The Door To December Part 14

Now, Dan fidgeted. 'Well, I told you last week that I probably couldn't make it. I asked you to give the tickets to someone else.'

'You didn't go?' Luther asked, disappointed.

'No time.'

'Danny, Danny, you've got to make time for these things. There's a battle raging that'll shape our lives, a battle between those who love freedom and those who don't, a quiet war between freedom-loving libertarians and freedom-hating fascists and leftists.'

Dan hadn't voted - or even registered to vote - in twelve years. He didn't much care which party or ideological faction was in power. It wasn't that he thought Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, were all screwups; they probably were, but he didn't really care, and that wasn't the reason for his stubborn political indifference. He figured society would muddle through regardless of who was in charge, and he had no time to listen to boring political arguments.

His main interest, his consuming interest, was murder, which was why he had no time for politics. Murder and murderers. Some people were capable of the most unthinkable brutality, and he was fascinated with them. Not those killers who were obviously lunatics. Not those who killed in mindless fits of rage or pa.s.sion after being subjected to understandable provocation. But the others. Some husbands could kill their wives without remorse, merely because they had grown tired of them. Some mothers could kill their children, just because they no longer wanted the responsibility of raising them, and they were without grief or even a sense of guilt. h.e.l.l, some people out there could kill anybody at all for any reason, even for trivial reasons like being cut off in traffic; they were amoral sociopaths, and Dan was never bored with them or with their aberrant psychology. He wanted to understand them. Were they mentally ill - or throwbacks? Were only certain people capable of cold-blooded murder when there was no element of self-defense involved, or were these killers a special breed? If they were special, wolves in a society of sheep, he wanted to know what made them different. What was missing in them? Why were compa.s.sion and empathy unknown to them?

He didn't entirely understand his intellectual fascination with murder. He did not have a particularly ruminative or philosophical bent - or at least he didn't think of himself in those terms. Perhaps, working day after day in a world of violence and blood and death, it was impossible not to grow philosophical with the pa.s.sage of years. Maybe most other homicide cops spent a lot of time contemplating the dark side of human potential; maybe he wasn't the only one; he had no way of knowing; it wasn't the kind of thing most cops talked about.

In his case, of course, perhaps his need to understand murder and the murderer's mind was related to the fact that both his brother and sister had been murdered. Maybe.

Now, smelling strongly of alcohol and vaguely of other chemicals used in the pathology lab, smiling up at Dan, Luther Williams said, 'Listen, Danny, next week there's a really terrific debate between-'

Dan interrupted him. 'Luther, I'm sorry, but I don't have time to chat. I need some information, and I need it right away.'

'What's the big hurry?'

'I gotta pee.'

'Look, Danny, I know politics bores you-'

'No, really, it isn't that,' Dan said with a straight face. 'I actually gotta pee.'

Luther sighed. 'Someday the totalitarians will take over, and they'll pa.s.s laws so you can't can't pee unless you have permission from the Official Federal Urinary Gatekeeper.' pee unless you have permission from the Official Federal Urinary Gatekeeper.'

'Ouch.'

'Then you'll come to me with your bladder bursting, and you'll say, "Luther, my G.o.d, why didn't you warn me about these people?"'

'No, no. I promise to crawl away somewhere, all by myself, and let my bladder burst in silence. I promise - swear swear - not to bother you. - not to bother you.

'Yeah, because you'd rather let your bladder burst than have to hear me say I told you so.'

Luther was sitting at the lab table on a wheeled stool. Dan pulled up another stool and sat down in front of him. 'Okay. Hit me with the dazzling scientific insights, Doctor Williams. You have three special customers from last night. McCaffrey, Hoffritz, and Cooper.'

'They're scheduled for autopsy this evening.'

'They haven't been done already?'

'We have a backlog here, Danny. They kill 'em faster than we can cut 'em open.'

'Sounds like a violation of free-market principles,' Dan said.

'Huh?'

'You've got a lot more supply than you have demand.'

