Hazard grinned and nodded as each dish was placed before him: “Nice. Nice. That’s nice. Real nice. Oh, very nice.”
The memory of being shot in the gut spoiled Ethan’s appetite. As he picked at his Moroccan salmon and couscous, he delayed bringing up the issue of Rolf Reynerd. “So you said you’ve got one foot on some snot-wad’s neck. What’s the case?”
“Twenty-two-year-old blond cutie strangled, dumped in a sewage-treatment slough. We call it Blonde in the Pond.”
Any cop who works homicides is changed forever by his job. The victims haunt him with the quiet insistence of spirochetes spinning poison in the blood.
Humor is your best and often only defense against the horror. Early in the investigation, every killing is given a droll name, which is thereafter used within the Homicide Division.
Your ranking officer would never ask, Are you making progress on the Ermitrude Pottlesby murder? It would always be, Anything new with Blonde in the Pond?
When Ethan and Hazard worked the brutal murders of two lesbians of Middle Eastern descent, the case had been called Lezzes in Fezzes. Another young woman, tied to a kitchen table, had choked to death on steel-wool pads and Pine-Sol-soaked sponges that her killer had forced into her mouth and down her throat; her case was Scrub Lady.
Outsiders would probably be offended to hear the unofficial case names. Civilians didn’t realize that detectives often dreamed about the dead for whom they sought justice, or that a detective could occasionally become so attached to a victim that the loss felt personal. No disrespect was ever intended by these case names—and sometimes they expressed a strange, melancholy affection.
“Strangled,” Ethan said, referring to Blonde in the Pond. “Which suggests passion, a good chance it was someone romantically involved with her.”
“Ah. So you haven’t gone entirely soft in your expensive leather jackets and your Gucci loafers.”
“I’m wearing Rockports, not loafers. Dumping her in a sewage slough probably means he caught her screwing around, so he considers her filthy, a worthless piece of crap.”
“Plus maybe he had knowledge of the treatment plant, knew an easy way to get the body in there. Is that a cashmere sweater?”
“Cotton. So your perp works at the plant?”
Hazard shook his head. “He’s a member of the city council.”
At once losing his appetite altogether, Ethan put down his fork. “A politician? Why don’t you just find a cliff and jump?”
Shoving a stuffed grape leaf in his maw, Hazard managed to grin while he chewed, without once opening his mouth. After swallowing, he said, “I’ve already got a cliff, and I’m pushing him off.”
“Anybody winds up broken on the rocks, it’ll be you.”
“You’ve just taken the cliff metaphor one step too far,” said Hazard, spooning hummus into a pita wedge.
After a half-century of squeaky-clean public officials and honest administration, California itself had lately become a deep sewage slough not seen since the 1930s and ’40s when Raymond Chandler had written about its dark side. Here in the early years of the new millennium, on a state level and in too many local jurisdictions, corruption had attained a degree of rot seldom seen outside a banana republic, though in this case a banana republic without bananas and with pretensions to glamour.
A significant percentage of the politicians here operated like thugs. If the thugs saw you going after one of their own, they would assume you’d come after them next, and they would use their power to ruin you one way or another.
In another gangster-ridden era, in a crusade against corruption, Eliot Ness had led a force of law-enforcement agents so beyond reach by bribery and so undeterred by bullets that they became known as the Untouchables. In contemporary California, even Ness and his exemplary crew would be destroyed not by bribes or bullets, but by bureaucracy wielded as ruthlessly as an ax and by slander eagerly converted to libel by a feeding-frenzy media with a sentimental affection for the thugs, both the elected and unelected varieties, upon whom they daily reported.
“If you were still doing real work like me,” Hazard said, “you’d handle this no different than I’m handling it.”
“Yeah. But I sure wouldn’t sit there grinning about it.”
Indicating Ethan’s sweater, Hazard said, “Cotton—like Rodeo Drive cotton?”
“Cotton like Macy’s on-sale cotton.”
“How much you pay for a pair of socks these days?”
Ethan said, “Ten thousand dollars.”
He’d been hesitant to bring up the Rolf Reynerd situation. Now he figured he could do nothing better for Hazard than distract him from this suicidal mission to nail a city councilman for murder.
“Take a look at these.” He opened a nine-by-twelve manila envelope, withdrew the contents, and passed them across the table.
As Hazard reviewed what he’d been given, Ethan told him about the five black boxes delivered by Federal Express and the sixth thrown over the gate.
“They came by Federal Express, so you know who sent them.”
“No. The return addresses were fake. They were dropped off at different mom-and-pop mailbox shops that collect for FedEx and UPS. The sender paid cash.”
“How much mail does Channing get a week?”
“Maybe five thousand pieces. But almost all of it is sent to the studio where it’s known he has offices. A publicity firm reviews it and responds. His home address isn’t a secret, but it’s not widely known, either.”
In the envelope were high-resolution computer printouts of six digital photographs taken in Ethan’s study, the first of which showed a small jar standing on a white cloth. Beside the jar lay the lid. Spread across the cloth were what had been the contents of the jar: twenty-two beetles with black-spotted orange shells.
“Ladybugs?” Hazard asked.
“The entomological name is Hippodamia convergens, of the family Coccinellidae. Not that I think it matters, but I looked it up.”
Hazard’s shrewd expression spoke clearly enough without words, but he said, “You’re stumped worse than a quadruple amputee.”
“This guy thinks I’m Batman, he’s the Riddler.”
“Why twenty-two bugs? Is the number significant?”
“I don’t know.”
“They alive when you received them?” Hazard asked.
“All dead. Whether they were alive when he sent them, I don’t know, but they looked like they’d been dead for a while. The shells were intact, but the more delicate bug parts were withered, crumbly.”
In the second photo, a collection of different, spirally coiled, light brown shells were canted at angles in a gray pile of sludge that had been emptied from a black box onto a sheet of waxed paper.
“Ten dead snails,” Ethan said. “Well, actually, two were alive but feeble when I opened the box.”
“That’s a fragrance Chanel won’t be bottling.”
Hazard paused to fork up some seafood tagine.
The third photo was of a small, clear-glass, screwtop jar. The label had been removed, but the lid indicated that the container had once held pickle relish.
Because the photograph wasn’t clear enough to reveal the murky contents of the jar, Ethan said, “Floating in formaldehyde were these ten pieces of translucent tissue with a pale pinkish