The Face (35 page)

CHAPTER 57

D
URING 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

T
HE 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.

Going to and from the BMW to secure a replacement suppressor seemed like an unnecessary complication. Instead, he crouched beside his riddled lover and felt her throat, trying to detect a pulse in her carotid artery.

She was as dead as disco.

In the bathroom, Corky washed his genitals, hands, and face. To be in love with chaos, one did not have to be scornful of good personal hygiene.

From the medicine cabinet, he withdrew a large bottle of Scope mouthwash. With Brittina dead and quite incapable of being offended, Corky took a swig directly from the container, and gargled.

Her kisses left him with a bad taste.

As a result of Brittina’s habit of fasting more than not, she had frequently been in a state of ketosis, during which her body was forced to burn what meager stores of fat it might have been jealously guarding. Among the symptoms of ketosis are nausea and vomiting, but a more pleasant symptom is sweet, fruity-smelling breath.

Corky enjoyed the fragrance of her breath, but after swapping a lot of spit, tongue to tongue, he was sometimes left with a sour aftertaste. Like all things in an imperfect world, lovemaking always comes with a price.

In this case, of course, the price had been greater for Brittina than for him.

He dressed quickly. In his stocking feet, he descended the narrow stairs to the cramped kitchen at the back of the house.

His yellow slicker and rain hat hung on a wall peg in the small screened porch off the kitchen. His black boots stood to one side of the slicker.

Rain crashed in such heavy cascades upon the porch roof that it sounded like a downpour in the jungled tropics. He half expected to see grinning crocodiles in the backyard and pythons slithering in the trees.

He slipped the pistol into one of the capacious pockets of the slicker. From another pocket he withdrew a length of flexible rubber tubing and an object that resembled a snack-size container of yogurt, though it was black with a red lid and featured no illustrations of luscious fruit.

With no reason remaining to be respectful of Brittina’s clean floors, he pulled on his boots and returned to the house. The deep wet tread of his rubber soles squeaked on the vinyl tile in the kitchen.

His work was not yet completed. He had left behind evidence that would convict him of murder. Semen, hair, fingerprints—all must be eliminated.

From the day that he’d begun visiting this pinched place, months previously, he had gone without the latex gloves that he customarily wore at the scenes of capital crimes. Even though Brittina Dowd was nothing if not an eccentric, she would surely have grown suspicious of a lover who at all times wore surgical gloves.

Steeper and narrower stairs than any others in the house led down from the kitchen to a garage in which three of the four walls were underground. Gloom gathered here as luxuriously as ever it had coiled in any catacomb or dungeon.

Corky could almost hear a multitude of spiders plucking their silken harp strings.

Four small windows in the garage door would have admitted some sun on a classic California day. Now the gray storm gloom could not penetrate the dusty glass.

He switched on a bare bulb overhead, providing hardly enough light by which to drain the god of Zoroastrianism.

The god of Zoroastrianism is Ahura Mazda. Brittina’s car was a Mazda, without the Ahura, but Corky enjoyed his little joke anyway.

From the trunk, he removed four hairspray-size aerosol cans with any one of which a stranded motorist could inflate a flat tire and at the same time seal the puncture in it. He set these aside and then took from the trunk a pair of empty two-gallon gasoline cans.

He had purchased these items for Brittina, in addition to road flares and a yellow pennant emblazoned with EMERGENCY in bold black letters, and had insisted that she keep them in the trunk of her Zoroastrian god at all times.

She had been touched by his concern and had said that diamonds would not have proved his love as surely as did these humble gifts. They were, in fact, part of his preparations to dispose of her body when the day arrived to kill her.

Corky would never deny that he could be brilliantly romantic when required, but greater than his flair for romance was his talent for meticulous preparation. Whether he was roasting a Thanksgiving turkey or murdering an inconvenient lover, or scheming to kidnap the son of the biggest movie star in the world, he approached the task with considerable thought and patience, taking all the time necessary to develop a flawless strategy as well as tactics certain to ensure success.

She had never asked why
two
fuel cans, when one would have been all that she could easily carry. He had
known
that she would not ask or even wonder, for she had been a woman of images and memes and utopian dreams, not one with an interest in math or logic.

