The Face-Changers

3

Jane Whitefield McKinnon climbed the stairs and emerged on the fifth floor. She had chosen the fifth because that was where they put the cardiac patients, and it seemed to her that they would provide the greatest proportion of men over fifty. She walked with an air of certainty, as though she knew exactly where she was going, but as she passed each open door she flicked her eyes to the left to study the room. In the first two rooms the patients were impossible to see, because there were visitors standing around the beds. In the third, the curtain was closed because a nurse was doing something to the patient. She turned the corner, and was in the blind spot from the nurses’ station.

The fourth door was closed. There was a sign on it that said, “Positively No Admittance.” That was what they did when somebody died. Jane opened the door quietly and slipped inside. They had not moved the body yet: the bed nearest the door was empty, but the bed beside the window was covered with a sheet. There were intravenous bags and feeding tubes on a tall metal stand, oxygen equipment, and several kinds of electronic monitors on carts, but none of them was connected to anything. On the stand near the bed were a pair of glasses and an open magazine with a picture of a hooked bass jumping out of a stream the way bass never did.

Jane opened the closet, feeling a little hope. The clothes had not been packed yet. The man had probably been in the hospital for a long time, because the clothes looked a little warm for this weather. She took the tweed sport coat, charcoal gray pants, a tie, a blue oxford shirt, a pair of shoes. She put them into her plastic bag, then opened drawers until she found underwear and socks. In the next drawer there was a travel bag. She opened it and saw the usual clutter of toothbrushes and combs and shaving gear, but there was also a little kit for shining shoes. She slipped the polish and a comb into her bag.

Jane carefully collected the other belongings of the dead man and put them in a drawer, closed the curtain around his bed, then took a last look at the room. She opened the door a crack to be sure nobody was near, then slipped back out into the corridor. She took the sign off the door, threw it into a trash can in the hall, and hurried to the stairwell. She made her way to the hallway outside the outpatient recovery room on the second floor. She looked inside to verify that there was no outpatient surgery at night. The lights were off. She pushed the automatic opener so the double doors swung open, walked in, and watched them close behind her.

She hurried to one of the little half-cubicles along the wall, closed the curtain, and turned on the light. There wasn’t much in the space: a straight-backed chair, a few cabinets. She changed into the lime-green pants and loose shirt Carey had given her, covered her shoes with the booties, stuffed her hair up under the plastic covering, and tied the face mask around her neck. When she hid her clothes and the bag in the cabinet, she found a box of tight latex gloves, so she put them on too. She went out into the central part of the big room, and looked around. There was a desk with telephones and incomprehensible monitors, and a few more cubicles. On the wall above one of them she noticed a television set like the ones in the patients’ rooms.

She found the remote control hanging from the bed, and pressed the switch. On the screen she could see the same newswoman standing in the lobby of the hospital. This time the woman was almost whispering. “Lieutenant Ballard, the police press officer, is here, and he’s about to issue a statement, so we’ll listen in.”

Jane heard a change in the sound, with microphones clanking together and some blips as switches somewhere were flipped, and then a man’s voice. The wide torso of a plainclothes policeman filled the screen. “At approximately six-thirty this evening, police officers at the Main Street Greyhound bus station encountered a man who fit the description of a murder suspect from Illinois. They attempted to question the man, who became nervous and attempted to flee. When they gave chase, he appeared to them to be reaching for a weapon. One of the officers fired his sidearm, wounding the suspect in the shoulder. That’s from the preliminary report, and it’s about all we know at the moment. When we have more—”

“Lieutenant!” came a reporter’s voice. “Can we talk to the officers?”

“Both officers have been relieved for the rest of the shift, and we’re not releasing their names just yet.”

“You said ‘appeared to have a weapon.’ Did he have one?”

“No weapon has been found yet.”

“Who is he?”

Lieutenant Ballard looked down at a sheet of paper. “His name is Dr. Richard Dahlman, age sixty-seven. He is being sought by Illinois authorities in the murder of Dr. Sarah Hoffman, and was considered armed and dangerous. I have no further details about that case.”

“Will he be sent back to Illinois?”

“No decision has been made about that.”

“Will there be an extradition hearing?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s his condition?”

