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 memoir,” Ethan said. “The guy who wrote it—Donald Gainsworth—spent thirty years training guide dogs for the blind and service dogs for people confined to wheelchairs.”
“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. [75] 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.”
[76] “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.&rdquo............