Читать книгу The Face - Dean Koontz - Страница 14
ОглавлениеBEYOND 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.