“He went into surgery about twenty minutes ago, at eight-fifteen. I’m told he’s in stable condition and his chances of recovery are excellent.”

Jane turned off the television set and glanced at her watch. It was eight thirty-two. She wheeled a gurney out to the elevator so she would look as though she had something to do, and put on her surgical mask as she ascended to the third floor. As soon as she was in the corridor, she could see room 3205. There was a uniformed police officer standing in the doorway, watching two orderlies wheeling a patient inside on a gurney. She stepped quickly toward the room.

“Hold it,” she said, and the two young men stopped and looked at her, puzzled. She spoke loudly enough so the policeman would hear too. “His room’s been changed. Let’s get him up to the fifth floor so he’ll be near the cardiac unit.”

The two orderlies wheeled the gurney out of the room, then pushed it to the elevator. Jane was aware of the policeman standing beside her in the elevator, but didn’t look into his eyes. He was young, at least a head taller than she was. His belt was so festooned with equipment—gun and ammunition, handcuffs, folding knife, and pepper spray, all in their own leather holsters—that she heard leather creaking every time he shifted his weight.

The door opened and the orderlies pushed the gurney out into the fifth floor hallway and followed Jane to room 5895. She opened the door and said to the policeman, “Excuse us for a moment.” He lingered in the doorway for a second to glance into the room, then stepped aside.

Jane let the two orderlies lift the old man onto the bed, then said, “Thanks, guys.”

One of them whispered, “Did he really kill somebody?”

Jane said, “That’s what I hear.” Her voice was an uninterested monotone that made the two men retreat out the door. Jane pulled the privacy curtain to screen the patient’s bed from the door, then knelt down and released the brake on the wheels, and did the same for the bed with the dead man in it. Then she pushed the patient’s bed aside, pushed the dead man’s bed into its place, and pushed the living patient to where the dead man had been.

She looked around her until she found the oxygen mask, slipped it onto the dead man’s face, slipped a surgical cap over the dead man’s head, and looked at him. He was lying peacefully with his eyes closed. His hair and lower face were invisible. Jane began to search in the drawers around the room. At last she found what she had been looking for: two long, white Velcro strips. She tried to lift the dead man’s arm, but it was stiff. She tugged him closer to the railing on the bed and tethered his arm to the rail at the wrist, then did the same to the other wrist.

She returned to the living patient by the window, then heard a knock on the door. She rushed to open it. The policeman was standing in the doorway, looking a bit sheepish. “I wondered—”

“Just a few more minutes,” she said.

“I’m supposed to be sure he’s restrained.” He was fiddling with his handcuffs.

“Oh, you can’t use those,” she said. “He’s been in surgery, and they’re not sterile. He can’t get out of the regular wrist restraints we use.” She stepped aside to let the policeman look in and satisfy himself that the dead man in the bed was not going anywhere. He nodded. “I’ll be right out here.”

She closed the door and went to the bed by the window. She leaned down, and stared into the open eyes of Richard Dahlman. The pupils were dilated and the face had a drug-induced calm. She took the mask off her face and whispered, “You awake?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did Carey tell you about me?”

“Yes.”

“Then sit up.” She pulled his good arm and watched him strain to raise himself. She felt frightened. He seemed too weak to do anything, but she had to try. She spoke quietly and firmly. “This is going to be hard, so concentrate. We’re going to try standing. If you fall, we’re lost. If you feel faint, warn me.”

She pulled his legs over the edge of the bed so they dangled a few inches from the floor. “Are you ready?”

He seemed to hesitate a long time, his eyes focused on the floor. “Yes.”

She helped him down and held him for a moment. The hospital gown made him look old and frail. He was thin, but his bare back looked soft and boneless, and his buttocks were shrunken with age. She put her left arm around his waist and pulled his right over her shoulder, then began to move. Each movement of Dahlman’s feet was fraught with risk and uncertainty. At first each shuffle gained them only two or three inches, but then something about the feel of the cold terrazzo floor on the soles of his bare feet brought back to him a sense of balance, and his shuffles became steps.

She talked to him in soft murmurs as she moved him into the bathroom. “You can do this,” she said. “I can tell you can. If I sit you on the toilet, can you keep from falling?”

“Yes.”

