THE FACE

DEAN KOONTZ

This book is dedicated to three exceptional men—and to their wives, who have worked so very hard to sculpt them from such rough clay. From the ground up: To Leason and Marlene Pomeroy, to Mike and Edie Martin, and to Jose and Rachel Perez. After The Project, I will not be able to get up in the morning, spend a moment at home during the day, or go to bed at night without thinking of you. I guess I’ll just have to live with that.

The civilized human spirit … cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny.

—Doctor Faustus, THOMAS MANN

Contents

Title Page Dedication Epigraph Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Chapter Forty Seven Chapter Forty Eight Chapter Forty Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty One Chapter Fifty Two Chapter Fifty Three Chapter Fifty Four Chapter Fifty Five Chapter Fifty Six Chapter Fifty Seven Chapter Fifty Eight Chapter Fifty Nine Chapter Sixty Chapter Sixty One Chapter Sixty Two Chapter Sixty Three Chapter Sixty Four Chapter Sixty Five Chapter Sixty Six Chapter Sixty Seven Chapter Sixty Eight Chapter Sixty Nine Chapter Seventy Chapter Seventy One Chapter Seventy Two Chapter Seventy Three Chapter Seventy Four Chapter Seventy Five Chapter Seventy Six Chapter Seventy Seven Chapter Seventy Eight Chapter Seventy Nine Chapter Eighty Chapter Eighty One Chapter Eighty Two Chapter Eighty Three Chapter Eighty Four Chapter Eighty Five Chapter Eighty Six Chapter Eighty Seven Chapter Eighty Eight Chapter Eighty Nine Chapter Ninety Chapter Ninety One Chapter Ninety Two Chapter Ninety Three Chapter Ninety Four Chapter Ninety Five Chapter Ninety Six Note About the Author Also By Dean Koontz Copyright About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

AFTER THE APPLE HAD BEEN CUT IN HALF, the halves had been sewn together with coarse black thread. Ten bold stitches were uniformly spaced. Each knot had been tied with a surgeon’s precision.

The variety of apple, a red delicious, might have significance. Considering that these messages had been delivered in the form of objects and images, never in words, every detail might refine the sender’s meaning, as adjectives and punctuation refined prose.

More likely, however, this apple had been selected because it wasn’t ripe. Softer flesh would have crumbled even if the needle had been used with care and if each stitch had been gently cinched.

Awaiting further examination, the apple stood on the desk in Ethan Truman’s study. The black box in which the apple had been packed also stood on the desk, bristling with shredded black tissue paper. The box had already yielded what clues it contained: none.

Here in the west wing of the mansion, Ethan’s ground-floor apartment was comprised of this study, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. Tall French windows provided a clear view of nothing real.

The previous occupant would have called the study a living room and would have furnished the space accordingly. Ethan did too little living to devote an entire room to it.

With a digital camera, he had photographed the black box before opening it. He had also taken shots of the red delicious from three angles.

He assumed that the apple had been sliced open in order to allow for the insertion of an object into the core. He was reluctant to snip the stitches and to take a look at what might lie within.

Years as a homicide detective had hardened him in some respects. In other ways, too much experience of extreme violence had made him vulnerable.

He was only thirty-seven, but his police career was over. His instincts remained sharp, however, and his darkest expectations were undiminished.

A sough of wind insisted at the French panes. A soft tapping of blown rain.

The languid storm gave him excuse enough to leave the apple waiting and to step to the nearest window.

Frames, jambs, rails, muntins—every feature of every window in the great house had been crafted in bronze. Exposure to the elements promoted a handsome mottled-green patina on exterior surfaces. Inside, diligent maintenance kept the bronze a dark ruby-brown.

The glass in each pane was beveled at every edge. Even in the humblest of service rooms—the scullery, the ground-floor laundry—beveling had been specified.

Although the residence had been built for a film mogul during the last years of the Great Depression, no evidence of a construction budget could be seen anywhere from the entrance foyer to the farthest corner of the last back hall.

When steel sagged, when clothes grew moth-eaten on haberdashery racks, when cars rusted on showroom floors for want of customers, the film industry nevertheless flourished. In bad times as in good, the only two absolute necessities were food and illusions.

From the tall study windows, the view appeared to be a painting of the kind employed in motion-picture matte shots: an exquisitely rendered dimensional scene that, through the deceiving eye of the camera, could serve convincingly as a landscape on an alien planet or as a place on this world perfected as reality never allowed.

Greener than Eden’s fields, acres of lawn rolled away from the house, without one weed or blade of blight. The majestic crowns of immense California live oaks and the drooping boughs of melancholy deodar cedars, each a classic specimen, were silvered and diamonded by the December drizzle.

Through skeins of rain as fine as angel hair, Ethan could see, in the distance, the final curve of the driveway. The gray-green quartzite cobblestones, polished to a sterling standard by the rain, led to the ornamental bronze gate in the estate wall.

During the night, the unwanted visitor had approached the gate on foot. Perhaps suspecting that this barrier had been retrofitted with modern security equipment and that the weight of a climber would trigger an alarm in a monitoring station, he’d slung the package over the high scrolled crest of the gate, onto the driveway.

The box containing the apple had been cushioned by bubble wrap and then sealed in a white plastic bag to protect it further from foul weather. A red gift bow, stapled to the bag, ensured that the contents would not be mistaken for garbage.

Dave Ladman, one of two guards on the graveyard shift, retrieved the delivery at 3:56 a.m. Handling the bag with care, he had carried it to the security office in the groundskeeper’s building at the back of the estate.

Dave and his shift partner, Tom Mack, x-rayed the package with a fluoroscope. They were looking for wires and other metal components of an explosive device or a spring-loaded killing machine.

These days, some bombs could be constructed with no metal parts. Consequently, following fluoroscopy, Dave and Tom employed a trace-scent analyzer capable of recognizing thirty-two explosive compounds from as few as three signature molecules per cubic centimeter of air.

When the package proved clean, the guards unwrapped it. Upon discovering the black gift box, they had left a message on Ethan’s voice mail and had set the delivery aside for his attention.

At 8:35 this morning, one of the two guards on the early shift, Benny Nguyen, had brought the box to Ethan’s apartment in the main house. Benny also arrived with a videocassette containing pertinent segments of tape from perimeter cameras that captured the delivery.

In addition, he offered a traditional Vietnamese clay cooking pot full of his mother’s com tay cam, a chicken-and-rice dish of which Ethan was fond.

“Mom’s been reading candle drippings again,” Benny said. “She lit a candle in your name, read it, says you need to be fortified.”

“For what? The most strenuous thing I do these days is get up in the morning.”

“She didn’t say for what. But not just for Christmas shopping. She had that temple-dragon look when she talked about it.”

“The one that makes pit bulls bare their bellies?”

“That one. She said you need to eat well, say prayers without fail each morning and night, and avoid drinking strong spirits.”

“One problem. Drinking strong spirits is how I pray.”

“I’ll just tell Mom you poured your whiskey down the drain, and when I left, you were on your knees thanking God for making chickens so she could cook com tay cam.”

“Never knew your mom to take no for an answer,” Ethan said.

Benny smiled. “She won’t take yes for an answer, either. She doesn’t expect an answer at all. Only dutiful obedience.”

Now, an hour later, Ethan stood at a window, gazing at the thin rain, like threads of seed pearls, accessorizing the hills of Bel Air.

Watching weather clarified his thinking.

Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings and the plots of dreams.

From his uniform days through his plainclothes career, friends on the force had said that he did too much thinking. Some of them were dead.

The apple had come in the sixth black box received in ten days. The contents of the previous five had been disturbing.

Courses in criminal psychology, combined with years of street experience, made Ethan hard to impress in matters regarding the human capacity for evil. Yet these gifts provoked his deep concern.

In recent years, influenced by the operatically flamboyant villains in films, every common gangbanger and every would-be serial killer, starring in his own mind movie, could not simply do his dirty work and move along. Most seemed to be obsessed with developing a dramatic persona, colorful crime-scene signatures, and ingenious taunts either to torment their victims beforehand or, after a murder, to scoff at the claimed competence of law-enforcement agencies.

Their sources of inspiration, however, were all hackneyed. They succeeded only in making fearsome acts of cruelty seem as tiresome as the antics of an unfunny clown.

The sender of the black boxes succeeded where others failed. For one thing, his wordless threats were inventive.

When his intentions were at last known and the threats could be better understood in light of whatever actions he took, they might also prove to be clever. Even fiendishly so.

In addition, he conferred on himself no silly or clumsy name to delight the tabloid press when eventually they became aware of his game. He signed no name at all, which indicated self-assurance and no desperate desire for celebrity.

For another thing, his target was the biggest movie star in the world, perhaps the most guarded man in the nation after the President of the United States. Yet instead of stalking in secret, he revealed his intentions in wordless riddles full of menace, ensuring that his quarry would be made even more difficult to reach than usual.

Having turned the apple over and over in his mind, examining the details of its packaging and presentation, Ethan fetched a pair of cuticle scissors from the bathroom. At last he returned to the desk.

He pulled the chair from the knee space. He sat, pushed aside the empty gift box, and placed the repaired apple at the center of the blotter.

The first five black boxes, each a different size, and their contents had been examined for fingerprints. He had dusted three of the deliveries himself, without success.

Because the black boxes came without a word of explanation, the authorities would not consider them to be death threats. As long as the sender’s intention remained open to debate, this failed to be a matter for the police.

Deliveries 4 and 5 had been trusted to an old friend in the print lab of the Scientific Investigation Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, who processed them off the record. They were placed in a glass tank and subjected to a cloud of cyanoacrylate fumes, which readily condensed as a resin on the oils that formed latent prints.

In fluorescent light, no friction-ridge patterns of white resin had been visible. Likewise, in a darkened lab, with a cone-shaded halogen lamp focused at oblique angles, the boxes and their contents continued to appear clean.

Black magnetic powder, applied with a Magna-Brush, had revealed nothing. Even bathed in a methanol solution of rhodamine 6G, scanned in a dark lab with the eerie beam from a water-cooled argon ion laser generator, the objects had revealed no telltale luminous whorls.

The nameless stalker was too careful to leave such evidence.

Nevertheless, Ethan handled this sixth delivery with the care he’d exhibited while examining the five previous items. Surely no prints existed to be spoiled, but he might want to check later.

With the cuticle scissors, he snipped seven stitches, leaving the final three to serve as hinges.

The sender must have treated the apple with lemon juice or with another common culinary preservative to ensure a proper presentation. The meat was mostly white, with only minor browning near the peel.

The core remained. The seed pocket had been scooped clean of pits, however, to provide a setting for the inserted item.

Ethan had expected a worm: earthworm, corn ear-worm, cutworm, leech, caterpillar, trematode, one type of worm or another.

Instead, nestled in the apple flesh, he found an eye.

For an ugly instant, he thought the eye might be real. Then he saw that it was only a plastic orb with convincing details.

Not an orb, actually, but a hemisphere. The back of the eye proved to be flat, with a button loop.

Somewhere a half-blinded doll still smiled.

When the stalker looked at the doll, perhaps he saw the famous object of his obsession likewise mutilated.

Ethan was nearly as disturbed by this discovery as he might have been if he’d found a real eye in the red delicious.

Under the eye, in the hollowed-out seed pocket, was a tightly folded slip of paper, slightly damp with absorbed juice. When he unfolded it, he saw typing, the first direct message in the six packages:

THE EYE IN THE APPLE? THE WATCHFUL WORM? THE WORM OF ORIGINAL SIN? DO WORDS HAVE ANY PURPOSE OTHER THAN CONFUSION?

Ethan was confused, all right. Whatever it meant, this threat—the eye in the apple—struck him as particularly vicious. Here the sender had made an angry if enigmatic statement, the symbolism of which must be correctly interpreted, and urgently.

CHAPTER 2

BEYOND THE BEVELED GLASS, THE IRON-black clouds that had masked the sky now hid themselves behind gray veils of trailing mist. The wind went elsewhere with its lamentations, and the sodden trees stood as still and solemn as witnesses to a funeral cortege.

The gray day drifted into the eye of the storm, and from each of his three study windows, Ethan observed the mourning weather while meditating on the meaning of the apple in the context of the five bizarre items that had preceded it. Nature peered back at him through a milky cataract and, in sympathy with his inner vision, remained clouded.

He supposed the shiny apple might represent fame and wealth, the enviable life of his employer. Then the doll’s eye might be a worm of sorts, a symbol of a particular corruption at the core of fame, and therefore an accusation, indictment, and condemnation of the Face.

For twelve years, the actor had been the biggest box-office draw in the world. Since his first hit, the celebrity-mad media referred to him as the Face.

This flattering sobriquet supposedly had arisen simultaneously from the pens of numerous entertainment reporters in a shared swoon of admiration for his charismatic good looks. In truth, no doubt a clever and perpetually sleepless publicist had called in favors and paid out cold cash to engineer this spontaneous acclamation and then to sustain it for more than a decade.

In a black-and-white Hollywood so distant in time and quality that contemporary moviegoers had only a little more knowledge of it than they had of the Spanish-American War, a fine actress named Greta Garbo had in her day been known as the Face. That flattery had been the work of a studio flack, but Garbo had proved to be more than mere flackery.

For ten months, Ethan had been chief of security for Channing Manheim, the Face of the new millennium. As yet he hadn’t glimpsed even the suggestion of Garboesque depths. The face of the Face seemed to be nearly all there was of Channing.

Ethan didn’t despise the actor. The Face was affable, as relaxed as might be a genuine demigod living with the sureness that life and youth were for him eternal.

The star’s indifference to any circumstances other than his own arose neither from self-absorption nor from a willful lack of compassion. Intellectual limitations denied him an awareness that other people had more than a single script page of backstory, and that their character arcs were too complex to be portrayed in ninety-eight minutes.

His occasional cruelties were never conscious.

If he hadn’t been who he was, however, and if he hadn’t been so striking in appearance, nothing that Channing said or did would have left an impression. In a Hollywood deli that named sandwiches after stars, Clark Gable might have been roast beef and Liederkranz on rye with horseradish; Cary Grant might have been peppered chicken breast with Swiss cheese on whole wheat with mustard; and Channing Manheim would have been watercress on lightly buttered toast.

Ethan didn’t actively dislike his employer, and he didn’t need to like him in order to want to protect him and keep him alive.

If the eye in the apple was a symbol of corruption, it might represent the star’s ego inside the beautiful fruit.

Perhaps the doll’s eye didn’t stand for corruption, but for the downside of fame. A celebrity of Channing’s magnitude enjoyed little privacy and was always under scrutiny. The eye in the apple might be symbolic of the stalker’s eye—always watching, judging.

Crap. Cheap analysis. For all his somber brooding, in weather conducive to contemplation and to dark speculation, Ethan’s every observation seemed obvious and useless.

He ruminated on the apple-damp words: THE EYE IN THE APPLE? THE WATCHFUL WORM? THE WORM OF ORIGINAL SIN? DO WORDS HAVE ANY PURPOSE OTHER THAN CONFUSION?

Stumped, he was grateful when the phone rang at a few minutes past ten o’clock, drawing him away from the windows and to the desk.

Laura Moonves, an old friend from the LAPD, had been tracking down a license-plate number for him. She worked out of the Detective Support Division. Only once before in the past year had he presumed upon their friendship in this way.

“Got your pervert,” Laura said.

“Suspected pervert,” he corrected.

“The three-year-old Honda is registered to Rolf Herman Reynerd in West Hollywood.” She spelled each name and gave him an address.

“What kind of parents Rolf a kid?”

Laura knew all about names. “It’s not so bad. Nicely masculine, in fact. In Old German, it means ‘famous wolf.’ Ethan, of course, means ‘permanent, assured.’”

Two years ago, they’d dated. For Laura, Ethan had been anything but permanent, assured. She’d have liked permanence, some assurance. He had been too wounded to provide what she wanted. Or too stupid.

“Looked him up for a rap sheet,” Laura said, “but he’s clean. DMV says ‘hair brown, eyes blue.’ Says ‘sex male.’ I like sex male. I don’t get enough sex male. Height six-one, weight one-eighty. DOB—June sixth, nineteen seventy-two, which makes him thirty-one.”

Ethan had it all on a notepad. “Thanks, Laura. I owe you one.”

“So then tell me—how big’s his charlie?”

“Isn’t that in the DMV file?”

“I don’t mean Rolf’s charlie. I mean Manheim’s. Does it hang to his ankles or just to his knees?”

“I’ve never seen his charlie, but he doesn’t seem to have any trouble walking.”

“Cookie, maybe you can introduce us sometime.”

Ethan had never known why she called him Cookie. “The man would bore your ass off, Laura, and that’s the truth.”

“Pretty as he is, I wouldn’t need conversation. I’d just shove a rag in his mouth, tape his lips shut, and off we’d go to paradise.”

“Basically it’s my job to keep people like you away from him.”

“Truman derives from two Old English words,” she said. “It means ‘steadfast, loyal, trustworthy, constant.’”

“You can’t get a date with the Face by making me feel guilty. Besides, when wasn’t I loyal and trustworthy?”

“Cookie, two out of four doesn’t mean you deserve your name.”

“You were too good for me anyway, Laura. You’ve got more to give than a shlump like me can appreciate.”

“I’d like to see your old Ten Card,” she said, referring to his record of service on the force. “Must be more brown stars for ass kissing on that baby than any hundred other cards in the history of the job.”

“If you’re done dissing me, I’ve been wondering. … Rolf. Famous wolf. Does that make sense? What’s a wolf have to do to get famous?”

“Kill a lot of sheep, I guess.”

By the time Ethan said good-bye to Laura, a thin rain had begun to fall again. Without the ardor of a wind, the droplets barely kissed the study windows.

Using the remote control, he switched on the TV and then the VCR. The tape was already loaded. He’d watched it six times before.

Exterior security cameras throughout the estate numbered eighty-six. Every house door and window and all the approaches across the grounds were monitored.

Only the north wall of the estate abutted public property. This long rampart, including the gate, was under surveillance by cameras mounted in the trees on the land directly across the street, a parcel also owned by Channing Manheim.

Anyone reconnoitering the front-wall security, the operation of the gate, and the protocols of visitor identification would detect no cameras on the public side or in the estate trees that overhung the wall. They would assume that surveillance could be conducted solely from within the property.

Meanwhile, they would be watched by the cameras on the farther side of the narrow Bel Air byway, barely two lanes wide, which lacked sidewalks and streetlamps. A zoom shot would provide a clear ID to help ensure a conviction if the subject proceeded from reconnoitering to any act of criminal intent.

The cameras operated 24/7. From the security office in the groundskeeper’s building and from several points in the house, any videocam in the system could be accessed if you knew the command.

Several televisions in the house and a bank of six in the security office could receive the video feed from any camera. One TV could display as many as four views simultaneously in quarter-screen format. Therefore, the security team was able to study images from as many as twenty-four cameras at any one time.

Mostly, the guards drank coffee and bullshitted each other. If an alarm was triggered, however, they could have an immediate, close look at whatever corner of the estate had been violated. Camera by camera, they would be able to track an intruder as he moved from one field of view into another.

From the security-office keyboard, a guard could direct the video feed from any of the eighty-six sources to a VCR. The system included twelve VCRs capable of simultaneously recording forty-eight feeds in quarter-screen format.

Even if a guard were not paying attention, motion detectors associated with each camera would instigate automatic recording of that field of vision when any living thing larger than a dog passed through its area of responsibility.

At 3:32 a.m. the previous night, motion detectors related to Camera 01, which ceaselessly panned the western end of the north perimeter, picked up a three-year-old Honda. Instead of passing by as the infrequent other traffic had done throughout the night, the car pulled off the pavement and parked a hundred yards short of the entrance gate.

The previous five black boxes had come by Federal Express with fake return addresses. Here Ethan had been presented with the first opportunity to identify the sender.

Now, less than seven hours later, he stood in his study and watched the Honda in full-screen format. The narrow shoulder of the road prevented the driver from parking the car entirely out of the eastbound lane.

In daylight, the exclusive streets of Bel Air didn’t carry a heavy load of traffic. At that late hour, they were hardly traveled.

Nevertheless concerned about safety, the driver of the Honda didn’t kill his headlights when he parked. He left the engine running and switched on his emergency blinkers.

The camera, featuring advanced night-vision technology, provided a high-resolution picture in spite of the darkness and foul weather.

For a moment, Camera 01 continued panning away from the Honda—then halted its programmed sweep and returned to the car. Dave Ladman had been on a routine foot patrol of the estate grounds at that time. Tom Mack, manning the security office, had recognized the presence of a suspicious vehicle and had overridden 01’s automatic function.

Rain had been falling heavily. Ceaseless barrages of raindrops shattered against the blacktop with force, creating such a froth and dancing spray that the street appeared to be aboil.

The driver’s door opened, and Camera 01 zoomed in for a close-up as a tall, solidly built man got out of the car. He wore a black waterproof windbreaker. His face was hidden in the shadow of a hood.

Unless Rolf Reynerd had loaned his car to a friend, this was the famous wolf. He fit the physical profile on Reynerd’s license.

He closed the driver’s door, opened the rear door, and took a large white ball from the backseat. This appeared to be the garbage bag containing the gift of the sutured apple.

Reynerd closed the door and started toward the front of the car, toward the driveway gate a hundred yards away. Abruptly he halted and turned to peer along the dark rain-swept lane, poised for flight.

Perhaps he thought that he’d heard an approaching engine above the rushing rustle of the rain racing down through the trees. The security tape provided no sound.

At that lonely hour, if another vehicle had arrived on the scene, chances were good that it would have been a cruiser belonging to the Bel Air Patrol, the private-security force that assisted in the policing of this extremely wealthy community.

When neither a cruiser nor a less-official vehicle appeared, the hooded man regained his confidence. He hurried eastward to the gate.

Camera 02 followed him as he stepped beyond the panning arc of Camera 01. As he neared the gate, Camera 03 watched him from across the street, zooming in for an intimate appraisal.

Immediately upon arrival at the entrance gate, Reynerd threw the white bag toward the top of that bronze barrier. Failing to clear the highest scrollwork, the package bounced back at him.

On his second attempt, he succeeded. When he turned away from the gate, his hood slipped half off, and Camera 03 captured a clear image of his face in the glow of the flanking gate lamps.

He had the chiseled features needed to be a successful waiter in the trendiest of L.A. restaurants, where both the service staff and the customers enjoyed the fantasy that any guy or gal ferrying plates of overpriced swordfish from kitchen to table during the Tuesday dinner shift might be offered, on Wednesday, a coveted role in Tom Cruise’s next hundred-fifty-million-dollar picture.

Turning from the gate, having delivered the apple, Rolf Reynerd was grinning.

