The Door To December

PART TWO ENEMIES WITHOUT FACES

WEDNESDAY

1:00 P.M. — 7:45 P.M.

At one o'clock, when Laura drove her blue Honda to Valley Medical, a uniformed policeman at the entrance to the main parking lot barred the way. He directed her to the staff lot, which had been opened to the public 'until we straighten out the mess here.' Eighty to a hundred feet behind him was a cluster of LAPD cruisers and other official vehicles, some with emergency beacons rotating and flashing.

As she followed the patrolman's directions and headed toward the staff lot, Laura glanced to the right, through the fence, and saw Lieutenant Haldane. He was the tallest and biggest man among those at the scene. She suddenly realized that the commotion might have a connection with Melanie and with the murders in Studio City the previous night.

By the time she slotted the Honda between two cars with MD plates and ran back the hospital driveway to the fence that encircled the public parking lot, Laura had half convinced herself that Melanie was hurt or missing or dead. The patrolman at the gate would not let her through, not even when she told him who she was, so she shouted to Dan Haldane.

He hurried across the macadam, favoring his left leg. Not much, only slightly. She might not have noticed if her senses hadn't been sharply honed by fear. He took her by the arm and led her away from the gate, along the fence, to a spot where they could talk privately.

As they walked, she said, 'What's happened to Melanie?'

'Nothing.'

'Tell me the truth!'

'That is the truth. She's in her room. Safe. Just the way you left her.'

They stopped, and she stood with her back to the fence, staring past Haldane toward the pulsing emergency beacons. She saw a morgue wagon with the patrol cars.

No. It wasn't fair. To find Melanie after all these years and then to lose her again so soon — it was unthinkable.

A tightness in her chest. A throbbing in her temples.

She said, 'Who's dead?'

'I've been calling your house—'

'I want—'

'—trying to get hold of you—'

'—to know—'

'—for the past hour and a half.'

'-who's dead!' she demanded.

'Listen, it's not Melanie. Okay?' His voice was unusually soft and gentle and reassuring for a man his size. She always expected a roar, but he purred. 'Melanie's fine. Really.'

Laura studied his face, his eyes. She believed that he was telling her the truth. Melanie was all right. But Laura was still scared.

Haldane said, 'I didn't get home until seven this morning, fell into bed. Eleven o'clock, my phone rings, and they want me at Valley Medical. They think maybe there's some link between this homicide and Melanie because—'

'Because what?'

'Well, after all, she's a patient here. So I've been trying to get hold of you—'

'I was out shopping, buying new clothes for her,' Laura said. 'What happened? Who's dead? Are you going to tell me, for God's sake?'

'A guy in his car. That Volvo over there. Dead in the front seat of his Volvo.'

'According to his ID, his name's Ned Rink.'

She leaned back against the chain-link fence, her pulse rate gradually slowing from the frantic beat it had attained.

'You ever heard of him?' Haldane asked. 'Ned Rink?'

'No.'

'I wondered if maybe he was an associate of your husband's. Like Hoffritz.'

'Not that I'm aware. The name's not familiar. Why would you think he knew Dylan? Because of the way he died? Is that it? Was he beaten to death like the others?'

'No. But it was odd.'

'Tell me.'

He hesitated, and from the look in his blue eyes she could see that it was another particularly brutal homicide.

'Tell me,' she said again.

'His throat was crushed, as if someone gave him one hell of a whack with a lead pipe, caught him right across the Adam's apple. More than one whack. Lots of damage. Literally pulverized the guy's windpipe, crushed the Adam's apple, the vocal cords. Broke his neck. Cracked his spine.'

'Okay,' she said, dry-mouthed. 'I get the picture.'

'Sorry. Anyway, it's not like the bodies in Studio City, but it's unusual. You can see why we might figure they're connected. In both cases, the murders involved an unusual degree of violence. This one wasn't as bad as those, not nearly, but nevertheless…'

She pushed away from the fence. 'I want to see Melanie.'

Suddenly she had to see Melanie. It was a strong physical need. She had to touch the girl, hold her, be reassured that her child was all right.

She headed away from the parking lot, toward the front entrance of the hospital.

Haldane walked beside her, limping slightly but apparently not in pain.

'You have an accident?' she asked.

'Huh?'

'Your leg.'

'Oh. No. Just an old football injury from college. Banged the knee up pretty bad my senior year. Sometimes it acts up in humid weather. Listen, there's more about the guy in the Volvo, Rink.'

'What?'

'He had an attachй case with him. Inside, there was a white lab coat, a stethoscope, and a pistol fitted with a silencer.'

'He shoot his assailant? Are you looking for someone with a bullet wound?'

'Nope. The piece wasn't fired. But do you see what I'm driving at? The lab coat? The stethoscope?'

'He wasn't a doctor, was he?'

'No. What it looks like to us is that maybe he was going to go into the hospital, put on the lab coat, hang the stethoscope around his neck, and pretend to be a doctor.'

She glanced at him as they reached the curb and stepped up onto the sidewalk. 'Why would he do that?'

'From a preliminary look, the assistant medical examiner thinks Rink was killed between four and six o'clock this morning, though he wasn't found until nine-forty-five. Now, if he was figuring to visit someone in the hospital at, say five o'clock in the morning, he'd almost have to try to pass himself off as a doctor, because visiting hours don't start until one in the afternoon. If he tried to get on one of the medical floors in civilian clothes at that hour, there's a good chance a nurse or maybe a security guard would stop him. But in a lab coat, with a stethoscope, he could probably breeze right through.

They had reached the front entrance of the hospital. Laura stopped on the sidewalk. 'When you say "visit" you don't mean "visit".'

'No.'

'So you believe he intended to go into the hospital and kill someone.'

'A man doesn't carry a pistol with a silencer unless he means to use it. A silencer's illegal. Law comes down on you hard for that. You get caught with one, you're in deep sh… deep soup. Besides, I haven't learned any details yet, but I'm told Rink has a criminal record. He's suspected of being a freelance hitman for the past few years.'

'A hired killer?'

'I'd almost bet on it.'

'But that doesn't mean he came here to kill Melanie. Could be someone else in the hospital…'

'We already considered that. We've been checking the patient list to see if there's anyone here with a criminal record, or maybe someone who's a material witness in a case that's going to trial soon. Or any known dope dealers or members of any organized-crime family. We haven't found anything so far. Nobody who might've been Rink's target… except Melanie.'

'Are you saying maybe this Rink killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the other man in Studio City — then came here to kill Melanie because she saw him do the others?'

'Could be.'

'But then who killed Rink?'

