The Face

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.
        [39] 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.
        [41] 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