The Face-Changers

2

Jane McKinnon turned into the driveway, drove to the back of the big old stone house, and strolled up the flagstone path toward the back door. She would just have time to get dinner going and step into the shower before Carey finished his rounds and started home. The feel of the evening made her think of the ends of summer days when she was a child in Deganawida, the air still and humid, the crickets just beginning to compete with the faint calls of the red-winged blackbirds in the marshy fields between her parents’ house and the river.

She heard the muffled sound of the telephone ringing inside the house and changed her walk to a trot. After two steps, the ringing stopped. Maybe she could still catch the call while the person talked to the answering machine. She reached the back porch with her key ready, unlocked the back door, flung it open, rushed through the little cloak room, across the kitchen, and snatched the telephone off the wall. She heard the dial tone. She took a deep breath, then blew it out through her teeth as she walked through the living room and into the den. She pressed the button on the answering machine and heard her husband’s voice.

“Jane? It’s me. Can you meet me at the hospital as soon as you get home? Thanks.”

Jane reached for the telephone, then let her hand hover over it. He had not said where he was, and his voice had sounded rushed. That usually meant he was already on his way to the next patient’s room. If she called the main desk it would probably take them fifteen minutes to get him to a telephone, and she could drive there in twenty. It would probably strike him as a refreshing change if she simply did as he had asked. The recording had sounded a bit like the voice of a man with car trouble.

She retraced her steps through the kitchen, swung her purse onto her shoulder, picked up her keys, locked the door, and backed the car out of the driveway. The drive to the hospital at this time of the evening was easy. The mild rush hour that Buffalo could manage was almost over, and the only heavy traffic that she could see was flowing out of the city toward her.

Jane pulled her car into the lot behind Carey’s office building, around the corner from the hospital, and walked up the street, feeling the warm, humid air wrap around her. Winters in this part of the world were dark and fierce, but the summers were a sweet, guilty pleasure. Jane went around to the rear entrance of the hospital, so she could go up the elevator closest to Carey’s wing.

As she turned the corner of the building, Jane saw the two police cars beside the emergency-room entrance, not exactly parked, just stopped and hastily vacated. One of them had its door open and the radio still crackling over a woman’s voice chanting numbers and street names into the hot night air. Jane glanced across the parking lot at the row of doctors’ reserved spaces to verify that Carey’s black BMW was still there, and that no tow truck was hooked to it, then noticed the news vans beyond it. There were three of them, all with transmitter booms folded on their roofs. Beside one of them, a young man who looked like a carnival roustabout uncoiled a long double strand of electrical cord.

She kept walking without changing her pace, as though maybe she had always intended to take the long way around the building, or maybe she had noticed the police cars and simply decided that whatever the police were doing here, they probably would prefer not to have inquisitive civilians in their way.

It had been over a year since she had last been on the road, but she could not yet abandon any of the precautions: never stop walking in a place where there were policemen who had nothing to do but study faces; never stay in the vicinity of a camera crew long enough to risk having her face appear on a television screen.

The police had left their vehicles in a hurry without securing them, and the news vans meant that all three of the local channels had been monitoring their scanners and agreed that this was where the best story of the night could be had. She guessed that probably a policeman had been shot. She caught a glimpse of men in dark blue uniforms through the glass of the emergency-room reception area. The time when they had been able to act, to move quickly and accomplish something, seemed to be over. Now they were just waiting.

She walked more quickly as she approached the glass doors and watched them slide apart automatically. As she stepped inside the lobby she held her head steady and walked purposefully toward the elevators. She veered to stay behind the man holding the video camera on a young, blond woman with a microphone.

“Hospital spokesmen have confirmed that the suspect has been shot, and they characterized his condition as ‘stable.’ The police officers we spoke to were only able to tell us that the injured man is a fugitive and he is believed to have been armed.”

Jane’s fingers found the button to close the elevator door, then the button for the third floor, and she felt the sudden amplification of gravity as the elevator rose. She tried to fight the growing sense of dread. This had nothing to do with her. She was Jane McKinnon now, a respected surgeon’s devoted wife who sometimes came to pick him up in the evening when he finished his rounds. Jane Whitefield was a memory.

She walked down the hallway, past the rooms where Carey’s patients of the last day or two were recovering, learning to live without whatever he had cut out of them or sleeping off their anesthetic hangovers. As she came in sight of the nurses’ station and began to crane her neck to look for Carey, she saw a door open near the end of the corridor. The first figure to appear made her take in a little breath. There were Carey’s long legs and big feet, and his long arms below the short sleeves of the green surgical shirt. He still wasn’t dressed to leave, but that was all right. He couldn’t know that there was something downstairs that made her impatient to get away.