He set the empty two-gallon cans on the floor. He fed a shorter end of rubber tubing into the fuel port of the car. A suck on the longer end was required to prime the siphon.

Much practice at this sort of thing ensured that Corky drew as little fumes into his lungs as possible and that none of Shell Oil’s finest got in his mouth. The flow came quickly as he tucked the longer end into the first can.

When four gallons had been drawn and both cans filled, Corky carried the containers up to the ground floor. He left the trailing end of the siphon to spill a stream of gasoline on the garage floor.

He returned for the four aerosol cans. In the kitchen, he placed two of these on the lowest rack of the bottom oven. He left the other two on the lowest rack of the top oven.

On his way upstairs with one of the two-gallon cans, he switched off the thermostat on the main floor, and then the thermostat on the upper floor. This would prevent the electric starter from striking a spark in the natural-gas furnace and possibly triggering an explosion of accumulated gasoline fumes before Corky had left the house.

Leaving the cap on the can, pouring from the spout, he liberally splashed the pale naked body of Brittina Dowd. Her long hair offered tinder, but she didn’t have much fat to feed the fire.

After pouring no more than a quart of fuel in the bathroom, he distributed perhaps half a gallon over the rumpled bedclothes. He didn’t prime the two other small upstairs rooms because he’d never been in them and because he didn’t need to saturate every corner to achieve the effect he wanted.

From the bedroom he drizzled an uninterrupted gasoline trail into the narrow upstairs hallway and down the stairs to the ground floor. At the bottom of the steps, he cast aside the empty can and picked up the full one.

He continued in a looping fashion through the living room and the dining room, to the kitchen doorway. There he set the can on the threshold. He unscrewed the cap and tossed it aside.

From a jacket pocket, he retrieved the black-and-red object that was about the size of a single-serving yogurt container: a chemical-action detonator.

The casing of the detonator was somewhat pliable. He shaped it into the hole that had been covered by the screw-on cap, plugging the two-gallon can in which approximately half a gallon of gasoline remained.

He popped a ring tab off the red cap. This initiated a chemical process that would rapidly generate heat and, in four minutes, an explosion fiery enough to ignite the remaining contents of the two-gallon can and the trail of fuel leading away from it to the bedroom on the second floor, to the corpse.

This would be a bad time for the doorbell to ring.

No chimes sounded, of course, because in addition to his fine strategy, solid tactics, and meticulous preparation, he could count on Laputa luck. His guardian angel was chaos, and he was always at the safe calm eye of its world-destroying force.

He returned to the ovens and latched both doors as required to initiate the self-cleaning cycle. On each he pressed a button marked
CLEAN.

Heat would rapidly expand the pressurized contents of the cans, which would explode. Because the doors were latched, the power of the explosions couldn’t easily be vented. The resultant damage to the ovens might be severe enough to cause a natural-gas leak and a larger blast.

The utter destruction of the house didn’t require the oven trick to work. The four gallons of high-grade accelerant that he had poured throughout the small structure and the additional gallons pooling on the garage floor would feed the flames and obliterate every source of his DNA, from semen to hairs, and every fingerprint that he’d left behind. Nonetheless, he believed in redundancy whenever possible.

On the back porch, Corky shrugged into his voluminous yellow slicker. He jammed the droopy rain hat on his head.

He pushed through the screen door and went down the steps. At the end of the backyard, he passed through a gate into an alleyway and never glanced again at the narrow house.

He thrived in the rain.

Cataracts gushed from the sky. The racing torrents in the gutters overflowed the curbs.

This downpour would not quench the fire that he had engineered. The gasoline-fed flames would thoroughly gut the wooden structure before the walls collapsed and offered admission to the rain.

Indeed, the storm was his ally. Badly flooded intersections and snarled traffic would delay the fire engines.

He had just turned a corner and come within sight of his BMW when he heard the first explosion in the distance. The sound was low, flat, muffled, but ugly.

Soon he would have erased everyone and every clue that might have led the police to him after the assault on Palazzo Rospo.