Perhaps if Ethan hadn’t known the meaning of the man’s first name, the grin wouldn’t have seemed wolfish. Then he might have been reminded instead of a crocodile or a hyena.

In any case, this was not the merry expression of a prankster. Captured on videotape, this curve of lips and bared teeth suggested a lunatic glee that required a full moon and medication.

Splashing through black puddles filigreed with silver by the headlights, Reynerd returned to the car.

As the Honda pulled off the shoulder and onto the eastbound lane once more, Camera 01 executed a swivel and zoom, then Camera 02. Both delivered readable shots of the rear license plate.

Dwindling into the night, the car conjured briefly lingering ghosts from its tailpipe.

Then the narrow street lay deserted, in wet gloom except for the lamps at the Manheim gate. Black rain, as if from a dissolving night sky, poured down, poured down, driving the darkness of the universe into the universally coveted Bel Air real estate.

Before leaving his quarters in the west wing, Ethan called the housekeeper, Mrs. McBee, to report that he’d be out most of the day.

More efficient than any machine, more dependable than the laws of physics, as trustworthy as any archangel, Mrs. McBee would within minutes dispatch one of the six maids under her command to Ethan’s apartment. Seven days a week, a maid collected the trash and provided fresh towels. Twice weekly, his rooms were dusted, vacuumed, and left immaculate. Windows were washed twice a month.

There were advantages to living in a mansion attended by a staff of twenty-five.

As the chief of security overseeing both the Face’s personal protection and the safeguarding of the estate, Ethan enjoyed many benefits, including free meals prepared by either Mr. Hachette, the household chef, or by Mr. Baptiste, the household cook. Mr. Baptiste lacked his boss’s training in the finest culinary schools; but no one with taste buds ever complained about any dish he put on the table.

Meals could be taken in the large and comfortably furnished day-room, where the staff not only ate but also did their household planning, spent their coffee breaks, and strategized all arrangements for the elaborate parties often held when the Face was in residence. Chef or cook would also prepare a plate of sandwiches or any other requested treat that Ethan might want to take back to his quarters.

Of course, he could prepare meals in his apartment kitchen if he preferred. Mrs. McBee kept his fridge and pantry stocked according to shopping lists he presented to her, at no expense to him.

Except for Monday and Thursday, when one of the maids changed the bedclothes—Mr. Manheim’s linens were cycled daily when he was in residence—Ethan had to make his own bed each morning.

Life was hard.

Now, after shrugging into a soft leather jacket, Ethan stepped out of his apartment into the ground-floor hallway of the west wing. He left his door unlocked as he would have done if he’d owned the entire house.

He took with him a file that he’d made on the black-box case, an umbrella, and a leather-bound copy of Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. He had finished reading the novel the previous evening and intended to return it to the library.

More than twelve feet wide, paved with limestone tiles featured through most of the main floor of the house, this hall was graced by softly colored contemporary Persian carpets. High-quality French antiques—all from the Empire period, and including the late-Empire style called Biedermeier—furnished the long space: chairs, chests, a desk, a sideboard.

Even with furniture to both sides, Ethan could have driven a car through the hall without grazing a single antique.

He might have enjoyed driving a car through the hall if he would not have had to explain himself to Mrs. McBee afterward.

During the invigorating hike to the library, he encountered two uniformed maids and a porter with whom he exchanged greetings. Because he occupied what Mrs. McBee defined as an executive position on the staff, he referred to these fellow workers by their first names, but they called him Mr. Truman.

Prior to each new employee’s first day on the job, Mrs. McBee provided a ring-bound notebook titled Standards and Practices, which she herself had composed and assembled. Woe be to the benighted soul who did not memorize its contents and perform always according to its directions.

The library floor was walnut, stained a dark warm reddish-brown. Here the Persian carpets were antiques that appreciated in value far faster than the blue-chip stocks of the country’s finest companies.

Club chairs in comfortable seating arrangements alternated with mazes of mahogany shelves that held over thirty-six thousand volumes. Some of the books were shelved on a second level served by a six-foot-wide catwalk that could be reached by an open staircase with an elaborate gilded-iron railing.

If you didn’t look up at the ceiling to help you define the true size of the enormous chamber, you might succumb to the illusion that it went on forever. Maybe it did. Anything seemed possible here.

The center of the ceiling featured a stained-glass dome thirty-two feet in diameter. The deep colors of the glass—crimson, emerald, burnt yellow, sapphire—so completely filtered natural light even on a bright day that the books were at no risk of sustaining sun damage.

Ethan’s Uncle Joe—who’d served as a surrogate dad when Ethan’s real father had been too drunk to handle the job—had been a truck driver for a regional bakery. He’d delivered breads and pastries to supermarkets and restaurants, six days a week, eight hours a day. Most of the time, Joe had held down a second job as a night janitor, three days a week.

In his best five years put together, Uncle Joe hadn’t made enough to equal the cost of this stained-glass dome.

When he’d first begun to earn a policeman’s pay, Ethan had felt rich. Compared to Joe, he had been raking in big dough.

His total income from sixteen years with the LAPD wouldn’t have paid the cost of this one room.

“Should’ve been a movie star,” he said as he entered the library to return Lord Jim to the shelf from which he’d gotten it.

Every volume in the collection had been arranged in alphabetical order, by author. A third were bound in leather; the rest were regular editions. A significant number were rare, and valuable.

The Face had read none of them.

More than two-thirds of the collection had come with the house. At her employer’s instructions, once each month, Mrs. McBee purchased the most talked-about and critically acclaimed current novels and volumes of nonfiction, which were at once catalogued and added to the library.

These new books were acquired for the sole purpose of display. They impressed houseguests, dinner guests, and other visitors with the breadth of Channing Manheim’s intellectual interests.

When asked for his opinion of any book, the Face elicited the visitor’s judgment first, then agreed with it in such a charming fashion that he seemed both erudite and every bit a kindred spirit.

As Ethan slid Lord Jim onto a shelf between two other Conrad titles, a small reedy voice behind him said, “Is there magic in it?”

Turning, he discovered ten-year-old Aelfric Manheim all but swallowed alive by one of the larger armchairs.

According to Laura Moonves, Aelfric (pronounced elf-rick) was an Old English word meaning “elf-ruled” or “ruled by elves,” which had first been used to describe wise and clever actions, but had in time come to refer to those who acted wisely and cleverly.

Aelfric.

The boy’s mother—Fredericka “Freddie” Nielander— a supermodel who had married and divorced the Face all in one year, had read at least three books in her life. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact she had read them repeatedly.

She had been prepared to name the boy Frodo. Fortunately, or not, one month before Freddie’s due date, her best girlfriend, an actress, had discovered the name Aelfric in the script for a cheesy fantasy film in which she had agreed to play a three-breasted Amazon alchemist.

If Freddie’s friend had landed a supporting role in The Silence of the Lambs, Aelfric would probably now be Hannibal Manheim.

The boy preferred to be called Fric, and no one but his mother insisted on using his full name. Fortunately, or not, she wasn’t around much to torture him with it.

Reliable scuttlebutt had it that Freddie had not seen Fric in over seventeen months. Even the career of an aging supermodel could be demanding.

“Is there magic in what?” Ethan asked.

“That book you just put away.”

“Magic of a sort, but probably not the kind of magic you mean.”

“This one has a shitload of magic in it,” Fric said, displaying a paperback with dragons and wizards on the cover.

“Is that advisable language for a wise and clever person?” Ethan asked.

“Heck, all my old man’s friends in the biz talk worse stuff than shitload. So does my old man.”

“Not when he knows you’re around.”

Fric cocked his head. “Are you calling my dad a hypocrite?”

“If I ever call your dad such a thing, I’ll cut my tongue out.”

“The evil wizard in this book would use it in a potion. One of his most difficult tasks is to find the tongue of an honest man.”

“What makes you think I’m honest?”

“Get real. You’ve got a triple shitload of honesty.”

“What’re you going to do if Mrs. McBee hears you using words like that?”

“She’s somewhere else.”

“Oh, she is?” Ethan asked, suggesting that he knew something regarding Mrs. McBee’s current whereabouts that would make the boy wish he’d been more discreet.

Unable to repress a guilty expression, Fric sat up straight and surveyed the library.

The boy was small for his age, and thin. At times, glimpsed from a distance as he walked along one of the vast halls or across a room scaled for kings and their entourages, he seemed almost wispy.

“I think she has secret passages,” Fric whispered. “You know, pathways in the walls.”

“Mrs. McBee?”

The boy nodded. “We’ve lived here six years, but she’s been here forever.”

Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee—both in their middle fifties—had been employed by the previous owner of the property and had stayed on at the request of the Face.

“It’s hard to picture Mrs. McBee skulking about in the walls,” said Ethan. “She’s not exactly a dastardly sort.”

“But if she was dastardly,” Fric said hopefully, “things would be more interesting around here.”

Unlike his father’s golden locks, which with a shake of the head always fell perfectly into place, Fric’s brown mop achieved perpetual disarray. Here was hair that foiled brushes and broke good combs.

Fric might grow into his looks and prove equal to his pedigree, but currently he appeared to be an average ten-year-old boy.

“Why aren’t you in class?” Ethan wondered.

“You an atheist or something? Don’t you know it’s the week before Christmas? Even home-schooled Hollywood brats get a break.”

A cadre of tutors visited five days a week. The private school that Fric attended for a while had not proved to be a suitable environment for him.

With the famous Channing Manheim for a father, with the famous and notorious Freddie Nielander for a mother, Fric became an object of envy and ridicule even among the children of other celebrities. Being the skinny son of a buffed star adored for heroic roles also made him a figure of fun to crueler kids. The severity of his asthma further argued for schooling at home, in a controlled environment.

“Have any idea what you’ll get Christmas morning?” Ethan asked.

“Yeah. I had to submit my list to Mrs. McBee by December fifth. I told her not to bother wrapping the stuff, but she will. She always does. She says it’s not Christmas morning without some mystery.”

“I’d have to agree with that.”

The boy shrugged, and slumped in his chair again.

Although the Face was currently on location for a film, he would return from Florida the day before Christmas.

“It’ll be good to have your dad home for the holidays. You guys have any special plans once he gets back?”

The boy shrugged again, attempting to convey lack of knowledge or indifference, but instead—and unwittingly— revealing a misery that made Ethan feel uncharacteristically helpless.

Fric had inherited luminous green eyes to match his mother’s. In the singular depths of those eyes, enough could be read about the boy’s loneliness to fill a library shelf or two.

“Well,” Ethan said, “maybe Christmas morning this year you’ll have a couple surprises.”

Sitting forward in his chair, eager for the sense of mystery that he had so recently dismissed as unimportant, Fric said, “What—you heard something?”

“If I heard something, which I’m not saying I did or didn’t, I couldn’t tell you what I heard, assuming I heard anything at all, and still keep the surprise a surprise, by which I don’t mean to imply that there is a surprise or that there isn’t one.”

The boy stared in silence for a moment. “Now you don’t sound cop honest, you sound like the head of a studio.”

“You know what heads of studios sound like, huh?”

“They come around here sometimes,” the boy said in a tone of worldly wisdom. “I recognize their rap.”

Ethan parked across the street from the apartment house in West Hollywood, switched off the windshield wipers, but left the engine running to power the heater. He sat in the Ford Expedition awhile, watching the place, deciding upon the best approach to Rolf Reynerd.

The Expedition was one of a collection of vehicles available for both job-related and personal use by the eight live-in members of the twenty-five-person estate staff. Among other wheels, a Mercedes ML500 SUV had been in the lower garage, but that might have drawn too much attention during a stakeout if the day required surveillance work.

The three-story apartment house appeared to be in good but not excellent repair. The cream-colored stucco wasn’t pocked or cracked, but the place looked to be at least a year overdue for painting. One of the address numbers above the front door hung askew.

Camellia bushes laden with heavy red blooms, a variety of ferns, and phoenix palms with enormous crowns provided the lushness of high-end landscaping; but everything had needed a trim months ago. The shaggy grass suggested that it was mown not weekly but twice a month.

The landlord shaved his costs, but the building nevertheless looked like a nice place to live.

No one rented here on a welfare check. Reynerd must have a job, but the fact that he’d been delivering death threats at three-thirty in the morning suggested that he didn’t have to get up early to go to work. He might be home now.

When Ethan tracked down his suspect’s place of employment and began to make inquiries about him with fellow workers and neighbors, Reynerd almost certainly would be alerted by someone. Thereafter, he would grow too wary to be approached directly.

Ethan preferred to start with the man himself and work outward from that initial contact.

He closed his eyes, tipped his head back against the headrest, and brooded about how to proceed.

The engine roar of an approaching car grew so loud that Ethan opened his eyes, half expecting to hear a sudden siren and to see a police chase in progress. Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, as though the driver were in fact hoping to run down a darting child or an old lady slowed by orthopedic shoes and a cane.

A tire-thrown plume spewed up from the puddled street, drenching the Expedition. The glass in the driver’s door briefly clouded with ripples of dirty water.

Across the street, the apartment house appeared to shimmer as if it were a place in a dream. Some aspect of that transient distortion seemed to trigger a vague memory of a long-forgotten nightmare, and the sight of the building in this warped condition caused the hairs to rise inexplicably on the back of Ethan’s neck.

Then the last gouts of the plume drained off the window. Falling rain quickly cleared the murky residue from the glass. The apartment house was nothing more than what it had been when he’d first seen it: a nice place to live.

After judging that the rain was falling only hard enough to make an umbrella more trouble than it was worth, he got out of the SUV and dashed across the street.

In southern California during the late autumn and early winter, Mother Nature suffered unpredictable mood swings. From one year to the next, and even from day to day in the same year, the week before Christmas could vary from balmy to bone-chilling. This air was cool, the rain colder than the air, and the sky as dead gray as it might have been in any truly wintry clime much farther north.

The main door of the building featured no buzz-through security lock. The neighborhood remained safe enough that apartment lobbies did not absolutely require fortification.

Dripping, he entered a small space, less a lobby than a foyer, with a Mexican-tile floor. An elevator and a set of stairs served the upper stories.

The foyer air curdled with the lingering meaty scent of Canadian bacon, cooked hours ago, and the musty smell of stale pot smoke. Weed had a singular aroma. Someone had stood here this morning, finishing a joint, before stepping out to meet the dreary day.

From the bank of mailboxes, Ethan counted four apartments on the ground floor, six on the second, and six on the third. Reynerd lived in the middle of the building, in 2B.

Only the last names of the current tenants were printed on the mailboxes. Ethan needed more information than these stick-on labels provided.

An open communal receptacle, recessed in the wall, had been provided for magazines and other publications on those occasions when the volume of other mail didn’t permit the postman to put all items in the boxes.

Two magazines lay in the tray. Both were for George Keesner in Apartment 2E.

Ethan rapped a knuckle against the aluminum doors on several of the mailboxes for the apartments in which he had no interest. The hollow sound suggested they were empty. Most likely the daily mail had not yet been delivered.

When he rapped on Keesner’s box, it sounded as though it was packed full of mail. Evidently the man had been away from home for at least a couple days.

Ethan climbed the stairs to the second floor. One long hall, three doors on each side. At 2E, he rang the bell and waited.

Reynerd’s unit, 2B, lay directly across from 2E.

When no one answered the bell at Keesner’s apartment, Ethan rang it again, twice. After a pause, he knocked loudly.

Each door had been fitted with a fisheye lens to allow the resident to examine a caller before deciding whether or not to admit him. Perhaps from across the hall, Reynerd was watching the back of Ethan’s head right now.

Receiving no response to his knock, Ethan turned away from Keesner’s door and made a show of frustration. He wiped his rain-wet face with one hand. He pushed that hand through his damp hair. He shook his head. He looked up and down the hall.

When Ethan rang the bell at 2B, the apple man answered almost at once, without the protection of a security chain.

Although an unmistakable match for the image captured by the security camera, he proved to be more handsome than he’d been in the rain the previous night. He resembled Ben Affleck, the actor.

In addition to the Affleck aspect, however, he had a welcome-to-the-Bates-Motel edge to him that any fan of Anthony Perkins would have recognized. The tightness at the corners of his mouth, the rapid pulse visible in his right temple, and especially the hard shine in his eyes suggested that he might be on methamphetamine, not fully amped but clipping along at high altitude.

“Sir,” Ethan said even as the door was still opening, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m sort of desperate to get in touch with George Keesner over there in 2E. Do you know George?”

Reynerd shook his head. He had a bull’s neck. Lots of time spent on weight machines at the gym.

“I know him to say hello in the hall,” Reynerd said, “and how’s the weather. That’s all.”

If that was true, Ethan felt secure enough to say, “I’m his brother. Name’s Ricky Keesner.”

That scam ought to work as long as Keesner was somewhere between twenty and fifty years old.

“Our Uncle Harry’s on his deathbed in the ICU,” Ethan lied. “Not going to hold on much longer. Since yesterday morning, I been calling George at every number I’ve got for him. He doesn’t get back to me. Doesn’t answer the door now.”

“I think he’s away,” said Reynerd.

“Away? He didn’t say anything about it to me. You know where he might’ve gone?”

Reynerd shook his head. “He was going out with a little suitcase the night before last, as I was coming in.”

“He tell you when he’d be back?”

“We just said how it looked like rain coming, and then he went out,” Reynerd replied.

“Man, he’s so close to Uncle Harry—we both are— he’s going to be upset he didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. Maybe I could leave him a note, so he sees it first thing he gets back.”

Reynerd just stared at Ethan. An artery began throbbing in his neck. His speed-cycled brain was racing, but although meth ensured frenetically fast thinking, it didn’t assist clear thinking.

“The thing is,” Ethan said, “I don’t have any paper. Or a pen, for that matter.”

“Oh. Sure, I got those,” said Reynerd.

“I really hate to bother you—”

“No bother,” Reynerd assured him, turning away from the open door, going off to find a notepad, a pen.

Left at the threshold, Ethan chafed to get into the apartment. He wanted a better look at Reynerd’s nest than he could obtain from the doorway.

Just as Ethan decided to risk being rude and to enter without an invitation, Reynerd halted, turned, and said, “Come on in. Sit down.”

Now that the invitation had been extended, Ethan could afford to inject a little authenticity into this charade by demurring. “Thanks, but I just came in from the rain—”

“Can’t hurt this furniture,” Reynerd assured him.

Leaving the door open behind himself, Ethan went inside.

The living room and dining area comprised one large space. The kitchen was open to this front room, but separated from it by a bar with two stools.

Reynerd proceeded into the kitchen, to a counter under a wall phone, while Ethan perched on the edge of an armchair in the living room.

The apartment was sparsely furnished. One sofa, one armchair, a coffee table, and a television set. The dining area contained a small table and two chairs.

On the television, the MGM lion roared. The sound was low, the roar soft.

On the walls were several framed photographs: large sixteen-by-twenty-inch, black-and-white art prints. Birds were the subject of every photo.

Reynerd returned with a notepad and a pencil. “This do?”

“Perfect,” Ethan said, accepting the items.

Reynerd had a dispenser of Scotch tape, as well. “To fix the note on George’s door.” He put the tape on the coffee table.

“Thanks,” Ethan said. “I like the photographs.”

“Birds are all about being free,” Reynerd said.

“I guess they are, aren’t they? The freedom of flight. You take the photos?”

“No. I just collect.”

In one of the prints, a flock of pigeons erupted in a swirl of feathered frenzy from a cobblestone plaza in front of a backdrop of old European buildings. In another, geese flew in formation across a somber sky.

Indicating the black-and-white movie on the TV, Reynerd said, “I was just getting some snacks for the show. You mind … ?”

“Huh? Oh, sure, I’m sorry, forget about me. I’ll jot this down and be gone.”

In one of the pictures, the birds had flown directly at the photographer. The shot presented a close-up montage of overlapping wings, crying beaks, and beady black eyes.

“Potato chips are gonna kill me one day,” Reynerd said as he returned to the kitchen.

“With me it’s ice cream. More of it in my arteries than blood.”

Ethan printed DEAR GEORGE in block letters, then paused as if in thought, and looked around the room.

From the kitchen, Reynerd continued: “They say you can’t ever eat just one potato chip, but I can’t ever eat just one bag.”

Two crows perched on an iron fence. A strop of sunlight laid a sharp edge on their beaks.

White carpet as pristine as winter snow lay wall to wall. The furniture had been upholstered in a black fabric. From a distance, the Formica surface of the dinette table appeared to be black.

Everything in the apartment was black-and-white.

Ethan printed UNCLE HARRY IS DYING and then paused again, as if a simple message taxed his powers of composition.

The movie music, though soft, had a melodramatic flair. A crime picture from the thirties or forties.

Reynerd continued to rummage in kitchen cabinets.

Here, two doves appeared to clash in midflight. There, an owl stared wide-eyed, as if shocked by what it saw.

Outside, wind had returned to the day. A dice-rattle of rain drew Ethan’s attention to the window.

From the kitchen came the distinctive rustle of a foil potato-chip bag.

PLEASE CALL ME, Ethan printed.

Returning to the living room, Reynerd said, “If you’ve got to eat chips, these are the worst because they’re higher in oil.”

Ethan looked up and saw a bag of Hawaiian-style chips. Reynerd had inserted his right hand into the open bag.

The way that the bag gloved the apple man’s hand struck Ethan as wrong. The guy might have been reaching in for some chips, of course; but an oddness of attitude, a tenseness in him, suggested otherwise.

Stopping beside the sofa, not six feet away, Reynerd said, “You work for the Face, don’t you?”

At a disadvantage in the armchair, Ethan pretended confusion. “For who?”

When the hand came out of the bag, it held a gun.

A licensed private investigator and certified bodyguard, Ethan had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Except in the company of Channing Manheim, when he armed himself as a matter of routine, he seldom bothered to strap on his piece.

Reynerd’s weapon was a 9-mm pistol.

This morning, disturbed by the eye in the apple and by the wolfish grin that this man had revealed on the security tape, Ethan had put on his shoulder holster. He hadn’t expected to need a gun, not really, and in fact he’d felt a little silly for packing it without greater provocation. Now he thanked God that he was armed.

“I don’t understand,” he said, trying to look equally bewildered and afraid.

“I’ve seen your picture,” Reynerd told him.

Ethan glanced toward the open door, the hallway beyond.

“I don’t care who sees or hears,” Reynerd told him. “It’s all over anyhow, isn’t it?”

“Listen, if my brother George did something to piss you off,” Ethan said, trying to buy a little time.

Reynerd wasn’t selling. Even as Ethan dropped the notepad and reached for the 9-mm Glock under his jacket, the apple man shot him point-blank in the gut.

For a moment, Ethan felt no pain, but only for a moment. He rocked back in the chair and gaped at the gush of blood. Then agony.