He sighed. 'That's where the logic falls apart.'

'Whoever killed him didn't want him to kill Melanie,' Laura said.

Haldane shrugged.

She said, 'If that's the case, I'm glad.'

'What's to be glad about?'

'Well, if someone killed Rink to stop him from killing Melanie, it must mean she doesn't only have enemies out there. It means she has friends too.'

With unconcealed pity, Haldane said, 'No. That isn't necessarily what it means. The people who killed Rink probably want Melanie just as much as he did — except they want her alive.'

'Why?'

'Because she knows too much about the experiments conducted in that house.'

'Then they'd want her dead too, just like Rink.'

'Unless they need her to continue those experiments.'

Laura knew it was true as soon as he said it, and her shoulders slumped under the weight of this new fear. Why had Dylan been working with a discredited fanatic like Hoffritz? And who was financing them? No legitimate foundation, university, or research institute would give a grant to Hoffritz, not since he had been forced out of UCLA. Nor would any reputable institute fund Dylan, a man who had stolen his own child and was hiding from his wife's attorneys, a man who was using his daughter as a guinea pig in experiments that had left her on the verge of autism. Whoever provided the money to support Dylan and to conduct that kind of research was insane, every bit as insane as Dylan and Hoffritz.

She wanted it to be over and done with. She wanted to take Melanie out of the hospital, go home, and live happily ever after, because if anyone on earth deserved peace and happiness it was her little girl. But now 'they' weren't going to allow it. 'They' were going to try to snatch Melanie away again. 'They' wanted the child for reasons and purposes that only 'they' understood. And who in the hell were they' anyway? Faceless. Nameless. Laura couldn't fight an enemy she couldn't see or, seeing, recognize.

'They're well informed,' she said. 'And they don't waste time, either.'

Haldane blinked. 'What do you mean?'

'Melanie was here at the hospital only a couple of hours before Rink came after her. Didn't take him long to find out where she'd gotten to.'

'Not long at all,' he agreed.

'Makes you think he had sources.'

'Sources? In the police department, you mean?'

'Could be. And it didn't take Rink's enemies long to learn he was after her,' Laura said. 'They all move damn fast, both groups, whoever they are.'

She stood at the front doors to the hospital and studied the traffic moving on the street, as well as the shops and offices on the other side of the avenue. Sun shining in big plate-glass windows. Sun glinting off the windshields and chrome of the passing cars and trucks. In all that revealing sunlight, she hoped to spot someone suspicious, someone Haldane could chase and catch, but there were only ordinary people doing ordinary things. She was angered by their ordinariness, by the enemy's failure to step up and identify himself.

Irrationally, even the sunshine and the warm air angered her. Haldane had just told her that someone out there wanted her daughter dead and that someone else wanted to snatch Melanie and shove her back into a sensory-deprivation chamber or maybe into another jerry-built electric chair where they could continue to torture her for God knew what purpose. For that kind of news, the atmosphere was all wrong. The storm shouldn't have passed already. The sky should still be low, gray, full of churning clouds; rain should be falling, and the wind should be cold and blustery. It just didn't seem right that the world around her was balmy, that other people were whistling and smiling and strolling in sunshine and having fun, while she was plunging deeper into a bleak, dark, living nightmare.

She looked at Dan Haldane. A breeze stirred his sandy hair, and sunlight sharpened his pleasant features, rendering him more handsome than he really was. Even disregarding the flattery of the sun and shadow, however, he was good-looking. In other circumstances, she might have been interested in him. The contrast between his brutish size and gentleness lent him a certain mystique. The lost potential of this relationship was one more thing she held against the unknown 'them'.

'Why were you so eager to reach me?' she asked. 'Why were you calling my place for an hour and a half? It wasn't just to tell me about Rink. You knew I'd be showing up here. You could've waited till then to give me the bad news.'

He glanced toward the parking lot, where the morgue wagon was pulling away from the crime scene. When he focused on Laura again, his face was lined, his mouth grim, his eyes direct and dark with worry. 'I wanted to tell you to call a private security firm and arrange for an around-the-clock guard at your house, for after you take Melanie home.'

'A bodyguard?'

'More or less, yeah.'

'But if her life's in danger, won't the police department provide protection?'

He shook his head. 'Not in this case. There's not been any direct threat against her. No phone calls. No notes.'

'Rink—'

'We don't know he was here to get Melanie. We only suspect.'

'Just the same—'

'If the state and city weren't always going through a budget crisis, if police funding hadn't been cut, if we weren't chronically short of manpower, maybe we could stretch a point and have your house put under surveillance. But given the current situation, I couldn't justify it. And if I arrange the surveillance without my captain's approval, he'll sell my butt to the Alpo people, and I'll wind up in cans of dog food. He and I don't get along so well to begin with. But a security service, professional bodyguards… that's as good as any protection we could supply you even if we had the men to do it. Can you afford to hire them, just for a few days?'

'I suppose so. I don't know how much something like that costs, but I'm not poor. If you think it'll be for only a few days—'

'I have a hunch this one's going to unravel fast. All this killing, all the chances someone's been taking — it indicates they're under a lot of pressure, that there's a time limit of some kind. I haven't the faintest goddamned idea what they've been doing to your kid or why they're so desperate to get their hands on her again, but I sense this situation's like a giant snowball, rolling fast down a mountain, fast as an express train, getting bigger and bigger as it goes. Right now, already, it's real big, gigantic, and it's not far from the bottom of the mountain. When it finally hits, it's going to bust into hundreds of pieces.'

As a pediatric psychiatrist, Laura was self-confident, never uncertain as to how she should proceed with a new patient. Of course she deliberated before choosing a course of therapy, but once she had decided on her approach, she implemented it without hesitation. She was a successful healer, a mender, a repairman of the psyche, and her success had given her the confidence and authority that generated more success. But now she was lost. She felt small, vulnerable, powerless. That was a feeling that she hadn't known for a few years, not since she had learned to accept Melanie's disappearance.

She said, 'I… I don't even know how you… how a person goes about finding bodyguards.'

Haldane pulled out his wallet, fished in it, withdrew a card. 'Most of the private investigators you sent after Dylan, years ago, probably also offer bodyguard service. We're not supposed to make recommendations. But I know these guys are good, and their rates are competitive.'

She took the card, looked at it:

CALIFORNIA PALADIN, INC.

PRIVATE INVESTIGATION

Personal Security

A phone number was provided at the bottom.

Laura tucked the card in her purse. 'Thanks.'

'Call them before you leave the hospital.'

'I will.'

'Have them send a man here. He can follow you home.'

She felt numb. 'All right.' She turned toward the hospital doors.

