The Face (41 page)

CHAPTER 70

A
LTHOUGH FRIGHTENED, BITTER, AND STRUGGLING against despair, Rachel Dalton remained a lovely woman, with lustrous chestnut hair and blue eyes mysterious in their depths.

She was also, in Hazard’s experience, uncommonly considerate. Having agreed by phone to an interview, she had prepared coffee by the time he arrived. She served it in the living room with a plate of miniature muffins and butter cookies.

In the line of duty, homicide detectives were rarely offered refreshments, never with damask napkins. Especially not from the wives of missing men for whom the police had done embarrassingly little.

Maxwell Dalton, as it turned out, had vanished three months earlier. Rachel had reported him missing when he had been four hours late from an afternoon class at the university.

The police, of course, had not been interested in an adult who was missing only four hours, nor had they been intrigued when he’d not shown up in a day, two days, or three.

“Apparently,” Rachel told Hazard, “we’re living in a time when a shocking number of husbands—and wives—go off on drug binges or just suddenly decide to spend a week in Puerto Vallarta with some tart they met at Starbucks ten minutes ago, or walk out on their lives altogether without warning. When I tried to explain Maxwell, they couldn’t believe in him—a husband so reliable. They were sure he would turn up in time, with bloodshot eyes, a sheepish look, and a venereal disease.”

Eventually, when Maxwell Dalton had been gone long enough for even contemporary authorities to consider the length of his absence unusual, the police had allowed the official filing of a missing-persons report. This had led to little or no activity in search of the man, which had frustrated Rachel, for she had wrongly assumed that a missing-persons case triggered an investigation only a degree less vigorous than a homicide.

“Not when it’s an adult,” Hazard said, “and not when there are no indications of violence. If they had found his abandoned car…”

His car had not been found, however, nor his discarded wallet stripped of cash, nor any item that might have indicated foul play. He had vanished with no more trace than any ship that had sailed into but not out of the Bermuda Triangle.

Hazard said, “I’m sure you’ve been asked already, but did your husband have any enemies?”

“He’s a good man,” Rachel said, as he expected she would. Then she added what he had not expected, “And like all good people in a dark world, of course he has enemies.”

“Who?”

“A gang of thugs at that sewer they call a university. Oh, I shouldn’t be so harsh. Many good people work there. Unfortunately, the English Department is in the hands of scoundrels and lunatics.”

“You think someone in the department might…”

“Not likely,” Rachel admitted. “They’re all talk, those people, and meaningless talk at that.” She offered more coffee, and when he declined, she said, “What was the name of the man whose death you’re investigating?”

He had told her only enough to get through her door; and he did not intend to elaborate now. He hadn’t even mentioned that already he had chased down and shot Reynerd’s killer. “Rolf Reynerd. He was shot in West Hollywood yesterday.”

“Do you think his case might be related to my husband’s? I mean, by more than the fact that he took Max’s class in literature?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “But unlikely. I wouldn’t…”

Oddly enough, a sad smile rendered her more lovely. “I won’t, Detective,” she said, responding to what he had been hesitant to say. “I won’t get my hopes up. But damn if I’ll let them fade, either.”

As Hazard rose to leave, the doorbell rang. The caller proved to be an older black woman with white hair and the most elegant hands he had ever seen, slender and long-fingered and as supple as those of a young girl. The piano teacher, come to give a lesson to the Daltons’ ten-year-old daughter.

Drawn by the music of her teacher’s voice, Emily, the girl, came downstairs in time to be introduced to Hazard before he left. She had her mother’s loveliness but not yet as much steel in her spine as her mother did, for her lower lip trembled and her eyes clouded when she said, “You’re going to find my father, aren’t you?”

“We’re going to try hard,” Hazard assured her, speaking for the department, hoping that what he said would not prove to be a lie.

After he crossed the threshold and stepped onto the front porch, he turned to Rachel Dalton, in the doorway. “The next name on my list is a colleague of your husband’s, from the English Department. Maybe you know him. Vladimir Laputa.”

As sadness did not diminish Rachel’s loveliness, neither did anger. “Among all those hyenas, he’s the worst. Max despised…despises him. Six weeks ago, Mr. Laputa paid me a visit, to express his sympathy and concern that there’d been no news of Max. I swear…the weasel was feeling me out to see if I’d grown lonely in my bed.”

“Good Lord,” Hazard said.