He heard the first shot, but he didn’t hear the second. The slug hammered him dead-center in the chest.

Everything in the black-and-white apartment went black.

Ethan knew the birds still gathered on the walls, watching him die. He could feel the tension of their wings frozen in flight.

He heard a dicelike rattle again. Not rain against the window this time. His breath rattling in a broken throat.

No Christmas.

CHAPTER 3

ETHAN OPENED HIS EYES.

Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, casting up a plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement.

Through the side window of the Expedition, the apartment house blurred and tweaked into strange geometry, like a place in a nightmare.

As if he’d sustained an electrical shock, he twitched violently, and inhaled with the desperation of a drowning man. The air tasted sweet, fresh and sweet and clean. He exhaled explosively.

No gut wound. No chest wound. His hair wasn’t wet with rain.

His heart knocked, knocked like a lunatic fist on the padded door of a padded room.

Never in his life had Ethan Truman experienced a dream of such clarity, such intensity, nor any nightmare so crisply detailed as the experience in Reynerd’s apartment.

He consulted his wristwatch. If he’d been asleep, he had been dreaming for no more than a minute.

He couldn’t have explored the convolutions of such an elaborate dream in a mere minute. Impossible.

Rain washed the last of the murky residue off the glass. Beyond the dripping fronds of the phoenix palms, the apartment house waited, no longer distorted, but now forever strange.

When he’d leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, the better to formulate his approach to Rolf Reynerd, Ethan had not been in the least sleepy. Or even tired.

He was certain that he had not taken a one-minute nap. He had not taken a five-second nap, for that matter.

If the first Ferrari had been a figment of a dream, the second sports car suggested that reality now followed precisely in the path of the nightmare.

Although his explosive breathing had quieted, his heart clumped with undiminished speed, galloping after reason, which set an even faster pace, steadily receding beyond reach.

Intuition told him to leave now, to find a Starbucks and have a large cup of coffee. Order a blend strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.

Given time and distance from the event, he would discover the key that unlocked the mystery and allowed understanding. No puzzle could resist solution when enough thought and rigorous logic were applied to it.

Even though years of police work had taught him to trust his intuition as a baby trusts its mother, he switched off the engine and got out of the Expedition.

No argument: Intuition was an essential survival tool. Honesty with himself, however, was more important than heeding intuition. In a spirit of honesty, he had to admit that he wanted to drive away not to find a place and time for quiet reflection, not to engage in Sherlockian deduction, but because fear had him in a pincer grip.

Fear must never be allowed to win. Surrender to it once, and you were finished as a cop.

Of course he wasn’t a cop anymore. He had left the force more than a year ago. The work that had given his life meaning while Hannah was alive had meant steadily less to him in the years after her death. He had ceased to believe that he could make a difference in the world. He had wanted to withdraw, to turn his back on the ugly reality of the human condition so evident in the daily work of a homicide detective. Channing Manheim’s world was as far as he could get from reality and still earn a living.

Although he didn’t carry a badge, although he might not be a cop in any official sense, he remained a cop in essence. We are what we are, no matter what we might wish to be, or pretend to be.

Hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket, shoulders hunched as if the rain were a burden, he dashed across the street to the apartment house.

Dripping, he entered the foyer. Mexican-tile floor. Elevator. Stairs. As it should be. As it had been.

Stale with the greasy scent of cooked breakfast meat and pot smoke, the air felt thick, seemed to cloy like mucus in his throat.

Two magazines lay in the tray. On each mailing label was the name George Keesner.

Ethan climbed the stairs. His legs felt weak, and his hands trembled. At the landing, he paused to take a few deep breaths, to knit the raveled fabric of his nerve.

The apartment house lay quiet. No voices muffled by the walls, no music for a melancholy Monday.

He imagined that he heard the faint tick and scrape of crow claws on an iron fence, the flap and rustle of pigeons taking flight, the tick-tick-tick of insistently pecking beaks. In truth, he knew that these were only the many voices of the rain.

Although he could feel the weight of the pistol in his shoulder holster, he reached under his coat and placed his right hand on the weapon to be certain that he had brought it. With one fingertip, he traced the checking on the grip.

He withdrew his hand from under his jacket, leaving the pistol in the holster.

Having collected hair by hair along the back of his head, rain reached a trickling finger down the nape of his neck, teasing a shudder from him.

When Ethan reached the second-floor hallway, he barely glanced at Apartment 2E, where George Keesner would fail to respond to either the bell or a knock, and he went directly to the door of 2B, where he lost his nerve, but only briefly.

The apple man answered the bell almost at once. Tall, strong, self-confident, he didn’t bother engaging the security chain.

He didn’t seem to be in the least surprised to see Ethan again or alive, as if their first encounter had never happened.

“Is Jim here?” Ethan asked.

“You’ve got the wrong apartment,” Reynerd said.

“Jim Briscoe? Really? I’m sure this was his place.”

“I’ve been here more than six months.”

Beyond Reynerd lay a black-and-white room.

“Six months? Has it been that long since I was here?” Ethan sounded false to himself, but he pressed forward. “Yeah, I guess that’s what it’s been, six or seven.”

On the wall opposite the door, an owl stared with immense eyes, in expectation of a gunshot.

Ethan said, “Hey, did Jim leave a forwarding address?”

“I never met the previous tenant.”

The hard shine in Reynerd’s eyes, the quick throbbing in his temple, the tightness at the corners of his mouth this time warned Ethan off.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” he said.

When he heard Reynerd’s television at low volume, the soft roar of the MGM lion, he hesitated no longer and headed directly for the stairs. He realized that he was retreating with suspicious haste, and he tried not to run.

Halfway down the stairs, at the landing, Ethan trusted instinct, turned, looked up, and saw Rolf Reynerd at the head of the stairs, silently watching him. The apple man had in his hand neither a gun nor a bag of potato chips.

Without another word, Ethan descended the last flight to the foyer. Opening the outer door, he glanced back, but Reynerd had not followed him to the lower floor.

Lazy no more, rain chased rain along the street, and cold wind blustered in the palms.

Behind the steering wheel of the Expedition again, Ethan started the engine, locked the doors, switched on the heater.

A strong double coffee at Starbucks no longer seemed adequate. He didn’t know where to go.

Premonition. Precognition. Psychic vision. Clairvoyance. The Twilight Zone Dictionary turned its own pages in the library of his mind, but no possibility that it presented to him seemed to explain his experience.

According to the calendar, winter would not officially arrive for another day, but it entered early in his bones. He contained a coldness unknown in southern California.

He raised his hands to look at them, never having known them to shake like this. His fingers were pale, each nail as entirely white as the crescent at its base.

Neither the paleness nor the tremors troubled Ethan half as much as what he saw beneath the fingernails of his right hand. A dark substance, reddish-black.

He stared at this material for a long time, reluctant to take steps to determine if it was real or hallucinated.

Finally he used the thumbnail of his left hand to scrape out a small portion of the matter that was trapped under the nail of his right thumb. The stuff proved slightly moist, gummy.

Hesitantly, he brought the smear to his nose. He sniffed it once, twice, and though the scent was faint, he didn’t need to smell it again.

Ethan had blood under all five nails of his right hand. With a certainty seldom given to any man who understood the world to be a most uncertain place, he knew that this would prove to be his own blood.

CHAPTER 4

PALOMAR LABORATORIES IN NORTH Hollywood occupied a sprawling single-story concrete-slab building with such small and widely spaced windows and with such a low and slightly pitched sheet-metal roof that it resembled a bunker in the storm.

The medical-lab division of Palomar analyzed blood samples, Pap smears, biopsies, and other organic materials. In their industrial division, they performed chemical analyses of every variety for both private-sector and government clients.

Each year, fans of the Face sent over a quarter of a million pieces of mail to him, mostly in care of his studio, which forwarded weekly batches of this correspondence to the publicity firm that responded to it in the star’s name. Among those letters were gifts, including more than a few homemade foods: cookies, cakes, fudge. Fewer than one in a thousand fans might be sufficiently deranged to send poisoned brownies, but Ethan nevertheless operated on the better-safe-than-sorry principle: All foodstuffs must be disposed of without sampling by anyone.

Occasionally, when a homemade treat from a fan arrived with a particularly suspicious letter, the edible goodie would not be at once destroyed but would be passed along to Ethan for a closer look. If he suspected contamination, he brought the item here to Palomar to be analyzed.

When a total stranger could work up sufficient hatred to attempt to poison the Face, Ethan wanted to know that the bastard existed. He subsequently cooperated with authorities in the poisoner’s hometown to bring whatever criminal charges might be sustained in court.

Now, proceeding first to the public reception lounge, he signed a form authorizing them to draw his blood. Lacking a doctor’s order for tests, he paid cash for the analyses he required.

He requested a basic DNA profile. “And I want to know if any drugs are present in my body.”

“What drugs are you taking?” the receptionist asked.

“Nothing but aspirin. But I want you to test for every possible substance, in case I’ve been drugged without my knowledge.”

Perhaps in North Hollywood they were accustomed to encounters with full-blown paranoids. The receptionist didn’t roll her eyes, raise an eyebrow, or in any other way appear to be surprised to hear him suggest that he might be the victim of a wicked conspiracy.

The medical technician who drew his sample was a petite and lovely Vietnamese woman with an angel’s touch. He never felt the needle pierce the vein.

In another reception lounge provided for the delivery of samples unrelated to standard medical tests, he filled out a second form and paid another fee. This receptionist did give him an odd look when he explained what he wanted to have analyzed.

At a lab table, under harsh fluorescent lights, a technician who resembled Britney Spears used a thin but blunt steel blade to scrape the blood from under the fingernails of his right hand, onto a square of acid-free white paper. Ethan hadn’t trimmed his nails in over a week, so she retrieved a significant number of shavings, some of which still appeared to be gummy.

His hand trembled throughout the process. She probably thought her beauty made him nervous.

The material from under his fingernails would first be tested to determine if it was indeed blood. Thereafter it would be conveyed to the medical-lab division to be typed and to have the DNA profile compared to the blood sample that the Vietnamese technician had drawn. Full toxicological results wouldn’t be ready until Wednesday afternoon.

Ethan didn’t understand how he could have his own blood under his fingernails when he had not, after all, been shot in the gut and the chest. Yet as migrating geese know south from north without the aid of a compass, he knew this blood was his.

CHAPTER 5

IN THE PALOMAR PARKING LOT, AS THE rain and the wind painted a procession of colorless spirit shapes on the windshield of the Expedition, Ethan placed a call to Hazard Yancy’s cell phone.

Hazard had been born Lester, but he loathed his given name. He didn’t like Les any better. He thought the shortened version sounded like an insult.

“I’m not less of anything than you are,” he’d once said to Ethan, but affably.

Indeed, at six feet four and 240 pounds, with a shaved head that appeared to be as big as a basketball and a neck only slightly narrower than the span of his ears, Hazard Yancy was nobody’s idea of a poster child for minimalism.

“Fact is, I’m more of a lot of things than some people. Like more determined, more fun, more colorful, more likely to make stupid choices in women, more likely to be shot in the ass. My folks should have named me More Yancy. I could’ve lived with that.”

When he had been a teenager and a young man, his friends had called him Brick, a reference to the fact that he was built like a brick wall.

Nobody in Robbery/Homicide had called him Brick in twenty years. On the force, he was known as Hazard because working a case in tandem with him could be as hazardous as driving a dynamite truck.

Gumshoe duty in Robbery/Homicide might be more dangerous than a career as a greengrocer, but detectives were less likely to die on the job than were night clerks in convenience stores. If you wanted the thrill of being shot at on a regular basis, the Gang Activities Section, the Narcotics Division, and certainly the Strategic Weapons and Tactics teams were better bets than cleaning up after murderers.

Even just staying in uniform promised more violence than hitting the streets in a suit.

Hazard’s career was an exception to the rule. People shot at him with regularity.

He professed surprise not at the frequency with which bullets were directed at him, but at the fact that the shooters were people who didn’t know him personally. “Being a friend of mine,” he once said, “you’d think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you?”

Hazard’s uncanny attraction for high-velocity projectiles wasn’t a consequence of either recklessness or poor investigative technique. He was a careful, first-rate detective.

In Ethan’s experience, the universe didn’t always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.

You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.

Hazard didn’t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.

Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He’d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard’s, but neither had died or been crippled.

Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he’d ever done.

Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, “You still sleeping with an inflatable woman?”

“You applying for the position?”

“Hey, Hazard, you busy right now?”

“Got my foot on a snot-wad’s neck.”

“Literally?” Ethan asked.

“Figuratively. Was it literally, I’d be stomping his windpipe, and you’d have been forwarded to voice mail.”

“If you’re about to make a collar—”

“I’m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won’t get it until tomorrow morning.”

“How about you and I have lunch, and Channing Manheim pays?”

“As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”

“Everyone’s a critic.” Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.

“They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?” Hazard asked.

“There’s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,” Ethan admitted. “Would you rather go Armenian?”

“Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o’clock?”

“I’ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.”

When he pressed end, terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.

His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren’t entirely familiar to him.

Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.

In the witches’ cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.

Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.

With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.

CHAPTER 6

OUR LADY OF ANGELS HOSPITAL WAS A tall white structure with ziggurat-style step-backs in its higher floors, crowned with a series of diminishing plinths that supported a final column. Aglow in the storm, a dome light capped the high column and was itself surmounted by a radio mast with a winking red aircraft-warning beacon.

The hospital seemed to signal mercy to sick souls across the Angelean hills and into the densely populated flatlands. Its tapered shape suggested a rocket ship that might carry to Heaven those whose lives could not be saved either by medicine or by prayer.

Ethan first stopped in the men’s lavatory off the ground-floor lobby, where he washed his hands vigorously at one of the sinks. The lab technician had not scraped every trace of blood from under his fingernails.

The liquid soap in the dispenser proved to have a strong orange fragrance. The lavatory smelled like a citrus orchard by the time that he finished.

Much hot water and much rubbing left his skin a boiled red. He could see no slightest stain remaining. Nevertheless Ethan felt that his hands were still unclean.

He was troubled by the disturbing notion that as long as even a few molecules of that stigmatic residue of his foretold death clung to his hands, the Reaper would track him down by smell and cancel the reprieve that had been granted to him.

Studying his reflection in the mirror, he half expected to see through his body, as through a sheer curtain, but he was solid.

Sensing in himself the potential for obsession, concerned that he might wash his hands without surcease, until they were scrubbed raw, he quickly dried them on paper towels and left the men’s room.

He shared an elevator with a solemn young couple holding hands for mutual strength. “She’ll be all right,” the man murmured, and the woman nodded, eyes bright with repressed tears.

When Ethan got off at the seventh floor, the young couple rode farther up to higher misery.

Duncan “Dunny” Whistler had been abed here on the seventh floor for three months. Between confinements to the intensive care unit—also on this floor—he was assigned to different rooms. During the five weeks since his most recent crisis, he’d been in Room 742.

A nun with a kind Irish face made eye contact with Ethan, smiled, and passed by with nary a swish of her voluminous habit.

The order of sisters that operated Our Lady of Angels rejected the modern garb of many nuns, which resembled the uniforms of airline flight attendants. They favored instead the traditional floor-length habits with commodious sleeves, guimpes, and winged wimples.

Their habits were radiant white, rather than white and black. When Ethan saw them gliding ethereally along these halls, seeming less to walk than to drift like spirits, he could almost believe that the hospital did not occupy only Los Angeles real estate, but bridged this world and the next.

Dunny had existed in a limbo of sorts, between worlds, ever since four angry men shoved his head in a toilet bowl once too often and held him under too long. The paramedics had pumped the water out of his lungs, but the doctors hadn’t been able to stir him from his coma.

When Ethan arrived at Room 742, he found it in deep shadow. An old man rested in the bed nearest the door: unconscious, hooked to a ventilator that pumped air into him with a rhythmic wheeze.

The bed nearest the window, where Dunny had spent the past five weeks, stood unoccupied. The sheets were crisp, fresh, luminous in the gloom.

Drowned daylight projected vague gray images of ameboid rain tracks from the window glass onto the bed. The sheets appeared to be acrawl with transparent spiders.

When he saw that the patient’s chart was missing, Ethan figured that Dunny had been moved to another room or transferred to the ICU yet again.

At the seventh-floor nurses’ station, when he inquired as to where he might find Duncan Whistler, a young nurse asked him to wait for the shift supervisor, whom she paged.

Ethan knew the supervisor, Nurse Jordan, from previous visits. A black woman with a drill sergeant’s purposeful carriage and the soft smoky voice of a chanteuse, she arrived at the nurses’ station with the news that Dunny had passed away that morning.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Truman, but I called both numbers you gave us and left voice-mail messages.”

“When would this have been?” he asked.

“He passed away at ten-twenty this morning. I phoned you about fifteen or twenty minutes later.”

At approximately ten-forty, Ethan had been at Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door, trembling with the memory of his foreseen death, pretending to be looking for the nonexistent Jim Briscoe. He’d left his cell phone in the Expedition.

“I know you weren’t that close to Mr. Whistler,” said Nurse Jordan, “but it’s still something of a shock, I’m sure. Sorry you had to learn this way—the empty bed.”

“Was the body taken down to the hospital garden room?” Ethan asked.

Nurse Jordan regarded him with new respect. “I didn’t realize you were a police officer, Mr. Truman.”

Garden room was cop lingo for morgue. All those corpses waiting to be planted.

“Robbery/Homicide,” he replied, not bothering to explain that he had left the force, or why.

“My husband’s worn out enough uniforms to retire in March. I’m workin’ overtime so I don’t go crazy.”

Ethan understood. Cops often went through long law-enforcement careers without worrying much about the dust-to-dust-ashes-to-ashes business, only to tighten with tension so much in the last months before retirement that they needed to eat Metamucil by the pound to stop retaining. The worry could be even worse for spouses.

“The doctor signed a certification of death,” Nurse Jordan said, “and Mr. Whistler went down to cold holding pending mortuary pickup. Oh … actually, it won’t be a mortuary, will it?”

“It’s a murder now,” Ethan said. “The medical examiner’s office will want him for an autopsy.”

“Then they’ll have been called. We’ve got a foolproof system.” Checking her watch, she said, “But they probably haven’t had time to take custody of the body yet, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Ethan rode the elevator all the way down to the dead. The garden room was in the third and lowest level of the basement, adjacent to the ambulance garage.

Descending, he was serenaded by an orchestrated version of an old Sheryl Crow tune with all the sex squeezed out of it and with a perkiness squeezed in, retaining only the skin of the melody to wrap a different and less tasty variety of sausage. In this fallen world, even the most insignificant things, like pop tunes, were inevitably corrupted.

He and Dunny, both thirty-seven now, had been each other’s best friends from the age of five until they were twenty. Raised in the same worn-down neighborhood of crumbling stucco bungalows, each had been an only child, and they’d been as close as brothers.

Shared deprivation had bonded them, as had the emotional and the physical pain of living under the thumb of alcoholic fathers with fiery tempers. And a fierce desire to prove that even the sons of drunks, of poverty, could be someone, someday.

Seventeen years of estrangement, during which they had rarely spoken, dulled Ethan’s sense of loss. Yet even with everything else that weighed on his mind right now, he was drawn into a melancholy consideration of what might have been.

Dunny Whistler cut the bond between them with his choice of a life outside the law even as Ethan had been training to enforce it. Poverty and the chaos of living under the rule of a selfish drunk had given birth in Ethan to a respect for self-discipline, for order, and for the rewards of a life lived in service to others. The same experiences had made Dunny yearn for buckets of money and for power sufficient to ensure that no one would ever again dare to tell him what to do or ever again make him live by rules other than his own.

In retrospect, their responses to the same stresses had been diverging since their early teens. Maybe friendship had too long blinded Ethan to the growing differences between them. One had chosen to seek respect through accomplishment. The other wanted that respect which comes with being feared.

Furthermore, they had been in love with the same woman, which might have split up even blood brothers. Hannah had come into their lives when they were all seven years old. First she had been one of the guys, the only kid they admitted to their previously two-boy games. The three had been inseparable. Then Hannah gradually became both friend and surrogate sister, and the boys swore to protect her. Ethan could never mark the day when she ceased to be just a friend, just a sister, and became for both him and Dunny … beloved.

Dunny desperately wanted Hannah, but lost her. Ethan didn’t merely want Hannah; he cherished her, won her heart, married her.

For twelve years, he and Dunny had not spoken, not until the night that Hannah died in this same hospital.

Leaving the ruination of Sheryl Crow in the elevator, Ethan followed a wide and brightly lighted corridor with white painted-concrete walls. In place of ersatz music, the only sound was the faint but authentic buzz of the fluorescent tubes overhead.

Double doors with square portholes opened onto the reception area of the garden room.

At a battered desk sat a fortyish, acne-scarred man in hospital greens. A desk plaque identified him as Vin Toledano. He looked up from a paperback novel that featured a grotesque corpse on the cover.

Ethan asked how he was doing, and the attendant said he was alive so he must be doing all right, and Ethan said, “Little over an hour ago, you received a Duncan Whistler from the seventh floor.”

“Got him on ice,” Toledano confirmed. “Can’t release him to a mortuary. Coroner gets him first ’cause it’s a homicide.”

Only one chair was provided for visitors. Transactions involving perishable cadavers were generally conducted expeditiously, with no need of waiting-room comfort and dog-eared old magazines.

“I’m not with a mortuary,” said Ethan. “I was a friend of the deceased. I wasn’t here when he died.”

“Sorry, but I can’t let you see the body right now.”

Sitting in the visitors’ chair, Ethan said, “Yeah, I know.”

To prevent defense attorneys from challenging autopsy results in court, an official chain of custody for the cadaver had to be maintained, ensuring that no outsider could tamper with it.

“There’s no family left to ID him, and I’m the executor of the estate,” Ethan explained. “So if they’re going to want me to confirm identity, I’d rather do it here than later at the city morgue.”

Putting aside his paperback, Toledano said, “This guy I grew up with, last year he gets himself thrown out of a car at like ninety miles an hour. It’s hard losing a good friend young.”

Ethan couldn’t pretend to grieve, but he was grateful for any conversation that took his mind off Rolf Reynerd. “We hadn’t been close in a long time. Didn’t talk for twelve years, then only three times in the past five.”

“But he made you executor?”

“Go figure. I didn’t know about that till Dunny was here two days in the ICU. Got a call from his lawyer, tells me not only I’m the executor if Dunny dies, but meanwhile I have power of attorney to handle his affairs and make medical decisions on his behalf.”

“Must’ve still been something special there between you.”

Ethan shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Must’ve been something,” Vin Toledano insisted. “Childhood friendships, they’re deeper than you know. You don’t see each other forever, then you meet, and it’s like no time passed.”