'Wait.' He handed her another card, his own. 'The printed number on the front is my line at Central, but you won't be able to get me there. I'm on assignment to the East Valley Division right now, so I've written that number on the back. I want you to call me if anything occurs to you, anything about Dylan's past or old research that might have a bearing on this.'

She turned the card over. 'There's two numbers here.'

'Bottom one's my home number, in case I'm not in the office.'

'Won't your office forward messages?'

'Yeah, but they might be slow about it. If you want to get me in a hurry, I want to be sure you can.'

'You usually give out your home phone like this?'

'No.'

'Then, why?'

'The thing I hate most of all…'

'What's that?'

'A crime like this. Child abuse of any kind is so infuriating and frustrating. Makes me sick. Makes my blood boil.'

'I know what you mean,' she said.

'Yeah, I guess you do.'

Dr. Rafael Ybarra, chief of pediatrics at Valley Medical, met with Laura in a small room near the nurses' station, where the staff took their coffee breaks. Two vending machines stood against one wall. An icemaker chugged, clinked, and clattered. Behind Laura a refrigerator hummed softly. She sat across from Ybarra at a long table on which were dog-eared magazines and two ashtrays full of cold cigarette butts.

The pediatrician — dark, slim, with aquiline features — was prim, even prissy. His perfectly combed hair seemed like a laquered wig. His shirt collar was crisp and stiff, tie perfectly knotted, lab coat tailored. He walked as though afraid of getting his shoes dirty, and he sat with his shoulders back and his head up, stiff and formal. He surveyed the crumbs and the cigarette ashes on the table, wrinkled his nose, and kept his hands in his lap.

Laura decided she didn't like the man.

Dr. Ybarra spoke with brisk authority, biting the words off: 'Physically, your daughter's in good condition, surprisingly good considering the circumstances. She is somewhat underweight, but not seriously so. Her right arm is bruised from repeated insertion of an IV needle by someone who wasn't very skilled at it. Her urethra is mildly inflamed, perhaps from catheterization. I have prescribed medication for that condition. And that's the extent of her physical problems.'

Laura nodded. 'I know. I've come to take her home.'

'No, no. I wouldn't advise that,' Ybarra said. 'For one thing, she'll be too difficult to care for at home.'

'She's not actually ill?'

'No, but—'

'She's not incontinent?'

'No. She uses the bathroom.'

'She can feed herself?'

'In a fashion. You have to start feeding her, then she'll take over. And you've got to keep watching her as she eats because after a few bites she seems to forget what she's doing, loses interest. You have to continue urging her to eat. She needs help to dress herself too.'

'I can handle all that.'

'I'm still reluctant to discharge her,' Ybarra said.

'But last night Doctor Pantangello said—'

At the mention of Pantangello, Ybarra wrinkled his nose. His distaste was evident in his voice. 'Doctor Pantangello only finished his residency last autumn and was accredited to this hospital last month. I am the head of pediatrics, and it is my opinion that your daughter should stay here.'

'How long?'

'Her behaviour is symptomatic of severe inhibited catatonia — not unusual in cases of prolonged confinement and mistreatment. She should remain here for a complete psychiatric evaluation. A week… ten days.'

'No.'

'It's the best thing for the child.' His voice was so cold and measured that it was hard to believe he ever gave a thought to what was best for anyone other than Rafael Ybarra.

She wondered how kids could possibly relate to a stuffy doctor like this.

'I'm a psychiatrist,' Laura said. 'I can evaluate her condition and give her the proper care at home.'

'Be your own daughter's therapist?' He raised his eyebrows. 'I don't think that's wise.'

'I disagree.' She wasn't going to explain herself to this man.

'Here, once an evaluation is completed and a course of treatment recommended, we have the proper facilities to provide that treatment. You simply don't have the right equipment at home.'

Laura frowned. 'Equipment? What equipment? Exactly what kind of treatment are you talking about?'

'That would be a decision for Doctor Gehagen in psychiatry. But if Melanie should continue in this severe catatonic state or if she should sink deeper into it, well… barbiturates and electroconvulsive therapy—'

'Like hell,' Laura said sharply, pushing her chair away from the table and getting to her feet.

Ybarra blinked, surprised by her hostility.

She said, 'Drugs and electric shock — that's part of what her goddamned father was doing to her the past six years.'

'Well, of course, we wouldn't be using the same drugs or the same kind of electric shock, and our intentions would be different from—'

'Yeah, sure, but how the hell is Melanie supposed to know what your intentions are? I know there are cases where barbiturates and even electroconvulsive therapy achieve desirable results, but they're not right for my daughter. She needs to regain her confidence, her feeling of self-worth. She needs freedom from fear and pain. She needs stability. She needs… to be loved.'

Ybarra shrugged. 'Well, you won't be endangering her health by taking her home today, so there's no way I can prevent you from walking out of here with her.'

'Exactly,' Laura said.

* * *

After the morgue wagon had gone, while the SID technicians were sweeping the parking lot around the Volvo, Kerry Bums, a uniformed patrolman, approached Dan Haldane. 'A call came through from East Valley, message from Captain Mondale.'

'Ah, the esteemed and glorious captain.'

'He wants to see you right away.'

'Does he miss me?' Dan asked.

'Didn't say why.'

'I'll bet he misses me.'

'You and Mondale got a thing for each other?'

'Definitely not. Maybe Ross is gay, but I'm straight.'

'You know what I mean. You got a grudge or something?'

'It's that obvious, huh?' Dan asked facetiously.

'Is it obvious that dogs don't like cats?'

'Let's just say, if I was burning to death and Ross Mondale had the only bucket of water in ten miles, I'd prefer to extinguish the fire with my own spit.'

'That's clear enough. You gonna go over to East Valley?'

'He ordered me to, didn't he?'

'But are you gonna go? I gotta call back and confirm.'

'Sure.'

'He wants you right away.'

'Sure.'

'I'll call back and confirm you're on your way.'

'Absolutely,' Dan said.

Kerry headed back to his patrol car, and Dan got into his unmarked department sedan. He drove out of the hospital parking lot, turned into the busy street, and headed downtown, in the opposite direction from East Valley and Ross Mondale.

* * *

Before talking to Dr. Ybarra, Laura had called the security service that Dan Haldane had recommended. By the time she had spoken to Ybarra, had dressed Melanie in jeans and a blue-checkered blouse and sneakers, and had signed the necessary release forms, the agent from California Paladin had arrived.