“Ruthlessness, Detective Yancy, is no less a quality of the average university academic than of the average member of a street gang. It’s just expressed differently. The day of the genteel scholar in his ivory tower, interested only in art and truth, is long gone.”

“Recently I’ve begun to suspect as much,” he told her, though he would never reveal that, for want of a better candidate, her husband had risen to the top of his list of suspects in the matter of the threat to Channing Manheim.

He found it difficult to believe that a woman like Rachel and a girl like Emily could love a man who was not exactly—and all—that he appeared to be.

Nevertheless, Maxwell Dalton’s disappearance might, in fact, mean that he
had
started a new life, a demented one that included making threats against celebrities either with the intent to do harm or in the naive hope that intimidation could serve extortion.

Even setting aside bells out of dreams and men into mirrors, Hazard Yancy had seen stranger things in his career than a once-honest professor, a man of reason, gone bad, made mad by envy, by greed.

The Daltons lived in a good neighborhood, but Laputa lived in a better one, less than fifteen minutes from their door.

The early winter twilight had crept in behind the storm while Hazard had been having coffee with Rachel Dalton. Dusk drained all light from the day as he drove to Professor Laputa’s place, until the low clouds were no longer gray and backlit, but sour yellow and underlit by the rising radiance of the city.

He parked across the street from the home of the reputed worst of all academic hyenas, switched off the headlights and windshield wipers, but left the engine running to keep the heater in action. Local kids wouldn’t be building snow forts; but with the coming of night, the air had grown wintry by southern-California standards.

He’d been unable to reach the professor by phone. Now, although the Laputa house was dark, he tried again.

As he let the number ring, Hazard noticed a pedestrian turn the corner at the end of the block, on the far side of the street, coming in the direction of the Laputa residence.

Something was wrong about the guy. He had neither an umbrella nor a raincoat. The downpour had diminished to a steady, businesslike drenching, but it was not weather in which anyone went for a stroll. And that was another thing: The guy didn’t hurry.

Attitude, however, was what really cranked up the Hazard Yancy suspicion machine. If the guy had been a sponge, he’d have been so saturated with attitude that he couldn’t have made room for one drop of rain.

He swaggered under the streetlamps, not like genuine tough guys sometimes swaggered, but as movie stars swaggered when they thought they were getting the tough-guy thing just right. His gray pants, black turtleneck, and black leather coat were soaked, but he seemed to
defy
the rain.

Theatrical. In this weather no other pedestrians were in sight, and at the moment no traffic moved on this quiet residential street, yet the guy appeared to be performing without an audience, for his own amusement.

Tired of listening to Laputa’s phone ring, Hazard pressed
END
on his cell keypad.

The pedestrian appeared to be talking to himself, although from across the street Hazard could not be certain of this.

When he rolled down his window and cocked his head to listen, he was defeated by the drumming of the rain. He caught a few snatches of the voice and thought the guy might be singing, though he couldn’t recognize either tune or lyrics.

To Hazard’s surprise, the swaggering man left the sidewalk and followed the driveway at the Laputa house. He must have been carrying a remote control, because the segmented garage door rolled up to admit him, and then at once closed.

Hazard put up the car window. He watched the house.

After two minutes, a single soft light appeared toward the back of the residence, in what might have been the kitchen. Perhaps half a minute later, another light came on upstairs.

Whether or not the lover of rain was Vladimir Laputa, he knew his way around the professor’s house.

CHAPTER 71

F
ROM THE ENTRANCE ROTUNDA, AT A WINDOW beside the front door, Ethan watched as Mr. Hachette’s car dwindled along the driveway, into the tintack rain and the riddled darkness. The chef had been the last member of the day staff to leave.

Set flush in one wall of the rotunda, tucked discretely near a corner, a dark display screen brightened when Ethan lightly pressed one finger to it. This was a Crestron touch-control unit by which he could access all the computerized features of the house: the heating and air-conditioning, the music system, the gas heating for swimming pools and spas, both the in-house and landscape lighting, the phone system, and much more.

Crestron panels were positioned throughout the mansion, but the same features could also be controlled from any computer work station, such as the one in Ethan’s study.

After Ethan activated the screen with a touch, three columns of icons were presented for his consideration. He tapped the one that represented the exterior surveillance cameras.

