The Door To December

'Thank you.'

When the physician had gone, leaving Laura and Haldane alone in the silent, antiseptic-scented corridor, the detective said, 'It's a big job.'

'I can handle it.'

'I'm sure you can.'

'She'll get well.'

'I hope she does.'

At the nurses' station, at the end of the hall, a muffled phone rang twice.

Haldane said, 'I've sent for a uniformed officer. Just in case Melanie witnessed the murders, in case someone might be looking for her, I thought it was a good idea to post a guard. Until tomorrow afternoon, anyway.'

'Thank you, Lieutenant.'

'You aren't staying here, are you?'

'Yes. Of course. Where else?'

'Not long, I hope.'

'A few hours.'

'You need your rest, Doctor McCaffrey.'

'Melanie needs me more. I couldn't sleep anyway.'

He said, 'But if she's coming home tomorrow, won't you have to get things ready for her?'

Laura blinked. 'Oh. I hadn't thought about that. I'll have to prepare a bedroom. She can't sleep in a crib any longer.'

'Better go home,' he said gently.

'In a little while,' she agreed. 'But not to sleep. I can't sleep. I'll leave her alone here just long enough to get the house ready for her homecoming.'

'I hate to bring it up, but I'd like to get blood samples from you and Melanie.'

The request puzzled her. 'Why?'

He hesitated. 'Well, with samples of your blood, your husband's, and the girl's, we can pretty much pin down for sure whether she's your daughter.'

'No need for that.'

'It's the easiest way—'

'I said, there's no need for that,' she told him irritably. 'She's Melanie. She's my little girl. I know it.'

'I know how you feel,' he said sympathetically. 'I understand. I'm sure she is your daughter. But since you haven't seen her in six years, six years in which she's changed a great deal, and since she can't speak for herself, we're going to need some proof, not just your instincts, or the juvenile court is going to put her in the state's custody. You don't want that, do you?'

'My God, no.'

'Doctor Pantangello tells me they've already got a sample of the girl's blood. It'll take only a minute to draw a few cc's of yours.'

'All right. But… where?'

'There's an examination room next to the nurses' station.' Laura looked apprehensively at the closed door to Melanie's room. 'Can we wait until the guard comes?'

'Of course.' He leaned against the wall. Laura just stood there, staring at the door. The glass-smooth silence became unbearable. To break it, she said' 'I was right, wasn't I?'

'About what?'

'Earlier, I said maybe the nightmare wouldn't be over when we found Melanie, that maybe it would be just beginning.'

'Yeah. You were right. But at least it is a beginning.'

She knew what he meant: They might have found Melanie's body with the other three — battered, dead. This was better. Frightening, perplexing, depressing, but definitely better.

7

Dan Haldane sat at the desk that he was using while on temporary assignment to the East Valley Division. The ancient wooden surface was scalloped by cigarette bums around the edge, scarred and gouged and marked by scores of overlapping dark rings from dripping mugs of coffee. The accommodation didn't bother him. He liked his job, and he could do it in a tent if he had to.

In the hour before dawn, the East Valley Division was as quiet as a police station ever got. Most potential victims were not yet awake, and even the criminals had to sleep sometime. A skeleton crew manned the station until the day crew arrived. In these last musty minutes of the graveyard shift, the place still possessed the haunted feeling common to all offices at night. The only sounds were the lonely clatter of a typewriter in a room down the hall from the bull pen, and the knock of the janitor's broom as it banged against the legs of the empty desks. Somewhere a telephone rang; even in the hour before dawn, someone was in trouble.

Dan zipped open his worn briefcase and spread the contents on the desk. Polaroid photographs of the three bodies that had been found in the Studio City house. A random sampling of the papers that had littered the floor in Dylan McCaffrey's office. Statements from the neighbors. Preliminary handwritten reports from the coroner's men and the Scientific Investigation Division (SID). And lists.

Dan believed in lists. He had lists for the contents of drawers, cupboards, and closets in the murder house, a list of the titles of the books on the living-room shelves, and a list of telephone numbers taken from a notepad by the phone in McCaffrey's office. He also had names — every name that appeared on any scrap of paper anywhere in that Studio City residence. Until the case was wrapped up, he would carry the lists with him, take them out and reread them whenever he had a spare moment — over lunch, when he was on the john, in bed just before switching off the light — prodding his subconscious, with the hope of attaining an important insight or turning up a vital cross-reference.

Stanley Holbein, an old friend and former partner from Robbery-Homicide, had once embarrassed Dan at an R&H Christmas party by telling a long and highly amusing (and apocryphal) story about having seen some of Dan's most private lists, including the ones on which he had kept track of every meal eaten and every bowel movement since the age of nine. Dan, who stood listening, amused but red-faced, with his hands deep in his jacket pockets, had finally pretended to want to strangle Stanley. But when he had withdrawn his hands from his pockets to lunge at his friend, he'd accidentally pulled out half a dozen lists that fluttered to the floor, eliciting gales of laughter from everyone present and necessitating a hasty retreat into another room.

Now he gave his latest set of lists a quick scan, with the vague hope that something would jump out at him, like a pop-up figure in a children's book. Nothing popped. He began again, reading through the lists more slowly.

The book titles were unfamiliar. The collection was a peculiar mix of psychology, medicine, physical science, and the occult. Why would a doctor, a man of science, be interested in clairvoyance, psychic powers, and other paranormal phenomena?

He looked over the list of names. He didn't recognize any. As his stomach grew increasingly acidic, he kept returning to the photos of the bodies. In fourteen years with the LAPD and four years in the army before that, he had seen more than a few dead men. But these were unlike any in his experience. He had seen men who had stepped on land mines yet had been in better shape than these.

The killers — surely there had been more than one — had possessed incredible strength or inhuman rage, or both. The victims had been struck repeatedly after they were already dead, hammered into jelly. What sort of man could kill with such unrestrained viciousness and cruelty? What maniacal hatred could have driven them to this?

Before he could really concentrate on those questions, he was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. Ross Mondale stopped at Dan's desk. The division captain was a stocky man, five-eight, with a powerful upper body. As usual, everything about him was brown: brown hair; thick brown eyebrows; brown, watchful, narrow eyes; a chocolate-brown suit, beige shirt, dark-brown tie, brown shoes. He was wearing a heavy ring with a bright ruby, which was the only spark of color that he allowed.

The janitor had gone. They were the only two in the big room.

'You still here?' Mondale asked.

'No. This is a clever, cardboard facade. The real me is in the john, shooting heroin.'

Mondale didn't smile. 'I thought you'd be gone back to Central by now.'

'I've become attached to the East Valley. The smog's got a special savory scent to it out here.'