by Dean Koontz
“No,” Ethan agreed, falling into their old rhythm, “it’s the principle of the thing. And it’s a hate crime.”
“Definitely a felony hate crime under the California Criminal Code,” Hazard deadpanned.
“For the duration of the season,” Ethan said, “we’re assigned to the Ornament and Manger Scene Defacement Response Team.”
“That’s a division,” Hazard added, “of the Christmas Spirit Task Force established pursuant to the Anti-Hate Act of 2001.”
A tentative smile crept across Sheen’s face as he cocked his head first at Ethan, then at Hazard. “You’re goofing me, right, doing Dragnet.”
Employing the intense and disapproving stare with which he could wither everything from hard-case thugs to flower arrangements, Hazard said, “Are you a Christian hater, Mr. Sheen?”
Sheen’s creeping smile froze before it fully formed. “What?”
“Do you,” Ethan asked, “believe in freedom of religion or are you one of those who think the United States Constitution guarantees you freedom from religion?”
Blinking the smile out of his eyes, licking it off his lips, the paramedic said, “Sure, of course, freedom of religion, who doesn’t believe in it?”
“If we were to obtain a warrant to search your residence right now,” Hazard said, “would we find a collection of anti-Christian hate literature, Mr. Sheen?”
“What? Me? I don’t hate anybody. I’m a get-along guy. What’re you talking about?”
“Would we find bomb-making materials?” Ethan asked.
As Sheen’s smirk had frozen and cracked apart under Hazard’s cold stare, so now the color drained from his face, leaving him as gray as the unpainted concrete walls of the ambulance garage.
Backing away from Hazard and Ethan, raising his hands as if to call a time-out, Sheen said, “What is this? Are you serious? This is crazy. What—there’s a two-dollar Christmas ornament missing, so I should get a lawyer?”
“If you have one,” Hazard said solemnly, “maybe you’d be smart to give him a call.”
Still not sure what to believe, Sheen backed away another step, two, then pivoted from them and hurried toward the dayroom in which ambulance crews waited to be dispatched.
“SWAT team, my ass,” Hazard grumbled.
Ethan smiled. “You da man.”
“You da man.”
Ethan had forgotten how much easier life could be with backup, especially backup with a sense of humor.
“You should rejoin the force,” Hazard said as they crossed the garage toward the doors to the garden-room corridor. “We could save the world, have some fun.”
On the stairs to the upper level of the public garage, Ethan said, “Supposing all this craziness stops sooner or later—being gut shot but not, the bells, the voice on the phone, a guy walking into your closet mirror. You think it’s possible just to go back to the usual cop stuff like nothing strange ever happened?”
“What am I supposed to do—become a monk?”
“Seems like this ought to…change things.”
“I’m happy who I am,” Hazard said. “I’m already as cool as cool gets. Don’t you think I’m cool to the chromosomes?”
“You’re walking ice.”
“Not to say I don’t have heat.”
“Not to say,” Ethan agreed.
“I’ve got plenty of heat.”
“You’re so cool, you’re hot.”
“Exactly. So there’s no reason for me to change unless maybe I meet Jesus, and He slaps me upside the head.”
They weren’t in a graveyard, weren’t whistling, but the tenor of their words, echoing off the crypt-cold walls of the stairwell, brought to Ethan’s mind old movie images of boys masking their fear with bravado as they journeyed through a cemetery at high midnight.
CHAPTER 56
ON A GRINDSTONE OF SELF-DENIAL, WITH THE diligence of a true obsessive, Brittina Dowd had sharpened herself into a long thin blade. When she walked, her clothes seemed certain to be cut to shreds by the scissoring movement of her body.
Her hips had been honed until they were almost as fragile as bird bones. Her legs resembled those of a flamingo. Her arms had no more substance than wings stripped of their feathers. Brittina seemed to be determined to whittle herself until a brisk breeze could carry her aloft, high into the realm of wren and sparrow.
She was not a single blade, in fact, but an entire Swiss Army knife with all its cutting edges and pointed tools deployed.
Corky Laputa might have loved her if she had not also been ugly.
Although he didn’t love Brittina, he made love to her. The disorder into which she had shaped her skeletal body thrilled him. This was like making love to Death.
Only twenty-six, she had assiduously prepared herself for early-onset osteoporosis, as though she yearned to be shattered in a fall, reduced to fragments as completely as a crystal vase knocked off a shelf onto a stone floor.
In their passion, Corky always expected to be punctured by one of her knees or elbows, or to hear Brittina crack apart beneath him.
“Do me,” she said, “do me,” and managed to make it sound less like an invitation to sex than like a request for assisted suicide.
Her bed was narrow, suitable only for a sleeper who did not toss and turn, who lay as unmoving as the average occupant of a casket, by far too narrow for the wild rutting of which they both were capable.
She had furnished the room with a single bed because she’d never had a lover and had expected to remain a virgin. Corky had romanced her as easily as he could have crushed a hummingbird in his fist.
The narrow bed stood in a room on the top floor of a narrow two-story Victorian house. The lot was deep but too narrow to qualify as a residential building site under current city codes.
Almost sixty years ago, just after the war, an eccentric dog fancier had designed and built the curious place. He lived in it with two greyhounds and two whippets.
Eventually he’d been paralyzed by a stroke. After several days passed during which their master had not fed them, the starving dogs ate him.