His name was Earl Benton, and he looked like a big old farm boy who had somehow awakened in the wrong house and had been forced to clothe himself in the contents of a banker's closet. His blond-brown hair was combed straight back from his temples, fashionably razor-cut — by a stylist, not a barber — but it didn't look quite right on him; his blocky face and plain features would probably have been better served by a shaggy, windblown, natural look. His seventeen-inch neck seemed about to pop the collar button on his Yves St. Laurent shirt, and he looked awkward and slightly uncomfortable in his three-piece gray suit. His huge, thick-fingered hands would never be graceful, but the fingernails were professionally manicured.

Laura could tell at a glance that Earl was one of those tens of thousands who came to Los Angeles every year with the hope of moving up in life, which he'd probably already done. He would most likely climb higher too, once he wore off some rough edges and learned to feel at home in his designer clothes. She liked him. He had a nice, wide smile and easy manner, yet he was watchful, alert, intelligent. She met him in the corridor, outside Melanie's room, and after she explained the situation in more detail than she had given his office on the telephone, she said, 'I assume you're armed.'

'Oh, yes, ma'am.'

'Good.'

'I'll be with you till midnight,' Earl said, 'and then a new man'll come on duty.'

'Fine.'

A moment later, Laura brought Melanie into the hall, and Earl hunkered down to her level. 'What a pretty girl you are.'

Melanie said nothing.

'Fact is,' he said, 'you remind me a lot of my sister, Emma.' Melanie stared through him.

Taking the girl's slack hand, engulfing it in his two enormous hands, Earl continued to speak directly to her, as though she were holding up her end of the conversation. 'Emma, she's nine years younger than me, in her junior year of high school. She's raised up two prize calves, Emma has. She's got a collection of prize ribbons, probably twenty of them, from all sorts of competitions, including livestock shows at three different county fairs. You know anything about calves? You like animals? Well, calves are just the cutest things. Real gentle faces. I'll bet you'd be good with them, just like Emma.'

Watching him with Melanie, Laura liked Earl Benton even more than she had on first meeting him.

He said, 'Now, Melanie, don't you worry about anything, okay? I'm your friend, and as long as old Earl's your friend, nobody's going to so much as look crosswise at you.'

The girl seemed utterly unaware of his presence.

He released her hand, and her thin arm dropped back to her side, limp.

Earl stood and rolled his shoulders to settle his jacket in place, and he looked at Laura. 'You say her daddy was responsible for making her like this?'

'He's one of the people responsible,' Laura said.

'And he's… dead?'

'Yes.'

Some of the others are still alive, though?'

'Yes.'

'Sure would like to meet one of them. Like to talk to one of them. Just me and him alone for a while. Sure would like that,' Earl said. There was a hard edge in his voice, a chilling light in his eyes that hadn't been there before: an anger that, for the first time, made him look dangerous.

Laura liked that too.

'Now, ma'am — Doctor McCaffrey, I guess I should call you — when we leave here, I'll go out the door first. I know that's not gentlemanly behavior, but from now on, most times, I'll be just a couple feet ahead of you wherever we go, sort of scouting the way ahead, you might say.'

'I'm sure no one's going to start shooting at us in broad daylight or anything like that,' Laura said.

'Maybe not. But I still go first.'

'All right.'

'When I tell you to do something, you right away do it, and no questions asked. Understand?'

She nodded.

He said, 'I might not yell at you. I might tell you to get down or to run like hell, and I might say it in a soft voice the same way I might say what a nice day it is, so you have to be alert.'

'I understand.'

'Good. I'm sure everything'll work out just fine. Now, are you two ladies ready to go home?'

They headed toward the elevator that would take them down to the lobby.

At least a thousand times over the past six years, Laura had dreamed about the wonderful day when she would bring Melanie home. She had imagined that it would be the happiest day of her life. She'd never thought it would be like this.

At Central, Dan Haldane took two folders from the clerk in Records and carried them to one of the small writing tables along the wall.

The name on the first file was Ernest Andrew Cooper. By his fingerprints, he had been identified as the John Doe victim found the previous night with Dylan McCaffrey and Wilhelm Hoffritz in the Studio City house.

Cooper was thirty-seven years old, stood five-eleven, and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. There were mug shots, related to a particularly serious DUI arrest, but they were of no use to Dan, because the victim's face had been battered into featureless, bloody pulp. He would have to rely on the fingerprint match.

Cooper lived in Hancock Park, on a street of million-dollar and multimillion-dollar homes. He was chairman of the board and majority stockholder of Cooper Softech, a successful computer software firm. He'd been arrested three times within the city limits of Los Angeles, always for drunken driving, and on all three occasions, he had also been driving without a license. He had protested the arrests, had gone to trial in each case, had been convicted of each offense, had been fined, but had served no jail time. In every case, the arresting officers noted that Cooper insisted it was immoral — and a violation of his constitutional rights — for the government to require a man to carry any form of identification whatsoever, even a driver's license. The second patrolman had also written: '…Mr. Cooper informed this officer that he (Mr. Cooper) was a member of an organization, Freedom Now, that would bring all governments to their knees, and that said organization would use his arrest as a test case to challenge certain laws, and that this officer was an unwitting tool of totalitarian forces. He then threw up and passed out.'

Smiling at that last line, Dan closed the folder. He looked at the name on the second file — Edward Philip Rink — and he was anxious to see what they had on this one.

First he carried both files to the nearest of three VDTs and sat down in front of the computer terminal. He switched it on, typed in his access code, and asked for a profile of Freedom Now.

After a brief pause, information began to appear on the screen:

Freedom Now

A political action committee registered with the Federal Elections Commission and the IRS.

Please note:

Freedom Now is a legitimate organization of private citizens exercising their constitutional rights. This organization is not the subject of any police intelligence division investigation, nor should it be the subject of any such investigation while it is engaged upon the activities for which it was formed and for which it has been cleared by the Federal Elections Commission. All information in this file was accumulated from public records. This file was created for the sole purpose of identifying legitimate political organizations and distinguishing them from subversive groups. The existence of this file in no way suggests special police interest in Freedom Now.

The LAPD had taken considerable heat from the American Civil Liberties Union and others for its secret surveillance of political groups that were suspected of involvement in dangerous subversive activities. The department was still fully empowered to conduct investigations of terrorist organizations, but it was enjoined from infiltrating properly registered political groups unless it obtained evidence sufficient to convince a judge that the organization in question had ties to other groups of individuals that were intent upon terrorist activities.

The disclaimer at the head of the file was familiar, and Dan didn't bother to read it. He pressed the cursor key to roll up more data.

