The Door To December

Still holding her daughter in her lap, Laura said, 'You are all the way down now, deep asleep. But you hear me and you will answer me when I ask you questions.'

The girl's mouth was slack, lips parted slightly.

'Can you hear me, Melanie?'

The girl said nothing.

'Melanie, can you hear me?'

The girl sighed, a sound as soft as the light from the amber-shaded brass lamps.

'Uh…'

It was the first sound that she had made since Laura had seen her in the hospital last night.

'What is your name?'

The child's brow furrowed. 'Muh…'

The calico cat raised its head.

'Melanie? Is that your name? Melanie?'

'Muh… muh.'

Pepper's ears pricked up.

Laura decided to move to another question. 'Do you know who I am, Melanie?'

Still sleeping, the child licked her lips. 'Muh… muh… it… ah… it…' She twitched and began to raise one hand as if fending something off.

'Easy,' Laura said. 'Relax. Be calm. Relax and be calm and sleep. You're safe. You're safe with me.'

The girl lowered her hand. She sighed.

When the lines in the girl's face smoothed out somewhat, Laura repeated the question. 'Do you know who I am?' Melanie made a wordless murmuring-whimpering sound. 'Do you know who I am, Melanie?'

Lines of worry or fear returned to the child's face, and she said, 'Umm… uh… uh-uh-uh… it… it…'

Taking a different tack, Laura said, 'What are you afraid of, Melanie?'

'It… it… there…' Fear was in her voice now as well as carved into the pale flesh of her face.

'What do you see?' Laura asked. 'What are you afraid of, honey? What do you see?'

"The… there… the…'

Pepper cocked her head and arched her back. The cat had become tense, watching the girl intently.

The air was unnaturally still and heavy.

Although it wasn't possible, the shadows in the corners of the room seemed darker and larger now than they had been a moment ago.

'It… there… no, no, no, no.'

Laura put one hand on her daughter's creased brow, reassuring her, and waited expectantly as the girl strove to speak. A strange, disconcerting feeling came over her, and she felt a chill creeping like a living thing up the length of her spine.

'Where are you, Melanie?'

'No…'

'Are you in the gray room?'

The girl was audibly grinding her teeth, squeezing her eyes shut, fisting her hands, as though resisting something very strong. Laura had been planning to regress her, take her back in time to the gray room in that Studio City house, but it seemed as though the girl had drifted back there without encouragement, as soon as she'd been hypnotized. But that didn't make sense: Laura had never heard of spontaneous hypnotic regression. The patient had to be guided, encouraged backward to the scene of the trauma.

'Where are you, Melanie?'

'N-n-no… the… no!'

'Easy. Be still. What are you afraid of?'

'Please… no…'

'Be calm, honey. What do you see? Tell me, baby. Tell Mommy what you see. The tank, the deprivation chamber? No one's going to make you go back in there, honey.'

But that wasn't what frightened the girl. Laura's reassurances didn't calm her. 'The… the…'

'The aversion-therapy chair? The electric chair? You'll never be put in that again, either.'

Something else terrified the child. She shuddered and began to strain against Laura, as if she wanted to get away, run.

'Honey, you're safe with me,' Laura said, holding her tighter than before. 'It can't hurt you.'

'Opening… it's opening… no… it… coming open…' 'Easy,' Laura said. As the chill climbed all the way up her back and reached the nape of her neck, she sensed that something of terrible importance was about to happen.

15

Behind his back, Lieutenant Felix Porteau of the Scientific Investigation Division was called 'Poirot,' after Agatha Christie's pompous Belgian detective. It was clear to Dan that Porteau preferred to think of himself as Sherlock Holmes, in spite of his stocky legs, potbelly, slumped shoulders, Santa Claus face, and high-domed bald head. To bolster his desired image, Porteau was seldom without a curved-stem pipe in which he smoked an aromatic blend of shag tobacco.

The pipe was not lit when Dan entered Porteau's office, but the SID man snatched it up from an ashtray and used it to point toward a chair. 'Sit down, Daniel, sit down. I've been expecting you, of course. I imagine you're here to inquire after my findings in the Studio City affair.'

'Amazingly perceptive, Felix.'

Porteau rocked back in his chair. 'A singular case, this one. Naturally, it will be several days before the full results are in from my laboratory.' It was always my laboratory with Felix, as if he wasn't in charge of a big-city police department's forensics unit but was, instead, conducting experiments in one room of his private quarters above Baker Street.

'However, I could, if you wish, share some of the preliminary findings.'

'That would be gracious of you.'

Porteau bit on the mouthpiece of the pipe, gave Dan a sly look, and smiled. 'You mock me, Daniel.'

'Never.'

'Yes. You mock everyone.'

'You make me sound like a wiseass.'

'You are.'

'Thanks so much.'

'But a nice, witty, intelligent, charming wiseass — and that makes all the difference.'

'Now you make me sound like Cary Grant.'

'Isn't that how you see yourself?'

Dan thought about it. 'Well, maybe half Cary Grant and, right now, half Wile E. Coyote.'

'Who?'

'The coyote in the road-runner cartoons.'

'Ah. And how so?'

'I get the feeling a giant boulder just rolled off the edge of a cliff above me, and it's falling toward me right now, going to smash me flat at any second.'

'The rock is this case?'

'Yeah. Any latent prints that're going to help us?'

Porteau opened a desk drawer and withdrew a pouch of tobacco. He began to prepare his pipe. 'Lots of prints belonging to the three victims. All over the house. Others belonging to the little girl — although those were in the converted garage.'

'The lab.'

'The gray room, as one of my men called it.'

'Then she was always kept in that room?'

'That's certainly the most logical deduction, yes. We do have a few partials from the hall bathroom that conceivably could be hers, but none anywhere else in the house.'

'And nothing else? No prints at all that might've belonged to the killers?'

'Oh, certainly, we found numerous other prints, mostly partials. We're putting them through the new high-speed computerized comparison program, trying to match them with prints of known criminals on file, but we've had no luck so far. Not likely to have any, either.' He paused, having tamped the tobacco into the generous bowl of his pipe, and searched his pockets for a match. 'In your experience, Daniel, how many times has a murderer left clear, unsmudged, and easily identifiable fingerprints at the scene of his crime?'

'Twice,' Dan said. 'In fourteen years. So we'll get no help from prints. What have we got?'

Porteau got his pipe fired up, exhaled sweetish smoke, and shook out the match. 'No weapon was found—'

'One of the victims had a fireplace poker.'

Porteau nodded. 'Mr. Cooper intended to defend himself with it, apparently. But it was never used to strike anyone. The only blood on it was Cooper's own, and only a few drops of that, all part of the natural spray pattern that spotted the walls and the floor around the body.'

'So Cooper didn't manage to land any blows on his assailant, and he wasn't hit with the poker himself.'

'Precisely.'

'Did the vacuum crew come up with anything besides dirt?'

'The results are being analyzed. Frankly, I'm not optimistic.'