It occurred to her that his brain might be so far shut down that no matter what a human voice said, he would answer “yes,” but that didn’t change what she had to do. She eased him down on the toilet. “Just sit here for a few minutes, and I’ll be back to get you out.”

She closed the door of the bathroom and returned to the doorway. She opened the door to the hallway and beckoned to the policeman. He stepped inside.

“We’ve got a little problem,” she said. “This room doesn’t have a good oxygen connection. We’ll have to move him back to the first room. Can you get me that gurney?” She pointed down the hall at the gurney she had left there.

The young policeman looked pleased. At last, he had something to do. He hurried down the hall and brought it back with him into the room. He prepared to reach for the body on the bed, but Jane stopped him. “Don’t touch,” she said. “You’re not wearing scrubs. Go out and wait for me.”

She pushed the gurney up beside the bed, removed the restraints from the dead man’s arms, lowered the railing, and tugged the body onto the gurney. She re-adjusted the oxygen mask and the cap, restrained the stiff arms again, and took a couple of breaths.

Jane pushed the gurney along the hallway. She and the policeman moved the gurney into the elevator again, got out on the third floor, and pushed the gurney into room 3205.

Jane reversed the procedure she had followed the first time, hauling the body off the gurney onto the bed, pulling the covers over it, and then closing the curtain before she opened the door for the policeman. She said, “He’s resting peacefully. Make sure that nobody disturbs him unless they have explicit permission from Dr. McKinnon.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” said the policeman.

Jane wheeled the gurney down the hallway, into the elevator, and back to the room on the fifth floor. She opened the bathroom door and turned on the light with trepidation. She had been afraid that Dahlman would be lying on the floor unconscious, but he simply turned and blinked at her.

“All right,” she said. “Climb aboard.”

She helped him sit on the gurney, then swung his legs up and helped him lie down. She pushed the gurney back to the elevator, then punched the button for level B, below the ground floor, and pushed the gurney into the outpatient recovery room. She took three deep breaths, then turned on the light in the cubicle she had visited earlier.

“Time to get up,” she said. She eased Dahlman’s feet to the floor, then helped him to the chair. She retrieved her bag from the cabinet where she had hidden it. “Just rest and get your bearings, and let me do all the work.” She knelt in front of him and slipped the shorts and pants over his feet and up to his knees, then put on the socks and shoes. She removed the hospital gown and gently slipped the shirt on over his useless left arm, then his right, and buttoned it.

His voice seemed to acquire some authority. “There will be nurses up on the fifth floor looking for me in a minute.”

“No, there won’t,” she answered quietly. “They didn’t know you were coming.”

“Of course they did.”

“Believe me, they didn’t.”

“But I’m a doctor. I know how—”

“Tonight you’re not a doctor, you’re a passenger. Do exactly as I say and you’ll be outside in a minute,” she said. “Do anything else, and you won’t.” She slipped the necktie over the back of his neck and quickly tied it.

“A tie?” He seemed wide awake now. His eyebrow raised.

“When somebody looks at you, if he thinks, ‘patient,’ then he might think, ‘Which patient?’ If he does, we’re in trouble.” She took his left wrist and removed the hospital’s plastic ID bracelet, then slipped it into her bag. “Now we’re going to stand up.”

She raised him to his feet and knelt to pull his pants up. She buttoned and zipped them, then carefully slipped the sport coat over his left arm, then his right. She could tell that he was hurting, in spite of the painkillers, so she eased him back down before she opened her bag and took out the polishing kit she had stolen from the dead man.

“What’s that?”

“Hair coloring,” she lied.

“Do we have time for that?”

Jane moved around behind him and opened the can of brown shoe polish. “We’ll make time. It combs in, like this.” She began at the top of his head and worked downward, sticking the comb into the dark brown shoe polish and combing it into his hair. “When I asked Carey to describe you, the gray hair came up. He’s not very observant—at least the way a cop is—because he’s never been afraid, never looked at people suspiciously. And the hair is about all any of the others know about you, so put up with it.”

Jane took off her plastic gloves, then stayed behind him while she took off the pale green hospital clothes and put on her skirt and blouse.

“What are you doing?”

“Disguising myself as a normal person.” She stuffed the surgical clothes, the hospital gown, the shoe polish, and the gloves into the bag Carey had given her, and raised Dahlman to his feet again. “Do you think you can walk?”