That had been forty years ago. The subsequent history of this residence at times had been as colorful and on occasion nearly as grisly as the life and ghastly death of its first owner.
The vibe of the house caught Brittina’s attention just like the high-frequency shriek of a dog whistle might have pricked the ears of a whippet. She’d purchased it with a portion of an inheritance that she received from her paternal grandmother.
Brittina was a graduate student at the same university that had provided multigeneration employment for the Laputa family. In another eighteen months, she would earn a doctorate in American literature, which she largely despised.
Although she had not blown her entire inheritance on the house, she needed to supplement her investment income with other revenue. She had served as a graduate assistant to keep herself in chocolate-flavored Slim-Fast and ipecac.
Then, six months ago, Channing Manheim’s personal assistant had approached the chairperson of the university’s English department to explain that a new tutor would be required for the famous actor’s son. Only academicians of the highest caliber need apply.
The chairperson consulted Corky, who was vice-chairperson of the department, and Corky recommended Ms. Dowd.
He’d known that she would be hired because, first of all, the idiot movie star would be impressed by her dramatic appearance. Cadaverous paleness, a gaunt face, and the body of an anorexic nun would be seen as proof that Brittina cared little for the pleasures of the flesh, that she enjoyed largely a life of the mind, that she was therefore a genuine intellectual.
In the entertainment business, only image mattered. Manheim would believe, therefore, that appearance equaled reality in other professions, as well.
Furthermore, Brittina Dowd was an intellectual snob who peppered her speech with academic jargon more impenetrable than the lab-speak of microbiologists. If the young woman’s emacia
tion didn’t convince the movie star of her intellectual credentials, her big words would.
The evening before Brittina went to her job interview, Corky poured on charm as thick as clotted cream, and she at once proved to be famished not only for food but also for flattery. She allowed herself to indulge her appetite for adoration, and Corky bedded her then for the first time.
Ultimately, she became Aelfric Manheim’s tutor in English and literature, making regularly scheduled visits to Palazzo Rospo.
Prior to this, Rolf Reynerd and Corky had discussed, in general terms, the blow that might be struck in the name of social disorder by proving that even a celebrity of worldwide renown was vulnerable to the agents of chaos. They had not been able to settle on an ideal target until Corky’s lover was hired by Channing Manheim.
From Brittina, in bed and out, Corky had learned much about the Manheim estate. Indeed, she disclosed the existence of Line 24—and, more important, told him about the security guard, Ned Hokenberry, valiant defender of Peaches and Herb, who according to Fric had been dismissed for leaving phony messages from the dead on that answering machine.
Brittina had also painted for Corky a detailed psychological portrait of Channing’s son. This would be invaluable when, with Aelfric prisoner, he proceeded to destroy the boy emotionally.
In the afterglow of insect-frenzy sex, Brittina never once had been suspicious that Corky’s interest in all things Manheim might be related to anything other than simple curiosity. She was an unwitting conspirator, a naive girl in love.
“Do me,” Brittina insisted now, “do me,” and Corky obliged.
Wind battered the narrow house and hard rain lashed its skinny flanks, and on the narrow bed, Brittina thrashed like an agitated mantis.
This time, in their dreamy postcoital cuddle, Corky had no need to ask questions related to Manheim. He had more information on that subject than he needed to know.
As occasionally was her wont, Brittina drifted into a monologue about the uselessness of literature: the antiquated nature of the written word; the coming triumph of image over language; those ideas that she called memes, which supposedly spread like viruses from mind to mind, creating new ways of thinking in society.
Corky figured that his brain would explode if she didn’t shut up, after which he would need a new way to think.
Eventually, Brittina clattered up from their love nest with the intention of rattling off to the bathroom.
Reaching under the bed, Corky retrieved the pistol where earlier he had hidden it.
When he shot her twice in the back, he half expected Brittina to shatter into bone splinters and dust, as if she were an ancient mummy made brittle by two centuries of dehydration, but she only dropped dead in a pale, angular heap.
CHAPTER 57
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.
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 mid-whirl. 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 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 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.”
CHAPTER 58
THE THINLY DRESSED BONES, TUMBLED ON THE floor, issued no cry of surprise, no groan, no meme.
To be sure that Brittina was dead, Corky wanted to shoot her once more, this time in the back of the head. Unfortunately, his pistol had begun to bark.
Even the highest quality sound suppressor deteriorates with use. Regardless of the material used as baffling in the barrel extension, it compacts a little with each shot, diminishing in function.
Furthermore, Corky didn’t possess a suppressor of the quality employed by agents of the CIA. You could not expect materials and craftsmanship equal to those of a major firearms manufacturer when you purchased a silencer from anti-veal activists.
He had popped Hokenberry six times and Brittina twice. In just eight shots, the pistol had begun to find its voice again.
Perhaps the most recent round had not been audible outside the narrow house, but the next report would be louder. He was a man who took calculated risks, but this one didn’t add up.
In the trunk of his car, in the tool kit, he kept a fresh sound suppressor, as well as a pair of night-vision goggles and a kit of hypodermic syringes with vials of sedatives and poisons. And two live hand grenades.
As always, however, he had parked a few blocks from Brittina’s house, on a street different from hers. Because Corky was a tenured professor and she was a student, they had been assiduously discreet about their romantic relationship.
