The Face

figured that in one of the bedrooms there had to be a young girl strapped to a levitating bed, vomiting violently, cursing Jesus, and speaking in the voices of demons.
        As a cop, he must never allow fear to inhibit him, but also as a [473] friend, he couldn’t walk away from this and leave Ethan with no one to guard his back.
        Information. In Hazard’s experience, doubt came from having too little information to make an intelligent decision. He needed someone to chase down the answers to a couple questions.
        The problem was that officially he had no reason to be pursuing these leads. If this cheese-eater were related to any active case, it was Mina Reynerd’s murder, which was on Kesselman’s desk, not on Hazard’s. He couldn’t seek information through the usual department channels.
        He phoned Laura Moonves in the Detective Support Division. She had dated Ethan, she still cared for him, and she had helped him track down Rolf Reynerd from the plates on the Honda that had been filmed by one of the estate’s video cameras.
        Hazard worried that she would have left for the day, but she took his call, and with relief he said, “You’re still there.”
        “Am I? I thought I’d left. I thought I was halfway home, already stopped for a bucket of takeout fried chicken, double slaw. No, son of a bitch, here I still am, but what does it matter, since I don’t have a social life.”
        “I tell him he’s an idiot for letting you slip away.”
        “I tell him he’s an idiot, too,” she said.
        “Everyone tells him he’s an idiot.”
        “Yeah? So maybe we all ought to get together and come up with a new strategy, because this telling-him-he’s-an-idiot thing isn’t working. I like him so much, Hazard.”
        “He’s still getting over Hannah.”
        “Five years, man.”
        “When he lost her, he lost more than her. He lost his sense of purpose. He couldn’t anymore see a bigger meaning to things. He needs to see it again, ’cause that’s him.”
        “The world’s full of sexy, smart, successful guys who wouldn’t [474] recognize a bigger meaning to life if God punched them in the face wearing a ring that left His initials in their foreheads.”
        “That would be your pissed-off Old Testament version of God.”
        “Why do I have to fall for a guy who needs meaning?”
        “Maybe because you need it, too.” That thought silenced Laura, and into the silence, Hazard said, “Remember that guy you helped him track down yesterday morning-Rolf Reynerd?”
        “Famous wolf,” she said. “Rolf means ‘famous wolf.’ ”
        “Rolf means dead . Don’t you watch the news?”
        “I’m not a masochist, am I?”
        “So check the homicide overnights. But not now. Right now I need you to do something for me, for Ethan, but off the record.”
        “What do you need?”
        Hazard glanced at the house. The place still radiated that dual atmosphere: as if the Brady Bunch had built their home over the gate to Hell.
        “Vladimir Laputa,” Hazard said. He spelled it for Laura. “Let me know as quick as you can, does anyone with that name have a rap sheet, even just a DUI, failure to pay parking tickets, anything.”

        Instead of pulling the trigger, Corky withdrew the barrel from Dalton’s mouth, bearing down to scrape the steel across the teeth, which were loose from malnutrition.
        “One shot would be too easy for you,” Corky said. “When I’m ready to finish you, it’ll be slow… and memorable.”
        He put the pistol aside, told Dalton some delicious lies about disposing of the bodies of Rachel and Emily, and eventually selected a fresh infusion bag from the nearby refrigerator.
        “I’ll be bringing someone back with me this evening,” Corky said as he worked. “An audience for your final suffering.”
        In the wasted face, surrounded by a raccoon mask of livid skin, glistening in sunken sockets, the eyes rolled to follow Corky during [475] his caregiving, no longer radiant jellies spiced with hatred, but once more flavored with fear, the haunted eyes of a man who at last believed in the power of chaos and understood its majesty.
        “He’s a ten-year-old boy, my new project. You’ll be surprised at his identity when I introduce you.”
        After replacing the infusion bag, he went to the drug cabinet, from which he withdrew a packaged hypodermic syringe and two small