He said, “I think so.”

Jane held his good arm and steered him out into the hallway, then around a pair of sharp corners and into another wing. She kept whispering in his ear. “We’re going out through oncology. They don’t schedule chemotherapy or radiation at night here, and any cancer specialists would be upstairs, where the patients are. But we might meet someone. If we do, can you walk by yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. “Not very well, but I can present like a chemo patient. Notable pallor, physical weakness, nausea.” He moved forward for a few seconds, then added, “Hair that looks like a toupee.”

Jane found a trash can and discarded the shoe polish, then a wheeled laundry bin and left the hospital gown and surgical outfit in it She glanced at her watch. It had been almost an hour since she had left Carey, and thirty-five minutes since Dahlman had gone into surgery. Dahlman’s golden time was dwindling to nothing. She kept him moving as steadily as she dared down the long, empty hallways, past offices and labs that had closed doors and darkened windows, but each step was short and deliberate. Her mind kept bounding ahead, bursting forward to consider each foot of the corridor they still had to cross.

They passed an alcove with a big window and she turned her head to look out. There was nothing out there but the driveway and a cinder-block wall, and the blackness threw a bright, sharp-edged reflection back at her. She kept exerting the steady, gentle pressure on Dahlman’s good arm. Her mind carried the sight of their reflection like a snapshot, and she studied it.

She could detect no errors so far. Whatever Carey’s anesthesiologist had shot into Dahlman seemed to be wearing off. He bent over a little as he walked, but he didn’t look as though he was protecting a bullet wound. The waxy brown polish had covered his gray hair, and it looked as though he had slicked it down with the kind of greasy stuff that some men his age actually used. The coat and tie helped. Dahlman looked like a man who had just come from visiting a patient, and Jane could easily be his daughter.

Jane led him around another corner and she could see the rectangle of the glass door ahead. Through it she could make out a few feet of dimly lighted sidewalk, and then inviting darkness. She wanted to push him, to get out of the light, away from the hospital before something happened. But suddenly there was movement in the darkness, and it startled her. In a second she could see that there were two men coming up the walk toward the door.

She let go of Dahlman’s arm. “Walk by yourself. Do the best you can.” She spoke evenly and forced her face into a smile as she glanced at the old man. From a distance, she knew, it would look as though they were having a pleasant chat.

“What is it?” Dahlman whispered. “What’s wrong?”

She looked at him as though he had said something clever. “Two men coming up the walk. If they’re cops, they won’t be the ones who arrested you, because those two have been sent home for the shift. These haven’t seen you before. Just act like we’ve visited Aunt Hilda, and we’re going home. Don’t rush, because we’re not in a hurry.”

“What if they’ve seen my picture?”

“If they say your name, laugh at the idea. Don’t try to run, but keep moving unless you have to stop. If we’re separated, turn right at the corner and go to 4997 Carroll Street. It’s about a block. Wait for me behind the building.”

As Jane moved toward the door she focused her eyes on the right objects: on the floor for two seconds, on her companion for two more, straight ahead for just a second and then at a spot on the floor ten feet ahead so she didn’t appear to be looking at the men or not looking. She controlled her breathing to relax the tightness that was growing in her chest. She had been so close to the outside that she had almost begun to consider it accomplished when the sudden sight of the two men had startled her.

The fact that there were two of them bothered her. There were a thousand harmless reasons why two large men in their thirties might come up the walk together, but until one of them had been positively shown to apply this time, none of them brought any reassurance. Couples or solitary men might be doing anything, but men didn’t usually travel in pairs unless they were working, or doing something that excluded women. These two weren’t playing poker or bowling.

She touched Dahlman’s arm again to move him along. The best place for them to see him was right outside the door, where the light would be behind him and his face in the shadow.

Through the glass she saw the blond one’s eyes take note of the fact that Jane and Dahlman weren’t going to turn at the end of the hall, but were coming out the door. Then he did something unexpected. He stopped, turned away, bent his head, and cupped his hands in front of his face to light a cigarette. His companion stopped and stood in front of him to shield him from the wind.