Freedom Now — current officers

President: Ernest Andrew Cooper, Hancock Park

Treasurer: Wilhelm Stephan Hoffritz, Westwood

Secretary: Mary Katherine O'Hara, Burbank

Freedom Now was chartered in 1990 for the purpose of supporting those libertarian-oriented candidates with a publicly expressed intention of working for the eventual abolition of all but minimalist government and for the eventual dissolution of all political parties.

Cooper and Hoffritz, president and treasurer, were both dead. And Freedom Now had been chartered the same year as Dylan McCaffrey had vanished with his young daughter, which might or might not be a coincidence.

Interesting, anyway.

Dan needed twenty minutes to read the computer file and make notes. Then he switched off the VDT and picked up the paper file on Ned Rink.

The documents were numerous, but he didn't find them boring. Rink, the man found dead in the Volvo that same morning, was thirty-nine. He had graduated from Los Angeles Police Academy when he was twenty-one, had served four years with the force while taking criminal-law courses at USC in the evenings. He'd twice been the subject of LAPD internal investigations subsequent to charges of brutality, but for lack of evidence, no action had been taken as a result of the accusations against him. He had applied to the FBI, had been accepted, after being granted a variance on minimum height requirements to comply with antidiscrimination laws, and had worked for the Bureau for five years. Nine years ago, he had been discharged from the FBI for reasons unknown, though there were indications that he had exceeded his authority and, on more than one occasion, had shown too much zeal during the interrogation of a suspect.

Dan thought he knew the type. Some men chose policework because they wanted to perform a socially useful function, some because their childhood heroes had been policemen, some because their fathers had been cops, some because the job was reasonably secure and offered a good pension. There were a hundred reasons. For men like Rink, the attraction was power; they found a special thrill in issuing orders, exercising authority, not because they took pleasure in leading well, but because they enjoyed telling other people what to do and being treated with deference.

According to the file, eight years ago, following his dismissal from the FBI, Rink had been arrested for assault with intent to kill. The charge had been reduced to simple assault to ensure a conviction, which had been obtained, and Rink had served ten months with time off for good behavior. Six years ago he was arrested again, for suspicion of murder. The evidence didn't hold up, and charges were eventually dropped. After that, Rink was a lot more careful. Local, state, and federal authorities believed he was a freelance killer, serving the underworld and anyone else who would pay for his services, and there was circumstantial evidence linking him to nine murders in the past five years — which was probably just the tip of the iceberg — but no police agency had acquired enough evidence to bring Rink to justice.

Justice had been dealt to him anyway.

By something other than a police agency or a court.

Haldane closed the folder, put it on top of the Cooper file, and withdrew his current batch of lists from his pocket. He spent a few minutes looking through them, and something did pop up this time. A name: Mary O'Hara. One of the officers of Freedom Now. Her name and number had been on the notepad beside the phone in Dylan McCaffrey's office.

He put the lists away and sat for a while, thinking. God, what a mess. Two doctors of psychology, both formerly at UCLA — dead. One millionaire businessman and political activist — dead. One ex-cop, ex-FBI agent, and suspected hit man — dead. A weird gray room hidden in an ordinary suburban house where one little girl had been, among other things, tortured with electric shocks. By her own father. The Great God of Sleazy Journalism was generous to his people: The press was going to love this one.

Dan returned the two files to the Records clerk and rode the elevator up to the Scientific Investigation Division.

As soon as they got in the house, Earl Benton went through every room to be sure that the windows and doors were locked. He closed the drapes and blinds and advised Laura and Melanie to stay away from the windows.

After choosing a few magazines from the stack of publications in the brass magazine tray in Laura's study, Earl moved a chair close to one of the front windows in the living room, from which he could see the walk and street beyond. 'Might look like I'm just lazing away, but don't worry. Nothing in these magazines will distract me.'

'I'm not worried.'

'Most of this job is just sitting and waiting. A guy would go nuts if he didn't have a magazine or a newspaper.'

'I understand,' she assured him.

Pepper, the calico, was more interested in Earl than in Melanie. She circled him warily for some time, studying him, sniffing at his feet. Finally she clambered onto him and demanded to be petted.

'Nice kitty,' he said, scratching Pepper behind the ears.

She settled on his lap with a blissful look of contentment.

'She doesn't take to many people that fast,' Laura told him.

Earl grinned. 'Always have had a way with animals.'

It was silly, but Pepper's acceptance of Earl Benton reassured Laura and made her feel even better about him. She trusted him completely now.

And what does that mean? she asked herself. Didn't I trust him completely already? Subconsciously, did I have doubts about him?

He had been hired to protect her and Melanie, and that's what he would do. She had no reason to suspect that he was connected with either the people who wanted Melanie dead — or the ones who seemed to want her alive and back in another gray room.

Yet that was exactly what Laura had suspected, just a little, deep down, on a purely subconscious level.

She would have to guard against paranoia. She didn't know who her enemies were: They remained faceless. There was a tendency, therefore, to suspect everyone, to spin grandiose conspiracy theories that could wind up encompassing everyone in the world but she herself and Melanie.

After brewing coffee for Earl and for herself, she made hot chocolate for Melanie and carried it into the den, where the girl waited. Laura had made arrangements to take an indefinite leave of absence from St. Mark's and to have her private patients covered by an associate for at least the upcoming week. She intended to begin therapy with Melanie right away, this afternoon, but she didn't want to conduct the session in the same room with Earl, for he would be a distraction.

The study was small but comfortable. Two walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that were filled with an eclectic collection of hardcover titles ranging from exotic volumes on highly specialized areas of psychology to popular fiction. The other walls were covered with beige grasscloth. There were two Delacroix prints, a dark pine desk with an upholstered chair, a rocking chair, and an emerald-green sofa with lots of pillows. Soft amber light came from a pair of brass Stiffel lamps on matching end tables; Earl had closed the emerald-green drapes at both windows.

Melanie was sitting on the sofa, her upturned hands in her lap, staring at her palms.

'Melanie.'

The girl gave no indication that she was aware of her mother's presence.

'Honey, I brought you some hot chocolate.'

When the girl still did not respond, Laura sat beside her. Holding the mug of cocoa in one hand, she put her other hand under Melanie's chin, tilted the girl's head up, and looked into her eyes. They were still disturbingly empty eyes, and Laura could make no connection with them, elicit no awareness.

She said, 'I want you to drink this, Melanie. It's good, tasty. You'll like it. I know you'll like it.'

