The Face

bottom.
        Crows on an iron fence, an eagle on a rock, a fierce-eyed heron as prehistoric as a pterodactyl: All peered into this living room from other times, other places.
        Paranoid and unashamed of it, Ethan sensed that when he looked away from the large photographs, the birds therein turned their heads [392] to watch him, all aware that he ought to be dead and that the man who had collected their images should be alive to admire them.
        “Here,” Hazard said, withdrawing a shoebox from one of the desk drawers. “Bank statements, canceled checks.”
        They sat at the stainless-steel and black-Formica dinette table to review Reynerd’s financial records.
        Beside the table: a window. Beyond the window: the tumultuous day, entirely in shades of gray, wind-whipped, awash, now without the thunder and lightning, yet still foreboding, dark and dire.
        The light proved too dim to facilitate their work. Hazard got up and switched on the small black-and-white ceramic chandelier over the table.
        Eleven bundles of checks had been bound with rubber bands, one for each month of the current year from January through November. The canceled checks from the current month would not be forwarded by the bank until mid-January.
        When they finished, they would have to return everything to the shoebox and replace the box in the desk drawer exactly as Hazard found it. Sam Kesselman, the detective assigned to Mina Reynerd’s murder, would no doubt review these same checks when he recovered from the flu, returned to work after Christmas, and read the dead actor’s partial screenplay.
        If they waited for Kesselman, however, Channing Manheim might by then be dead. And Ethan, too.
        They needed to look through only those checks written in the first eight months of the year, prior to Mina Reynerd’s murder.
        Hazard took four months’ worth of checks. He pushed four packets across the table to Ethan.
        In the screenplay, an out-of-work and underappreciated actor had taken an acting class at a university, where he’d met a professor with whom he had devised a scheme to kill the biggest movie star in the world. If the fictional academic had been inspired by a murderous [393] professor in real life, a tuition check might suggest an institution of higher learning at which the search should begin.
        Soon they discovered that Rolf Reynerd had been a fiend for continuing education. His entries on the memo line of each check were meticulous and helpful. In the first eight months of the year, he’d attended a pair of three-day weekend conferences on acting, another on screenwriting, a one-day seminar on publicity and self-promotion, and two university-extension courses in American literature.
        “Six possibilities,” Hazard said. “I guess we’ve got a busy day ahead of us.”
        “The sooner we check them out, the better,” Ethan agreed. “But Manheim doesn’t return from Florida until Thursday afternoon.”
        “So?”
        “We’ve got tomorrow yet.”
        Hazard looked past Ethan, at the window, and gazed into the storm, as though he were reading rain with the same expectation of meaning that a soothsayer might bring to the reading of sodden tea leaves.
        After consideration, he said, “Maybe we shouldn’t absolutely count on tomorrow. I get the feeling we’re running out of time.”

CHAPTER 58
        
        THE THINLY DRESSED BONES, TUMBLED ON the floor, issued no cry of surprise, no groan, no męme.
        To be sure that Brittina was dead, Corky wanted to shoot her once more, this time in the back of the head. Unfortunately, his pistol had begun to bark.
        Even the highest quality sound suppressor deteriorates with use. Regardless of the material used as baffling in the barrel extension, it compacts a little with each shot, diminishing in function.
        Furthermore, Corky didn’t possess a suppressor of the quality employed by agents of the CIA. You could not expect materials and craftsmanship equal to those of a major firearms manufacturer when you purchased a silencer from anti-veal activists.
        He had popped Hokenberry six times and Brittina twice. In just eight shots, the pistol had begun to find its voice again.
        Perhaps the most recent round had not been audible outside the narrow house, but the next report would be louder. He was a man who took calculated risks, but this one didn’t