'Isn't that the truth? Would you like to go into the cooler, see the tables where we have all the stiffs stacked on top of one another?'

'No thanks, but it sounds like a charming excursion.'

'Pretty soon, we'll have to start piling them in the closets with bags of ice.'

'You at least seen seen the three I'm interested in?' the three I'm interested in?'

'Oh, yeah.'

'Can you tell me anything about them?'

'They're dead.'

'As soon as the totalitarians take over, they're going to do away with all smarta.s.s black pathologists, first thing.'

'Hey, that's what I'm telling telling you,' Luther said. you,' Luther said.

'You've examined the wounds on those three?'

His dark face darkening even further, the pathologist said, 'Never seen anything like it. Each corpse is a ma.s.s of overlapping contusions, scores of them, maybe hundreds. Such a mess. Jesus. Yet no two of those blows have the same configuration. Dozens of points of fracture too, but there's no pattern to the bone injuries. The autopsy will tell us for sure, but based on just a preliminary examination, I'd say the bones sometimes look snapped, sometimes splintered, sometimes ... crushed. Now, there's no d.a.m.n way a blunt instrument, used as a club, can pulverize pulverize bone. A blow will crack or splinter bone, but that's strictly impact. Impact doesn't crush - unless it's tremendous impact, like you get when a car rams a pedestrian and pins him against a brick wall. Generally, you can only crush bone by applying pressure, by bone. A blow will crack or splinter bone, but that's strictly impact. Impact doesn't crush - unless it's tremendous impact, like you get when a car rams a pedestrian and pins him against a brick wall. Generally, you can only crush bone by applying pressure, by squeezing squeezing, and I'm talking a lot lot of pressure. of pressure.

'So, what were they hit with?'

'You don't get me. See, when somebody's bashed as hard and as many times as these guys were, you'll find a pattern of the striking face - rough, smooth, sharp, rounded, whatever. And you'll be able to say, "This fella was wasted with a hammer that had a round striking surface, one inch in diameter, with a gently beveled edge." Or maybe it's a crowbar, the dull end of a hatchet, a bookend, or a salami. But once you've examined the wounds, you'll usually be able to put a name to the instrument. But not this time. But not this time. Every contusion has a different shape. Every injury appears to've been made by a different instrument.' Every contusion has a different shape. Every injury appears to've been made by a different instrument.'

Pulling on his left earlobe, Dan said, 'I suppose we can rule out the possibility that the killer walked into that house with a suitcase full of blunt instruments just because he likes variety. I don't see the victims standing still while he traded the hammer for a shovel and the shovel for a lug wrench.'

'I'd think that was a safe a.s.sumption. The thing is.. . I didn't notice one one wound that looked exactly like a hammer blow or like the mark from a crowbar or a lug wrench. Each contusion was not only different from other contusions, but each was unique, oddly shaped. wound that looked exactly like a hammer blow or like the mark from a crowbar or a lug wrench. Each contusion was not only different from other contusions, but each was unique, oddly shaped.

'Any ideas at all?'

'Well, if this were an old Fu Manchu novel, I'd say we have a villain who's invented a fiendish new weapon, a compressed-air machine that has more force than Arnold Schwarzenegger wielding a sledgehammer.'

'Colorful theory. But not too d.a.m.ned likely.'

'You ever read Sax Rohmer, those old Fu Manchu books?' h.e.l.l, they were full of exotic weapons, far-out methods of murder.'

'This is real life.'

'That's what they say.'

'Real life isn't a Fu Manchu novel.'

Luther shrugged. 'I'm not so sure. You been watching the news lately?'

'I need something better than that, Luther. I need a whole lot of help with this one.'

They stared at each other.

Then, without a trace of humor this time, Luther said, 'But that is what it looks like, Danny. Like they were beaten to death with a hammer of air.'

18.

After Laura encouraged Melanie to come out from beneath the desk, she brought the girl up from the hypnotic state. Well, not up exactly: The child didn't rise to full consciousness. Rather, she moved out of the hypnotic trance and more or less sideways, returning to the semicatatonic state in which she'd been since the police had found her.

