The Door To December Part 26

'It'll get them all,' Melanie said, her voice heavy with dread.

Earl had looked up from the smoldering sc.r.a.ps of the radio and was watching intently.

'What?' Laura asked. 'What will get them, honey?'

'And then it'll ... get ... me,' the girl said.

'No,' Laura said quickly. 'Nothing's going to get you. I'll take care of you. I'll-'

'It'll ... come up from ... inside.'

'Inside where?'

'... from inside ...'

'What is it, honey? What're you afraid of. What is it?'

'... it'll ... come ... and eat me ...'

'No.'

'... eat me ... all up,' the girl said, and she shuddered. 'No, Melanie. Don't worry about ...' She let her voice trail away because she saw that the girl's eyes had shifted subtly. They were not entirely out of focus, but neither were they fixed on Laura anymore.

The child sighed and her breathing changed. She had gone back into that private place where she had been hiding ever since they'd found her wandering naked in the street.

Earl said, 'Doc, can you make anything of this?'

'No.'

'Because I can't figure it at all.'

'Me neither.'

Earlier, cooking dinner, she had begun to feel better about Melanie and the future. She'd begun to feel almost normal. But their situation had changed for the worse, and now her nerves were frayed again.

In this city, there were people who wanted to kidnap Melanie in order to continue experimenting with her. Laura didn't know what they hoped to achieve or why they had picked on Melanie, but she was certain they were out there. Even the FBI seemed sure of that. Other people wanted the girl dead. The discovery of Ned Rink's body seemed to prove that Melanie's life was indisputably in danger. But now it appeared that those faceless people were not the only ones who wanted to get their hands on Melanie. Now there was another enemy as well. That was the essence of the warning that had come to them through the radio.

But who or what had been controlling the radio? And how? Who or what had sent the warning? And why? More important, who was this new enemy?

'It,' the radio had said, and the implication had been that this enemy was more frightening and more dangerous than all the others combined. It It was loose, the radio had said. It was coming. They had to run, the radio said. They had to hide. From It. was loose, the radio had said. It was coming. They had to run, the radio said. They had to hide. From It.

'Mommy? Mom?'

'Right here, honey.'

'Mommmeeee!'

'Right here. It's okay. I'm right here.'

'I'm ... I'm ... I'm ... scared.'

Melanie was not speaking to Laura or Earl. She seemed not to have heard Laura's rea.s.surance. She was talking only to herself, in a tone of voice that was the essence of loneliness, the voice of the lost and abandoned. 'So scared. Scared.

PART THREE.

THE HUNTED.

WEDNESDAY, 8:00 P.M.- THURSDAY, 6:00 A.M.

22.

Still sitting at Joseph Scaldone's desk in the office-storeroom behind the shop on Ventura Boulevard, Dan Haldane looked through the diskette storage wheel that stood beside the IBM computer. He read the labels on the floppy disks and saw that most held nothing of interest for him; however, one of them was marked CUSTOMER MAILING LIST, and that one seemed worth examining.

He switched on the computer, studied the menu of options, loaded the proper software, and brought up the mailing list. It appeared in white letters on a blue screen, divided into twenty-six doc.u.ments, one for each letter of the alphabet.

He summoned the M doc.u.ment and scrolled slowly through it, searching for Dylan McCaffrey. He found the name and address of the house in Studio City.

He called up the H doc.u.ment and located w.i.l.l.y Hoffritz. In the C file, he found Ernest Andrew Cooper, the millionaire businessman whose mangled body had been in that Studio City house last night, with McCaffrey and Hoffritz. Dan called up the R file. Ned Rink was there.

He had discovered a cord that tied all four victims together: an interest in the occult and, more specifically, patronage of the late Joseph Scaldone's bizarre little shop. He checked under U. There was an address in Ojai and a telephone number for Albert Uhlander, the author of those quirky volumes about the occult, which someone had attempted to remove from Ned Rink's house and which now were safely stored in the trunk of the department sedan that Dan was using.

Who else?

