounty hunters get hired to find somebody in particular. You’re one of the few who just sits in one place and watches faces. In order to do that, you need to have a current list of which faces are worth money. You tell me why Brian Vaughn’s is, and I’ll let you go home and unplug your coffeepot.”

Jardine stared at the ceiling again to focus his thoughts, but he found it took more strength than he had to overcome the awareness of each second ticking by. What if tonight was one of those nights when CalTrans decided to repave a section of the freeway between here and his house? “The reason you couldn’t find any Wanted posters on Brian Vaughn is that he hasn’t been charged yet.”

“Charged with what?”

“Murder.”

Jane nodded. It was what she had expected. “Where is he wanted?”

“Well,” said Jardine, “he isn’t, exactly, but he is. The police in Boston found a car with a deceased young lady in it. When they did the tests, they found that she had been freshly fucked.”

“Raped?”

“Not sure,” he said. “That’s always the theory when they’re dead, but she had all her clothes on right. No signs of a struggle, but her blood showed a fatal dose of a sedative. The car, it turned out, wasn’t hers. It belonged to Brian Vaughn.”

“Did they arrest him?”

“Here’s where we get into things I heard that I can’t swear to. He was rich—old money. He lived on an estate in some little town outside Boston. I heard the local police brought a detective or two from Boston out to the estate with their hats in their hands to inquire whether he might have something he’d like to get off his chest. It seems he wasn’t at home. But while they were on the way from the station to the house, some caretaker called to report that the car was missing.”

“Where was Vaughn?”

“Supposedly some servants said he was in Europe, some said they didn’t know. Anyway, the stories didn’t exactly match.”

“Did he have a family?”

“Sure did. His parents were really old—living in Florida. They said he had mentioned some time before that he was going to Europe. Anyway, you get the idea. Nobody knew which country he was in or when he left, but everybody was sure it was at least a week before this girl shows up dead in his car. Nobody can get in touch with him. Only suddenly, he’s got a lawyer.”

“How did the lawyer explain that?”

“The usual. He’s a family friend, he wonders if he can be of help to the police, and so on.” He looked at her nervously. “What time is it?”

“One forty-three. Do you know the lawyer’s name?”

“I never asked. It wouldn’t mean anything to me.”

“What happened next?”

“The police look closer. It seems Vaughn has a record.”

“What kind?”

“On paper, it’s spoiled-kid stuff. Driving fast and parking wherever, then not paying until the car gets impounded. But they also turn up a few people who hate Brian Vaughn, and one of them gives them the names of a couple of young ladies who were given large amounts of money years before. Sure enough, they’re real. Both decline to say what the money was for. The money came from Vaughn’s parents.”

“Go on.”

“The police are drooling. Now they want this guy bad. They don’t have enough to charge him with anything, and there’s no way they can go public and treat him like a fleeing suspect.”

“The car wasn’t enough?”

“They can’t shake the alibi until they find out what it is. They figure if they give him a DNA test, he is almost certainly going to be the missing player in the sex scene. He is also going to have to prove how and when he went to Europe, how his stolen car got to Boston without being hot-wired, and numerous other things too time-consuming to mention when my fucking house is about to burn down.” He sat up.

“You’ve got time,” she said as she raised the pistol. “Why do you know all this?”

“Who hasn’t been heard from?”

“The girl’s family. Who was she?”

“She was from New York. Vaughn definitely knew her. But everybody thought she was in New York that night, and there’s no proof Vaughn was around. Her family had a little money, and they hired a guy—a detective—to unravel all this stuff, and this is what he found out.”

“Was any of this in the papers?”

“Sure. ‘Amanda Barnes found dead in stolen car. Owner could not be reached for comment by press time.’ ”

“How did Vaughn manage that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the lawyer was working overtime. And maybe the police helped. They don’t usually want it all over the news that a guy like this is their only suspect until they’ve got their hands on him. He had the money and the sort of history that would make them think he could stay in Europe forever. They asked Interpol to watch for him and let him know they wanted to talk. Big silence on the other end.”

“You still haven’t exactly said how you heard. Did you know the detective?”

“Not personally.”

“Then how?”

“Word got around.”

“How much is the girl’s family offering?”

“A hundred grand. I added him to my list when I heard about it. I figured if he was in Europe, his smartest move wouldn’t be to fly into Logan Airport or Kennedy. It would be to stay in Europe until somebody gets around to losing some physical evidence or they arrest somebody else for something similar. But if he got homesick, he’d fly in at L.A., where nobody’s expecting him.”

Jane nodded. “We only have about five minutes left. The police haven’t charged him. If you saw him, you couldn’t grab him and drag him to a station. You couldn’t handcuff him and take him on a plane to Boston. Just what were you supposed to do for a hundred thousand?”

“Detain him.”

“Detain him for whom?”

“For whoever is willing to pay me the hundred thousand.” He fidgeted. “Now, can I go?”

“Which was it? Were you supposed to do it yourself, or tie him up and call somebody?”

