The Face

emotionally vulnerable, and no wonder, but in no physical danger. The skeleton staff at the estate still numbered ten, counting Chef Hachette and the groundskeeper, Mr. Yorn. Estate security was formidable. The real danger to Fric remained that some lunatic might get at Channing Manheim, leaving the boy fatherless.
        Ethan pressed START.
        The elevator moved again. In but a moment it stopped at the upper level of the parking garage.
        Perhaps he would step out and find himself on a rainy street, in the path of an out-of-control PT Cruiser.
        The door slid aside, revealing nothing more impossible than the concrete walls of an underground garage and ranks of vehicles huddled under fluorescent lights.
        As he walked to the Expedition, his ragged breathing quickly grew normal. His racing heart not only slowed but also settled out of his throat, into his chest where it belonged.
        Behind the wheel of the SUV, he pushed the master switch to engage the power locks on all the doors.
        Through the windshield he could see nothing but a concrete wall mottled by water stains and car-exhaust deposits. Here and there, over time, florescences of lime had risen to the surface.
        His imagination wanted to search for images in this mottling, as it sometimes hunted big game and collected menageries among the shifting shapes of clouds. Here, he saw only decomposing faces and the tumbled, tangled bodies of the cruelly murdered. He might have [375] been sitting before a ghastly mural of the many victims in the names of whom he, as a homicide detective, had sought justice.
        He tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and let the tension shiver out of him.
        After a while, he considered turning on the radio to pass the time until Hazard arrived. Sheryl Crow, Barenaked Ladies, Chris Isaak, without orchestral strings and timpanis and French horns, might mellow his mood.
        He was reluctant to click the switch. He suspected that instead of the usual music, news, and talk shows, he would discover, from one end of the dial to the other, only the voice that might be Hannah’s, futilely trying to speak to him on every frequency.
        Knuckles on glass- tap-tap-tap -startled him. Wearing a rolled seaman’s cap and a scowl to curdle vinegar, Hazard Yancy peered through the passenger’s window.
        Ethan unlocked the doors.
        Filling the SUV as fully as he might have filled a bumper car at a carnival, Hazard climbed into the front passenger’s seat and pulled the door shut. Although he had more knees than knee space, he didn’t adjust the power controls to move the seat back. He seemed nervous. “They find Dunny?”
        “Who?”
        “The hospital.”
        “No.”
        “Then why’re you here?”
        “I talked to the doctor who signed the death certificate, trying to figure it out.”
        “You get anywhere?”
        “Right back where I started-lookin’ up my own ass.”
        “Not a view that’ll draw tourists,” Hazard said. “Sam Kesselman has the flu.”
        Ethan needed Kesselman-the detective assigned to the ormolu-lamp murder of Rolf Reynerd’s mother-to read Reynerd’s unfinished [376] screenplay and then to track down the real-life inspiration for the murderous professor depicted in its pages.
        “When’s he back on the job?” Ethan asked.
        “His wife says he can’t even keep chicken soup on his stomach. Looks like we won’t see him till after Christmas.”
        “Anybody partners with him?”
        “Right at the start, Glo Williams had a piece of it, but the case went cold fast, and he stepped out.”
        “Get him back in?”
        “He’s on the rape-and-chop of that eleven-year-old girl that’s all over the news, no time for anything else.”
        “Man, the world gets sicker by the week.”
        “By the hour. Otherwise, we’d be unemployed. They call Mina Reynerd’s case Vamp and the Lamp ’cause in pictures of her when she was younger, she looked like one of those vamps in the old movies, like Theda Bara or Jean Harlow. The file is strictly on Kesselman’s desk, along with other active cases.”
        “So even after Christmas, he might not get to it first thing.”
        Hazard stared at the concrete wall beyond the windshield, as if stocking a menagerie of his own. Maybe he saw gazelles and kangaroos. More likely, he could not avoid seeing battered children, strangled