As Jane stepped out and held the door for Dahlman, she turned her face to feel the direction of the wind. She had to be sure. The wind sometimes whipped around in eddies beside big, tall buildings. She took five more steps, then watched the darker man point his finger toward the lighted lobby entrance and mutter something. The blond one agreed, and they set off across the lawn in that direction, walking slowly. Jane stared at their backs as she walked. As soon as she was five more steps away from the building she stuck her finger in her mouth and lifted it to feel the wind. “We might have a problem,” she said quietly.

“Why? They ignored us,” Dahlman protested.

“The blond one—the one that lit the cigarette—turned into the wind to do it.”

“I’m not surprised. Smoking in this day and age requires a certain flair for ignoring the forces of nature.”

“Don’t you see?” she asked. “He was doing it just to turn his face away from us. He’s thirty feet from a building where he’d have to put it out anyway.”

Dahlman was silent for a moment. He looked over his shoulder, then winced and grunted from the pain. “Do you think they’re policemen?”

“A policeman might recognize you, but he doesn’t care if you see his face. Carey said you thought someone wasn’t just trying to get you arrested. Is that true?”

“Yes. I think someone is trying to kill me.”

Jane found that Dahlman was walking a little faster now, but it cost him great effort. They moved down the street toward the corner. Just as they turned up Carroll Street, Jane saw the two men coming away from the lighted lobby entrance of the hospital and walking toward the door where she had first seen them. She said, “We’re in trouble. They didn’t go into the lobby entrance. You’re too weak to run, it’s too late to hide, and I’m not carrying anything that would scare them”—the answer came to her as she heard herself say it—“off.” She leaned close to him and said, “Can you keep walking?”

“I can, but—”

“Then do it. Walk straight up the street to the small brick building over there. It’s Carey’s office. No matter what anyone does, keep walking. Go around to the little parking lot in back. Sit down between the gray car and the brick wall. Don’t move. If they follow you, try to watch them but don’t let them see you. Got it?”

“I heard it,” said Dahlman.

“Do it.” Jane pivoted away from him, then stepped along the side of the hospital building. As soon as she was out of sight of the sidewalk she began to run. She knew that she must look insane running in a skirt, but in the narrow space beside the tall building nobody could see her. The weightless, flat shoes she had worn were better than she had expected.

She worked herself up into a sprint, dashing along the side of the building. Three stories above her, there were lighted windows where she knew that patients lay staring up at television sets that showed live shots of police officers milling around the hospital. Down here she was alone.

Just before she reached the lighted area at the far end of the building she slowed to a walk. She knew it would have to be the first try. She couldn’t walk up and loiter, looking for an opportunity. It had to be there and she would have to read it instantly.

Jane took a deep breath as she stepped around the corner into the light. The three television trucks had their booms up and their dishes turned toward their stations’ receivers. The ambulances were lined up in their spaces as before. No one was missing. There were five police cars now. Three had arrived after the emergency was over, so they had been parked in designated spaces with their doors closed.

She stepped along more quickly, her head held rigid, but her eyes scanning. She was closer now, and she could hear the same garbled radio noises she had heard when she had arrived. She passed to the right of the first police car, where she could see the ignition on the steering column, but the radio sound led her on past it.

The window of the second car was half open, and faint orange lights glowed on the dashboard. She angled away from the curb and passed the trunk. In a single, fluid movement, she reached for the door handle, swung open the driver’s door, and was in. She turned the key, brought down the gear selector, and stepped on the gas pedal. She didn’t let the car glide forward before she began the turn, because it would pass in front of the glass doors of the emergency room. Instead she wrenched the wheel to the left as far as it would go and swung around smoothly to drive the wrong way down the entrance lane.

Jane pulled out of the drive and accelerated up the straight, empty street away from the hospital. As she passed into the little splash of light under each street lamp she studied the interior of the police car: first the shotgun upright in the rack behind her right elbow, then the dashboard with its radio and mike and what looked like a computer screen, next some hard-sided notebooks that could be manuals or books of tickets or even the source of all of those forms that cops seemed to whip out when anything happened. It wasn’t until she reached the bright intersection that she found the switches she had been searching for.

She made the turn, drove past the hospital, and began to look for Dahlman. She searched for the two pursuers, but she could not see them either. Could they have run hard and caught him already? She tried to imagine it. They would have needed to recognize him, see her part from him, decide she was going for help, dash to catch him, and either kill him silently and hide the body or push him into a car.