He saw her and hurried up the hallway toward her, but he didn’t pause. His arm came around her waist and he spun her gently and pulled her along with him. He didn’t let go, and she allowed his hand to guide her while she quickened her pace to match his.

“Got to talk to you,” he whispered. His brows were knitted, and the sharp brown eyes seemed to be searching her face for something.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “Is there a transplant patient who needs something I’ve got?”

“I love you,” he said.

“You’ve already had everything that will get you,” she murmured. “Anything else, you’ll have to get me in the mood.”

“Let’s go in my office.” As he led her into the tiny room, her eyes settled on familiar things: his briefcase, his coat. She watched him close the door and push in the button to lock it, then stop and lean against his desk. She felt the smile fading from her lips and became watchful.

He folded his arms across his chest, and she suspected she was seeing him as his patients saw him, just before he told them something that they wanted desperately not to hear.

Carey said, “I’ve got a patient and in fifteen minutes I’ve got to go in and repair a bullet wound in his shoulder. I want you to talk to him.”

Jane stared into his eyes. She could see that Carey was making an enormous effort to keep his eyes on hers, unwavering, unblinking. She felt an unaccustomed chill, and when she identified it, she resisted the knowledge that came with it. He was building distance between them, trying to make her look at him the way a colleague or a patient would. That was why he was standing across the little room from her, not holding her or even reaching out to touch her hand. She recognized the stance with the arms folded in front of him. It was an unconscious gesture, using the arms to protect the midsection, where the guts and lungs and heart were. I don’t expect to be attacked, it said, but I’m prepared for the possibility.

She felt a strong impulse to fold her arms too, to hug herself to ward off the hurt. This is my husband, who loves me. Why is this happening? “Why do you want me to talk to him?”

Carey sighed. It was coming. “He’s in trouble.”

She said, “What do you care?”

“I know him. He’s a doctor. A surgeon. He was one of my teachers. There’s some kind of crazy misunderstanding, and the police think he killed another doctor. I knew her too—when I was a resident in Chicago, she was a couple of years ahead of me. The whole thing is insane.” Carey’s eyes softened, and he held up his hands in a gesture of despair. “I know,” he said. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly know he didn’t do it. I can’t make that judgment.”

“No, you probably can,” she said. “I’m just wondering how you can be sure nobody else can. Cops, judges, and district attorneys are better at telling who’s guilty than people think they are. And when they just want to close the books on a case, the one they pick to hang it on isn’t somebody like a surgeon. It’s some loser with the right kind of criminal record and no money for lawyers.” She gently put her hand on Carey’s shoulder. “If you want to do something for him, let’s start making some calls and get him some terrific legal help.”

“What he’s worried about isn’t that he’ll get convicted. It’s that he won’t get to court.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know much. He’s coherent, but we didn’t have much time alone. He was agitated, in pain. He said something about being framed. He thinks there are people within some police department who are in on it, and whatever they put in their bulletin about him was designed to get him shot.”

Jane tilted her head, as though she had heard an odd change of pitch. “The police here don’t shoot unless somebody is in danger. Running away isn’t enough.”

“He’s not lying about the bullet hole.”

“I didn’t say that. I mean something’s missing, left out.”

“Everything is missing. Everything is left out. I don’t even have time to tell you what I know, let alone piece together what I don’t know. I have to operate on him in a little while. All I ask is that you talk to him.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, ‘No, that isn’t all you ask’ and ‘No, I don’t want to talk to him.’ ” She said it without malice, preoccupied.

Carey’s head nodded slightly, and he closed his eyes, as though he were waiting for a pain to pass. “You’re right. I guess that isn’t all I wanted. And it was a bad idea.” He pushed off his desk and stood straight. “Well, I’d better go get ready to patch him up. If you’ll wait, I think I’d like to drive home together tonight.”

Jane was still motionless, her eyes staring at a little square of tile on the floor below him. Carey never did that, she thought. Even if they went out, they would come back to the hospital and pick up the second car before they went home. He was going to try to do something himself—slip this wounded man the keys to his car? She seemed to notice Carey only when his foot moved out of the square. “Wait.”

“What?”

“You still haven’t answered my question. What do you care?”

He winced. “A hundred reasons.” He seemed to search his memory for one. “Remember I told you how I was almost washed out of surgical residency?”

“When they left you to sew somebody up and instead you went in again and redid the operation?”

“That’s close enough. I saw signs that the patient was hemorrhaging internally, so I opened the sutures and stopped it. The surgeon I was assisting said I’d performed a procedure I wasn’t trained for, endangered a patient, and so on.”

“But this man saved you?”

“You know what he said? The charge that I wasn’t trained was absurd, because I had just watched an outstanding surgeon perform the operation. It didn’t work. Finally, he said if I went, he went.”