Because eighty-six outdoor cameras were positioned across the estate, he was next presented with eighty-six designating numbers. For the most part, to obtain quickly a view of any specific portion of the grounds, you had to have memorized the numbers—at least those that, in your particular staff position, you were most likely to use frequently.

He touched 03, and the Crestron screen at once filled with a view of the main gate as seen from outside the estate wall. This was the same camera that had captured Rolf Reynerd delivering the package that contained the doll’s eye in the apple.

The gate rolled open. Mr. Hachette’s car drove off the grounds, onto the public street, turned right, and disappeared from the frame.

As the front gate rolled shut, Ethan touched the screen and exited the exterior-camera menu. He pressed the icon for the house alarm system.

Not all staff members were authorized to activate and deactivate the alarm; consequently, the screen requested Ethan’s password. He entered it, was granted access, and set the house-perimeter alarm.

All public areas of the mansion—virtually everything except bedrooms, bathrooms, and staff quarters—featured motion detectors that would register the passage of anyone moving along a hallway or through a room. They were activated 24/7, but were actually linked to the alarm only when it was in the “nobody-home mode,” when the house was entirely deserted, a rare occurrence.

With Fric and Ethan in residence, if the motion detectors had been linked to the alarm, the breach siren would have gone off every time that they passed through a monitored space or so much as made a gesture with one hand.

All he needed was the assurance that the siren would sound if a door or window were opened. This precaution, along with the team of guards monitoring the additional layers of detection on the grounds beyond the house, ensured that no one could set upon him or Fric by surprise.

Nevertheless, he didn’t want Fric to sleep alone on the third floor. Not tonight, not tomorrow night, not anytime soon.

Either they would make arrangements for the kid to camp out on the ground floor or Ethan would spend the night in the living room of Fric’s third-floor suite. He intended to discuss the matter with the boy after dinner.

Meanwhile, for the first time since returning home, he went to his apartment, to his study, to the desk where he had left the three silvery bells. They were gone.

In the deepest garage at Our Lady of Angels, when he had found only a single set of bells missing from the ambulance, he’d suspected that the set currently in Hazard’s possession was the same one that he had found in his hand outside Forever Roses.

The phantom that he had seen in the bathroom mirror at Dunny’s apartment, the phantom that had vanished into a mirror in Hazard’s bedroom, had somehow come here during the night, as Ethan slept, had taken the bells, and had transferred them to Hazard, for reasons that were mysterious if not forever beyond understanding. And the phantom, more likely than not, was Dunny Whistler, dead but risen.

Ethan marveled that he could stand here, entertaining such bizarre thoughts, and still be sane. At least he believed himself to be sane. He might be wrong about that.

Although the bells were gone, the items from the black boxes remained on display. He sat at the desk and studied the six parts of the riddle, hoping for enlightenment.

Ladybugs, snails, a jar containing ten foreskins, the cookie jar full of Scrabble tiles—
OWE, WOE
—a book about guide dogs, the eye in the apple…

On better days, in a better mood, he’d been unable to make sense of these messages. He hoped that in his current state of wound-tight tension and mental exhaustion, his intellectual fences might fall away, allowing him suddenly to see everything from a new perspective and to understand what before had seemed indecipherable.

No luck.

He phoned the guards in the security office at the back of the estate, in the groundskeeper’s building. On duty from four until midnight, they were already aware that he had set the house-perimeter alarm earlier than usual, because that action had registered on their displays.

Without giving them a reason, he asked that they be especially alert this evening. “And pass that request along to the guys on the graveyard shift when they get here.”

He phoned Carl Shorter, the chief road warrior who managed the squad of bodyguards protecting the Face in Florida. Shorter had nothing disturbing to report.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Ethan said. “We’ll need to go over new arrangements I’m going to make for your L.A. arrival on Thursday. More security at the airport and all the way here to home base, new procedures, a new route, just in case anyone has tumbled to our usual routine.”

“Is your fan still clean?” Shorter asked.

“No shit’s hit it yet,” Ethan assured him.

“Then what’s up?”

“I told you about the weird gifts in the black boxes. We’ve got an issue related to those, that’s all. It’s containable.”

After signing off with Carl Shorter, Ethan went to the bathroom to shave and freshen up for dinner. He pulled off his sweater, put on a clean shirt.

A few minutes later, standing at the desk in the study, he took one more look at the enigmatic six items.

An indicator light on the phone caught his attention: Line 24, first fluttering and then burning steadily.