“Wasn’t that way with us.” But Ethan knew that the something special between him and Dunny had been Hannah and their love for her. To change the subject, he said, “So how does your friend come to be pushed out of a car doing ninety?”

“He was a great guy, but he always thought more with his little head than his big one.”

“That’s not an exclusive club.”

“He’s in a bar, sees three hotties, no guys with them, so he moves in. All three come on to him, say let’s go back to our place, and he figures he’s so Brad Pitt they want to three-on-one him.”

“But it’s a robbery setup,” Ethan guessed.

“Worse. He leaves his car, rides in theirs. Two girls get him hot in the backseat, half undress him—then push him out for fun.”

“So the hotties were hopped on something.”

“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Toledano. “Turns out they’d done it twice before. This time they got caught.”

Ethan said, “I came across this old movie on TV the other night. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello. One of those beach-party flicks. Women sure were different back then.”

“So was everybody. Nobody’s got better or nicer since the mid-sixties. Wish I’d been born thirty years sooner. So how’d yours die?”

“Four guys thought he’d cheated them out of some money, so they thumped him a little, taped his wrists behind his back, and submerged his head in a toilet long enough to cause brain damage.”

“Man, that’s ugly.”

“It’s not Agatha Christie,” Ethan agreed.

“But you’re dealing with all this, it proves there must’ve been something left between you and your buddy. Nobody has to be executor of an estate, they don’t want to be.”

Two meat haulers from the medical examiner’s office pushed open the double doors and entered the garden-room reception area.

The first guy was tall, in his fifties, and obviously proud about having kept all his hair. He wore it in a pompadour elaborate enough that it should have been finished with bows.

Ethan knew Pomp’s partner. Jose Ramirez was a stocky Mexican-American with myopic eyes and with the sweet dreamy smile of a koala bear.

Jose lived for his wife and four children. While Pomp dealt with the paperwork supplied by the attendant, Ethan asked Jose to see the latest wallet photographs of Maria and the kids.

Once formalities were completed, Toledano led them through an inner door, into the garden room. Instead of a vinyl-tile floor as in the reception area, this chamber featured white ceramic tile with only sixteenth-inch grout joints: an easy surface to sterilize in the event that it became contaminated with bodily fluids.

Although continually cycled through sophisticated filters, the cold air carried a faint but unpleasant scent. Most people didn’t die smelling of shampoo, soap, and cologne.

Four standard stainless-steel morgue drawers might have held bodies, but two cadavers on gurneys made an immediate impression. Both were draped with sheets.

A third gurney stood empty, trailing a tangled shroud, and to this one Toledano proceeded with a stupefied expression. “This was him. Right here.”

Frowning with confusion, Toledano peeled the sheets back from the heads of the other two cadavers. Neither was Dunny Whistler.

One at a time, he pulled open the four stainless-steel drawers. They were empty.

Because the hospital sent the vast majority of its patients home rather than to funeral services, this garden room was small by the standards of the city morgue. All possible hiding places had already been explored.

CHAPTER 7

IN THIS WINDOWLESS CHAMBER THREE stories underground, the four living and the two dead were for a moment so silent that Ethan imagined he could hear rain falling in the streets far above.

Then the meat hauler with the pompadour said, “You mean you released Whistler to the wrong people?”

The attendant, Toledano, shook his head adamantly. “No way. Never did in fourteen years, not startin’ today.”

A wide door allowed bodies on gurneys to be conveyed directly from the garden room into the ambulance garage. Two deadbolts should have secured it. Both were disengaged.

“I left them locked,” Toledano insisted. “They’re always locked, always,’ cept when I’m overseeing a dispatch, and then I’m always here, right here, watching.”

“Who’d want to steal a stiff?” Pomp asked.

“Even some perv wanted to steal one, he couldn’t,” Vin Toledano said, pulling open the door to the garage to reveal that it lacked keyholes on the outside. “Two blind locks. No keys ever made for it. Can’t unlock this door unless you’re already here in this room, then you use the thumb-turns.”

The attendant’s voice had been quickly worn thin by worry. Ethan figured that Toledano saw his job going down the drain as surely as blood was drawn by gravity down the gutters of an inclined autopsy table.

Jose Ramirez said, “Maybe he wasn’t dead, you know, so he walked out himself.”

“He’s deader than dead,” Toledano said. “Total damn dead.”

With a slump-shouldered shrug and a koala smile, Jose said, “Mistakes happen.”

“Not in this hospital, they don’t,” the attendant insisted. “Not since once fifteen years ago, when this old lady was in cold holding almost an hour, certified dead, and then she sits up and screams.”

“Hey, I remember hearing about that,” said Pomp. “Some nun had herself a heart attack over it.”

“Who had the heart attack was the guy in this job before me, and it was the nun chewin’ him out that gave it to him.”

Stooping, Ethan extracted a white plastic bag from under the gurney that had held Dunny’s body. The bag featured drawstrings, to one of which had been tied a tag that bore the name DUNCAN EUGENE WHISTLER, his date of birth, and his social-security number.

With a wheeze of panic in his voice, Toledano said, “That held the clothes he was wearing when he was admitted to the hospital.”

Now the bag proved empty. Ethan put it on top of the gurney. “Ever since the old lady woke up fifteen years ago, you double-check the doctors?”

“Triple-check, quadruple-check,” Toledano declared. “First thing a deader comes in here, I stethoscope him, listen for heart and lung action. Use the diaphragm side to hear high-pitched sounds, bell side for low-pitched.” He nodded continually, as though while he talked he were mentally reviewing a checklist of steps he’d taken on receipt of Dunny’s body. “Do a mirror test for breath. Then establish internal body temp, take it again a half-hour later, then a half-hour after that, to see is it dropping like it should if what you’ve got is really a deader.”

Pomp found this amusing. “Internal temperature? You mean you spend your time shovin’ thermometers up dead people’s butts?”

Unamused, Jose said, “Have some respect,” and crossed himself.

Ethan’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his shirt. “Well, if nobody could get in here to take him, and if he was dead—where is he now?”

“Probably one of the sisters jerking your chain,” Pomp told the morgue attendant. “Those nuns are jokers.”

Cold air, snow-white ceramic tile, stainless-steel drawer fronts glistening like ice: None of it accounted for the depth of Ethan’s chill.

He suspected that the subtle scent of death had saturated his clothing.

Places like this had never in the past disturbed him. He was disturbed now.

In the space labeled Next of Kin or Responsible Party, the hospital paperwork listed Ethan’s name and telephone numbers; nevertheless, he gave the harried attendant a card with the same information.

Ascending in the elevator, he half listened to one of Barenaked Ladies’ best songs reduced to nap music.

He went all the way up to the seventh floor, where Dunny had died. When the elevator doors opened, he realized that he had needed to go only as high as the garage on the first subterranean level, where he’d parked the Expedition, just two floors above the garden room.

After pressing the button for the main garage level, he rode up to the fifteenth floor before the cab started down again. People got on the elevator, got off, but Ethan hardly noticed them.

His racing mind took him elsewhere. The incident at Reynerd’s apartment. Dead Dunny’s disappearance.

Badgeless, Ethan nonetheless retained a cop’s intuition. He understood that two such extraordinary events, occurring in the same morning, could not be coincidental.

The power of intuition alone, however, wasn’t sufficient to suggest the nature of the link between these uncanny occurrences. He might as well try to perform brain surgery by intuition.

Logic didn’t offer immediate answers, either. In this case, even Sherlock Holmes might have despaired at the odds of discovering the truth through deductive reasoning.

In the garage, an arriving car traveled the rows in search of a parking space, turned a corner onto a down ramp, and another car came up out of the concrete abyss, behind headlights, like a deep-salvage submersible ascending from an ocean trench, and drove toward the exit, but Ethan alone was on foot.

Mottled by years of sooty exhaust fumes that formed enigmatic and taunting Rorschach blots, the low gray ceiling appeared to press lower, lower, as he walked farther into the garage. Like the hull of a submarine, the walls seemed barely able to hold back a devastating weight of sea, a crushing pressure.

Step by step, Ethan expected to discover that he wasn’t after all alone on foot. Beyond each SUV, behind every concrete column, an old friend might wait, his condition mysterious and his purpose unknowable.

Ethan reached the Expedition without incident.

No one waited for him in the vehicle.

Behind the steering wheel, even before he started the engine, he locked the doors.

CHAPTER 8

THE ARMENIAN RESTAURANT ON PICO boulevard had the atmosphere of a Jewish delicatessen, a menu featuring food so delicious that it would inspire a condemned man to smile through his last meal, and more plainclothes cops and film-industry types together in one place than you would find anywhere outside of the courtroom devoted to the trial of the latest spouse-murdering celebrity.

When Ethan arrived, Hazard Yancy waited in a booth by a window. Even seated, he loomed so large that he would have been well advised to audition for the title role in The Incredible Hulk if Hollywood ever made a black version.

Hazard had already been served a double order of the kibby appetizer with cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickled turnip on the side.

As Ethan sat across the table from the big detective, Hazard said, “Somebody told me they saw in the news your boss got twenty-seven million bucks for his last two movies.”

“Twenty-seven million each. He’s the first to break through the twenty-five-million ceiling.”

“Up from poverty,” Hazard said.

“Plus he’s got a piece of the back end.”

“That kind of money, he can get a piece of anybody’s back end he wants.”

“It’s an industry phrase. Means if the picture is a big hit, he gets a share of the profits, sometimes even a percentage of gross.”

“How much might that amount to?”

“According to Daily Variety, he’s had worldwide hits so big he sometimes walks away with fifty million, thereabouts.”

“You read the show-biz press now?” Hazard asked.

“Helps me stay aware of how big a target he’s making himself.”

“You got your work cut out for you, all right. How many movies does the man do a year?”

“Never fewer than two. Sometimes three.”

“I was planning to chow down so much on his dime, Mr. Channing Manheim himself would notice, and you’d get fired for abusing your credit-card privileges.”

“Even you can’t eat a hundred thousand bucks’ worth of kibby.”

Hazard shook his head. “Chan the Man. Maybe I’m not hip anymore, but I don’t see him being fifty million cool.”

“He also owns a TV-production company with three shows currently on major networks, four on cable. He pulls in a few million a year from Japan, doing TV commercials for their top-selling beer. He has a line of sports clothes. Lots more. His agents call the non-acting income ‘additional revenue streams.’”

“People just pissing money on him, huh?”

“He’ll never need to shop for bargains.”

When the waitress came to the table, Ethan ordered Moroccan salmon with couscous, and iced tea.

Taking Hazard’s order, she wore the point off her pencil: lebne with string cheese and extra cucumbers, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, lahmajoon flatbread, seafood tagine. … “Plus give me two of those little bottles of Orangina.”

“Only person I ever saw eat that much,” Ethan said, “was this bulimic ballerina. She went to the john to puke after every course.”

“I’m just sampling, and I never wear a tutu.” Hazard cut his last kibby in two. “So how big an asshole is Chan the Man?”

The masking roar of other lunchtime conversations provided Ethan and Hazard with privacy nearly equal to that on a remote Mojave hill.

“It’s impossible to hate him,” Ethan said.

“That’s your best compliment?”

“It’s just that in person he doesn’t have the impact he does on the screen. He doesn’t stir your emotions one way or the other.”

Hazard forked half a kibby into his mouth and made a small sound of pleasure. “So he’s all image, no substance.”

“That’s not quite it. He’s so … bland. Generous to employees. Not arrogant. But there’s this … this weightlessness about him. He’s sort of careless how he treats people, even his own son, but it’s a benign indifference. He’s not an actively bad guy.”

“That money, that much adoration, you expect a monster.”

“With him, you don’t get it. You get …”

Ethan paused to think. In the months he’d worked for Manheim, he had not spoken this much or this frankly about the man to anyone.

He and Hazard had been shot at together, and each had trusted his life to the other. He could speak his mind and know that nothing he said would be repeated.

With such a confidential sounding board, he wanted to describe the Face not only as honestly as possible but as perceptively. In explaining Manheim to Hazard, he also might be able more fully to explain the actor to himself.

After the waitress brought iced tea and the Oranginas, Ethan at last said, “He’s self-absorbed but not in the usual movie-star way, not in any way that makes him appear egotistical. He cares about the money, I guess, but I don’t think he cares what anyone thinks of him or that he’s famous. He’s self-absorbed, all right, totally self-absorbed, but it’s like this … this Zen state of self-absorption.”

“Zen state?”

“Yeah. Like life is about him and nature, him and the cosmos, not him and other people. He always seems to be half in a meditative state, not entirely here with you, like some con-man yogi pretending to be otherworldly, except he’s sincere. If he’s always contemplating the universe, then he’s also confident the universe is contemplating him, that their fascination is mutual.”

Having finished the last of his kibby, Hazard said, “Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Bogart—were they all airheads, and nobody knew it, or in those days were movie stars real men with their feet on the ground?”

“Some real people are still in the business. I met Jodie Foster, Sandra Bullock. They seem real.”

“They seem like they could kick ass, too,” Hazard said.

Two waitresses were required to bring all the food to the table.

Hazard grinned and nodded as each dish was placed before him: “Nice. Nice. That’s nice. Real nice. Oh, very nice.”

The memory of being shot in the gut spoiled Ethan’s appetite. As he picked at his Moroccan salmon and couscous, he delayed bringing up the issue of Rolf Reynerd. “So you said you’ve got one foot on some snot-wad’s neck. What’s the case?”

“Twenty-two-year-old blond cutie strangled, dumped in a sewage-treatment slough. We call it Blonde in the Pond.”

Any cop who works homicides is changed forever by his job. The victims haunt him with the quiet insistence of spirochetes spinning poison in the blood.

Humor is your best and often only defense against the horror. Early in the investigation, every killing is given a droll name, which is thereafter used within the Homicide Division.

Your ranking officer would never ask, Are you making progress on the Ermitrude Pottlesby murder? It would always be, Anything new with Blonde in the Pond?

When Ethan and Hazard worked the brutal murders of two lesbians of Middle Eastern descent, the case had been called Lezzes in Fezzes. Another young woman, tied to a kitchen table, had choked to death on steel-wool pads and Pine-Sol-soaked sponges that her killer had forced into her mouth and down her throat; her case was Scrub Lady.

Outsiders would probably be offended to hear the unofficial case names. Civilians didn’t realize that detectives often dreamed about the dead for whom they sought justice, or that a detective could occasionally become so attached to a victim that the loss felt personal. No disrespect was ever intended by these case names—and sometimes they expressed a strange, melancholy affection.

“Strangled,” Ethan said, referring to Blonde in the Pond. “Which suggests passion, a good chance it was someone romantically involved with her.”

“Ah. So you haven’t gone entirely soft in your expensive leather jackets and your Gucci loafers.”

“I’m wearing Rockports, not loafers. Dumping her in a sewage slough probably means he caught her screwing around, so he considers her filthy, a worthless piece of crap.”

“Plus maybe he had knowledge of the treatment plant, knew an easy way to get the body in there. Is that a cashmere sweater?”

“Cotton. So your perp works at the plant?”

Hazard shook his head. “He’s a member of the city council.”

At once losing his appetite altogether, Ethan put down his fork. “A politician? Why don’t you just find a cliff and jump?”

Shoving a stuffed grape leaf in his maw, Hazard managed to grin while he chewed, without once opening his mouth. After swallowing, he said, “I’ve already got a cliff, and I’m pushing him off.”

“Anybody winds up broken on the rocks, it’ll be you.”

“You’ve just taken the cliff metaphor one step too far,” said Hazard, spooning hummus into a pita wedge.

After a half-century of squeaky-clean public officials and honest administration, California itself had lately become a deep sewage slough not seen since the 1930s and ’40s when Raymond Chandler had written about its dark side. Here in the early years of the new millennium, on a state level and in too many local jurisdictions, corruption had attained a degree of rot seldom seen outside a banana republic, though in this case a banana republic without bananas and with pretensions to glamour.

A significant percentage of the politicians here operated like thugs. If the thugs saw you going after one of their own, they would assume you’d come after them next, and they would use their power to ruin you one way or another.

In another gangster-ridden era, in a crusade against corruption, Eliot Ness had led a force of law-enforcement agents so beyond reach by bribery and so undeterred by bullets that they became known as the Untouchables. In contemporary California, even Ness and his exemplary crew would be destroyed not by bribes or bullets, but by bureaucracy wielded as ruthlessly as an ax and by slander eagerly converted to libel by a feeding-frenzy media with a sentimental affection for the thugs, both the elected and unelected varieties, upon whom they daily reported.

“If you were still doing real work like me,” Hazard said, “you’d handle this no different than I’m handling it.”

“Yeah. But I sure wouldn’t sit there grinning about it.”

Indicating Ethan’s sweater, Hazard said, “Cotton—like Rodeo Drive cotton?”

“Cotton like Macy’s on-sale cotton.”

“How much you pay for a pair of socks these days?”

Ethan said, “Ten thousand dollars.”

He’d been hesitant to bring up the Rolf Reynerd situation. Now he figured he could do nothing better for Hazard than distract him from this suicidal mission to nail a city councilman for murder.

“Take a look at these.” He opened a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, withdrew the contents, and passed them across the table.

As Hazard reviewed what he’d been given, Ethan told him about the five black boxes delivered by Federal Express and the sixth thrown over the gate.

“They came by Federal Express, so you know who sent them.”

“No. The return addresses were fake. They were dropped off at different mom-and-pop mailbox shops that collect for FedEx and UPS. The sender paid cash.”

“How much mail does Channing get a week?”

“Maybe five thousand pieces. But almost all of it is sent to the studio where it’s known he has offices. A publicity firm reviews it and responds. His home address isn’t a secret, but it’s not widely known, either.”

In the envelope were high-resolution computer printouts of six digital photographs taken in Ethan’s study, the first of which showed a small jar standing on a white cloth. Beside the jar lay the lid. Spread across the cloth were what had been the contents of the jar: twenty-two beetles with black-spotted orange shells.

“Ladybugs?” Hazard asked.

“The entomological name is Hippodamia convergens, of the family Coccinellidae. Not that I think it matters, but I looked it up.”

Hazard’s shrewd expression spoke clearly enough without words, but he said, “You’re stumped worse than a quadruple amputee.”

“This guy thinks I’m Batman, he’s the Riddler.”

“Why twenty-two bugs? Is the number significant?”

“I don’t know.”

“They alive when you received them?” Hazard asked.

“All dead. Whether they were alive when he sent them, I don’t know, but they looked like they’d been dead for a while. The shells were intact, but the more delicate bug parts were withered, crumbly.”

In the second photo, a collection of different, spirally coiled, light brown shells were canted at angles in a gray pile of sludge that had been emptied from a black box onto a sheet of waxed paper.

“Ten dead snails,” Ethan said. “Well, actually, two were alive but feeble when I opened the box.”

“That’s a fragrance Chanel won’t be bottling.”

Hazard paused to fork up some seafood tagine.

The third photo was of a small, clear-glass, screwtop jar. The label had been removed, but the lid indicated that the container had once held pickle relish.

Because the photograph wasn’t clear enough to reveal the murky contents of the jar, Ethan said, “Floating in formaldehyde were these ten pieces of translucent tissue with a pale pinkish tint. Tubelike structures. Hard to describe. Like tiny exotic jellyfish.”

“You took ’em to a lab?”

“Yeah. When they gave me the analysis, they also gave me a weird look. What I had in the jar were foreskins.”

Hazard’s jaws locked in midchew, as if the seafood tagine had hardened like a dental mold.

“Ten foreskins from grown men, not infants,” Ethan amplified.

After chewing mechanically, not with his former relish, and after swallowing with a grimace, Hazard said, “Ouch. How many grown men get themselves circumcised?”

“They’re not standing in line for it,” Ethan agreed.

CHAPTER 9

CORKY LAPUTA THRIVED IN THE RAIN.

He wore a long shiny yellow slicker and a droopy yellow rain hat. He was as bright as a dandelion.

The slicker had many inside pockets, deep and weatherproof.

In his tall black rubber boots, two layers of socks kept his feet pleasantly warm.

He yearned for thunder.

He ached for lightning.

Storms in southern California, usually lacking crash and flash, were too quiet for his taste.

He liked the wind, however. Hissing, hooting, a champion of disorder, it lent a sting to the rain and promised chaos.

Ficus and pine trees shivered, shuddered. Palm fronds clicked and clattered.

Stripped leaves whirled in ragged green conjurations, short-lived demons that blew down into gutters.

Eventually, clogging drain grills, the leaves would be the cause of flooded streets, stalled cars, delayed ambulances, and many small but welcome miseries.

Here in the blustery, dripping midday, Corky walked a charming residential neighborhood in Studio City. Sowing disorder.

He didn’t live here. He never would.

This was a working-class neighborhood, managerial- class at best. Intellectual stimulation in such a place would be hard to find.

He had driven here to take a walk.

Emergency-yellow, blazing canary, he nevertheless passed along these streets with complete anonymity, drawing as little notice as might a ghost whose substance was but a twist of ectoplasmic mist.

He had yet to encounter anyone on foot. Few cars traveled the quiet streets.

The weather kept most people snug indoors.

The glorious rotten weather was Corky’s fine conspirator.

At this hour, of course, most residents of these houses were away at work. Toiling, toiling, with stupid purpose.

Because this was a holiday week, children had not gone to school. Today: Monday. Christmas: Friday. Deck the halls.

Some children would be in the company of siblings. A lesser number would be under the protection of a nonworking mother.

Others were home alone.

In this instance, however, children were not Corky’s avenue of expression. Here, they were safe from the yellow ghost passing among them.

Anyway, Corky was forty-two. Kids these days were too savvy to open their doors to strange men.

Welcome disorder and lovely decadence had deeply infected the world in recent years. Now the lambs of all ages were growing wary.

He contented himself with lesser outrages, just happy to be out in the storm and doing a little damage.

In one of his capacious inner pockets, he carried a plastic bag of glittering blue crystals. A wickedly powerful chemical defoliant.

The Chinese military had developed it. Prior to a war, their agents would sow this stuff in their enemy’s farms.

The blue crystals withered crops through a twelvemonth growing cycle. An enemy unable to feed itself cannot fight.

One of Corky’s colleagues at the university had accepted a grant to study the crystals for the Department of Defense. They felt an urgent need to find a way to protect against the chemical in advance of its use.

In his lab, the colleague had a fifty-pound drum of the stuff. Corky had stolen one pound.

He wore thin protective latex gloves, which he could easily hide in the great winglike sleeves of his slicker.

The slicker was as much a serape as a coat. The sleeves were so voluminous that he could withdraw his arms from them, search his interior pockets, and slip into the sleeves again with fistfuls of one poison or another.

