It was, he had to admit, not a bad way to hire a hit man. Nobody, not Dot and not the person who did the work, had any idea who Call-Me-Al might be, or where he lived, or anything else about him. So if things went wrong and Keller wound up in a cell, he couldn’t get himself a deal by giving up his employer. He could give up Dot, but that’s as far back as it would reach, because there was nobody for Dot to give up. Al was out of anybody’s reach.

Say you were planning an extremely high-profile assassination. You wanted a patsy, a fall guy, to give some latter-day Warren Commission a plausible explanation of what had taken place.

Keller had never spent a lot of time on conspiracy theories, and was by no means convinced that the official explanations were wrong; it seemed entirely possible to him that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had shot down John F. Kennedy, and that James Earl Ray had done the same for Martin Luther King. He wasn’t going to bet the rent money that it happened like that, but he wouldn’t bet the other way, either. Both subjects seemed unlikely assassins, but was either one of them as wildly improbable as Sirhan Sirhan, the killer so witless they had to name him twice? And there was no question that he’d shot Bobby Kennedy, because they’d caught him in the act.

But never mind what actually happened. If you were orchestrating something like that, a fall guy was a handy thing to have. And the best sort of fall guy would be someone who did this sort of thing for a living. If you wanted to frame someone for murder, why not pick a murderer? Hire him to kill some nonentity, and time it so he’s in the right place at the right time, and then frame him for the real killing, the important killing. But don’t let him actually do it, because then he might wind up in a position to rat you out. This way, when the cops picked him up, he couldn’t say anything because he wouldn’t know anything, and the closest he could come to giving a good account of himself would be to start yammering about how he’d come here to Des Moines to kill someone else. Some poor schlump with no criminal ties and no one looking to kill him, some guy whose sole offense was overzealous lawn care.

Wonderful. The cops would love that one. Jesus, if they did pick him up, he’d know better than to try to sell that story. Or, for that matter, any other story he could come up with just now.

He was sitting in front of the television set, his eyes on the screen, but he was too caught up in his own train of thought for his mind to pay any real attention to what his eyes were seeing. None of it registered, until something about the image on the screen forced its way into his consciousness.

It was a picture of a man, though why they were showing it was unclear, as the sound was still muted. Keller didn’t recognize the guy, and yet it seemed to him that there was something familiar about him. He was middle-aged, with a full head of dark hair and something furtive about him. Not the face of someone you’d be inclined to trust, and—

He shot out a hand, groped for the remote. By the time he’d triggered the Mute button it was too late, the picture was gone, and the news itself gone with it. They played a commercial, one Keller especially hated, the one with the moth coming in to assure the sleeping woman of eight hours of restful sleep. Any woman he’d ever known, a moth came in and settled on her face, what she’d do was leap up and start screaming, then pick up a broom and chase the thing all over the house.

He looked for a button to push to back the thing up, but this was TiVo-less TV, and you had to watch everything in real time. And he’d missed it, but who said CNN was the only game in town? He began switching channels, getting half-second glimpses of everything from a lacrosse match to a Texas Hold-’Em tournament, from a rerun of The Match Game to a hair replacement infomercial, and before he knew it he’d run the table and was back at CNN, staring once again at his own picture on the screen.

Furtive? Is that how he’d seen himself? No he just looked a little tentative, as if he was trying to work out what he was doing there, with his face on national TV for all the world to see.

The sound was on now, and somebody was saying something, but he couldn’t take it in; it was all he could do to look at his own unfortunate face and the caption under it. THE FACE OF A KILLER, it said.

5

The first thing he did was call Dot. After all the years they’d worked together, that was pretty much an automatic reaction. He picked up the phone, hit Redial, and let it ring. Voice mail cut in after the fourth ring, and he sat there with his mouth open for a long moment, then decided it was pointless to leave a message. He closed the phone and sat there, looking at the TV some more.

Ten minutes later he was in the bathroom, taking a shower.

He’d resisted the idea at first, deeming it a waste of time, but what else was he going to do with his time? Waste some more of it staring at the TV, switching channels until he found one that would proclaim his innocence? Hop in the car and make a run for it? Drive over to Dowling’s house and strangle him with his garden hose? He’d showered that morning, he didn’t really need a shower, but who could say when he’d get the chance to shower again? Maybe he’d be living in subway tunnels and sleeping in his clothes, maybe he’d be hopping freight trains. He might as well stay as clean as possible for as long as he could.

Or was he running a risk by showering? Hair from his head or his body could wind up going down the drain and get caught in the trap, and a CSI crew could recover it and determine his DNA. But he’d already showered several times in the course of his stay, so the trap was probably overflowing with his DNA.

For a moment he considered opening the drain himself and trying to get rid of the evidence, but then it struck him that DNA was the least of his worries. They already had his fingerprints, so what possible difference could it make if they had his DNA as well? Once they picked him up, once they got their hands on him, he was finished. DNA wasn’t going to figure in the equation.

He got out of the shower and stood in front of the sink and shaved. He’d already done so a few hours ago, he could barely feel any stubble even against the grain, but when would he get to shave again? And why not leave a little more DNA in the sink trap, just for the hell of it?

He got dressed, and packed his bag. He might not be going anywhere, not until he figured out what to do next and when to do it, but it wouldn’t hurt to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

His bag was black, like everybody else’s, and had wheels and a handle. It was small enough to carry onto an airplane, and would fit easily in an overhead compartment, but nowadays he always checked it because anything as dangerous as a pair of stamp tongs or as potentially explosive as a tube of hair gel would send the airport security people into a frenzy. And when they spotted his Swiss Army knife they’d call out the National Guard.

If he’d known he was going to be checking it all the time, he’d have bought another color. It seemed to him that three out of four bags coming down the baggage carousel were essentially indistinguishable from his, and he’d come to envy the few garishly colored ones that you saw now and then. To make it a little easier to find his own bag, he’d bought a flame-orange device to wrap around the handle, and it helped. Dot had assured him it would serve a dual purpose; it might help keep some hunter from mistaking his suitcase for a deer.

Dot. He picked up the phone, hesitated, then hit Redial. It rang four times and switched him to voice mail, with a computerized voice inviting him to leave a message. Once again he decided against it, and was about to ring off when he noticed an icon on the screen indicating that he’d received a voice mail message himself. It took him a moment to remember how to retrieve it.