He pondered that question, then called up the S file and searched for Regine Savannah. She was the young woman who had been under Hoffritz's total control and whose beating had resulted in the psychologist's removal from the UCLA faculty four years ago. She wasn't one of Scaldone's customers.

The G file. Just in case. But he could find no listing for Irmatrude Gelkenshettle.

He hadn't actually expected to find her there. He was slightly ashamed of himself for even checking on it. But it was the nature of a homicide detective to trust no one.

Calling up the O file, he searched for Mary Katherine O'Hara of Burbank, the secretary of Freedom Now, the organization which Cooper and Hoffritz served as president and treasurer, respectively.

Apparently, Mary O'Hara didn't share her fellow officers' enthusiasm for occult literature and paraphernalia.

Dan couldn't think of any more names to look for, but there would most likely be others of interest when he read through the entire mailing list. He ordered a printout.

The laser printer produced the first page in seconds. Dan s.n.a.t.c.hed the sheet of paper from the tray and read it while the machine continued to print. There were twenty names and addresses, two columns of ten each. He didn't recognize anybody in that first section of the list.

He picked up the second page, and toward the bottom of the second column, he saw a name that was not merely familiar but startling. Palmer Boothe.

Owner of the Los Angeles Journal Los Angeles Journal, heir to a huge fortune, but also one of the shrewdest businessmen in the country, Palmer Boothe had vastly increased the wealth that he had inherited. He kept his hands in not only the newspaper and magazine business but also in real estate, banking, motionpicture production, transportation, a variety of high-technology industries, broadcasting, agriculture, thoroughbred horse breeding, and probably anything else that made money. He was widely and well regarded, a political power broker, a philanthropist who annually earned the grat.i.tude of a score of charities, a man known for his hardheaded pragmatism.

Yeah? How did hardheaded pragmatism coexist with a belief in the occult? Why would a canny businessman, with an appreciation for the no-nonsense rules and methods and laws of capitalism, patronize a strange place like the Sign of the Pentagram?

Curious.

Of course there was virtually no chance whatsoever that Palmer Boothe was involved with men like McCaffrey, Hoffritz, and Rink. The appearance of his name on Scaldone's mailing list did not link him to the McCaffrey case. Not everyone who bought from the Sign of the Pentagram was involved in that conspiracy.

Nevertheless, Dan opened Scaldone's personal address book - the item that had precipitated the confrontation with Mondale - and paged to the B listings, to see if Palmer Boothe was more than merely one of Scaldone's customers. The businessman's name wasn't there. Which probably meant that his sole contact with Joseph Scaldone was as an occasional purchaser of occult books and other items.

Dan reached to an inside coat pocket and withdrew Dylan McCaffrey's address book. Boothe's name wasn't in that one, either.

Dead end.

He had known that it would be.

As an afterthought, he checked McCaffrey's book for Albert Uhlander. The author was there: the same address and phone number in Ojai.

He looked in Scaldone's book again. Uhlander was also listed there. The writer was evidently more than just another customer of the Sign of the Pentagram. He was an integral part of whatever project McCaffrey and Hoffritz had been engaged upon.

They sure had a jolly little group. Dan wondered what they did when they got together. Compare favorite brands of bat s.h.i.t? Whip up tasty dishes featuring snake eyes? Discuss megalomaniacal schemes to brainwash everyone and rule the world?

Torture little girls?

The printer spewed out the fifteenth and final page long before Dan finished scanning the first fourteen. He collected them, stapled them together, folded the sheets, and put them in his pocket. Nearly three hundred names appeared on the mailing list, and he wanted to go over them later, when he was alone at home, with a beer, and could concentrate better.

He located an empty stationery box and filled it with Dylan McCaffrey's address book, Scaldone's smaller address book, and several other items. He carried the box out of the office, through the store, where the coroner's men were bagging Joseph Scaldone's hideously battered corpse, and he went outside.

