by Dean Koontz
Giant drooping cedars mourned with the weeping day, and birds, like spirits risen, stirred in the cloistered branches when he passed near enough to worry them.
As far as he could see, he alone walked in these mortal fields. Respect for the loved and lost was usually paid on sunny days, with remembrances as bright as the weather. No one would choose to visit a cemetery in a storm.
No one but a cop whose mainspring of curiosity had been wound tight, who had been born with a compulsive need to know the truth. A clockwork mechanism in his heart and soul, designed by fate and granted as a birthright, compelled him to follow wherever suspicion and logic might lead.
In this case, suspicion, logic, and dread.
Intuition wove in him the strange conviction that he would prove to be not the first visitor of the day and that in this bastion of the dead, he would discover something disturbing, though he had no idea what it might be.
Headstones of time-eaten granite, mausoleums crusted with lichen and stained by settled smog, memorial columns and obelisks tilted by ground subsidence: None of that traditional architecture identified this as a cemetery. The marker at each of these graves—a bronze plaque on a pale granite plinth—had been set flush with the grass. From a distance the burial ground appeared to be an ordinary park.
Radiant and unique in life, Hannah was here remembered with the same drab bronze that memorialized the thousands of others who slept eternal in these fields.
Ethan visited her grave six or seven times a year, including once at Christmas. And always on their anniversary.
He didn’t know why he came that often. Hannah didn’t lie here, only her bones. She lived in his heart, always with him.
Sometimes he thought he traveled to this place less to remember her—for she was not in the least forgotten—than to gaze at the empty plot beside her, at the blank granite tablet on which a cast-bronze plaque with his name would one day be fixed.
At thirty-seven, he was too young a man to welcome death, and life continued to hold the greater promise for him. Nevertheless, five years after losing Hannah, Ethan still felt that something of himself had died, as well.
Through twelve years of marriage, they delayed having children. They had been so young. No need to hurry.
No one expected a vibrant, beautiful, thirty-two-year-old woman to be diagnosed with a virulent cancer, to be dead four months later. When it took her, the malignancy also claimed the children they might have brought into the world, and the grandchildren thereafter.
In a sense, Ethan had died with her: the Ethan who would have been a loving father to the children blessed with her grace, the Ethan who would have known the joy of her company for decades yet to come, who would have known the peace and the purpose of growing old at her side.
Perhaps he would have been surprised to find her grave torn open, empty.
What he found instead of grave robbery, though unexpected, did not surprise him.
At the base of her bronze plaque lay two dozen fresh long-stemmed roses. The florist had wrapped them in a cone of stiff cellophane that partly protected the blooms from the pelting rain.
These were hybrid tea roses, a golden-red variety named Broadway. Of all the roses that Hannah loved and grew, Broadway had been her favorite.
Ethan turned slowly in a full circle, studying the cemetery. No figure moved anywhere on those gently sloped green acres.
He peered with special suspicion at every cedar, every oak. As best he could tell, those trunks didn’t shelter a lurking observer.
No traffic moved on the narrow winding road that served the cemetery. Ethan’s Expedition—white as winter, glimmering like ice—was the only vehicle parked along the lane.
Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery, urban vistas loomed in veils of rain and fog, less like a real city than like a metropolis in a dream. No rumble of traffic, no bleat of horn penetrated from its maze of streets, as though all its citizens had long ago gone horizontal in these silent grassy acres surrounding Ethan.
He looked down at the bouquet once more. In addition to bright color, the Broadway rose offers a fine fragrance. It flourishes in any sun-drenched garden and is more resistant to mildew than are many other varieties.
Two dozen roses found on a grave would not be admitted as evidence in a court of law. Yet Ethan regarded these colorful blooms as proof enough of a strange courtship of the dead, by the dead.
CHAPTER 20
EATING A MAMOUL, WASHING IT DOWN WITH coffee from a thermos, Hazard Yancy sat in an unmarked sedan directly in front of Rolf Reynerd’s apartment house in West Hollywood.