She put the rim of the mug to the girl's lips, and with a lot of coaxing, she managed to get her daughter to sip the cocoa. Some of it dribbled down Melanie's chin, and Laura wiped it away with a paper napkin before it could drip onto the sofa. With more encouragement, the girl began to drink less sloppily. At last her small frail hands came up, and she held the mug firmly enough that Laura was able to let go. Once she had hold of the mug, Melanie drank the remainder of the hot chocolate quickly, greedily. When it was all gone, she licked her lips. In her eyes there was for the briefest moment a flicker of life, an indication of consciousness; and for a second, but no longer than a second, her eyes met her mother's eyes, didn't stare through Laura as before, but at her. That precious instant of contact was electrifying. Unhappily, Melanie at once sank back into her secret inner world, and her eyes glazed over again. But now Laura knew the child was capable of returning from her self-imposed exile; therefore, there was a chance, however small, that she could be brought back not just for a second but permanently.

She took the empty mug out of Melanie's hands, put it on one of the end tables, then sat sideways on the couch, facing the girl. She took both of Melanie's hands and said, 'Honey, it's been so long, and you were so little when we saw each other last… maybe you aren't exactly sure who I am. I'm your mother, Melanie.'

The girl didn't react.

She spoke softly, reassuringly, taking the child through it step by step, because she was sure that, at least on a subconscious level, the girl could understand her. 'I brought you into this world because I wanted you more than anything. You were such a beautiful baby, so sweet, never any trouble. You learned to walk and talk sooner than I expected, and I was so proud of you. So very proud. Then you were stolen from me, and while you were gone, all I wanted was to get you back. To hold you again and love you again. And now, baby, the most important thing is to make you well, to bring you out of that hole you're hiding in. I'm going to do that, honey. I'm going to make you well. Help you get well.'

The girl said nothing.

Her green eyes indicated that her attention was far away. Laura pulled the girl onto her lap, put her arms around her, held her. For a while, they just sat like that, being close, giving it time, because they had to establish bonds of affection in order for the therapy to have a chance.

After a few minutes, Laura found herself humming a lullaby, then crooning the lyrics almost in a whisper. She smoothed her daughter's forehead, used fingers to comb the girl's hair back from her face. Melanie's eyes remained distant, glazed, but she raised one hand to her face and put a thumb in her mouth. As if she were a baby. As she had done when she had been three years old.

Tears welled in Laura's eyes. Her voice quivered, but she kept crooning softly and running her hand through her daughter's silken hair. Then she remembered how hard she had tried to break Melanie of the thumb-sucking habit six years ago, and it seemed funny that she should be so pleased and moved by it now. Suddenly she was half crying and half laughing, and she must have looked ridiculous, but she felt wonderful.

In fact, she felt so good and was so encouraged by the girl's thumb-sucking, by the instant of real eye contact that had followed the drinking of the hot chocolate, that she decided to try hypnosis today, rather than waiting until tomorrow, as planned. In Melanie's conscious but semicatatonic state, the child was withdrawn into deep fantasy and was resistant to being brought up from those sheltering depths of her psyche. Hypnotized, she would be more malleable, more open to suggestion, and might be drawn back at least part of the way toward the real world.

Hypnotizing someone in Melanie's condition could be either much easier than hypnotizing an alert person — or nearly impossible. Laura continued softly singing the lullaby and began to massage the girl's temples, moving her fingertips around and around in small circles, pressing lightly. When the child's eyes began to flutter, Laura stopped singing and said, in a whisper, 'Let go, baby. Sleep now, baby, sleep, that's it, I want you to sleep, just relax… you are settling into a deep natural sleep… settling down like a feather floating down and down through very still warm air… settling down and down… sleep… but you will continue to listen to my voice… down and down like a lazily turning, like a drifting feather… down into sleep… but my voice will follow you down into sleep… down… down… and you will listen to me and answer all questions I ask… sleep but listen and obey. Listen and respond. And she massaged even more lightly than before, moving her fingertips more slowly, until at last the girl's eyes closed and her breathing indicated that she was sound asleep.

Pepper slunk through the doorway and regarded them with evident curiosity. Then she crossed the room, jumped onto the rocker, and curled in a ball.

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.

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.'

Porteau usually was optimistic, another Holmesian trait, so his pessimism in the current case was especially disturbing. Dan said, 'What about the scrapings from under the victims' fingernails?'

'Nothing of interest. No skin, no hair, no blood but their own under their nails, which probably means they didn't get a chance to claw at their assailants.'

'But the killers had to move in close. I mean, Felix, they beat these people to death.'

'Yes. But although they had to get close, none of them seems to have been wounded. We took scores of blood samples from every surface in those rooms, only to discover that all of it belonged to the victims.'

They sat in silence.

Porteau puffed clouds of fragrant smoke into the air above his head. A distant look came into his eyes as he pondered the evidence in the case, and if he, like Sherlock, had played a violin, he would have reached for it now.

At last Dan said, 'I assume that you saw the photographs of the bodies.'

'Yes. Horrible. Incredible. Such fury.'

'Do you get the feeling that this one is going to be really weird?'

'Daniel, I find all murder to be weird,' Porteau said.

'But this one seems weirder than usual.'

'Weirder than usual,' Porteau agreed, and smiled, as if pleased by the challenge.

'I'm beginning to get the creeps.'

'Look out for that falling boulder, Mr. Coyote.'

Dan left the SID lieutenant in his aromatic haze and rode the elevator back down, this time to the basement, where Pathology was located.

Still in a hypnotic state, the girl said, 'No!'

'Melanie, honey, take it easy, take it easy now. Nobody's going to hurt you.

The girl tossed her head, drawing the quick shallow inhalations indicative of panic. A half-born wail of fear and dread was trapped in her throat and issued only as a thin, high-pitched eeeeeeee. She squirmed and tried to push herself off her mother's lap.

Laura held her. 'Stop struggling, Melanie. Relax. Be still. Be calm.'

Suddenly the girl struck out at an imaginary assailant, flailing with both hands. Unintentionally she struck her mother on the breast, then on the face, two hard and painful blows.

For an instant Laura was stunned. The blow to the face was hard enough to bring involuntary tears of pain to her eyes.

Melanie rolled off her mother's lap, onto the floor, and began to crawl away from the couch.

'Melanie, stop!'

In spite of the posthypnotic suggestion that required the girl to respond to and obey Laura's commands, she ignored her mother. She crawled past the rocking chair, making pitiful animal sounds of pure, blind terror.

The calico cat stood on the rocking chair, ears flattened, hissing fearfully. As Melanie scrambled past the chair, Pepper leaped over the girl, hit the floor running, and streaked out of the study.

'Melanie, listen to me.'

The girl disappeared beyond the desk.