Jane was nearly at Carey’s office. As she came to the parking lot, she spun the wheel sharply toward the entrance to make the car seem to have come from nowhere. As soon as her front wheels touched the driveway, she reached to the dashboard, switched on the red and blue lights, and stopped.

Just outside the beams of her headlights she discerned the two men walking toward the end of the building near a red car. If Dahlman had followed her instructions, then they must have seen him come as far as the building. If they were looking at the red car and not the gray, then they hadn’t found him yet. Their heads turned in her direction, then away. Jane put her hand on the upright shotgun beside her and waited. The men didn’t move.

Jane suspected they could see a head silhouetted in the windshield above the headlights, and she knew they could see the bright red and blue lights revolving on the roof. Maybe they could see Jane was alone, or even recognize her.

She closed her right hand on the grip of the shotgun, but didn’t lift it. Of course it would be loaded. There would be no shell in the chamber, but there would be five rounds of number four buckshot in a line ahead of it in the magazine.

With her left hand she switched on the spotlight mounted on her door, and manipulated the handle to sweep the beam along the side of the building. She let the car begin to drift forward slowly in their general direction as she shone the light on the door of the building, then along the ground near it, inching her way along like a cop who had received a prowler call. Then she swept the beam ahead to the corner of the building. The two men were gone.

She hit the gas pedal and shot forward to stop behind her own gray car, then waited. Where was Dahlman? She craned her neck to look in every direction, but she saw nothing. Her breath came out in a hiss through clenched teeth. She had come too late. The men must have killed him, and she had let them walk away. She began to turn the police car around, then hit the brake. Of course: What had she been thinking?

Dahlman was a fugitive. If he saw a police car pull into the lot with its lights flashing, would he come out of hiding and climb in? She backed up quickly, opened the door of the police car, and ran to the row of cars parked behind the building. “Dr. Dahlman?” she called.

“Here,” came the quiet voice behind her.

She whirled. “Where?”

Dahlman slowly stood up behind the low brick wall at the end of the lot. She stepped to the wall and helped him swing his legs over it.

“Did you see what they did when I got here?”

“They threw something over the wall. Over there someplace. I heard it but I couldn’t see what it was.”

Jane didn’t need to see. She vaulted over the brick wall and walked the weedy patch between the two parking lots. She found first one gun, then the other only a few feet away, picked them up, and ran to the police car. She looked around anxiously. “Get in.”

Jane helped him ease his body into the passenger’s seat, then handed him the two guns. “Hold these.”

She turned off the flashing lights and drove quickly out of the lot and up a dark side street, then turned and drove up another. She drove until she passed a house a mile away with its lights off and a FOR SALE sign stuck on the lawn. She stopped, backed up, and pulled into the driveway.

She opened the garage door, got back into the car, and drove inside. She opened Dahlman’s door and helped him out. “Do you think you can walk a little farther by yourself?”

He said, “Yes.”

“Then start walking up the street in that direction. I’ll catch up.”

“What are you doing?”

“Go,” she said.

As soon as she could see that Dahlman was heading in the right direction, Jane closed the garage door, turned on the headlights, and found a rag hanging on a nail on the garage wall. She quickly wiped the steering wheel, the shotgun, the door handles, the shifter, then opened the trunk and found the foam fire extinguisher. She sprayed it liberally inside the car, then wiped the extinguisher off too, and tossed it onto the front seat. The foam would destroy any fingerprints she had missed. She turned off the headlights and stepped out the small door in the back of the garage. She walked along the house to the street and hurried after Dahlman.

When she caught up with him, she said, “I don’t want you to faint or fall down. But can you walk a little faster?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure. You could get caught.”

He turned his head to focus his sharp gray eyes on her. “Suppose those men had seen your face—figured out that the police car was stolen? That you weren’t a police officer?”

Jane shrugged. “They were still on foot in a parking lot. They could see I had a very big car, and suspect that there was a very big shotgun inside it.”

“But suppose they had guessed that those were just part of the bluff?”

Jane looked at him with quiet sincerity in her eyes. “If they had guessed that, then one of them would have tire tracks on his chest, and the other would have a five-inch hole in his. This isn’t a game.”