The early winter twilight would not descend for another thirty minutes, but under the pall of the storm, the city had an hour ago settled into a prolonged dusk. Activated by photoelectric sensors, streetlamps glowed, painting a steely sheen on the needles of rain that stitched the gauzy gray sky ever closer to the earth.
Although it might appear that Hazard lingered over cookies on the city’s time, he was considering his approach to Reynerd.
After lunch with Ethan, he had returned to his desk in Homicide. In a couple hours, on the Internet and off, working both the keyboard and the phone, he had learned more than a little about his subject.
Rolf Reynerd was an actor who only intermittently made a living at his craft. Between occasional multi-episode supporting roles as a bad boy on one cheesy soap opera or another, he endured long periods of unemployment.
In an episode of The X-Files, he’d played a federal agent driven psychotic by an alien brain leech. In an episode of Law & Order, he had been a psychotic personal trainer who killed himself and his wife near the end of the first act. In a TV commercial for a deodorant, he had been cast as a psychotic guard in a Soviet gulag; the spot had never gone national, and he’d made only a little money from it.
An actor unlucky enough to be typecast usually didn’t fall into that career trap until he’d experienced great success in a memorable role. Thereafter, the public had difficulty accepting him as any character type other than the one that had made him famous.
In Reynerd’s case, however, he seemed to have been typecast even in failure. This suggested to Hazard that certain qualities of the man’s personality and demeanor allowed him to portray only mentally unbalanced characters, that he played screw-loose well because several of his own screws had stripped threads.
Despite an unreliable flow of income, Rolf Reynerd lived in a spacious apartment in a handsome building, in a good neighborhood. He dressed well, frequented the hottest nightclubs with young actresses who had a taste for Dom Perignon, and drove a new Jaguar.
According to former friends of Reynerd’s widowed mother, Mina, she doted on her son, believed that one day he would be a star, and subsidized him with a fat monthly check.
They were her former friends because Mina Reynerd had died four months ago. She’d first been shot in the foot, then beaten to death with a marble lamp encrusted with ornate ormolu mountings.
Her killer remained unknown. Detectives had turned up no leads in her case.
Not surprisingly, the sole heir to her estate had been her only child, poor typecast Rolf.
The actor had a dead-solid perfect alibi for the evening of his mother’s murder.
This didn’t either surprise Hazard or convince him of Reynerd’s innocence. Sole heirs usually had airtight alibis.
According to the medical examiner, Mina had been bludgeoned to death between 9:00 and 11:00 P.M. She’d been struck with such brutal force that patterns of the bronze ormolu had been deeply imprinted on her flesh, even crushed into the bone of her forehead.
Rolf had been partying with his current girlfriend and four other couples from seven o’clock that evening until two o’clock in the morning. They had been a flashy, noisy, memorable group at the two trendy nightclubs between which they had divided their time.
Anyway, even though Mina’s murder remained unsolved, and even if Rolf’s alibi had been only that he’d stayed home alone,
playing with himself, Hazard would have had no excuse to give the man a once-over. The case belonged to another detective.
By happy chance, one of Reynerd’s party pals that night—Jerry Nemo—was known to Hazard from another case, which opened a door.
Two months ago, a drug dealer named Carter Cook had been shot in the head. Apparently the murder had been incidental to robbery; Cook had been loaded with merchandise and cash.
Reynerd’s buddy, Jerry Nemo, had placed a call to Cook’s cell phone an hour before the murder. Nemo was a customer, a cokehead. He set up a meet with Cook to score some blow.
Nemo was no longer under suspicion. No one in Los Angeles or anywhere on Planet Earth was still under suspicion. The Cook murder qualified as classic shitcan, a case unlikely ever to be solved.
Nevertheless, by pretending that Nemo remained a suspect, Hazard had an excuse to approach Reynerd and scope him out for Ethan.
He didn’t need an excuse for the purpose of satisfying Reynerd. Using just badge and bluster, Hazard could spin a hundred stories convincing enough to persuade the party boy to open the door and answer questions.