“So you feel you have to do something because you owe him?”

“I’m sure that’s partly true. I hope it is, anyway. But he didn’t do that to save me. He believed that my career wasn’t as important as somebody’s life—no surprise—but that his career wasn’t either.” Carey was silent for a second, then said, “That’s part of it, anyway. I know he’s a good man, who certainly didn’t do this.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“I guess it’s a feeling I have … a hunch.” Carey’s brows knitted. “In the last few years he’s been doing research.”

“You mean he’s indispensable or something?”

“Nobody’s indispensable.” He paused. “This is going to be hard to put into words without sounding foolish. See all those?” He waved his arm at the collection of medical publications that lined the shelves over his desk. She recognized the familiar covers of the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet.

“Looks as though there’s plenty of research going on.”

“Right. The articles are short—just brief summaries of important things people discover in a month, doing medical research in a thousand places at once. It’s impossible to keep up with all of it in even one specialty. But if one person could somehow hold a fair portion of it in his head at once and make the connections between discoveries that seem unrelated, and had the skills, and had the power to put it all into play, we just might make the next giant step.”

“What giant step?”

He waved his arm in frustration. “That’s just it. We don’t know, exactly—can’t know until it happens. It’s like describing the wheel while you’re waiting for somebody to invent the wheel.” He glanced at Jane, then began again. “What if somebody invented a method that causes normal tissue cells to replicate quickly—the way some cancer cells do, only faster—so that surgical incisions would heal in hours rather than weeks or months?”

“You tell me.”

“Surgeons like me could do things that we would never dare try now: virtually nothing would kill a patient if you could keep him alive for twelve hours. It might very well make procedures like kidney or heart transplants into historical oddities.”

“The man down the hall is the one who’s going to do that?”

“We don’t know if anyone will. He’s doing research in that area. It’s rare for a person like him to turn to basic research, so there’s been a lot of speculation, some tantalizing rumors. A few surprising early results have been published.”

“So he might?”

“All I’m sure of is that he’s something that seldom comes along. Twenty or thirty years ago, he was already one of the very best practicing surgeons in the country—the best hands, a temperament that was all concentration, an immediate understanding of the ways each technical advance could have been used to save the last patient, and how he would use it to save the next one. He’s still doing it, year after year after year, getting better at it. And he never forgets anything, so all of that knowledge has been building. He’s reaching a point now—a kind of peak—that hardly anyone ever reaches, because by the time you know that much, it’s too late. Right now, he has as much scientific knowledge as anyone, the experience of bringing thousands of patients through the most difficult surgery, and he’s so deeply respected that if he wants to try something, the money and the facilities will come to him. I don’t know of anybody else like that. If he’s lost—destroyed—maybe nobody will be in that position again for fifty years.”

Jane studied Carey for a moment. “And if he isn’t lost?”

“What do you mean?”

“I assume this process or formula or whatever would be patented, so we’re talking about a lot of money? Nobel Prize, that kind of thing?”

Carey shook his head. “I know him. He’s the one I picked to learn surgery from. I spent four years following him around from morning until night, listening to everything he said, watching everything he did. He makes decisions to keep people alive, and when he does, nothing else matters to him: money, egos—his or anyone else’s.”

“What if somebody got in his way—this other doctor threatened to make the giant step impossible? What if all the thousands of people he might save would be lost unless he sacrificed the life of one single person? Would he do it?”

Carey shrugged. “It’s an impossible situation. For one thing, that kind of act would require that he believed he was the only one in the world who could ever make the next step. To believe that, you’d have to ignore what’s in all those medical journals—tiny contributions that add up. What I was telling you is that I have a feeling that he might provide a short-cut, and it would be a shame if we missed it.”

Jane considered for a moment. “So we have a special man, who did you what’s probably the biggest favor of your life, and who might be on the edge of inventing the cure for just about everything.”

“I know,” said Carey. “Why does a person like that need to disappear? An investigation will show he didn’t do it, or a trial will, anyway. But he’s convinced that whoever planted the evidence that he’s a murderer has that figured out, and won’t let it get that far.”

Jane shrugged. “If there is such a person, that’s probably what he would want. It’s easy to get somebody killed in prison, and hard to keep a frame from falling apart. But if there is no such person, then he’s as safe in police custody as he would be anywhere. Running is what you do if nothing else will keep you alive.”

“I’m convinced that he can’t be wrong about the existence of the framer. The police in Illinois didn’t just pull him in for questioning. They arrested him and showed him a lot of manufactured evidence.”

Jane stared at Carey for a long moment, then straightened. Her eyes had changed. They were quick and alert now. She began to pace. “We’d better get started. I’ve taken too much time with this. You know how rescue crews try to get a person to the hospital in the first few minutes—what do you call it—when you can still do something?”