The crowd of curiosity seekers had grown smaller, maybe because the night was colder. A few reporters still lingered in the vicinity of the occult shop, standing with shoulders drawn up, hands in their pockets, shivering. A heat-leeching wind alternately hissed and howled along Ventura Boulevard, sucking the warmth out of the city and everyone in it. The air was heavy, moist. The rains would return before morning.

Nolan Swayze, the youngest of the uniformed officers on duty in front of the Sign of the Pentagram, accepted the box when Dan handed it to him.

'Nolan, I want you to take this back to East Valley and give it to clerical. There're two address books among this stuff. I want the contents of both books transcribed, and all the detectives on the special task force should have a copy of the transcriptions in their information packets by tomorrow morning.'

'Can do,' Swayze said.

'There's also a diskette. I want the contents printed out with copies to everyone. There's an appointments calendar in there too.'

'Copies to everyone?'

'You catch on fast.'

Swayze nodded. 'I intend to be chief someday.'

'Good for you.'

'Make my mother proud.'

'If that's your goal, it's probably wiser to stay a patrolman. There's also a sheaf of invoices here-'

'You want the information transcribed into a less c.u.mbersome format.'

'Right,' Dan said.

'With copies to everyone.'

'Maybe you could even be mayor.'

'I've already got my campaign slogan. "Let's Rebuild L.A."'

'Why not? It's worked for every other candidate for thirty years.'

'This ledger-?'

'It's a checkbook,' Dan said.

'You want the information transcribed from the stubs, with copies to everyone. Maybe I could even be governor.'

'No, you wouldn't like the job.'

'Why not?'

'You'd have to live in Sacramento.'

'Hey, that's right. I prefer civilization.'

Dinner was late because they had to clean up the kitchen. The water for the spaghetti had to be poured out; bits of the demolished radio were floating in it. Laura scrubbed the pot, refilled it, and put it back on the stove to boil.

By the time they sat down to eat, she wasn't hungry anymore. She kept thinking of the radio, which had been infused with a strange and demonic life of its own, and that memory spoiled her appet.i.te. The air was rich with the mouthwatering aromas of garlic and tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese, but there was also an underlying hint of scorched plastic and hot metal that seemed (this was crazy, but true, G.o.d help her) like the olfactory trace of an evil spiritual presence.

Earl Benton ate more than she did, but not much. He didn't talk much either. He stared at his plate even when he took a long pause between bites, and the only time he looked up was when he glanced, occasionally, toward that end of the kitchen counter where the Sony had been. His usual efficient, no-nonsense manner wasn't in evidence now; his eyes had a faraway look.

Melanie's eyes were still focused on a far place too, but the girl ate more than either Laura or Earl Benton. Sometimes she chewed slowly and absentmindedly, and sometimes she gobbled up four or five bites in rapid succession, with wolflike hunger. Now and then she altogether forgot that she was eating, and she had to be reminded.

Feeding her daughter, repeatedly wiping spaghetti sauce off the child's chin, Laura could not avoid thinking about her own blighted childhood. Her mother, Beatrice, had been a religious zealot who had permitted no singing or dancing or reading of books other than the Bible and certain religious tracts. A recluse with a persecution complex, Beatrice had labored hard to ensure that Laura would remain shy, withdrawn, and frightened of the world; if Laura had turned out like Melanie was now, Beatrice no doubt would have been delighted. She would have interpreted schizophrenic catatonia as a rejection of the evil world of the flesh, would have seen it as a deep communion with G.o.d. Beatrice would not only have been unable but unwilling to help Laura back into the real world.

But I can help you, honey, Laura thought as she wiped a smear of sauce off her daughter's chin. I am able and willing to help you find your way back, Melanie, if only you'll reach out to me, if only you'll let me help.

Melanie's head dropped. Her eyes closed.

Laura twisted more spaghetti onto the fork and put it to the girl's lips, but the child seemed to have slipped from apathy into some deeper level, perhaps even sleep.

'Come on, Melanie, have another bite. You've got to gain some weight, honey.'

Something clicked loudly.

Earl Benton looked up from his plate. 'What was that?'