Should Reynerd directly or indirectly disclose his obsession with Channing Manheim, however, or in the unlikely event that Reynerd revealed an intent to harm the movie star, Hazard would have to refer the situation outside the Homicide Division for investigation. Then he would need a credible intradepartmental explanation as to why he had been interviewing Reynerd in the first place, when information regarding Manheim had fallen into his lap.
By pretending that Reynerd’s snow-blowing buddy, Nemo, remained a suspect in the Carter Cook murder, Hazard could cover his ass.
After licking powdered sugar and mamoul crumbs from his fingers, he got out of the car.
He didn’t bother with an umbrella. Considering that he presented nearly two linebackers’ worth of surface area to the rain, he would have needed a bumbershoot the size of a beach umbrella to shelter himself completely.
Approaching the apartment house, he proceeded briskly but did not run through the downpour. The building didn’t set far back from the street.
Besides, Hazard seldom accommodated himself to the world, for the world usually moved out of his way. He hardly noticed the rain.
Inside, he ignored the elevator and climbed the stairs.
He’d once been shot at in an elevator. He’d ridden up to the sixth floor, the doors had slid aside, and the perp had been waiting.
Targeted in an elevator, you don’t have much room to dodge: As a place in which to be shot at, only a telephone booth and a parked car offered worse circumstances.
Hazard had been shot at while sitting in a parked car, but never while standing in a telephone booth. He expected that it was only a matter of time.
Waiting outside the elevator, the shooter had been packing a 9-mm pistol. And he’d been pants-wetting nervous.
If the freak had been either calm or armed with a shotgun, the outcome for Hazard would have been much bleaker than what happened.
The first round had slammed into the cabin ceiling. The second blew a hole in the back wall. The third winged the stranger who had shared the elevator with Hazard.
As it turned out, the stranger, an IRS agent, was the intended target. Hazard had just been in the wrong place at an inconvenient time, marked for death only because he was a witness.
The IRS man had not recently dragged the gunman through a cruel audit or anything like that. He’d been jumping the shooter’s wife.
Instead of returning fire, Hazard had gone in under the pistol. He wrenched it away from the assailant, drove him across the hallway, hammered him into the wall, and compacted his testicles with a knee. Not accidentally, he broke the guy’s arm.
Later, for a few months during the divorce proceedings, he dated the shooter’s wife. She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d just gotten mixed up with bad men.
Now, Hazard climbed to the second floor of the apartment house, not entirely comfortable with the confining nature of the stairwell.
At Apartment 2B, he rang the bell without hesitation.
When Rolf Reynerd opened the door, he proved to be a perfect match for Ethan’s description, down to the methamphetamine shine in his cold blue eyes and to the tiny flecks of foamy spittle in the corners of his mouth, which suggested that he was so routinely amped that he might, in a moment of toxic psychosis, spin wildly around his apartment under the misapprehension that he was Spiderman squirting silky filaments from his wrists.
Hazard flashed his ID, spread a garden-growing load of crap about Jerry Nemo being a suspect in the death of Carter Cook, and got into the apartment so fast that rain still dripped from his earlobes.
A product of weight training and protein powders, Reynerd looked as if he would have to eat a dozen raw eggs every morning merely to sustain the muscle mass in his right triceps.
Of the two of them, Hazard Yancy was the bigger and no doubt the smarter, but he cautioned himself to remain wary, alert.
Reynerd closed the apartment door and escorted Hazard into the living room, expressing a sincere desire to cooperate, as well as a sincere conviction that his good friend Jerry Nemo was incapable of harming a fly.
Regardless of how fly-loving Nemo might or might not be, Reynerd troweled on the sincerity as thickly as he might have done had he been wearing a purple-dinosaur costume, teaching little life lessons to preschoolers on an early-morning TV program.
If his acting had been this dreadful when he’d appeared on those soap operas, the writers must have been frantic to script Reynerd into a deadly car accident or a lightning-quick terminal brain tumor. The audience might have preferred a bloody end for him, by shotgun in an elevator.