He scattered blue crystals over primrose and liriope, over star jasmine and bougainvillea. Azaleas and ferns. Carpet roses, lantana.

The rain swiftly dissolved the crystals. The chemical seeped into the roots.

In a week, the plants would yellow, drop leaves. In two weeks, they would collapse in a muck of reeking rot.

Large trees would not be affected by the quantities that Corky could scatter. Lawns, flowers, shrubs, vines, and smaller trees would succumb, however, in satisfying numbers.

He didn’t sow death in the landscaping of every house. One out of three, in no apparent pattern.

If an entire block of homes were blighted, neighbors might be drawn closer by the shared catastrophe. If some were untouched, they would become the envy of the afflicted. And might arouse suspicion.

Corky’s mission was not merely to cause destruction. Any fool could wreck things. He intended also to spread dissension, distrust, discord, and despair.

Occasionally a dog barked or growled from the shelter of a porch where it was tethered or from within a doghouse behind a board fence or a stone wall.

Corky liked dogs. They were man’s best friend, though why they would want to fill that role remained a mystery, considering the vile nature of humanity.

Now and then, when he heard a dog, he fished tasty biscuits from an inner pocket. He tossed them onto porches, over fences.

In the interest of societal deconstruction, he could put aside his love of dogs and do what must be done. Sacrifices must be made.

You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and all that.

The dog biscuits were treated with cyanide. The animals would die far faster than the plants.

Few things would spread despair so effectively as the untimely death of a beloved pet.

Corky was sad. Sad for the luckless dogs.

He was happy, too. Happy that in a thousand little ways he daily contributed to the fall of a corrupt order—and therefore to the rise of a better world.

For the same reason that he didn’t damage the landscaping at every house, he didn’t kill every dog. Let neighbor suspect neighbor.

He wasn’t concerned that he would be caught in these poisonings. Entropy, the most powerful force in the universe, was his ally and his protecting god.

Besides, the at-home parents would be watching sleazy daytime talk shows on which daughters revealed to their mothers that they were whores, on which wives revealed to their husbands that they were having affairs with their brothers-in-law.

With school out, the kids would be busy learning homicidal skills from video games. Better yet, the pubescent boys would be surfing the Net for pornography, sharing it with innocent younger brothers, and scheming to rape the little girl next door.

Because he approved of those activities, Corky went about his work as discreetly as possible, so as not to distract these people from their self-destruction.

Corky Laputa was not merely a dreary poisoner. He was a man of many talents and weapons.

From time to time, as he plodded along the puddled walkways, under the drizzling trees, he indulged in melody. He sang “Singin’ in the Rain,” of course, which might be trite, but which amused him.

He did not dance.

Not that he couldn’t dance. Although not as limber and as right with rhythm as Gene Kelly, he could dazzle on any dance floor.

Capering along a street in a yellow slicker as roomy as any nun’s habit was, however, not wise behavior for an anarchist who preferred anonymity.

The streetside mailbox in front of each house always sported a number. Some boxes featured family names, as well.

Sometimes a name appeared to be Jewish. Stein. Levy. Glickman.

At each of these boxes, Corky paused briefly. He inserted one of the letter-size white envelopes that he carried by the score in another slicker pocket.

On each envelope, a black swastika. In each, two sheets of folded paper certain to instill fear and stoke anger.

On the first page, in bold block letters, were printed the words DEATH TO ALL DIRTY JEWS.

The photo on the second page showed bodies stacked ten deep in the furnace yard of a Nazi concentration camp. Under it in red block letters blazed the message YOU’RE NEXT.

Corky had no prejudice against the Jewish people. He held all races, religions, and ethnic groups in equal contempt.

At other special venues, he had distributed DEATH TO ALL DIRTY CATHOLICS notices, DEATH TO ALL BLACKS, and IMPRISON ALL GUN OWNERS.

For decades, politicians had been controlling the people by dividing them into groups and turning them against one another. All a good anarchist could do was try to intensify the existing hatreds and pour gasoline on the fires that the politicians had built.

Currently, hatred of Israel—and, by extension, all Jews—was the fashionable intellectual position among the most glamorous of media figures, including many nonreligious Jews. Corky was simply giving the people what they wanted.

Azalea to lantana to jasmine vine, dog to dog to mailbox, he journeyed through the rain-swept day. Seeding chaos.

Determined conspirators might be able to blow up skyscrapers and cause breathtaking destruction. Their work was helpful.

Ten thousand Corky Laputas—inventive, diligent— would in their quiet persistent way do more, however, to undermine the foundations of this society than all the suicide pilots and bombers combined.

For every thousand gunmen, Corky thought, I’d rather have one hate-filled teacher subtly propagandizing in a schoolroom, one day-care worker with an unslakable thirst for cruelty, one atheist priest hiding in cassock and alb and chasuble.

By a circuitous route, he came within sight of the BMW where he had parked it an hour and a half earlier. Right on schedule.

Spending too much time in a single neighborhood could be risky. The wise anarchist keeps moving because entropy favors the rambler, and motion foils the law.

The dirty-milk clouds had churned lower during his stroll, coagulating into sooty curds. In the storm gloom, in the wet shade of the oak tree, his silver sedan waited as dark as iron.

Trailers of bougainvillea lashed the air, casting off scarlet petals, raking thorny nails against the stucco wall of a house, making sgraffito sounds: scratch-scratch, screek-screek.

Wind threw sheets, lashed whips, spun funnels of rain. Rain hissed, sizzled, chuckled, splashed.

Corky’s phone rang.

He was still half a block from his car. He would miss the call if he waited to answer it in the BMW.

He slipped his right arm out of its sleeve, under his slicker, and unclipped the phone from his belt.

Arm in sleeve again, phone to ear, toddling along as buttercup-yellow and as smile-evoking as any character in any TV program for children, Corky Laputa was in such a good mood that he answered the call by saying, “Brighten the corner where you are.”

The caller was Rolf Reynerd. As thick as Corky was yellow, Rolf thought he’d gotten a wrong number.

“It’s me,” Corky said quickly, before Reynerd could hang up.

By the time he reached the BMW, he wished he had never answered the phone. Reynerd had done something stupid.

CHAPTER 10

BEYOND THE RESTAURANT WINDOW, falling rain as clear as a baby’s conscience met the city pavement and flooded the gutters with filthy churning currents.

Studying the photo of the jar full of foreskins, Hazard said, “Ten little hats from ten little proud heads? You think they could be trophies?”

“From men he’s murdered? Possible but unlikely. Anybody with that many kills isn’t the kind to taunt his victims first with freaky gifts in black boxes. He just does the job.”

“And if they were trophies, he wouldn’t give them away so easy.”

“Yeah. They’d be the central theme of his home decor. What I think is he works with stiffs. Maybe in a funeral home or a morgue.”

“Postmortem circumcisions.” Hazard twisted some string cheese onto his fork as he might have spun up a bite of spaghetti. “Kinky, but it’s got to be the answer, ’cause I haven’t heard about ten unsolved homicides where it looks like the perp might be a lunatic rabbi.” He dunked the string cheese in lebne and continued with lunch.

Ethan said, “I think he harvested these from cadavers for the sole purpose of sending them to Channing Manheim.”

“To convey what—that Chan the Man is a prick?”

“I doubt the message is that simple.”

“Fame doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.”

The fourth black box had been larger than the others. Two photos were required to document the contents.

In the first picture stood a honey-colored ceramic cat. The cat stood on its hind paws and held a ceramic cookie in each forepaw. Red letters on its chest and tummy spelled COOKIE KITTEN.

“It’s a cookie jar,” Ethan said.

“I’m such a good detective, I figured that out all by myself.”

“It was filled with Scrabble tiles.”

The second photo showed a pile of tiles. In front of the pile, Ethan had used six pieces to spell OWE and WOE.

“The jar contained ninety of each letter: O, W, E. Either word could be spelled ninety times, or both words forty-five times side by side. I don’t know which he intended.”

“So the nutball is saying, ‘I owe you woe.’ He thinks somehow Manheim has done him wrong, and now it’s payback time.”

“Maybe. But why in a cookie jar?”

“You could also spell wow,” Hazard noted.

“Yeah, but then you’re left with half the Os and all the Es not used, and they don’t make anything together. Only owe or woe uses all the letters.”

“What about two-word combinations?”

“The first one is wee woo. Which could mean ‘little love,’ I guess, but I don’t get the message in that one. The second is E-W-E, and woo again.”

“Sheep love, huh?”

“Seems like a dead end to me. I think owe woe is what he intended, one or the other, or both.”

Smearing lebne on a slice of lahmajoon flatbread, Hazard said, “Maybe after this we can play Monopoly.”

The fifth black box had contained a hardcover book titled Paws for Reflection. The cover featured a photo of an adorable golden retriever puppy.

“It’s a memoir,” Ethan said. “The guy who wrote it—Donald Gainsworth—spent thirty years training guide dogs for the blind and service dogs for people confined to wheelchairs.”

“No bugs or foreskins pressed between the pages?”

“Nope. And I checked every page for underlining, but nothing was highlighted.”

“It’s out of character with the rest. An innocuous little book, even sweet.”

“Box number six was thrown over the gate a little after three-thirty this morning.”

Hazard studied the last two photos. First, the sutured apple. Then the eye inside. “Is the peeper real?”

“He pried it out of a doll.”

“Nevertheless, this one disturbs me most of all.”

“Me too. Why you?”

“The apple’s the most crafted of the six. It took a lot of care, so it’s probably the one he finds most meaningful.”

“So far it doesn’t mean much to me,” Ethan lamented.

Stapled to the last photograph was a Xerox of the typewritten message that had been folded in the seed pocket, under the eye. After reading it twice, Hazard said, “He didn’t send anything like this with the first five packages?”

“No.”

“Then this is probably the last thing he’s sending. He’s said everything he wants to say, in symbols and now in words. Now he moves from threats to action.”

“I think you’re right. But the words are as much of a riddle as the symbols, the objects.”

With silvery insistence, headlights cleaved the afternoon gloom. Radiant wings of water flew up from the puddled pavement, obscuring the tires and lending an aura of supernatural mission to the vehicles that plied the currents of Pico Boulevard.

After a brooding silence, Hazard said, “An apple might symbolize dangerous or forbidden knowledge. The original sin he mentions.”

Ethan tried his salmon and couscous again. He might as well have been eating paste. He put down his fork.

“The seeds of knowledge have been replaced by the eye,” Hazard said, almost more to himself than to Ethan.

A flock of pedestrians hurried past the restaurant windows, bent forward as if resisting a wind greater than the one that the December day exhaled, under the inadequate protection of black umbrellas, like mourners quickening to a grave.

“Maybe he’s saying, ‘I see your secrets, the source— the seeds—of your evil.’”

“I had a similar thought. But it doesn’t feel entirely right, and it doesn’t lead me anywhere useful.”

“Whatever he means by it,” Hazard said, “it bothers me that you have this eye in the apple come just after this book about a guy who raised guide dogs for the blind.”

“If he’s threatening to blind Manheim, that’s bad enough,” said Ethan, “but I think he intends worse.”

After shuffling through the photos once more, Hazard returned them to Ethan and again addressed the seafood tagine with gusto. “I assume you’ve got your man well covered.”

“He’s filming in Florida. Five bodyguards travel with him.”

“You don’t?”

“Not usually. I oversee all security operations from Bel Air. I talk to the head road warrior at least once a day.”

“Road warrior?”

“That’s Manheim’s little joke. It’s what he calls the bodyguards who travel with him.”

“That’s a joke? I fart funnier than he talks.”

“I never claimed he was the king of comedy.”

“When somebody tossed the sixth box over the gate last night,” Hazard asked, “who was the somebody? Any security tape?”

“Plenty. Including a clear shot of his license plate.”

Ethan told him about Rolf Reynerd—though he didn’t mention his encounters with the man, neither the one that he knew to be real nor the one that he seemed to have dreamed.

“And what do you want from me?” Hazard asked.

“Maybe you could check him out.”

“Check him out? How far? You want me to hold his privates while he turns his head and coughs?”

“Maybe not that far.”

“You want I should look for polyps in his lower colon?”

“I already know he doesn’t have any criminal priors—”

“So I’m not the first one you’re calling in a favor from.”

Ethan shrugged. “You know me, I’m a user. No one’s safe. It’d be useful to know, does Reynerd have any legally registered firearms.”

“You been talking to Laura Moonves over in Support Division?”

“She was helpful,” Ethan admitted.

“You should marry her.”

“She didn’t give me that much on Reynerd.”

“Even all us morons can see you and her would be as right as bread and butter.”

“We haven’t even dated in eighteen months,” Ethan said.

“That’s because you’re not as smart as us morons. You’re just an idiot. So don’t jive me. Moonves could get firearm registrations for you. That’s not what you want from me.”

While Hazard concentrated on lunch, Ethan gazed into the false twilight of the storm.

After two winters of below-average rainfall, the climatological experts had warned that California was in for a long and disastrous dry spell. As usual, the ensuing dire stories of drought, flooding the media, had proved to be sure predictors of a drowning deluge.

The pregnant belly of the sky hung low and gray and fat, and water broke to announce the birth of still more water.

“I guess what I want from you,” Ethan said at last, “is to take a look at the guy up close and tell me what you think of him.”

As perceptive as ever, Hazard said, “You’ve already knocked on his door, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. Pretended I’d come to see who lived there before him.”

“He creeped you out. Something way different about him.”

“You’ll see it or you won’t,” Ethan said evasively.

“I’m a homicide cop. He’s not a suspect in any killing. How do I justify this?”

“I’m not asking for an official visit.”

“If I don’t wave a badge, I won’t get past the doorstep, not as mean as I look.”

“If you can’t, you can’t. That’s okay.”

When the waitress arrived to ask if they wanted anything more, Hazard said, “I love those walnut mamouls. Give me six dozen to go.”

“I like a man with a big appetite,” she said coyly.

“You, young lady, I could gobble up in one bite,” Hazard said, eliciting from her a flush of erotic interest and a nervous laugh.

When the waitress went away, Ethan said, “Six dozen?”

“I like cookies. So where does this Reynerd live?”

Earlier, Ethan had written the address on a slip of paper. He passed it across the table. “If you go, don’t go easy.”

“Go what—in a tank?”

“Just go ready.”

“For what?”

“Probably nothing, maybe something. He’s either high wired or a natural-born headcase. And he’s got a pistol.”

Hazard’s gaze tracked across Ethan’s face as though reading his secrets as readily as an optical scanner could decipher any bar pattern of Universal Product Code. “Thought you wanted me to check for gun registration.”

“A neighbor told me,” Ethan lied. “Says Reynerd’s a little paranoid, keeps the piece close to himself most of the time.”

While Ethan returned the computer-printed photos to the manila envelope, Hazard stared at him.

The papers didn’t seem to fit in the envelope at first. Then for a moment the metal clasp was too large to slip through the hole in the flap.

“You have a shaky envelope there,” said Hazard.

“Too much coffee this morning,” Ethan said, and to avoid meeting Hazard’s eyes, he surveyed the lunchtime crowd.

The flogged air of human voices flailed through the restaurant, beat against the walls, and what seemed, on casual attention, to be a celebratory roar sounded sinister when listened to with a more attentive ear, sounded now like the barely throttled rage of a mob, and now like the torment of legions under some cruel oppression.

Ethan realized that he was searching face to face for one face in particular. He half expected to see toilet- drowned Dunny Whistler, dead but eating lunch.

“You’ve hardly touched your salmon,” Hazard said in a tone of voice as close as he could ever get to motherly concern.

“It’s off,” Ethan said.

“Why didn’t you send it back?”

“I’m not that hungry, anyway.”

Hazard used his well-worn fork to sample salmon. “It’s not off.”

“It tastes off to me,” Ethan insisted.

The waitress returned with the lunch check and with pink bakery boxes full of walnut mamouls packed in a clear plastic bag bearing the restaurant’s logo.

While Ethan fished a credit card from his wallet, the woman waited, her face a clear window to her thoughts. She wanted to flirt more with Hazard, but his daunting appearance made her wary.

As Ethan returned the check with his American Express plastic, the waitress thanked him and glanced at Hazard, who licked his lips with theatrical pleasure, causing her to scurry off like a rabbit that had been so flattered by a fox’s admiration that she had almost offered herself for dinner before recovering her survival instinct.

“Thanks for picking up the check,” Hazard said. “Now I can say Chan the Man took me to lunch. Though I think these mamouls are going to turn out to be the most expensive cookies I ever ate.”

“This was just lunch. No obligations. Like I said, if you can’t, you can’t. Reynerd’s my problem, not yours.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got me intrigued now. You’re a better flirt than the waitress.”

Midst a clutter of darker emotions, Ethan found a genuine smile.

A sudden change in the direction of the wind threw shatters of rain against the big windows.

Beyond the hard-washed glass, pedestrians and passing traffic appeared to melt into ruin as though subjected to an Armageddon of flameless heat, a holocaust of caustic acid.

Ethan said, “If he’s carrying a potato-chip bag, corn chips, anything like that, there might be more than snack food in it.”

“This the paranoid part? You said he keeps his piece close.”

“That’s what I heard. In a potato-chip bag, places like that, where he can reach for it, and you don’t realize what he’s doing.”

Hazard stared at him, saying nothing.

“Maybe it’s a nine-millimeter Glock,” Ethan added.

“He have a nuclear weapon, too?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Probably keeps the nuke in a box of Cheez-Its.”

“Just take a bagful of mamouls, and you can handle anything.”

“Hell, yeah. Throw one of these, you’d crack a guy’s skull.”

“Then eat the evidence.”

The waitress returned with his credit card and the voucher.

As Ethan added the gratuity and signed the form, Hazard seemed almost oblivious of the woman and did not once look at her.

With needles of rain, the blustering wind tattooed ephemeral patterns on the window, and Hazard said, “Looks cold out there.”

That was exactly what Ethan had been thinking.

CHAPTER 11

SLICKERED AND BOOTED, WEARING THE same jeans and wool sweater as before, sitting behind the wheel of his silver BMW, Corky Laputa felt stifled by a frustration as heavy and suffocating as a fur coat.

Although his shirt wasn’t buttoned to the top, anger pinched his throat as tight as if he’d squeezed his sixteen-inch neck into a fifteen-inch collar.

He wanted to drive to West Hollywood and kill Reynerd.

Such impulses must be resisted, of course, for though he dreamed of a societal collapse into complete lawlessness, from which a new order would arise, the laws against murder remained in effect. They were still enforced.

Corky was a revolutionary, but not a martyr.

He understood the need to balance radical action with patience.

He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.

To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.

Contrary to the claims of organized medicine, both the greed-corrupted Western variety and the spiritually smug Eastern brand, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed him.

Very old people, nerves rubbed to an excruciating sensitivity by life and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey’s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.

In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.

She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a network of arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.

Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.

Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.

Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother’s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.

If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn’t greedy.

She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and she cared not at all about his comfort or his needs. He’d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.

In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.

She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.

Corky didn’t hate his mother. He didn’t hate anyone.

He didn’t envy anyone, either.

Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.

Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.

Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he’d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.

The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.

Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.

His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.

Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.

He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.

When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.

Noticing that the yellow slicker had shed a lot of water on the seat, he sighed but did nothing. Corky was too committed an anarchist to care about the upholstery.

Besides, he had Reynerd to brood about. A perpetual adolescent inside a dour exterior, Rolf had been unable to resist the temptation to deliver the sixth box in person. Looking for a thrill.

The fool had thought that perimeter security cameras did not exist solely because he himself could not spot them.

Are there no other planets in the solar system, Corky had asked him, just because you can’t locate them in the sky?

When Ethan Truman, Manheim’s security chief, came calling, Reynerd had been stunned. By his admission, he behaved suspiciously.

As Corky wadded up the candy wrapper and stuffed it into the trash bag, he wished that he could dispose of Reynerd as easily.

Suddenly rain fell more heavily than at any previous moment of the storm. The deluge knocked stubborn acorns from the oak under which he had parked, and cast them across the BMW. They rattled off the paint work and surely marred it, snapped off the windshield but did not crack it.

He didn’t have to sit here, in a danger of acorns, plotting Reynerd’s demise, until a rotting thousand-pound limb broke free, fell on the car, and crushed him for his trouble. He could get on with his day and mentally draw up blueprints for the murder while he attended to other business.

Corky drove a few miles to a popular upscale shopping mall and parked in the underground garage.

He got out of the BMW, stripped off his slicker and his droopy rain hat, which he tossed onto the floor of the car. He shrugged into a tweed sports coat that complemented his sweater and jeans.

An elevator carried him from subterranean realms to the highest of two floors of shops, restaurants, and attractions. The arcade was on this top level.

With school out, kids crowded around the arcade games. Most were in their early teens.

The machines beeped, rang, tolled, chimed, bleated, tweedled, whistled, rattattooed, boomed, shrieked, squealed, ululated, roared like gunning engines, emitted scraps of bombastic music, the screams of virtual victims, twinkled, flashed, strobed, and scintillated in all known colors, and swallowed quarters, dollars, more voraciously even than the iconic Pac-Man had once gobbled cookies off a million arcade screens in an era now quaint if not unknown to the current crowd.

Wandering among the machines, Corky distributed free drugs to the kids.

These small plastic bags each contained eight doses of Ecstasy—or Extasy, if you’d gone to a public school—with a block-lettered label that promised FREE X, and then suggested, JUST REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIEND IS.

He was pretending to be a dealer drumming up business. He never expected to see any of these brats again.

Some kids accepted the packets, thought it was cool.

Others showed no interest. Of those who declined, none made an effort to report him to anyone; nobody liked a rat.

In a few instances, Corky slipped the bags into kids’ jacket pockets without their knowledge. Let them find it later, be amazed.

Some would take the stuff. Some would throw it away or give it away. In the end, he would have succeeded in contaminating a few more brains.

Truth: He wasn’t interested in creating addicts. He would have given away heroin or even crack cocaine if that had been his goal.

Scientific studies of Ecstasy revealed that five years after taking just a single dose, the user continued to exhibit lingering changes in brain chemistry. After regular use, permanent brain damage could ensue.

Some oncologists and neurologists suggested that in the decades to come, the current high incidence of Ecstasy use would produce a dramatic increase in early-onset cancerous brain tumors, as well as a decrease in the cognitive abilities of hundreds of thousands if not millions of citizens.

Eight-dose giveaways like this would not facilitate the collapse of civilization overnight. Corky was committed to long-term effect.

He never carried more than fifteen bags, and once he started to hand them out, he made a point of ridding himself of them quickly. Too clever to get caught holding, he was in and out of the arcade in three minutes.

Because he didn’t need to pause to make a sale, the staff didn’t have an opportunity to notice him. By the time he left the arcade, he was just another shopper: nothing incriminating in his pockets.