Laura had nurtured a small hope that termination of the hypnotic trance would snap the girl out of her catatonia as well. Briefly the child's eyes did did fix on Laura's, and she put one hand against Laura's cheek as if disbelieving her mother's presence. fix on Laura's, and she put one hand against Laura's cheek as if disbelieving her mother's presence.

'Stay with me, baby. Don't slip away. Stay with me.'

But the girl slipped away nevertheless. The moment of contact was poignant but brief, achingly brief.

The therapy session had taken its toll from Melanie. Her face was slack with exhaustion, and her eyes were bloodshot. Laura put Melanie to bed for a nap, and the girl was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

When Laura went out to the living room, she discovered that Earl Benton had left his chair and had taken off his suit jacket. He had also drawn the revolver from his shoulder holster and was holding it in his right hand, down at his side, not as if he would use it that very minute, but as if he thought he might have a need for it soon. He was standing at a French window, staring outside, a worried look on his broad face.

'Earl?' she said uncertainly.

He glanced at her. 'Where's Melanie?'

'Napping.'

He returned his attention to the street in front of the house. 'Better go sit with her.'

Her breath caught in her throat. She swallowed hard. 'What's wrong?'

'Maybe nothing. Half an hour ago, a telephone-company van pulled up across the street, parked there. n.o.body got out.'

She stepped beside him at the window.

A gray-and-blue van with white-and-blue lettering was across from the house, slightly uphill, parked half in sunlight and half in the shade of a jacaranda. It looked like all the other phone-company vans she had ever seen: nothing special about it, nothing sinister.

'Why's it look suspicious to you?' she asked.

'Like I said, so far as I could see, n.o.body got out.

'Maybe the repairman's just taking a nap on company time.'

'Not likely. Phone company's too well managed to let that sort of thing go on a lot. Besides, it just ... smells. I get a feeling about it. I've seen this sort of thing before, and what it means to me is that we're under surveillance.'

'Surveillance? Who?'

'Hard to say. But phone-company vans ... well, the feds often work that way.'

'Federal agents?'

'Yeah.'

Astonished, she shifted her attention from the van to Earl's profile. He didn't seem to share her surprise. 'You mean, like FBI?'

'Maybe. Or the Treasury Department - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Maybe even a security arm of the Defense Department. There're all different kinds of feds.'

'But why would federal agents have us under surveillance? We're the victims - the potential victims, anyway - not criminals.'

'I didn't say it was for sure the feds. I just said they often work this way.'

Staring at Earl while he stared at the van, Laura realized that he had changed. He was no longer the aw-shucks guy with a veneer of West L.A. polish. He looked harder, older than his twenty-six years, and his manner was more brisk and professional than before.

Confused, Laura said, 'Well, if it's government men, we don't have anything to worry about.'

'Don't we?'

'They aren't the ones trying to kill Melanie.'

'Aren't they?'

Startled, she said, 'Well, of course they aren't. It wasn't the government that killed my husband and the other two.'

'How do you know that?' he asked, his eyes still riveted on the telephone-company van.

'Oh, for heaven's sake-'

'Your husband and one of the men killed with him ... they they used to work at UCLA.' used to work at UCLA.'

'So?'

'They received grants. For research.'

'Yes, of course, but-'

'Some of those grants, maybe even most of them, came from the government, didn't they?'

Laura didn't bother to reply, because Earl obviously knew the answer already.

'Defense Department grants,' he said.

She nodded. 'And others.'

He said, 'The Defense Department would be interested in behavior modification. Mind control. The best way to deal with an enemy is to control his mind, make him your friend, without him ever realizing that he's been manipulated. A real breakthrough in that field could put an end to war as we know it. But, h.e.l.l, as far as that goes, pretty much any any d.a.m.n government agency would be interested in mind control. d.a.m.n government agency would be interested in mind control.