The Face[脸]
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DURING THE YEARS THEY’D BEEN OFFICIAL partners, Ethan and Hazard had gone by the book as much as it is ever possible to go by a book that is written largely by people who have never done the job.
On this December day, however, unofficially partners once more, they were bad boys. Being bad boys made Ethan uneasy, but it gave him the comforting feeling that at least they were taking control of the situation.
A notice on Rolf Reynerd’s door warned that Apartment 2B was the site of an ongoing police investigation. The premises remained off-limits to all but authorized personnel of the police department and the district attorney’s office.
They ignored the warning.
The deadbolt lock on Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door was covered with a police seal. Ethan cracked it, peeled it.
Hazard had with him a Lockaid lock-release gun, an item sold exclusively to law-enforcement agencies. In ordinary circumstances, he would have requisitioned this device with the proper paperwork, specifying the exact intended use, virtually always with reference to an existing search warrant.
[391] These were not ordinary circumstances.
Hazard had gotten his hands on one of the department’s Lockaids by unconventional means. He would be walking a razor’s edge between righteousness and ruin until he returned the device to the equipment locker where it belonged.
“When you’re up against some mojo man who fades into mirrors,” he said, “your ass is hanging over a cliff anyway.”
Hazard slid the thin pick of the Lockaid into the key channel of the deadbolt, under the pin tumblers. He squeezed the trigger four times before the steel spring in the gun managed to lodge all the pins at the shear line and thereby fully disengage the lock.
Ethan followed Hazard into the apartment, closing the door behind them. He tried to step around and over the stains—Reynerd’s blood—that marred the white carpet just inside the threshold.
He had spilled rivers of his own blood on this carpet. Died on it. The experience rose in memory, too vivid to have been a dream.
The black-and-white furnishings, art, and decorations proved to be as he remembered them.
On the walls, a flock of pigeons was frozen in midwhirl. Like white chalk checks on gray slate, geese flew across a somber sky, and a parliament of owls perched on a barn roof, deliberating over the fate of mice.
Hazard had been present the previous night during the first search of the apartment. He knew what had been collected as possible evidence and what had been left behind.
He went directly to that corner of the living room in which stood a black-lacquered desk with faux-ivory drawer pulls. “What we need is probably here,” he said, and searched the drawers from top to bottom.
Crows on an iron fence, an eagle on a rock, a fierce-eyed heron as prehistoric as a pterodactyl: All peered into this living room from other times, other places.
Paranoid and unashamed of it, Ethan sensed that when he looked away from the large photographs, the birds therein turned their heads [392] to watch him, all aware that he ought to be dead and that the man who had collected their images should be alive to admire them.
“Here,” Hazard said, withdrawing a shoebox from one of the desk drawers. “Bank statements, canceled checks.”
They sat at the stainless-steel and black-Formica dinette table to review Reynerd’s financial records.
Beside the table: a window. Beyond the window: the tumultuous day, entirely in shades of gray, wind-whipped, awash, now without the thunder and lightning, yet still foreboding, dark and dire.
The light proved too dim to facilitate their work. Hazard got up and switched on the small black-and-white ceramic chandelier over the table.
Eleven bundles of checks had been bound with rubber bands, one for each month of the current year from January through November. The canceled checks from the current month would not be forwarded by the bank until mid-January.
When they finished, they would have to return everything to the shoebox and replace the box in the desk drawer exactly as Hazard found it. Sam Kesselman, the detective assigned to Mina Reynerd’s murder, would no doubt review these same checks when he recovered from the flu, returned to work after Christmas, and read the dead actor’s partial screenplay.
If they waited for Kesselman, however, Channing Manheim might by then be dead. And Ethan, too.
They needed to look through only those checks written in the first eight months of the year, prior to Mina Reynerd’s murder.
Hazard took four months’ worth of checks. He pushed four packets across the table to Ethan.
In the screenplay, an out-of-work and underappreciated actor had taken an acting class at a university, where he’d met a professor with whom he had devised a scheme to kill the biggest movie star in the world. If the fictional academic had been inspired by a murderous [393] professor in real life, a tuition check might suggest an institution of higher learning at which the search should begin.
Soon they discovered that Rolf Reynerd had been a fiend for continuing education. His entries on the memo line of each check were meticulous and helpful. In the first eight months of the year, he’d attended a pair of three-day weekend conferences on acting, another on screenwriting, a one-day seminar on publicity and self-promotion, and two university-extension courses in American literature.
“Six possibilities,” Hazard said. “I guess we’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
“The sooner we check them out, the better,” Ethan agreed. “But Manheim doesn’t return from Florida until Thursday afternoon.”
“So?”
“We’ve got tomorrow yet.”
Hazard looked past Ethan, at the window, and gazed into the storm, as though he were reading rain with the same expectation of meaning that a soothsayer might bring to the reading of sodden tea leaves.
After consideration, he said, “Maybe we shouldn’t absolutely count on tomorrow. I get the feeling we’re running out of time.”
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