His eyes shifted wildly. He looked at the door, he looked at her, then at the door again. “The hundred was for killing him. If I could keep him alive long enough for the girl’s father to fly out here and blow his brains out, that was two hundred.”

Jane sighed. She glanced at her watch and stood up. “All right,” she said. “You’ve got thirty-three minutes to go save your house and your spotless reputation.”

She held the gun on him as she walked close to the bed and used her pocketknife to slice the wrist restraint.

Jardine stood up. In the back of his mind was a reckless urge. He had insurance on the house, and his equity in it was less than forty thousand anyway. Having her in his hands would be like having millions. What was in the house, anyway? Cheap clothes, furniture that was ten years old and had stains on it from things that had gotten spilled, and … oh, yes. Heroin.

He took a step toward the door, then went back to the bed and picked up the picture of his mother, and his eyes met hers. “I won’t forget this.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean next time I see you I might just kill you.”

Jane shook her head. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t take the chance that I might be worth money.”

Jardine stared at her and heard his breath hiss in and out through his teeth. He half-formed a plan to stop at a phone booth and call someone to break into his house while he waited for her outside. His friends and colleagues paraded through his mind, but each face had something hidden behind it—maybe greed, maybe the suspicion of unspoken malice. He turned, rushed out, and ran across the little parking lot toward his car. As he flung the door open he heard distant sirens. He muttered, “Don’t let that be a ten-car pileup on the freeway.” To whose ear he had spoken, or why he had taken three precious seconds to say it, he had no idea.

Jane waited until she had seen Jardine drive as far as the freeway entrance, then walked out of the building and down the street to her car. When she had started the engine and was almost to the same freeway entrance, she allowed herself to feel relief. For some reason, the part she felt most relieved about was a tiny detail. She was glad that he had chosen to move in when she had wanted him to—when she was walking up to a car she had never seen before in the middle of a deserted parking lot and pretending it was hers. Once he was standing in front of her, she had been too busy to feel afraid.

As she drove north toward Santa Barbara, her thoughts turned to Brian Vaughn. Jardine had insinuated that the family had been supplying him with money since he had disappeared. Certainly he had spent more than he could have carried with him. The face-changers had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep protecting him afterward. They would only do that if they thought the money was going to keep on coming and they couldn’t get their hands on it all at once.

Other little details made Jardine’s story seem right. If the police were playing Vaughn carefully, trying to lure him home, they might behave as Jardine had said. Vaughn had been in a very difficult position. The police had not charged him, but they would certainly keep quietly looking for him until they found him, so he couldn’t go anyplace where people would recognize him. He also had to worry about how many people like Jardine might be looking for him. The only solution had been to stop calling himself Brian Vaughn, and stop looking like Brian Vaughn.

What had not struck Jane as right was the story Jardine had told her about the crime, but she had to take into account that it had probably been of little interest to Jardine. The dead girl had been found in Brian Vaughn’s car. She tried to imagine how that could have happened.

One possibility was that Vaughn had picked her up in New York and taken her to his house in Weston. He had drugged and raped her, then realized that he had given her so much sedative that she had died. He had loaded her body into his car, intending to take her back to her apartment in New York. He had somehow been trapped—had mechanical trouble, run out of gas, gotten stuck in snow or mud—and had seen no alternative to abandoning the car. Maybe he had thought he was leaving temporarily, to walk to a gas station or something, but the police found the car before he could get back. But the story had to account not just for what had happened but for what Brian Vaughn had wanted to happen.

What would he have wanted? He certainly wouldn’t have planned a crime that included dragging a dead—or even unconscious—woman from Weston, Massachusetts, to New York, then into an apartment building where people could hardly be expected not to see him. He would want the whole event to take place indoors at one address: but which address? He certainly would not want a woman he had raped to wake up in his house in Weston. He would want her to be in her own apartment in New York all evening, and wake up there not positive about the details of what had happened to her. Just waking up alone at home might make her feel that whatever had happened was over. After reflecting on what she remembered, and what she would have to face if she called the police, she might decide it was better if she didn’t. But she hadn’t been in New York, or even in Weston. She had been found in the place Vaughn was least likely to want her—in his car.

Jane tried another version. Vaughn and the woman had spent the evening together in Weston. After making love, maybe he fell asleep and she couldn’t. She found sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet and accidentally overdosed because they weren’t hers, or took her own and got a bad reaction because she had alcohol in her system. He woke up and found her unconscious, then put her into the car to rush her to the hospital in Boston. On the way he saw she was dead. He panicked. No, that didn’t quite work. If someone was that sick, you didn’t drive them to Boston. You called an ambulance.

What Jane had kept thinking all the time while she was listening to Jardine was that everything he had said was possible. But it was strangely neat. There was an odd perfection to the stories of all of the runners she had found on this trip. Vaughn was rich. He was used to having people provide expensive personal services for him. He seemed to have a history of offenses against women that might not be rape but were serious enough to require hush money. That was important too. He had bought his way out of serious trouble before. If a man like that got into this kind of trouble and happened to find his way to the face-changers, the face-changers would be lucky. What if they had picked him out and designed a particular kind of trouble just for him? It would look a lot like this.