The Face

dirty-milk clouds had churned lower during his stroll, coagulating into sooty curds. In the storm gloom, in the wet shade of the oak tree, his silver sedan waited as dark as iron.
        Trailers of bougainvillea lashed the air, casting off scarlet petals, raking thorny nails against the stucco wall of a house, making sgraffito sounds: scratch-scratch, screek-screek.
        Wind threw sheets, lashed whips, spun funnels of rain. Rain hissed, sizzled, chuckled, splashed.
        Corky’s phone rang.
        [71] He was still half a block from his car. He would miss the call if he waited to answer it in the BMW.
        He slipped his right arm out of its sleeve, under his slicker, and un-clipped the phone from his belt.
        Arm in sleeve again, phone to ear, toddling along as buttercup-yellow and as smile-evoking as any character in any TV program for children, Corky Laputa was in such a good mood that he answered the call by saying, “Brighten the corner where you are.”
        The caller was Rolf Reynerd. As thick as Corky was yellow, Rolf thought he’d gotten a wrong number.
        “It’s me,” Corky said quickly, before Reynerd could hang up.
        By the time he reached the BMW, he wished he had never answered the phone. Reynerd had done something stupid.

CHAPTER 10
        
        BEYOND 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.”
        [73] “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.”
        [74] 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