DURING THE YEARS THEY’D BEEN OFFICIAL partners, Ethan and Hazard had gone by the book as much as it is ever possible to go by a book that is written largely by people who have never done the job.
On this December day, however, unofficially partners once more, they were bad boys. Being bad boys made Ethan uneasy, but it gave him the comforting feeling that at least they were taking control of the situation.
A notice on Rolf Reynerd’s door warned that Apartment 2B was the site of an ongoing1 police investigation2. The premises3 remained off-limits to all but authorized4 personnel of the police department and the district attorney’s office.
They ignored the warning.
The deadbolt lock on Rolf Reynerd’s apartment door was covered with a police seal. Ethan cracked it, peeled it.
Hazard had with him a Lockaid lock-release gun, an item sold exclusively to law-enforcement agencies. In ordinary circumstances, he would have requisitioned this device with the proper paperwork, specifying5 the exact intended use, virtually always with reference to an existing search warrant.
[391] These were not ordinary circumstances.
Hazard had gotten his hands on one of the department’s Lockaids by unconventional means. He would be walking a razor’s edge between righteousness and ruin until he returned the device to the equipment locker6 where it belonged.
“When you’re up against some mojo man who fades into mirrors,” he said, “your ass7 is hanging over a cliff anyway.”
Hazard slid the thin pick of the Lockaid into the key channel of the deadbolt, under the pin tumblers. He squeezed the trigger four times before the steel spring in the gun managed to lodge8 all the pins at the shear9 line and thereby10 fully11 disengage the lock.
Ethan followed Hazard into the apartment, closing the door behind them. He tried to step around and over the stains—Reynerd’s blood—that marred12 the white carpet just inside the threshold.
He had spilled rivers of his own blood on this carpet. Died on it. The experience rose in memory, too vivid to have been a dream.
The black-and-white furnishings, art, and decorations proved to be as he remembered them.
On the walls, a flock of pigeons was frozen in midwhirl. Like white chalk checks on gray slate14, geese flew across a somber15 sky, and a parliament of owls16 perched on a barn roof, deliberating over the fate of mice.
Hazard had been present the previous night during the first search of the apartment. He knew what had been collected as possible evidence and what had been left behind.
He went directly to that corner of the living room in which stood a black-lacquered desk with faux-ivory drawer pulls. “What we need is probably here,” he said, and searched the drawers from top to bottom.
Crows on an iron fence, an eagle on a rock, a fierce-eyed heron as prehistoric18 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, entirely19 in shades of gray, wind-whipped, awash, now without the thunder and lightning, yet still foreboding, dark and dire17.
The light proved too dim to facilitate their work. Hazard got up and switched on the small black-and-white ceramic20 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 acting21 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 fictional22 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 memo13 line of each check were meticulous23 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 publicity24 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 sodden25 tea leaves.
After consideration, he said, “Maybe we shouldn’t absolutely count on tomorrow. I get the feeling we’re running out of time.”
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ongoing
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| adj.进行中的，前进的 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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premises
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| n.建筑物，房屋 | |
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authorized
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| a.委任的，许可的 | |
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specifying
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| v.指定( specify的现在分词 )；详述；提出…的条件；使具有特性 | |
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locker
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| n.更衣箱，储物柜，冷藏室，上锁的人 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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shear
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| n.修剪，剪下的东西，羊的一岁；vt.剪掉，割，剥夺；vi.修剪，切割，剥夺，穿越 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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marred
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| adj. 被损毁, 污损的 | |
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memo
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| n.照会，备忘录；便笺；通知书；规章 | |
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slate
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| n.板岩，石板，石片，石板色，候选人名单；adj.暗蓝灰色的，含板岩的；vt.用石板覆盖，痛打，提名，预订 | |
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somber
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| adj.昏暗的，阴天的，阴森的，忧郁的 | |
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owls
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| n.猫头鹰( owl的名词复数 ) | |
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dire
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| adj.可怕的，悲惨的，阴惨的，极端的 | |
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prehistoric
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| adj.（有记载的）历史以前的，史前的，古老的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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ceramic
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| n.制陶业，陶器，陶瓷工艺 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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fictional
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| adj.小说的，虚构的 | |
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meticulous
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| adj.极其仔细的，一丝不苟的 | |
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publicity
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| n.众所周知，闻名；宣传，广告 | |
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sodden
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| adj.浑身湿透的；v.使浸透；使呆头呆脑 | |
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