At a Starbucks, he bought a double latte, and sipped it at one of their tables on the promenade, watching the parade of humanity in all its absurdity.

After finishing the coffee, he went to a department store. He needed socks.

CHAPTER 12

THE TREES, A GROVE OF EIGHT, ROSE ON beautifully gnarled trunks, lifted high their exquisitely twisted branches, shook their graceful gray-green tresses in the wet wind, seeming both to defy the storm and to celebrate it. Fruitless in this season, they cast off no olives, only leaves, upon the cobbled walkway.

Twining through the branches, Christmas lights were unlit at this hour, bulbs of dull color waiting to brighten in the night.

This five-story Westwood condominium, less than one block from Wilshire Boulevard, was neither as grand as some in the neighborhood nor large enough to require a doorman. Nevertheless, the purchase price of an apartment here would gag a sword swallower.

Ethan trod the leaves of peace, passed under the extinguished lights of Christmas, and entered a marble-floored and marble-paneled public foyer. He used a key to let himself through the inner security door.

Past the foyer, the secure lobby was small but cozy, with an area rug to soften the marble, two Art Deco armchairs, and a table with a faux Tiffany lamp in red, amber, and green stained glass.

Although stairs served the five-story building, Ethan took the slow-moving elevator. Dunny Whistler lived—had lived—on the fifth floor.

Each of the first four floors held four large apartments, but the highest was divided into only two penthouse units.

A faint unpleasant odor lingered in the elevator from a recent passenger. Complex and subtle, the scent teased memory, but Ethan could not quite identify it.

As he ascended past the second floor, the elevator cab suddenly impressed him as being smaller than he remembered from previous visits. The ceiling loomed low, like a lid on a cook pot.

Passing the third floor, he realized that he was breathing faster than he should be, as though he were a man on a brisk walk. The air seemed to have grown thin, inadequate.

By the time he reached the fourth floor, he became convinced that he detected a wrongness in the sound of the elevator motor, in the hum of cables drawn through guide wheels. This creak, that tick, this squeak might be the sound of a linchpin pulling loose in the heart of the machinery.

The air grew thinner still, the walls closer, the ceiling lower, the machinery more suspect.

Perhaps the doors wouldn’t open. The emergency phone might be out of order. His cell phone might not work in here.

In an earthquake, the shaft might collapse, crushing the cab to the dimensions of a coffin.

Nearing the fifth floor, he realized that these symptoms of claustrophobia, which he had never previously experienced, were a mask that concealed another fear, to which he, being a rational man, was loath to admit.

He half expected Rolf Reynerd to be waiting on the fifth floor.

How Reynerd would have known about Dunny or where Dunny lived, how he would have known when Ethan intended to come here—these were questions unanswerable without extensive investigation and perhaps without the abandonment of logic.

Nevertheless, Ethan stepped to the side of the cab, to make a smaller target of himself. He drew his pistol.

The elevator doors opened on a ten-by-twelve foyer paneled in honey-toned, figured anigre. Deserted.

Ethan didn’t holster his weapon. Identical doors served two penthouse units, and he went directly to the Whistler apartment.

With the key provided by Dunny’s attorney, he unlocked the door, eased it open, and entered cautiously.

The security alarm was not engaged. On his most recent visit, eight days ago, Ethan had set the alarm when he’d left.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Hernandez, had visited in the interim. Before Dunny landed in a hospital, in a coma, she had worked here three days a week; but now she came only on Wednesday.

In all likelihood, Mrs. Hernandez had forgotten to enter the alarm code when she’d departed last week. Yet as likely as this explanation might be, Ethan didn’t believe it. Juanita Hernandez was a responsible woman, methodically attentive to detail.

Just inside the threshold, he stood listening. He left the door open at his back.

Rain drummed on the roof, a distant rumble like the marching feet of legions gone to war in some far, hollow kingdom.

Otherwise, only silence rewarded his keen attention. Maybe instinct warned him or maybe imagination misled him, but he sensed that this was not a slack silence, that it was instead a coiled quiet as full of potential energy as a cobra, rattler, or black mamba.

Because he preferred not to draw the attention of a neighbor and didn’t want to facilitate any exit but his own, he closed the door. Locked it.

From scams, from drugs, from worse, Duncan Whistler had made himself rich. Criminals routinely grab big money, but few keep it or keep the freedom to spend it. Dunny had been clever enough to avoid arrest, to launder his money, and to pay his taxes.

Consequently, his apartment was enormous, with two connecting hallways, rooms leading into rooms, rooms that ordinarily did not spiral as they seemed to spiral now like nautilus shell into nautilus shell.

Searching in a hostile situation of the usual kind, Ethan would have proceeded with both hands on the gun, with arms out straight, maintaining a measured pressure on the trigger. He would have cleared doorways quick and low.

Instead, he gripped the pistol in his right hand, aimed at the ceiling. He proceeded cautiously but not with the full drama inherent in police-academy style.

To keep his back always to a wall, to avoid turning his back to a doorway, to move fast while scanning left-right-left, to be ever aware of his footing, of the need to stay sufficiently well balanced to assume, in an instant, a shooting stance: Doing all that, he would have had to admit that he was afraid of a dead man.

And there was the truth. Evaded, now acknowledged.

The claustrophobia in the elevator and the expectation that he would find Rolf Reynerd on the fifth floor had been nothing but attempts to deflect himself from consideration of his true fear, from the even less rational conviction that dead Dunny had risen from the morgue gurney and had wandered home with unknowable intent.

Ethan didn’t believe that dead men could walk.

He doubted that Dunny, dead or alive, would harm him.

His anxiety arose from the possibility that Duncan Whistler, if indeed he’d left the hospital garden room under his own power, might be Dunny in name only. Having nearly drowned, having spent three months in a coma, he might be suffering brain damage that made him dangerous.

Although Dunny had his good qualities, not least of all the sense to recognize in Hannah a woman of exceptional virtues, he had been capable of ruthless violence. His success in the criminal life had not resulted from polished people skills and a nice smile.

He could break heads when he needed to break them. And sometimes he’d broken them when skull cracking wasn’t necessary.

If Dunny were half the man that he’d once been, and the wrong half, Ethan preferred not to come face to face with him. Over the years, their relationship had taken peculiar turns; one final and still darker twist in the road could not be ruled out.

The huge living room featured high-end contemporary sofas and chairs, upholstered in wheat-colored silk. Tables, cabinets, and decorative objects were all Chinese antiques.

Either Dunny had discovered a genie-stuffed lamp and had wished himself exquisite taste, or he’d employed a pricey interior designer.

Here high above the olive trees, the big windows revealed the buildings across the street and a sky that looked like the soggy char and ashes of a vast, extinguished fire.

Outside: a car horn in the distance, the low somber grumble of traffic up on Wilshire Boulevard.

The June-bug jitter, scarab click, tumblebug tap of the beetle-voiced rain spoke at the window, click-click-click.

In the living room, stillness distilled. Only his breathing. His heart.

Ethan went into the study to seek the source of a soft light.

On the chinoiserie desk stood a bronze lamp with an alabaster shade. The buttery-yellow glow struck iridescent colors from the border of mother-of-pearl inlays.

Previously a framed photograph of Hannah had been displayed on the desk. It was missing.

Ethan recalled his surprise on discovering the photo during his first visit to the apartment, eleven weeks ago, after he had learned that he held authority over Dunny’s affairs.

Surprise had been matched by dismay. Although Hannah had been gone for five years, the presence of the picture seemed to be an act of emotional aggression, and somehow an insult to her memory that she should be an object of affection—and once an object of desire—to a man steeped in a life of crime and violence.

Ethan had left the photograph untouched, for even with a power of attorney covering all of Dunny’s affairs, he had felt that the picture in the handsome silver frame hadn’t been his property either to dispose of or to claim.

At the hospital on the night of Hannah’s death, again at the funeral, following twelve years of estrangement, Ethan and Dunny had spoken. Their mutual grief had not, however, brought them together otherwise. They had not exchanged a word for three years.

On the third anniversary of Hannah’s passing, Dunny had phoned to say that over those thirty-six months, he had brooded long and hard on her untimely death at thirty-two. Gradually but profoundly, the loss of her—just knowing that she was no longer out there somewhere in the world—had affected him, had changed him forever.

Dunny claimed that he was going to go straight, extract himself from all his criminal enterprises. Ethan had not believed him, but had wished him luck. They had never spoken again.

Later, he heard through third parties that Dunny had gotten out of the life, that old friends and associates never saw him anymore, that he had become something of a hermit, bookish and withdrawn.

With those rumors, Ethan had taken enough salt to work up a thirst for truth. He remained certain that eventually he would learn Duncan Whistler had fallen back into old habits—or had never truly forsaken them.

Later still, he heard that Dunny had returned to the Church, attended Mass each week, and carried himself with a humility that had never before characterized him.

Whether this was true or not, the fact remained that Dunny had held fast to the fortune that he amassed through fraud, theft, and dealing drugs. Living in luxury paid for with such dirty money, any genuinely reformed man might have been racked with guilt until at last he put his riches to a cleansing use.

More than the photograph of Hannah had been taken from the study. An atmosphere of bookish innocence was gone, as well.

A double score of hardcover volumes were stacked on the floor, in a corner. They had been removed from two shelves of the wall-to-wall bookcase.

One of the shelves, which had seemed to be fixed like all the others, had been removed. A section of the bookcase backing, which also had appeared fixed, had been slid aside, revealing a wall safe.

The twelve-inch diameter door of the safe stood open. Ethan felt inside. The spacious box proved empty.

He hadn’t known that the study contained a safe. Logic suggested that no one but Dunny—and the installer—would have been aware of its existence.

Brain-damaged man dresses himself. Finds his way home. Remembers the combination to his safe.

Or … dead man comes home. In a mood to party, he picks up some spending money.

Dunny dead made nearly as much sense as Dunny with severe brain damage.

CHAPTER 13

FRIC IN A FRACAS: TWO TRAINS CLACKETY-clacking and whistling at key crossroads, Nazis in the villages, American troops fighting their way down from the hills, dead soldiers everywhere, and villainous SS officers in black uniforms herding Jews into the boxcars of a third train stopped at a station, more SS bastards shooting Catholics and burying their bodies in a mass grave here by a pine woods.

Few people knew that the Nazis had killed not only Jews but also millions of Christians. Most of the higher-echelon Nazis had adhered to a strange and informal pagan creed, worshiping land and race and myths of ancient Saxony, worshiping blood and power.

Few people knew, but Fric knew. He liked knowing things that other people didn’t. Odd bits of history. Secrets. The mysteries of alchemy. Scientific curiosities.

Like how to power an electric clock with a potato. You needed a copper peg, a zinc nail, and some wire. A potato-powered clock looked stupid, but it worked.

Like the truncated pyramid on the back of the one-dollar bill. It represents the unfinished Temple of Solomon. The eye floating above the pyramid is symbolic of the Grand Architect of the Universe.

Like who built the first elevator. Using alternatively human, animal, and water power, Roman architect Vitruvius constructed the first elevators circa 50 b.c.

Fric knew.

A lot of the weird stuff he knew didn’t have much application in daily life, didn’t alter the fact that he was short for his age, and thin for his age, or that he had a geeky neck and the huge unreal green eyes that magazine writers slobbered about when describing his mother but that made him look like a cross between a hoot owl and an alien. He liked knowing these weird things anyway, even if they did not lift him out of the mire of Fricdom.

Having exotic knowledge rare in other people made Fric feel like a wizard. Or at least like a wizard’s apprentice.

Aside from Mr. Jurgens, who came to the estate two days every month to clean and maintain the large collection of contemporary and antique electric trains, only Fric knew everything about the train room and its operation.

The trains belonged to that world-renowned movie star, Channing Manheim, who also happened to be his father. In the private world of Fric, the movie star had long been known as Ghost Dad because he was usually only here in spirit.

Ghost Dad knew very little about the train room. He had spent enough money on the collection to purchase the entire nation of Tuvalu, but he rarely played here.

Most people had never heard of the nation of Tuvalu. On nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean, with a population of just ten thousand, its major exports were copra and coconuts.

Most people had no idea what copra might be. Neither did Fric. He’d been meaning to look it up ever since he’d learned about Tuvalu.

The train room was in the higher of two basements, adjacent to the upper garage. It measured sixty-eight feet by forty-four feet, which amounted to more square footage than in the average home.

The lack of windows ensured that the real world could not intrude. The railroad fantasy ruled.

Along the two short walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves housed the train collection, except for whatever models were currently in use.

On the two long walls hung fabulous paintings of trains. Here, a locomotive exploded through thick luminous masses of fog, headlamp blazing. There, a train traveled a moonlit prairie. Trains of every vintage raced through forests, crossed rivers, climbed mountains in rain and sleet and snow and fog and dark of night, clouds billowing from their smokestacks, sparks flying from their wheels.

At the center of this great space, on a massive table with many legs, stood a sculptured landscape of green hills, fields, forests, valleys, ravines, rivers, lakes. Seven miniature villages comprised of hundreds of intricately detailed structures were served by country lanes, eighteen bridges, nine tunnels. Convex curves, concave curves, horseshoe curves, straightaways, descending grades, and ascending grades featured more train track than there were coconuts in Tuvalu.

This amazing construction measured fifty feet by thirty-two, and you could either walk around it or, by lifting a gate, enter into it and take a tour on an inner racetrack walkway, as though you were a giant vacationing in the land of Lilliput.

Fric was in the thick of it.

He had distributed armies of toy soldiers across this landscape and had been playing trains and war at the same time. Considering the resources at his command for the game, it should have been more fun than it was.

Telephones were located at both the exterior and the interior control stations. When they rang with his personal tone, the sound startled him. He seldom received calls.

Twenty-four phone lines served the estate. Two of these were dedicated to the security system, another to the off-site monitoring of the hotel-type heating and air-conditioning system. Two were fax lines, and two were dedicated Internet lines.

Sixteen of the remaining seventeen lines were rationed to family and staff. Line 24 had a higher purpose.

Fric’s father enjoyed the use of four lines because everyone in the world—once even the President of the United States—wanted to talk to him. Calls for Channing—or Chan or Channi, or even (in the case of one infatuated actress) Chi-Chi—often came in even when he wasn’t in residence.

Mrs. McBee had four lines, although this didn’t mean, as the Ghost Dad sometimes joked, that Mrs. McBee should start to think that she was as important as her boss.

Ha, ha, ha.

One of those four lines served Mr. and Mrs. McBee’s apartment. The other three were her business phones.

On an ordinary day, management of the house didn’t require those three lines. When Mrs. McBee had to plan and execute a party for four or five hundred Hollywood nitwits, however, three telephones were not always sufficient to deal with the event designer, the food caterer, the florist, the talent bookers, and the uncountable other mysterious agencies and forces that she had to marshal in order to produce an unforgettable evening.

Fric wondered if all that effort and expense was worthwhile. At the end of the night, half the guests departed so drunk or so drug-fried that in the morning they wouldn’t remember where they had been.

If you sat them in lawn chairs, gave them bags of burgers, and provided tanker trucks of wine, they would get wasted as usual. Then they’d go home and puke their guts out as usual, collapse into unconsciousness as usual, and wake up the next day none the wiser.

Because he was chief of security, Mr. Truman had two lines in his apartment, one personal and one business.

Only two of the six maids lived on the estate, and they shared a phone line with the chauffeur.

The groundskeeper had a line of his own, but the totally scary chef, Mr. Hachette, and the happy cook, Mr. Baptiste, shared one of Mrs. McBee’s lines.

Ms. Hepplewhite, personal assistant to Ghost Dad, had two lines for her use.

Freddie Nielander, the famous supermodel known in Fricsylvania as Nominal Mom, had a dedicated phone line here, although she had divorced Ghost Dad nearly ten years ago and had stayed overnight less than ten times since then.

Ghost Dad once told Freddie that he called her line every now and then, hoping she would answer and would tell him that she had come back to him at last and was home forever.

Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.

Fric had enjoyed his own line since he was six. He never called anyone, except once when he’d used his father’s contacts to get the unlisted home number for Mr. Mike Myers, the actor, who had dubbed the voice of the title character in Shrek, to tell him that Shrek absolutely, no doubt about it, rocked.

Mr. Myers had been very nice, had done the Shrek voice for him, and lots of other voices, and had made him laugh until his stomach hurt. This injury to his abdominal muscles resulted partly from the fact that Mr. Myers was wickedly funny and partly because Fric had not recently exercised his laugh-muscle group as much as he would have liked.

Fric’s father, a believer in a shitload of paranormal phenomena, had set aside the last telephone line to receive calls from the dead. That was a story in itself.

Now, for the first time in eight days, since the Ghost Dad’s most recent call, Fric heard his signature tone coming from the train-room phones.

Everyone on the estate had been assigned a different sound for the line or lines that were dedicated to him or her. Each of Ghost Dad’s lines produced a simple brrrrrrrr. Mrs. McBee’s signature tone was a series of musical chimes. Mr. Truman’s lines played the first nine notes from the theme song of an ancient TV cop show, Dragnet, which was stupid, and Mr. Truman thought so, too, but he endured it.

This highly sophisticated telephone system could produce up to twelve different signature tones. Eight were standard. Four—like Dragnet—could be custom-designed for the client.

Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as “a cheerful child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.” Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric.

Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings? Maybe they would phone their mommies and say, Yuch. I crapped in my diaper, and it don’t feel good.

Stupid.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo, said the train-room phones.

Fric hated the sound. He had hated it when he’d been six, and he hated it even worse now.

Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.

This was the annoying sound that might be made by some furry, roly-poly, pink, half-bear, half-dog, halfwit character in a video made for preschoolers who thought stupid shows like Teletubbies were the pinnacle of humor and sophistication.

Humiliated even though he was alone, Fric pushed two transformer switches to kill power to the trains, and he answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Bob’s Burger Barn and Cockroach Farm,” he said. “Our special today is salmonella on toast with coleslaw for a buck.”

“Hello, Aelfric,” a man said.

Fric had expected to hear his father’s voice. If instead he had heard the voice of Nominal Mom, he would have suffered cardiac arrest and dropped dead into the train controls.

The entire estate staff, with the possible exception of Chef Hachette, would have mourned for him. They would have been deeply, terribly sad. Deeply, deeply, terribly, terribly. For about forty minutes. Then they would have been busy, busy, busy preparing for the post-funeral gala to which would be invited perhaps a thousand famous and near-famous drunks, druggies, and butt-kissers eager to plant their lips on Ghost Dad’s golden ass.

“Who’s this?” Fric asked.

“Are you enjoying the trains, Fric?”

Fric had never heard this voice before. No one on the staff. Definitely a stranger.

Most of the people in the house didn’t know that Fric was in the train room, and no one outside the estate could possibly know.

“How do you know about the trains?”

The man said, “Oh, I know lots of things other people don’t. Just like you, Fric. Just like you.”

The talented hairs on the back of Fric’s neck did impressions of scurrying spiders.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t know me,” the man said. “When does your father return from Florida?”

“If you know so much, why don’t you tell me?”

“December twenty-fourth. In the early afternoon. Christmas Eve,” the stranger said.

Fric wasn’t impressed. Millions of people knew his old man’s whereabouts and his Christmas plans. Just a week ago, Ghost Dad had done a spot on Entertainment Tonight, talking about the film that he was shooting and about how much he looked forward to going home for the holidays.

“Fric, I’d like to be your friend.”

“What’re you, a pervert?”

Fric had heard about perverts. Heck, he’d probably met hundreds of them. He didn’t know all the things they might do to a kid, and he wasn’t exactly sure what thing they liked most to do, but he knew they were out there with their collections of kids’ eyeballs, wearing necklaces made out of their victims’ bones.

“I have no desire to hurt you,” said the stranger, which was no doubt what any pervert would have said. “Quite the opposite. I want to help you, Fric.”

“Help me do what?”

“Survive.”

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name.”

“Everyone has to have a name, even if it’s just one, like Cher or Godzilla.”

“Not me. I’m only one among multitudes, nameless now. There’s trouble coming, young Fric, and you need to be ready for it.”

“What trouble?”

“Do you know of a place in your house where you could hide and never be found?” the stranger asked.

“That’s a weird-ass question.”

“You’re going to need a place to hide where no one can find you, Fric. A deep and special secret place.”

“Hide from who?”

“I can’t tell you that. Let’s just call him the Beast in Yellow. But you’re going to need a secret place real soon.”

Fric knew that he should hang up, that it might be dangerous to play along with this nutball. Most likely he was a pathetic pervert loser who got lucky with a phone number and would sooner or later start with the dirty talk. But the guy might also be a sorcerer who could cast a spell long distance, or he might be an evil psychologist who could hypnotize a boy over the telephone and make him rob liquor stores and then make him turn over all the money while clucking like a chicken.

Aware of those risks and many more, Fric nevertheless stayed on the line. This was by far the most interesting phone conversation he’d ever had.

Just in case this guy with no name happened to be the one from whom he might need to hide, Fric said, “Anyway, I’ve got bodyguards, and they carry submachine guns.”

“That’s not true, Aelfric. Lying won’t get you anything but misery. There’s heavy security on the estate, but it won’t be good enough when the time comes, when the Beast in Yellow shows up.”

“It is true,” Fric deceitfully insisted. “My bodyguards are former Delta Force commandos, and one of them was even Mr. Universe before that. They can for sure kick major ass.”

The stranger didn’t respond.

After a couple seconds, Fric said, “Hello? You there?”

The man spoke in a whisper now. “Seems like I have a visitor, Fric. I’ll call you again later.” His whisper subsided to a murmur that Fric had to strain to hear. “Meanwhile, you start looking for that deep and special hiding place. There’s not much time.”

“Wait,” Fric said, but the line went dead.

CHAPTER 14

GUN READY, MUZZLE UP, CHAMBER BY hall by chamber, through Dunny Whistler’s nautilus apartment, Ethan came to the bedroom.

One nightstand lamp had been left on. Against the headboard of the Chinese sleigh bed, decorative silk pillows fashioned from cheongsam fabrics had been artfully arranged by the housekeeper.

Also on the bed, cast off with evident haste, lay articles of men’s clothing. Wrinkled, stained, still damp from the rain. Slacks, shirt, socks, underwear.

Tumbled in a corner were a pair of shoes.

Ethan didn’t know what Dunny had been wearing when he had left the morgue at Our Lady of Angels Hospital. However, he wouldn’t have wagered a penny against the proposition that these were the very clothes.

Moving closer to the bed, he detected the faint malodor that he’d first smelled in the elevator. Some of the components of the scent were more easily identified than they had been earlier: stale perspiration, a whiff of rancid ointment with a sulfate base, thin fumes of sour urine. The smell of illness, of being long abed and bathed only with basin and sponge.