Her left cheek still stinging where the child had struck her, Laura also went behind the desk. Melanie had crawled into the kneehole and was hiding there. Laura stooped down and peered in at her. The girl sat with her knees drawn up, arms locked around her legs, hunched, chin against her knees, peering out with wide eyes that, as before, saw neither Laura nor anything else in that room.

'Honey?'

Gasping for breath as if she had run a long way, the girl said, 'Don't let it… open. Keep it… shut… tight shut.

Earl Benton stepped into the doorway. 'You okay?'

Laura looked at him over the top of the desk. 'Yes. Just… my daughter, but she'll be okay.'

'You're sure? You don't need me?'

No, no. I need to be alone with her. I can handle it.'

Reluctantly, Earl retreated to the living room.

Laura looked under the desk again. Melanie was still breathing hard, and now she was shaking violently too. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

'Come out of there, honey.'

The girl didn't move.

'Melanie, you will listen to me, and you will do what I tell you. Come out of there right now.'

Instead, the girl tried to draw farther back into the kneehole, though she had nowhere to go.

Laura had never known a patient to rebel so completely during hypnotic therapy. She studied the girl and at last decided to allow her to remain under the desk for the time being, since she seemed to feel at least marginally safer there.

'Honey, what are you hiding from?'

No answer.

'Melanie, you must tell me — what did you see that you wanted to keep shut?'

'Don't let it open,' the girl said miserably, as if responding to Laura for the first time, although her eyes still remained focused on some horror in another time and place.

'Don't let what open? Tell me, Melanie.'

'Keep it closed!' the girl cried, and she squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip so hard that she drew a small spot of blood.

Laura reached into the kneehole and consolingly put one hand on her daughter's arm. 'Honey, what are you talking about? I'll help you keep it closed if you'll only tell me what you're talking about.'

'The d-d-door,' the girl said.

'What door?'

'The door!'

'The door to the tank?'

'It's coming open, it's coming open!'

'No,' Laura said sharply. 'Listen to me. You have to listen to me and accept what I tell you. The door isn't coming open. It's shut. Tightly shut. Look at it. See? It's not even ajar, not even open a little crack.'

'Not even a crack,' the girl said, and now there was no doubt that some part of her could hear Laura and respond, even though she continued to gaze through Laura and even though she remained, for the most part, in some other reality of her own making.

'Not even a crack,' Laura repeated, greatly relieved to be exerting some control at last.

The girl calmed a little. She was trembling, and her face was still lined with fear, but she was not biting her lip anymore. A crimson thread of blood sewed a curved seam down her chin.

Laura said, 'Now, honey, the door is closed, and it's going to stay closed, and nothing on the other side will be able to open it, because I've put a new lock on it, a heavy dead-bolt lock. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' the girl said weakly, doubtfully.

'Look at the door. There's a big shiny new lock on it. Do you see the new lock?'

'Yes,' Melanie said, more confident this time.

'A big brass lock. Enormous.'

'Yes.'

'Enormous and strong. Absolutely nothing in the world could break through that lock.'

'Nothing,' the girl agreed.

'Good. Very good. Now… even though the door can't be opened, I'd like to know what's on the other side of it.'

The girl said nothing.

'Honey? Remember the strong lock. You're safe now. So tell me what's on the other side of the door.'

Melanie's small white hands pulled and patted the empty air under the desk, as though she were attempting to draw a picture of something.

'What's on the other side of the door?' Laura asked again. The hands moved ceaselessly. The girl made wordless, frustrated sounds.

'Tell me, honey.'

'The door…'

'Where does the door lead?'

'The door…'

'What kind of room is on the other side?'

'The door to…'

'To where?'

'The door… to… December,' Melanie said. Her fear broke under the crushing weight of many other emotions — misery, despair, grief, loneliness, frustration — all of which were audible in the wordless sounds that she made and in her uncontrollable sobbing. Then: 'Mommy? Mommy?'

'I'm right here, baby,' Laura said, startled to hear her daughter calling for her.

'Mommy?'

'Right here. Come to me, baby. Come out from under there.'

Weeping, the girl did not come but cried, again, 'Mommy?' She seemed to think she was alone, far from Laura's consoling embrace, though in fact they were only inches apart. 'Oh, Mommy! Mommy!'

Staring into the shadowy recess beneath the desk, watching her little girl weep and gibber, reaching back in there, touching the child, Laura shared some of Melanie's feelings, especially grief and frustration, but she was also filled with a powerful curiosity. The door to December?

'Mama?'

'Here. Right here.'

They were so close yet they remained separated by an immense and mysterious gulf.

Luther Williams was a young black pathologist working for the LAPD. He dressed as though he were the ghost of Sammy Davis, Jr. — leisure suits and too much jewelry — but was as articulate and amusing as Thomas Sowell, the black sociologist. Luther was an admirer of Sowell and of other sociologists and economists in the burgeoning conservative movement within the black intellectual community, and could quote from their books at length. Too great a length. Several times, he had lectured Dan on pragmatic politics and had expounded upon the virtues of free-market economics as a mechanism for lifting the poor out of poverty. He was such a fine pathologist, with such a sensitive eye for the anomalous details that were important in forensic medicine, that it was almost worth tolerating his tedious political dissections in order to obtain the information he collected from his dissections of the flesh. Almost.

Luther was sitting at a microscope, examining a tissue sample, when Dan entered the green-tiled lab. He looked up and grinned when he saw who was visiting him. 'Danny boy! Did you use those tickets I gave you?'

For a moment, Dan didn't know what the pathologist was talking about, but then he remembered. Luther had bought two tickets to a debate between G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary, and then something had come up to prevent him from going. He had run into Dan in the hall a week ago and had insisted that Dan take the tickets. 'It'll raise your consciousness,' he had said.

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 passion 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. Hell, 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 compassion 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 passage 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 pass laws so you can't 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 God, 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 — 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 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 smartass black pathologists, first thing.'

'Hey, that's what I'm telling 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 mass 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 damn way a blunt instrument, used as a club, can 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 squeezing, and I'm talking a lot 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. 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 assumption. The thing is.. I didn't notice 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.

'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 damned likely.'

'You ever read Sax Rohmer, those old Fu Manchu books?' Hell, 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.'

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 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. Nobody 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, nobody 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 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, hell, as far as that goes, pretty much any damn government agency would be interested in mind control.

'How do you know all this about Dylan's work? I didn't tell you all this.'

Instead of answering her, Earl said, 'Maybe your husband and Hoffritz were still working for the government.'

'Hoffritz was a discredited—'

'But if his research was important, if it was producing results, they wouldn't care if he was discredited in the academic community. They'd still use him.'