Furniture, carpet, blinds, photographs of birds: Everything in the apartment was black-and-white. On the TV, in an old black-and-white movie, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert showed Reynerd how it ought to be done.
In black slacks and a black-and-white sport shirt, the sincere friend of Jerry Nemo had coordinated his wardrobe with the decor.
At the suggestion of his host, Hazard settled in an armchair. He perched on the edge, the better to get up fast.
Reynerd plucked the remote control off the coffee table, pausing Gable in midspeech and Colbert in reaction. He sat on the sofa.
The only color in the room was provided by Reynerd’s blue eyes and by the bright designs that enlivened the two bags of potato chips that flanked him on the sofa.
The bag to his left offered Hawaiian-style chips. The bag to his right held a sour-cream-and-chive variety. Mr. Gourmet.
Hazard had not forgotten Ethan’s enigmatic but intense warning about snack-food containers.
Both bags were open, standing upright, plump enough to be full. Hazard detected the faint oily aroma of the chips.
If the bags contained handguns as well as chips, Hazard wasn’t able to smell the weapons. He couldn’t see them, either, because the bags, made of foil, were not transparent.
Reynerd sat with his hands palms-down on his thighs, licking his lips, as though he might reach for a salty treat at any moment.
With a nod to indicate the frozen image on the TV, the actor said, “That’s the perfect medium for me. I was born too late. I should have lived back then.”
“When’s that?” Hazard asked, for he knew that suspects often revealed the most when they seemed to be rambling.
“The 1930s and ’40s. When all films were black-and-white. I’d have been a star in those days.”
“Is that right?”
“I’m too strong a personality for color films. I explode off the screen. I overwhelm the medium, the audience.”
“I can see where that would be a problem.”
“In the color era, the most successful stars have all been flat personalities, shallow. They’re an inch wide, half an inch deep.”
“And why is that?”
“The color, the depth of field made possible by modern cameras, surround-sound technology�
�all that stuff makes flat personalities bigger than life, provides them with a powerful illusion of substance and complexity.”
“You, on the other hand—”
“I, on the other hand, am wide and deep and so alive to begin with that the further enhancement of modern film technology puts me over the top, makes a caricature of me.”
“That must be frustrating,” Hazard commiserated.
“You can’t imagine. In black-and-white film, I would fill the screen without overwhelming the audience. Where are the Bogarts and Bacalls of our age, the Tracys and Hepburns, the Cary Grants and the Gary Coopers and the John Waynes?”
“We don’t have them,” Hazard acknowledged.
“They couldn’t succeed today,” Reynerd assured him. “They would be too powerful for modern film, too deep, entirely too glamorous. What did you think of Moonshaker?”
Hazard frowned. “Of what?”
“Moonshaker. Charming Manheim’s latest hit. Two hundred million dollars at the box office.”
Perhaps Reynerd was so obsessed with Manheim that sooner or later in any conversation, he would bring the subject around to the star.
Wary nonetheless, Hazard said, “I don’t go to the movies.”
“Everybody goes.”
“Not really. Fewer than thirty million tickets have to be sold to generate two hundred million bucks. Maybe just ten percent of the country.”
“All right, but other people see it on TV, on DVD.”
“Maybe another thirty million. Pick any particular movie—at least eighty percent of the country never sees it. They have lives to live.”
Reynerd seemed to boggle at the notion that movies were not the hub of the world. Although he didn’t reach for a gun in either of the chip-bag holsters, his displeasure with this turn in the conversation was evident.
Hazard got back in the actor’s good graces by saying, “Now, in the black-and-white era you’re talking about, half the country went to the movies once a week. Stars were stars in those days. Everybody knew Clark Gable’s movies, Jimmy Stewart’s.”
“Exactly,” Reynerd agreed. “Manheim would have faded away in the black-and-white era. He would have been too thin for the medium, too flat. He’d be forgotten now. Worse than forgotten—he’d be unknown.”