Ethan became aware of a background sizzle, which he initially mistook for a new manifestation of the rain. Then he realized that he was listening to the fall of water in the master-bathroom shower.

The bathroom door stood ajar. Past the jamb and through the gap, with the sizzle came a wedge of light and wisps of steam.

He eased the door all the way open.

Golden marble sheathed the floor, the walls. In the black granite countertop, two black ceramic sinks were served by brushed-gold spouts and faucets.

Above the counter, a long expanse of beveled mirror, hazed with condensation, failed to present a clear reflection. His distorted shape moved under that frosted surface, like a strange pale something glimpsed swimming just beneath the shadow-dappled surface of a pond.

Veils of steam floated in the air.

Within the bathroom was a water closet. The door stood open, the toilet visible. No one in there.

Dunny had nearly been drowned in this toilet.

Neighbors in a fourth-floor apartment had heard him struggling furiously for his life, shouting for help.

Police arrived quickly and caught the assailants in desperate flight. They found Dunny lying on his side in front of the toilet, semiconscious and coughing up water.

By the time the ambulance arrived, he had fallen into a coma.

His attackers—who’d come for money, vengeance, or both—had not been cheated recently by Dunny. They had been in prison for six years and, only recently released, had come to settle a long-overdue account.

Dunny might have hoped to journey far from his life of crime, but old sins had caught up with him that night.

Now on the bathroom floor lay two rumpled, damp black towels. Two dry towels still hung on the rack.

The shower was in the far-right corner from the entrance to the bathroom. Even if the steam-opaqued glass door had been clear, Ethan couldn’t have seen into that cubicle from any distance.

Approaching the stall, he had an image in his mind of the Dunny Whistler whom he expected to encounter. Skin sickly pale where not a lifeless gray, impervious to the pinking effect of hot water. Gray eyes, the whites now pure crimson with hemorrhages.

Still holding the gun in his right hand, he gripped the door with his left and, after a hesitation, pulled it open.

The stall was unoccupied. Water beat upon the marble floor and swirled down the drain.

Leaning into the stall, he reached behind the cascade, to the single control, and turned off the flow.

The sudden silence in the wake of the watery sizzle seemed to announce his presence as clearly as if he had triggered an air horn.

Nervously, he turned toward the bathroom entrance, expecting some response, but not sure what that might be.

Even with the water turned off, steam continued to escape the shower, though in thinner veils, pouring over the top of the glass door and around Ethan.

In spite of the moist air, his mouth had gone dry. Pressed together, tongue and palate came apart as reluctantly as two strips of Velcro.

When he started toward the bathroom door, his attention was drawn again to the movement of his vague and distorted reflection in the clouded mirror above the sinks.

Then he saw the impossible shape, which brought him to a halt.

In the mirror, under the skin of condensation, loomed a pale form as blurred as Ethan’s veiled image but nonetheless recognizable as a figure, man or woman.

Ethan was alone. A quick survey of the bathroom failed to reveal any object or any fluke of architecture that the misted mirror might trick into a ghostly human shape.

So he closed his eyes. Opened them. Still the shape.

He could hear only his heart now, only his heart, not fast, but faster, sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out unreason.

Of course his imagination had given meaning to a meaningless blur in a mirror, in the same way that he might have found men and dragons and all kinds of fanciful creatures among the clouds in a summer sky. Imagination. Of course.

But then this man, this dragon, whatever—it moved in the mirror. Not much: a little, enough to make Ethan’s sledgehammer heart stutter between blows.

Maybe the movement also was imaginary.

Hesitantly he approached the mirror. He didn’t step directly in front of the phantom form, for in spite of the strong rush of blood that ought to have clarified his thinking, Ethan suffered from the superstitious conviction that something terrible would happen to him if his reflection were to overlay the ghostly shape.

Surely the movement of the misted apparition had been imaginary, but if it had been, then he imagined it again. The figure seemed to be motioning for him to come forward, closer.

Ethan would not have admitted to Hazard Yancy or to any other cop from the old days, perhaps not even to Hannah if she were alive, that when he put his hand to the mirror, he half expected to feel not wet glass, but the hand of another, making contact from a cold and forbidding Elsewhere.

He swabbed away an arc of mist, leaving a glimmering smear of water.

Even as Ethan’s hand moved, so did the phantom in the mirror, sliding away from the cleansing swipe. Cunningly elusive, it remained behind the shielding condensation—and moved directly in front of him.

With the exception of his face, Ethan’s vague reflection in the misted glass had been dark because his clothes were dark, his hair. The steam-frosted shape now before him rose as pale as moonlight and moth wings, impossibly supplanting his own image.

Fear knocked on his heart, but he wouldn’t let it in, as when he’d been a cop under fire and dared not panic.

Anyway, he felt as though he were half in a trance, accepting the impossible here as he might easily accept it in a dream.

The apparition leaned toward him, as if trying to discern his nature from the far side of the silvered glass, in much the same way that he himself leaned forward to study it.

Raising his hand once more, Ethan tentatively wiped away a narrow swath of mist, fully expecting that when he came eye to eye with his reflection, the eyes would not be his, but gray like Dunny Whistler’s eyes.

Again the mystery in the mirror moved, quicker than Ethan’s hand, remaining blurred behind the frosting of condensation.

Only when breath exploded from Ethan did he realize that he had been holding it.

On the inhale, he heard a crash in a far room of the apartment, the brittle music of shattering glass.

CHAPTER 15

ETHAN HAD TOLD PALOMAR LAB-oratories to analyze his blood for traces of illicit chemicals, in case he’d been drugged without his knowledge. During the events at Reynerd’s apartment house, he had almost seemed to be in an altered state of consciousness.

Now, leaving the steamy bathroom, he felt no less disoriented than when, after being gut shot, he had found himself behind the wheel of the Expedition once more, unharmed.

Whatever had happened—or had only seemed to happen—at the mirror, he no longer entirely trusted his senses. As a consequence, he proceeded with greater caution than before, assuming that yet again things might not be as they appeared to be.

He passed through rooms he’d already searched and then into new territory, arriving at last in the kitchen. Shattered glass sparkled on the breakfast table and littered the floor.

Also on the floor lay the silver picture frame missing from the desk in the study. The photo of Hannah had been stripped out of it.

Whoever had taken the picture had been in too great a hurry to release the four fasteners on the back of the frame, and had instead smashed the glass.

The rear door of the apartment stood open.

Beyond lay a wide hall that served the back of both penthouse units. At the nearer end, an exit sign marked a stairwell. Toward the farther end was a freight elevator big enough to carry refrigerators and large pieces of furniture.

If someone had taken the freight route down, he had already completed his descent. No sound issued from the elevator machinery.

Ethan hurried to the stairs. Opened the fire door. Paused on the threshold, listening.

Groan or moan, or melancholy sigh, or clank of chains: Even a ghost ought to make a sound, but only a cold hollow silence rose out of the stairwell.

He went down quickly, ten flights to the ground floor, then another two flights to the garage. He encountered neither a flesh-and-blood resident nor a spirit.

The scent of sickness and fever sweats, first detected in the elevator, didn’t linger here. Instead, he smelled a faint soapy odor, as if someone fresh from a bath had passed this way. And a trace of spicy aftershave.

Pushing open the steel fire door, stepping into the garage, he heard an engine, smelled exhaust fumes. Of the forty parking stalls, many were empty at this hour on a work day.

Toward the front of the garage, a car backed out of a stall. Ethan recognized Dunny’s midnight-blue Mercedes sedan.

Triggered by remote control, the garage gate was already rising with a steely clack and clatter.

Pistol still in hand, Ethan ran toward the car as it pulled away from him. The gate rose slowly, and the Mercedes had to stop for it. Through the rear window, he could see the silhouette of a man behind the steering wheel, but not clearly enough to make an identification.

Drawing near to the Mercedes, he swung wide of it. He intended to go directly to the driver’s door.

The car shot forward while the barrier continued to rise, before it was fully out of the way. The roof of the Mercedes came within a fraction of an inch of leaving a generous paint sample on the bottom rail of the ascending gate, and raced up the steep exit ramp to the street.

The driver thumbed close on his remote even as he passed under the gate, which was clattering down again when Ethan reached it. Already the Mercedes had turned out of sight into the street above.

He stood there for a moment, peering through the gate into the gray storm light.

Rainwater streamed down the driveway ramp. Foaming, it vanished through the slots of a drain in the pavement immediately outside the garage.

On that concrete incline, a small lizard, back broken by a car tire, but still alive, struggled gamely against the sluicing water. So persistently did it twitch upward inch by inch that it seemed to believe all its needs could be satisfied and all its injuries healed by some power at the summit.

Not wanting to see the little creature inevitably defeated and washed down to die upon the drain grate, Ethan turned away from the sight of it.

He returned the pistol to his shoulder holster.

He studied his hands. They were trembling.

On the back stairs once more, climbing to the fifth floor, he encountered the lingering soapy smell, the trace of aftershave. This time, he also detected another odor less clean than the first two, elusive but disturbing.

Whatever else he might be, Dunny Whistler was surely a living man, not an animated corpse. Why would one of the walking dead come home to shower, shave, and dress in clean clothes? Absurd.

In the apartment kitchen, Ethan used a DustBuster to vacuum up the fragments of picture-frame glass.

He found a spoon and an open half-gallon container of ice cream in the sink. Apparently, those who were recently resurrected enjoyed chocolate caramel swirl.

He put the ice cream in the freezer and returned the empty picture frame to the study.

In the master bedroom, he stopped short of the bathroom doorway. He had intended to check the mirror once more, to see if it was still misted and if, in the glass, anything moved that shouldn’t be there.

Actively seeking that phantom suddenly seemed to be a bad idea. Instead, he left the apartment, turning off the lights and locking the door behind him.

In the main elevator, as Ethan descended, he thought, For the same reason that the proverbial wolf put on a sheep’s skin to move undetected among the lambs.

That was why one of the walking dead would shower, shave, and put on a good suit.

As the elevator conveyed Ethan to the ground floor, he knew how Alice must have felt in free fall down the rabbit hole.

CHAPTER 16

AFTER SHUTTING DOWN THE RAILROADS, Fric left the dirty Nazis to their evil schemes, departed the unreality of the train room for the unreality of the multimillion-dollar car collection in the garage, and ran for the stairs.

He should have taken the elevator. That cableless mechanism, which raised and lowered the cab on a powerful hydraulic ram, would be too slow, however, for his current mood.

Fric’s engine raced, raced. The telephone conversation with the weird stranger—whom he had dubbed Mysterious Caller—was high-octane fuel for a boy with a boring life, a feverish imagination, and empty hours to fill.

He didn’t climb the stairs; he assaulted them. Legs pumping, grabbing at the handrail, Fric flung himself up from the basement, conquering two, four, six, eight long flights, to the top of Palazzo Rospo, where he had rooms on the third floor.

Only Fric seemed to know the meaning of the name given to the great house by its first owner: Palazzo Rospo. Nearly everyone knew that palazzo was Italian for “palace,” but no one except perhaps a few sneeringly superior European film directors seemed to have any idea what rospo meant.

To be fair, most people who visited the estate didn’t give a rip what it was called or what its grand name actually meant. They had more important issues on their minds—such as the weekend box-office numbers, the overnight TV ratings, the latest executive shuffles at the studios and networks, who to screw in the new deal that they were putting together, how much to screw them out of, how to bedazzle them so they wouldn’t realize they were being screwed, how to find a new source for cocaine, and whether their careers might have been even bigger if they had begun having face-lifts when they were eighteen.

Among the few who had ever given a thought to the name of the estate, there were competing theories.

Some believed the house had been named after a famous Italian statesman or philosopher, or architect. The number of people in the film industry who knew anything about statesmen, philosophers, and architects was almost as small as the number who’d be able to give a lecture regarding the structure of matter on a subatomic level; consequently, this theory was easily embraced and never challenged.

Others were certain that Rospo had been either the maiden name of the original owner’s beloved mother or the name of a snow sled that he had ridden with great delight in childhood, when he had been truly happy for the last time in his life.

Still others assumed that it had been named after the original owner’s secret love, a young actress named Vera Jean Rospo.

Vera Jean Rospo had actually existed back in the 1930s, though her real name had been Hilda May Glorkal.

The producer, agent, or whoever had renamed her Rospo must have secretly despised poor Hilda. Rospo was Italian for “toad.”

Only Fric seemed to know that Palazzo Rospo was as close as you could get, in Italian, to naming a house Toad Hall.

Fric had done some research. He liked knowing things.

Evidently, the film mogul who built the estate more than sixty years ago had possessed a sense of humor and had read The Wind in the Willows. In that book, a character named Toad lived in a grand house named Toad Hall.

These days, no one in the film business read books.

In Fric’s experience, no one in the business had a sense of humor anymore, either.

He climbed the stairs so fast that he was breathing hard by the time that he reached the north hallway on the third floor. This wasn’t good. He should have stopped. He should have rested.

Instead, he hurried along the north hall to the east hall, where his private rooms were located. The antiques that he passed on the top floor were spectacular, although not of the museum quality to be found on the two lower levels.

Fric’s rooms had been refurnished a year ago. Ghost Dad’s interior designer had taken Fric shopping. To redo the furniture in these quarters, his father had provided him with a budget of thirty-five thousand dollars.

Fric had not asked for fancy new furniture. He never asked for anything—except at Christmas, when he was required to fill out the childish Dear Santa form that his father insisted be provided by Mrs. McBee. The idea of refurnishing was entirely Ghost Dad’s.

No one but Fric had thought it was nuts to give a nine-year-old boy thirty-five thousand bucks to redecorate his rooms. The designer and the salespeople acted as if this were the usual drill, that every nine-year-old had an equal amount to spend on a room makeover.

Lunatics.

Fric often suspected that the soft-spoken, seemingly reasonable people surrounding him were in fact all BIG-TIME CRAZY.

Every item in his remade rooms was modern, sleek, and bright.

He had nothing against the furniture and artworks of distant times. He liked all that stuff. But sixty thousand square feet of fine antiques was enough already.

In his own private space, he wanted to feel like a kid, not like an old French dwarf, which sometimes he seemed to be among all these French antiques. He wanted to believe that such a thing as the future actually existed.

An entire suite had been set aside for his use. Living room, bedroom, bathroom, walk-in closet.

Still breathing hard, Fric hurried through his living room. Breathing harder still, he crossed his bedroom to the walk-in closet.

Walk-in was a seriously inadequate description. If Fric had owned a Porsche, he could have driven into the closet.

Were he to add a Porsche to his Dear Santa list, one would most likely be parked in the driveway come Christmas morn, with a giant gift bow on the roof.

Lunatics.

Although Fric had more clothes than he needed, more than he wanted, his wardrobe required only a quarter of the closet. The rest of the space had been fitted out with shelves on which were stored collections of toy soldiers, which he cherished, boxed games to which he was indifferent—as well as videos and DVDs of every stupid boring movie for kids made in the past five years, which were sent to him free by studio executives and by others who wanted to score points with his father.

At the back of the closet, the nineteen-foot width was divided into three sections of floor-to-ceiling shelves. Reaching under the third shelf in the right-hand section, he pressed a concealed button.

The middle section proved to be a secret door that swung open on a centrally mounted pivot hinge. The shelving unit measured ten inches deep, which left a passageway of about two and a half feet to either side.

Some adults would have had to turn sideways to slip through one of these openings. Fric, however, could walk straight into the secret realm beyond the closet.

Behind the shelves lay a six-by-six space and a stainless-steel door. Although not solid steel, it was four inches thick and looked formidable.

The door had been unlocked when Fric discovered it three years ago. It was unlocked now. He had never found the key.

In addition to the regular lever handle at the right side, the door featured a second handle in the center. This one turned a full 360 degrees and in fact was not a handle, but a crank, similar to those featured on casement windows throughout the house.

Flanking the crank were two curious items that appeared to be valves of some kind.

He opened the door, switched on the light, and stepped into a room measuring sixteen feet by twelve. An odd place in many ways.

A series of steel plates formed the floor. The walls and the ceiling also were covered in sheets of steel.

These plates and panels had been welded meticulously at every joint. During his study of the room, Fric had never been able to find the smallest crack or pinhole in the welds.

The door featured a rubber gasket. Now old and dried and cracked, the rubber had probably once made an airtight seal with the jamb.

Built into the inner face of the door was a fine-mesh screen behind which lay a mechanism that Fric had examined more than once with a flashlight. Through the screen, he could see fan blades, gears, dusty ball bearings, and other parts that he couldn’t name.

He suspected that the crank on the outside of the door had once turned the suction fan, drawing all the air out of the room through the valves, until something like a vacuum had been created.

He remained mystified as to the purpose of the place.

For a while, he’d thought it might have been a suffacatorium.

Suffacatorium was a word of Fric’s invention. He imagined an evil genius forcing his terrified prey into the suffacatorium at gunpoint, slamming the door, and gleefully cranking the air out of the chamber, until the victim gradually suffocated.

In fiction, villains sometimes engineered elaborate devices and schemes to kill people when a knife or gun would be much quicker and cheaper. Evil minds were apparently as complex as anthill mazes.

Or maybe some psycho killers were squeamish about blood. Maybe they enjoyed killing, but not if they were left with a mess to clean. Such murderous types might install a secret suffacatorium.

Certain elements of the room design, however, argued against this creepily appealing explanation.

For one thing, a lever handle on the inside of the door overrode the deadbolt lock operated by a key from the outside. Clearly, the intention had been to guard against anyone being trapped in the room by accident, but it also ensured that no one could be locked in here on purpose, either.

The stainless-steel hooks in the ceiling were another issue. Two rows of them extended the length of the room, each row about two feet from a wall.

Gazing up at the gleaming hooks, Fric heard himself breathing as hard now as when he’d just finished racing up eight flights of stairs. The sound of every inhalation and exhalation rushed and reverberated along the metal walls.

An itching between his shoulders spread quickly to the back of his neck. He knew what that meant.

This wasn’t merely rapid respiration, either. He’d begun to wheeze.

Suddenly his chest tightened, and he grew short of breath. The wheezing became louder on the exhale than on the inhale, leaving no doubt that he was having an asthmatic attack. He could feel his airways narrowing.

He could get air in more easily than he could get it out. But he had to expel the stale to draw in the fresh.

Hunching his shoulders, leaning forward, he used the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to try to squeeze out his trapped breath. He didn’t succeed.

As asthma attacks went, this was a bad one.

He clutched at the medicinal inhaler clipped to his belt.

On three occasions that he could remember, Fric had been so severely deprived of air that his skin had taken on a bluish tint, and he had required emergency treatment. The sight of a blue Fric had scared the piss out of everyone.

Freed from his belt, the inhaler slipped out of his fingers. It fell to the floor, clattered against the steel plates.

Wheezing, he stooped to retrieve the device, grew dizzy, dropped to his knees.

Breath had become so hard to draw that a killer might as well have had both hands around Fric’s throat, throttling him.

Anxious but not yet desperate, he crawled forward, groping for the inhaler. The device squirted between his suddenly sweaty fingers and rattled farther across the floor.

Vision swam, vision blurred, vision darkened at the edges.

No one had ever taken a photo of him in a blue phase. He’d long been curious about what he looked like when lavender, when indigo.

His airways tightened further. His wheezing grew higher pitched. He sounded as if he had swallowed a whistle that had lodged in his throat.

When he put his hand on the inhaler again, he held fast to it and rolled onto his back. No good. He couldn’t breathe at all on his back. He wasn’t in a proper position to use the inhaler, either.

Overhead: the hooks, gleaming, gleaming.

Not a good place to have a severe asthma attack. He didn’t have enough wind to cry out. No one would hear a shout, anyway. Palazzo Rospo was well built; sound didn’t travel through these walls.

Now he was desperate.

CHAPTER 17

IN A MEN’S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING mall, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.

He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn’t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.

People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.

For a significant portion of humanity, having someone to hate was as necessary as having bread, as breathing.

Some people needed to be furious about something, anything. Corky was happy to scrawl these messages that, when seen by certain restroom visitors, would fan their simmering anger and add a new measure of bile to their bitterness.

As he worked, Corky hummed along with the music on the public-address system.

Here on December 21, the Muzak play list included no Christmas tunes. Most likely, the mall management worried that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or even “Jingle Bell Rock” would deeply offend those shoppers who were of non-Christian faiths, as well as alienate any highly sensitized atheists with money to spend.

Currently, the system broadcast an old Pearl Jam number. This particular arrangement of the song had been performed by an orchestra with a large string section. Minus the shrieking vocal, the tune was as mind-numbing as the original, though more pleasantly so.

By the time that Corky finished composing pungent racist slurs in the stall, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands at one of the sinks, he was alone in the men’s room. Unobserved.

He prided himself on taking advantage of every opportunity to serve chaos, regardless of how minor the damage he might be able to inflict on social order.

None of the restroom sinks had stoppers. He tore handfuls of paper towels from one of the dispensers. After wetting the towels, he quickly wadded them into tightly compressed balls and crammed them into the drain holes in three of the six sinks.

These days, most public restrooms featured push-down faucets that gushed water in timed bursts, and then shut off automatically. Here, however, the faucets were old-fashioned turnable handles.

At each of the three plugged sinks, he cranked on the water as fast as it would flow.

A drain in the center of the floor could have foiled him. He moved the large waste can, half full of used paper towels, and blocked the drain with it.

He picked up his shopping bag—which contained new socks, linens, and a leather wallet purchased at a department store, as well as a fine piece of cutlery acquired at a kitchen shop catering to the crowd that tuned in regularly to the Food Network—and he watched the sinks fill rapidly with water.

Set in the wall, four inches above the floor, was a large air-intake vent. If the water rose that high, spilling into the heating system and traveling through walls, a mere mess might turn into an expensive disaster. Several businesses in the mall and the lives of their employees might be disrupted.

One, two, three, the sinks brimmed. Water cascaded to the floor.

To the music of splash and splatter—and thinly spread Pearl Jam—Corky Laputa departed the restroom, smiling.

The hall serving the men’s and women’s lavatories was deserted, so he put down the shopping bag.

From a sports-coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of electrician’s tape. He never failed to be prepared for adventure.

He used the tape to seal off the eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold. At the sides of the jamb, the door met the stop tightly enough to hold back the mounting water, so he didn’t need to apply additional tape.

From his wallet, he extracted a folded three-inch-by-six-inch sticker. He unfolded this item, peeled the protective paper off the adhesive back, and applied it to the door.

Red letters on a white background declared OUT OF ORDER.

The sticker would trigger suspicion in any mall security guard, but shoppers would turn away without further investigation and would seek out another lavatory.

