“No bugs or foreskins pressed between the pages?”
“Nope. And I checked every page for underlining, but nothing was highlighted.”
“It’s out of character with the rest. An innocuous little book, even sweet.”
“Box number six was thrown over the gate a little after three-thirty this morning.”
Hazard studied the last two photos. First, the sutured apple. Then the eye inside. “Is the peeper real?”
“He pried it out of a doll.”
“Nevertheless, this one disturbs me most of all.”
“Me too. Why you?”
“The apple’s the most crafted of the six. It took a lot of care, so it’s probably the one he finds most meaningful.”
“So far it doesn’t mean much to me,” Ethan lamented.
Stapled to the last photograph was a Xerox of the typewritten message that had been folded in the seed pocket, under the eye. After reading it twice, Hazard said, “He didn’t send anything like this with the first five packages?”
“No.”
“Then this is probably the last thing he’s sending. He’s said everything he wants to say, in symbols and now in words. Now he moves from threats to action.”
“I think you’re right. But the words are as much of a riddle as the symbols, the objects.”
With silvery insistence, headlights cleaved the afternoon gloom. Radiant wings of water flew up from the puddled pavement, obscuring the tires and lending an aura of supernatural mission to the vehicles that plied the currents of Pico Boulevard.
After a brooding silence, Hazard said, “An apple might symbolize dangerous or forbidden knowledge. The original sin he mentions.”
Ethan tried his salmon and couscous again. He might as well have been eating paste. He put down his fork.
“The seeds of knowledge have been replaced by the eye,” Hazard said, almost more to himself than to Ethan.
A flock of pedestrians hurried past the restaurant windows, bent forward as if resisting a wind greater than the one that the December day exhaled, under the inadequate protection of black umbrellas, like mourners quickening to a grave.
“Maybe he’s saying, ‘I see your secrets, the source— the seeds—of your evil.’”
“I had a similar thought. But it doesn’t feel entirely right, and it doesn’t lead me anywhere useful.”
“Whatever he means by it,” Hazard said, “it bothers me that you have this eye in the apple come just after this book about a guy who raised guide dogs for the blind.”
“If he’s threatening to blind Manheim, that’s bad enough,” said Ethan, “but I think he intends worse.”
After shuffling through the photos once more, Hazard returned them to Ethan and again addressed the seafood tagine with gusto. “I assume you’ve got your man well covered.”
“He’s filming in Florida. Five bodyguards travel with him.”
“You don’t?”
“Not usually. I oversee all security operations from Bel Air. I talk to the head road warrior at least once a day.”
“Road warrior?”
“That’s Manheim’s little joke. It’s what he calls the bodyguards who travel with him.”
“That’s a joke? I fart funnier than he talks.”
“I never claimed he was the king of comedy.”
“When somebody tossed the sixth box over the gate last night,” Hazard asked, “who was the somebody? Any security tape?”
“Plenty. Including a clear shot of his license plate.”
Ethan told him about Rolf Reynerd—though he didn’t mention his encounters with the man, neither the one that he knew to be real nor the one that he seemed to have dreamed.
“And what do you want from me?” Hazard asked.
“Maybe you could check him out.”
“Check him out? How far? You want me to hold his privates while he turns his head and coughs?”
“Maybe not that far.”
“You want I should look for polyps in his lower colon?”
“I already know he doesn’t have any criminal priors—”
“So I’m not the first one you’re calling in a favor from.”
Ethan shrugged. “You know me, I’m a user. No one’s safe. It’d be useful to know, does Reynerd have any legally registered firearms.”
“You been talking to Laura Moonves over in Support Division?”
“She was helpful,” Ethan admitted.
“You should marry her.”
“She didn’t give me that much on Reynerd.”
“Even all us morons can see you and her would be as right as bread and butter.”
“We haven’t even dated in eighteen months,” Ethan said.
“That’s because you’re not as smart as us morons. You’re just an idiot. So don’t jive me. Moonves could get firearm registrations for you. That’s not what you want from me.”
While Hazard concentrated on lunch, Ethan gazed into the false twilight of the storm.
After two winters of below-average rainfall, the climatological experts had warned that California was in for a long and disastrous dry spell. As usual, the ensuing dire stories of drought, flooding the media, had proved to be sure predictors of a drowning deluge.
The pregnant belly of the sky hung low and gray and fat, and water broke to announce the birth of still more water.
“I guess what I want from you,” Ethan said at last, “is to take a look at the guy up close and tell me what you think of him.”
As perceptive as ever, Hazard said, “You’ve already knocked on his door, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Pretended I’d come to see who lived there before him.”
“He creeped you out. Something way different about him.”
“You’ll see it or you won’t,” Ethan said evasively.
“I’m a homicide cop. He’s not a suspect in any killing. How do I justify this?”
“I’m not asking for an official visit.”
“If I don’t wave a badge, I won’t get past the doorstep, not as mean as I look.”
“If you can’t, you can’t. That’s okay.”
When the waitress arrived to ask if they wanted anything more, Hazard said, “I love those walnut mamouls. Give me six dozen to go.”
“I like a man with a big appetite,” she said coyly.
“You, young lady, I could gobble up in one bite,” Hazard said, eliciting from her a flush of erotic interest and a nervous laugh.
When the waitress went away, Ethan said, “Six dozen?”
“I like cookies. So where does this Reynerd live?”
Earlier, Ethan had written the address on a slip of paper. He passed it across the table. “If you go, don’t