“Golden time.”

“Well, this is his.”

“You’ve decided to take him out without talking to him?”

She looked at him in surprise. “This isn’t between him and me. When you asked me, you made the decision. That doesn’t mean I’ll succeed, or that when it’s over, you won’t wish you hadn’t asked.” She walked past him to glance out the window. “Is there a policeman on guard with him right now?”

“Yes,” said Carey. “They have him handcuffed to the bed in pre-op. He’s been arrested.”

“How bad is the wound?”

Carey shrugged. “Not life-threatening, but I don’t have the pictures yet. He’s lost some blood. The bullet passed through, but I’m guessing it left bone fragments. And he’s not young.”

“How ‘not young’?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Healthy sixty-seven or weak sixty-seven?”

“Healthy.”

“He’d better be. Describe him.”

“I told you. His mind is—”

“Not that,” she interrupted. “His looks.”

“Maybe a bit over six feet. A hundred and sixty-five. Gray hair.”

“Beard or mustache?”

“No. It makes your mask hot and itchy. He’s a surgeon.”

“Is the anesthetist someone you can manipulate a little?”

“Within limits. It’s Shelton. He won’t do anything illegal.”

“He doesn’t have to. You’ll just have to give him good enough reasons to do what you want.”

“Maybe I can get him to do that. He respects Dahlman, and if Dahlman tells him I’m right, he’ll go along.”

“Dahlman. Is that the patient?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s going to be in the operating room besides you and Shelton?”

“Darlene Brooks will be surgical nurse. Shelton will have one of his people. Sylvia Stern will assist me.”

Jane stared at the wall to avoid being distracted. “How long will the operation take?”

“A half hour to four or five, depending on whether there are bone fragments, or if vessels need to be tied off or if I find nerve damage.”

“All right,” she said. “Here’s what you do. Go in while they’re prepping the patient, get rid of the cop and the handcuffs. Whatever you have to say, say it.”

“No problem with the handcuffs, and the police don’t go into the O.R. when we operate on a prisoner. But they do wait outside.”

“Then Shelton. Have him order the full-dress general anesthetic, then change it to something else after you’re in there.”

“Something else?”

“This is your field, not mine. Say what doctors say—you’re worried about his age, or something. Put him out for a half hour, do what you need to, then wake him up.”

“I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to do what needs to be done by then.”

“And I can’t guarantee anything will happen afterward either. Just make sure he’ll live. If he’ll be in terrible pain, shoot some local painkillers into him, but nothing that dulls his brain.”

“I’ll do my best. Then what?”

“Give the cops a little preparation. Tell them he’s going to stay unconscious and the cops will contaminate his wound or hamper his recovery if they bother him before morning. Tell them where he’s going to be afterward. Where would that be?”

“The recovery room.”

“No good. We need to send him someplace else. Where would that be?”

“Intensive care—”

“Someplace where there won’t be a million nurses watching him.”

“His room, I suppose. I’m sure the police would like it if he were in an isolated place where he wouldn’t attract attention.”

“It will have to do. Work it out so that one of the staff talks to the orderlies and has him taken there. Then send her on an errand or something so somebody else talks to the cops. Don’t do either thing yourself.”

Carey held up his hand. “Wait. I’ll work out the details and excuses. Just tell me what you want to happen.”

She spoke patiently. “Get rid of the cuffs and get the cop to wait outside. Do your work in a half hour, and get him sent to his room. You keep everyone else assuming he’s still in the recovery room until, say, two hours are up. The longer the better. Now, what’s his room number?”

“It’s 3205. But how are you going to wheel him out of the hospital?”

Jane shook her head as though she felt sorry for him. “There are cops and reporters in the lobby with nothing to look at but each other. If they see any patient being moved from this hospital tonight, they’ll be all over him. He has to do what nobody thinks is possible. He has to walk out of here under his own power.” She frowned. “Can you get me one of these surgery outfits with the mask and headgear?”

“Sure.” He opened the door and went outside, then returned with a bundle of green cloth and plastic under his arm. “These should fit you.” He put them into a plastic bag and handed them to her.

She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, then threw her arms around his neck and kissed him again, harder. “I’ll get word to you somehow. But don’t expect to see me for a couple of weeks. I’m going to try to buy him enough time for the police to straighten it out and drop the charges. Now go tell him about me, so he has time to think it over.”

“I don’t have to.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

Carey shrugged. “He remembers me. He knew that I was on the staff of a hospital in Buffalo, but not specifically this one. Anyway, he didn’t come to Buffalo to get shot and admitted to a hospital. He was trying to make it to Deganawida. He was looking for Jane Whitefield.”