Corky’s work here had been completed. The ultimate extent of the water damage now lay in the hands of fate.

Security cameras were banned from restrooms and from approaches to them. Thus far he’d not been captured on videotape near the crime.

The L-shaped corridor serving the restrooms led to the second-floor mall promenade, which was under constant security surveillance. Previously, Corky had scoped out the positions of the cameras that covered the approaches to the lavatory hallway.

Departing now, he casually averted his face from those lenses. Keeping his head down, he quickly blended into the crowd of shoppers.

When security guards later reviewed the tapes, they might focus on Corky as having entered and departed the lavatory corridor in the approximate time frame of the vandalism. But they would not be able to obtain a useful image of his face.

He had intentionally worn nondescript clothes, the better to fade into the rabble. On videotapes recorded elsewhere in the mall, he wouldn’t be easily identifiable as the same man who had visited the restroom just prior to the flood.

A gorgeous excess of spangled and frosted holiday decorations further compromised the usefulness of the cameras, infringing upon the established angles of view.

The winter-wonderland theme avoided both direct and symbolic references to Christmas: no angels, no mangers, no images of Santa Claus, no busy elves, no reindeer, no traditional ornaments—and no festive lengths of colored lights, only tiny white twinkle bulbs. Festoons of plastic and shiny aluminum-foil icicles, measured in miles, glimmered everywhere. Thousands of large, sequined Styrofoam snowflakes hung on strings from the ceiling. In the central rotunda, ten life-size ice skaters, all mechanical figures moving on tracks, glided around a fake frozen pond in an elaborate re-creation of a winter landscape complete with snowmen, snow forts, robot children threatening one another with plastic snowballs, and animated figures of polar bears in comical poses.

Corky Laputa was enchanted by the pure, blissful vacuousness of it all.

On the first escalator to the ground floor, on the second to the garage, he brooded over a few details of his scheme to kill Rolf Reynerd. Both as he had shopped and as he had enjoyed his destructive escapades in the mall, Corky had carefully laid a bold and simple plan for murder.

He was a natural-born multitasker.

To those who had never studied political strategy and who also lacked a solid grounding in philosophy, Corky’s capers in the men’s room might have seemed at best to be childish larks. A society could seldom be brought down solely by acts of violence, however, and every thoughtful anarchist must be dedicated to his mission every minute of the day, wreaking havoc by actions both small and large.

Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.

If somehow Corky could have carried the black plague without risking his own life, he would have enthusiastically passed that disease to everyone he met by way of sneezes, coughs, touches, and kisses. If sometimes all he could do was flush a cherry bomb down a public toilet, he would advance chaos by that tiny increment while he awaited opportunities to do greater damage.

In the garage, when he reached his BMW, he shrugged out of his sports coat. Before settling behind the steering wheel, he donned the yellow slicker once more. He put the droopy yellow rain hat on the front passenger’s seat, within easy reach.

Besides providing superb protection in even a hard-driving rain, the slicker was the ideal gear in which to commit homicide. Blood could be easily washed off the shiny vinyl surface, leaving no stain.

According to the Bible, to every season there is a purpose, a time to kill and a time to heal.

Not much of a healer, Corky believed there was a time to kill and a time not to kill. The time to kill had arrived.

Corky’s death list contained more than one name, and Reynerd was not at the top. Anarchy could be a demanding faith.

CHAPTER 18

FRIC IN THE SUFFACATORIUM, ANXIOUS and wheezing, and no doubt bluer than a blue moon, dragged himself out of the middle of the room and sat with his back against a steel wall.

The medicinal inhaler in his right hand weighed slightly more than a Mercedes 500 M-Class SUV.

If he’d been his father, he would have been surrounded by an entourage big enough to help him lift the stupid thing. Yet another disadvantage of being a geek loner.

For lack of oxygen, his thoughts grew muddled. For a moment he believed that his right hand was trapped on the floor under a heavy shotgun, that it was a shotgun he wanted to lift, put in his mouth.

Fric almost cast the device away in terror. Then in a moment of clarity, he recognized the inhaler and held fast to it.

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, could only wheeze and cough and wheeze, and seemed to be spiraling into one of those rare attacks that were severe enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. Doctors would poke him and prod him, bend him and fold him, babbling about their favorite Manheim movies. The scene with the elephants! The airplane-to-airplane midair jump with no parachute! The sinking ship! The alien snake king! The funny monkeys! Nurses would gush over him, telling him how lucky he was and how exciting it must be to have a father who was a star, a hero, a hunk, a genius.

He might as well die here, die now.

Although he was not Clark Kent or Peter Parker, Fric raised the gazillion-pound device to his face. He slipped the mouthpiece between his lips and administered a dose of medication, sucking in the deepest breath that he could manage, which wasn’t deep at all.

In his throat: a hard-boiled egg or a stone, or a huge wad of phlegm worthy of the Guinness book of world records, a plug of some kind, allowing only thin wisps of air to enter, to exit.

He leaned forward. Clenching and relaxing neck muscles, chest and abdominal muscles. Struggling to draw cool medicated air into his lungs, to exhale the hot stale breath pooled like syrup in his chest.

Two puffs. That was the prescribed dosage.

He triggered puff two.

He might have gagged on the faint metallic taste if his inflamed and swollen airways could have executed a gag, but the tissues were able only to contract, not expand, flexing tighter, tighter, tighter.

A yellow-gray soot seemed to sift down through his eyes, the slow fall of an interior twilight.

Dizzy. Sitting here on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight out in front of him, he felt as if he were balanced on one foot on a high wire, teetering, about to take a death plunge.

Two puffs. He’d taken two doses.

Overmedicating was inadvisable. Dangerous.

Two puffs. That ought to be enough. Usually was. Sometimes just one dose allowed him to slip out of this invisible hangman’s noose.

Don’t overmedicate. Doctor’s orders.

Don’t panic. Doctor’s advice.

Give the medication a chance to work. Doctor’s instruction.

Screw the doctor.

He triggered a third puff.

A bone-click sound like dice on a game board rattled out of his throat, and his wheezing became less shrill, less of a whistle, more of a raw windy rasping.

Hot air exploding out. Cool air going down. Fric on the mend.

He dropped the inhaler on his lap.

Fifteen minutes was the average time required to recover from an asthma attack. Nothing could be done but wait it out.

Darkness faded from the edges of his vision. Blur gradually gave way to clarity.

Fric on the floor in an empty steel room, with nothing to distract him but hooks in the ceiling, naturally looked at those peculiar curved forms, and thought about them.

When he’d first discovered the room, he’d been reminded of movie scenes set in meat lockers, cow carcasses hanging from ceiling hooks.

He had wondered if a mad criminal genius had hung the bodies of his human victims in this meat locker. Perhaps the room had once been refrigerated.

The hooks weren’t set far enough apart to accommodate the bodies of grown men and women. Initially, Fric had sprung to the grim conclusion that the killer had collected dead, refrigerated children.

On closer inspection, he had seen that the stainless-steel hooks were not sharp. They were too blunt to pierce either kids or cows.

That’s when he’d set the matter of the hooks aside for later contemplation and had come to the determination that the room had been a suffacatorium. The existence of the interior lock release, however, had proved this theory wrong.

As his wheezing quieted, as breath came more easily, as the tightness in his chest loosened, Fric studied the hooks, the brushed-steel walls, trying to arrive at a third theory regarding the purpose of this place. He remained mystified.

He’d told no one about the pivoting section of closet shelving or about the hidden room. What made the hidey-hole so cool was less its exotic nature than the fact that only he knew it existed.

This space could serve as the “deep and special secret place” that, according to Mysterious Caller, would soon be needed.

Maybe he should stock it with supplies. Two or three six-packs of Pepsi. Several packages of peanut-butter- and-cracker sandwiches. A couple flashlights with spare batteries.

Warm cola would never be his first choice of beverage, but it would be preferable to dying of thirst. And even warm cola was better than being stranded in the Mojave with no source of water, forced to save and drink your own urine.

Peanut-butter-and-cracker sandwiches, tasty under ordinary circumstances, would be unspeakably vile if accompanied by urine.

Maybe he should stock four six-packs of cola.

Even though he wouldn’t be drinking his urine, he would need something in which to pee, supposing that he would be required to hide out longer than a few hours. A pot with a lid. Better yet, a jar with a screw top.

Mysterious Caller hadn’t said how long Fric should expect to be under siege. They would have to discuss that in their next chat.

The stranger had promised that he would be in touch again. If he was a pervert, he would call for sure, drooling all over his phone. If he wasn’t a pervert, then he might be a sincere friend, in which case he would still call, but for better reasons.

Time passed, the asthma relented, and Fric got to his feet. He clipped the inhaler to his belt.

A little woozy, he balanced himself with one hand against the cold steel wall as he went to the door.

A minute later, in his bedroom, he sat on the edge of the bed and lifted the handset from the telephone. An indicator light on the keyboard appeared at his private line.

No one had phoned him since he’d answered his Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo in the train room. After pressing *69, he listened while his phone automatically entered the number of his most recent caller.

If he’d been a brainiac trained in the skills required to be an enormously dangerous spy, and if he’d had the supernaturally attuned ear of Beethoven before Beethoven went deaf, or if one of his parents had been an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to crossbreed with humans, perhaps Fric could have translated those rapidly sounded telephone tones into numerals. He could have memorized Mysterious Caller’s phone number for future use.

He was nothing more, however, than the son of the biggest movie star in the world. That position came with lots of perks, like a free Xbox from Microsoft and a lifetime pass to Disneyland, but it didn’t confer upon him either astonishing genius or paranormal powers.

After waiting through twelve rings, he engaged the speakerphone feature. He went to a window while the number continued to ring.

The billiards-table smoothness of the east lawn sloped away through oaks, through cedars, to rose gardens, vanishing into gray rain and silver mist.

Fric wondered if he should tell anyone about Mysterious Caller and the warning of impending danger.

If he called Ghost Dad’s global cell-phone number, it would be answered either by a bodyguard or by his father’s personal makeup artist. Or by his personal hair stylist. Or by the masseur who always traveled with him. Or by his spiritual adviser, Ming du Lac, or by any of a dozen other flunkies orbiting the Fourth Most Admired Man in the World.

The phone would be handed from one to another of them, across unknowable vertical and horizontal distances, until after ten minutes or fifteen, Ghost Dad would come on the line. He would say, “Hey, my main man, guess who’s here with me and wants to talk to you.”

Then before Fric could say a word, Ghost Dad would pass the phone to Julia Roberts or Arnold Schwarzenegger, or to Tobey Maguire, or to Kirsten Dunst, or to Winnie the Wonder Horse, probably to all of them, and they would be sweet to Fric. They would ask him how he was doing in school, whether he wanted to be the biggest movie star in the world when he grew up, what variety of oats he preferred in his feed bag. …

By the time that the phone had been passed around to Ghost Dad again, a reporter from Entertainment Weekly, using the wrong end of a pencil, would be taking notes for a feature piece about the father-son chat. When the story hit print, every fact would be wrong, and Fric would be made to look like either a whiny moron or a spoiled sissy.

Worse, a giggly young actress with no serious credits but with a little industry buzz—what they used to call a starlet—might answer Ghost Dad’s phone, as often one of them did. She would be tickled by the name Fric because these girls were always tickled by everything. He’d talked to scores of them, hundreds, over the years, and they seemed to be as alike as ears of corn picked in the same field, as if some farmer grew them out in Iowa and shipped them to Hollywood in railroad cars.

Fric wasn’t able to phone his Nominal Mom, Freddie Nielander, because she would be in some far and fabulously glamorous place like Monte Carlo, being gorgeous. He didn’t have a reliable phone number for her.

Mrs. McBee, and by extension Mr. McBee, were kind to Fric. They seemed to have his best interests always in mind.

Nevertheless, Fric was reluctant to turn to them in a case like this. Mr. McBee was just a little … daffy. And Mrs. McBee was an all-knowing, all-seeing, rule-making, formidable woman whose soft-spoken words and mere looks of disapproval were powerful enough to cause the object of her reprimand to suffer internal bleeding.

Mr. and Mrs. McBee served in loco parentis. This was a Latin legal phrase that meant they had been given the authority of Fric’s parents when his parents were absent, which was nearly always.

When he’d first heard in loco parentis, he’d thought it meant that his parents were loco.

The McBees, however, had come with the house, which they had managed long before Ghost Dad had owned it. To Fric, their deeper allegiance seemed to be to Palazzo Rospo, to place and to tradition, more than to any single employer or his family.

Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was a friendly acquaintance, not actually a friend, and certainly not a confidant.

Mr. Hachette, the fearsome and possibly insane chef, was not a person to whom anyone would turn in time of need, except perhaps Satan. The Prince of Hell would value the chef’s advice.

Fric carefully planned every foray into the kitchen so as to avoid Mr. Hachette. Garlic wouldn’t repel the chef, because he loved garlic, but a crucifix pressed to his flesh would surely cause him to burst into flames and, screaming, to take flight like a bat.

The possibility existed that the psychotic chef was the very danger about which Mysterious Caller had been warning Fric.

Indeed, virtually any of the twenty-five staff members might be a scheming homicidal nutjob cunningly concealed behind a smiley mask. An ax murderer. An ice-pick killer. A silk-scarf strangler.

Maybe all twenty-five were ax murderers waiting to strike. Maybe the next full moon would stir tides of madness in their heads, and they would explode simultaneously, committing hideous acts of bloody violence, attacking one another with guns, hatchets, and high-speed food processors.

If you couldn’t know the full truth of what your father and your mother thought of you, if you couldn’t really know who they were and what went on inside their heads, then you couldn’t expect to know for sure anything about other people who were even less close to you.

Fric pretty much trusted Mr. Truman not to be a psychopath with a chain-saw obsession. Mr. Truman had once been a cop, after all.

Besides, something about Ethan Truman was so right. Fric didn’t have the words to describe it, but he recognized it. Mr. Truman was solid. When he came into a room, he was there. When he talked to you, he was connected to you.

Fric had never known anyone quite like him.

Nevertheless, he wouldn’t tell even Mr. Truman about Mysterious Caller and the need to find a hiding place.

For one thing, he feared not being believed. Boys his age often made up wild stories. Not Fric. But other boys did. Fric didn’t want Mr. Truman to think he was a lying sack of kid crap.

Neither did he want Mr. Truman to think that he was a fraidy-cat, a spineless jellyfish, a chicken-hearted coward.

No one would ever believe that Fric could save the world twenty times over, the way they believed his father had done, but he didn’t want anyone to think he was a timid baby. Especially not Mr. Truman.

Besides, he sort of liked having this secret. It was better than trains.

He watched the wet day, half expecting to catch a brief glimpse of a villain skulking across the estate, obscured by rain and mist.

After Mysterious Caller’s number had rung maybe a hundred times without being answered, Fric returned to the phone and terminated the call.

He had work to do. Preparations to make.

A bad thing was coming. Fric intended to be ready to meet it, greet it, defeat it.

CHAPTER 19

UNDER A BLACK UMBRELLA, ETHAN Truman walked the grassy avenue of graves, his shoes squishing in the saturated turf.

Giant drooping cedars mourned with the weeping day, and birds, like spirits risen, stirred in the cloistered branches when he passed near enough to worry them.

As far as he could see, he alone walked in these mortal fields. Respect for the loved and lost was usually paid on sunny days, with remembrances as bright as the weather. No one would choose to visit a cemetery in a storm.

No one but a cop whose mainspring of curiosity had been wound tight, who had been born with a compulsive need to know the truth. A clockwork mechanism in his heart and soul, designed by fate and granted as a birthright, compelled him to follow wherever suspicion and logic might lead.

In this case, suspicion, logic, and dread.

Intuition wove in him the strange conviction that he would prove to be not the first visitor of the day and that in this bastion of the dead, he would discover something disturbing, though he had no idea what it might be.

Headstones of time-eaten granite, mausoleums crusted with lichen and stained by settled smog, memorial columns and obelisks tilted by ground subsidence: None of that traditional architecture identified this as a cemetery. The marker at each of these graves—a bronze plaque on a pale granite plinth—had been set flush with the grass. From a distance the burial ground appeared to be an ordinary park.

Radiant and unique in life, Hannah was here remembered with the same drab bronze that memorialized the thousands of others who slept eternal in these fields.

Ethan visited her grave six or seven times a year, including once at Christmas. And always on their anniversary.

He didn’t know why he came that often. Hannah didn’t lie here, only her bones. She lived in his heart, always with him.

Sometimes he thought he traveled to this place less to remember her—for she was not in the least forgotten—than to gaze at the empty plot beside her, at the blank granite tablet on which a cast-bronze plaque with his name would one day be fixed.

At thirty-seven, he was too young a man to welcome death, and life continued to hold the greater promise for him. Nevertheless, five years after losing Hannah, Ethan still felt that something of himself had died, as well.

Through twelve years of marriage, they delayed having children. They had been so young. No need to hurry.

No one expected a vibrant, beautiful, thirty-two-year-old woman to be diagnosed with a virulent cancer, to be dead four months later. When it took her, the malignancy also claimed the children they might have brought into the world, and the grandchildren thereafter.

In a sense, Ethan had died with her: the Ethan who would have been a loving father to the children blessed with her grace, the Ethan who would have known the joy of her company for decades yet to come, who would have known the peace and the purpose of growing old at her side.

Perhaps he would have been surprised to find her grave torn open, empty.

What he found instead of grave robbery, though unexpected, did not surprise him.

At the base of her bronze plaque lay two dozen fresh long-stemmed roses. The florist had wrapped them in a cone of stiff cellophane that partly protected the blooms from the pelting rain.

These were hybrid tea roses, a golden-red variety named Broadway. Of all the roses that Hannah loved and grew, Broadway had been her favorite.

Ethan turned slowly in a full circle, studying the cemetery. No figure moved anywhere on those gently sloped green acres.

He peered with special suspicion at every cedar, every oak. As best he could tell, those trunks didn’t shelter a lurking observer.

No traffic moved on the narrow winding road that served the cemetery. Ethan’s Expedition—white as winter, glimmering like ice—was the only vehicle parked along the lane.

Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery, urban vistas loomed in veils of rain and fog, less like a real city than like a metropolis in a dream. No rumble of traffic, no bleat of horn penetrated from its maze of streets, as though all its citizens had long ago gone horizontal in these silent grassy acres surrounding Ethan.

He looked down at the bouquet once more. In addition to bright color, the Broadway rose offers a fine fragrance. It flourishes in any sun-drenched garden and is more resistant to mildew than are many other varieties.

Two dozen roses found on a grave would not be admitted as evidence in a court of law. Yet Ethan regarded these colorful blooms as proof enough of a strange courtship of the dead, by the dead.

CHAPTER 20

EATING A MAMOUL, WASHING IT DOWN with coffee from a thermos, Hazard Yancy sat in an unmarked sedan directly in front of Rolf Reynerd’s apartment house in West Hollywood.

The early winter twilight would not descend for another thirty minutes, but under the pall of the storm, the city had an hour ago settled into a prolonged dusk. Activated by photoelectric sensors, streetlamps glowed, painting a steely sheen on the needles of rain that stitched the gauzy gray sky ever closer to the earth.

Although it might appear that Hazard lingered over cookies on the city’s time, he was considering his approach to Reynerd.

After lunch with Ethan, he had returned to his desk in Homicide. In a couple hours, on the Internet and off, working both the keyboard and the phone, he had learned more than a little about his subject.

Rolf Reynerd was an actor who only intermittently made a living at his craft. Between occasional multi-episode supporting roles as a bad boy on one cheesy soap opera or another, he endured long periods of unemployment.

In an episode of The X-Files, he’d played a federal agent driven psychotic by an alien brain leech. In an episode of Law & Order, he had been a psychotic personal trainer who killed himself and his wife near the end of the first act. In a TV commercial for a deodorant, he had been cast as a psychotic guard in a Soviet gulag; the spot had never gone national, and he’d made only a little money from it.

An actor unlucky enough to be typecast usually didn’t fall into that career trap until he’d experienced great success in a memorable role. Thereafter, the public had difficulty accepting him as any character type other than the one that had made him famous.

In Reynerd’s case, however, he seemed to have been typecast even in failure. This suggested to Hazard that certain qualities of the man’s personality and demeanor allowed him to portray only mentally unbalanced characters, that he played screw-loose well because several of his own screws had stripped threads.

Despite an unreliable flow of income, Rolf Reynerd lived in a spacious apartment in a handsome building, in a good neighborhood. He dressed well, frequented the hottest nightclubs with young actresses who had a taste for Dom Perignon, and drove a new Jaguar.

According to former friends of Reynerd’s widowed mother, Mina, she doted on her son, believed that one day he would be a star, and subsidized him with a fat monthly check.

They were her former friends because Mina Reynerd had died four months ago. She’d first been shot in the foot, then beaten to death with a marble lamp encrusted with ornate ormolu mountings.

Her killer remained unknown. Detectives had turned up no leads in her case.

Not surprisingly, the sole heir to her estate had been her only child, poor typecast Rolf.

The actor had a dead-solid perfect alibi for the evening of his mother’s murder.

This didn’t either surprise Hazard or convince him of Reynerd’s innocence. Sole heirs usually had airtight alibis.

According to the medical examiner, Mina had been bludgeoned to death between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m. She’d been struck with such brutal force that patterns of the bronze ormolu had been deeply imprinted on her flesh, even crushed into the bone of her forehead.

Rolf had been partying with his current girlfriend and four other couples from seven o’clock that evening until two o’clock in the morning. They had been a flashy, noisy, memorable group at the two trendy nightclubs between which they had divided their time.

Anyway, even though Mina’s murder remained unsolved, and even if Rolf’s alibi had been only that he’d stayed home alone, playing with himself, Hazard would have had no excuse to give the man a once-over. The case belonged to another detective.

By happy chance, one of Reynerd’s party pals that night—Jerry Nemo—was known to Hazard from another case, which opened a door.

Two months ago, a drug dealer named Carter Cook had been shot in the head. Apparently the murder had been incidental to robbery; Cook had been loaded with merchandise and cash.

Reynerd’s buddy, Jerry Nemo, had placed a call to Cook’s cell phone an hour before the murder. Nemo was a customer, a cokehead. He set up a meet with Cook to score some blow.

Nemo was no longer under suspicion. No one in Los Angeles or anywhere on Planet Earth was still under suspicion. The Cook murder qualified as classic shitcan, a case unlikely ever to be solved.

Nevertheless, by pretending that Nemo remained a suspect, Hazard had an excuse to approach Reynerd and scope him out for Ethan.

He didn’t need an excuse for the purpose of satisfying Reynerd. Using just badge and bluster, Hazard could spin a hundred stories convincing enough to persuade the party boy to open the door and answer questions.

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