He glanced at her again, and there was a cynicism in his eyes, a weary-of-the-world expression on his face that made him appear utterly different from the way he'd looked earlier.

She could no longer see the farm boy at all, and she wondered if that image of a simple man seeking polish and sophistication from a new life in L.A. had been an act. She was suddenly sure that Earl Benton, even as young as he was, had never been simple.

And she was no longer sure that she should trust him.

The situation had abruptly become so complex, the possibilities so multifarious, that she felt a bit dizzy. 'A government conspiracy? But then why would they have killed Dylan and Hoffritz if Dylan was working for them?'

Earl didn't even hesitate. 'Maybe they didn't do the killing. In fact, it's highly unlikely. But maybe your husband's research was leading toward a major breakthrough with military applications, and maybe because of that, the other side had him wasted.'

'Other side?'

He was watching the street once more. 'Foreign agents.'

'The Soviet Union went kaput. Maybe you heard. It was in all the newspapers.'

'The Russians are still there, and we're a long way from being best buddies with them. Then there's China. Iran and Iraq and Libya. There's never a shortage of enemies in the world. Power-mad men are always with us.'

'This is crazy,' she protested.

'Why?'

'Secret agents, spy stuff, international intrigue… Ordinary people don't get mixed up in that stuff except in the movies.'

'That's just it. Your husband wasn't ordinary people,' Earl said. 'Neither was Hoffritz.'

She couldn't look away from this man who was undergoing such a profound metamorphosis — aging, hardening — before her eyes. She repeated the question that he had not answered before. 'All this speculation… you couldn't have thought about any of it unless you knew my husband's field, his personality, the kind of work he might be doing. How do you know all this about Dylan? I didn't tell you any of it.

'Dan Haldane told me.'

'The detective? When?'

'When he called me. Just before noon.'

'But I didn't even hire your firm until after one o'clock.'

'Dan said he'd give you our card, make sure you called us. He wanted us to understand all the possible ramifications of the case right from the start.'

'But he never told me there might be FBI agents and, for God's sake, Russians involved.'

'He doesn't know they're involved, Doctor McCaffrey. He just realized there was the possibility that these murders had more than local significance. He didn't go into it much with you, because he didn't want to worry you unnecessarily.'

'Christ.'

The mad, seductive murmur of paranoia swelled in her mind again. She felt trapped in an elaborate web of conspiracies.

'Better go look after Melanie,' Earl said.

Outside, a Chevy sedan drove slowly along the street. The car stopped beside the phone-company van, then pulled forward and parked in front of it. Two men got out.

'Ours,' Earl said.

'Paladin agents?'

'Yeah. I called the office a while ago, after I decided the van was a surveillance operation, asked them to send some guys to check it out 'cause I didn't want to go over there myself and leave you two alone.'

The two men who got out of the Chevy went to opposite sides of the van.

'Better go see about Melanie,' Earl repeated.

'She's okay.'

'Then at least step back from the window.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm paid to take risks, and you aren't. And I warned you at the start you'd have to do what I told you to do.'

She retreated from the window, but she didn't move completely away from it. She wanted to see what was happening at the phone-company van.

One of the Paladin agents was still at the driver's door. The other man had gone around to the rear of the van.

'If they're federal agents, there won't be any shooting,' she said. 'Not even if they want Melanie.'

'That's right,' Earl agreed. 'We'd have to give her up.'

'No,' she said, alarmed.

'Yes, I'm afraid we wouldn't have a choice. They're the law. But then at least we'd know who had her, and we could fight to get her back through the courts. But like I said, these guys might not be feds.'

'And if they're… someone else?' she asked, unable to bring herself to say 'Russians.'

'Then it might get nasty.'

His large, strong hand curled tightly around the revolver.

Laura looked past him, out the window, which was streaked and spotted from the previous night's rain.

The late-afternoon sunlight painted the street in shades of brass and copper.

Squinting, she saw one of the rear doors swing open on the phone-company van.

Dan left the pathology department but took only a few steps along the hall before a thought stopped him. He went back, opened the door, and leaned into the office as Luther looked up from the microscope again.

'Thought you had to pee,' the pathologist said. 'You've only been gone ten seconds.'

'Peed right here in the hall,' Dan said.

'Typical homicide detective.'

'Listen, Luther, you're a libertarian?'

'Well, yeah, but there's all kinds of libertarians. You've got your libertarian conservatives, your libertarian anarchists, and your basic orthodox libertarians. You've got libertarians who believe that we should—'

'Luther, look at me, and you'll see the definition of "boredom."'

'Then why'd you ask—'

'I just wanted to know if you'd ever heard of a libertarian group called Freedom Now.'

'Not that I remember.'

'It's a political-action committee.'

'Means nothing to me.'

'You're pretty active in libertarian circles, aren't you? You would have heard of Freedom Now if they were really a bunch of movers and shakers, wouldn't you?'

'Probably.'

'Ernest Andrew Cooper.'

'One of the three stiffs from Studio City,' Luther said.

'Yeah. Ever hear of him before this?'

'No.'

'You sure?'

'Yeah.'

'He's supposed to be a big wheel in libertarian circles.'

'Where?'

'Here in L.A.

'Well, he's not. Never heard of him before this.'

'You sure?'

'Of course I'm sure. Why're you acting like a homicide dick with me?'

'I am a homicide dick.'

'You're a dick, that's for sure,' Luther said, grinning. 'All the people you work with say so. Some of 'em use different words, but they all mean "dick."'

'Dick, dick, dick… are you fixated on that word or something? What's wrong with you, Luther? Are you lonely, maybe need a new boyfriend?'

The pathologist laughed. He had a hearty laugh and a smile that made you want to smile back at him. Dan couldn't figure why such a good-natured, vital, optimistic, energetic man as Luther Williams had chosen to spend his working life with corpses.

* * *

Dr. Irmatrude Gelkenshettle, chairperson of the Department of Psychology at UCLA, had a corner office with lots of windows and a view of the campus. Now, at 4:45 in the afternoon, the short winter day was already fading, casting a muddy orange light like that of a fire settling into embers. Outside, the shadows were growing longer by the minute, and students were hurrying in deference to the evening chill, which was creeping in ahead of the darkness.

Dan sat in a Danish-modern chair, while Dr. Gelkenshettle went around the desk to a spring-backed chair behind it. She was a short, stocky woman in her fifties. Her iron-gray hair was chopped without any sense of style, and although she had never been beautiful, her face was appealing and kind. She wore blue slacks and a man's white shirt, with pocket flaps and epaulets; the sleeves were rolled up, and she even wore a man's watch, a plain but dependable Timex on an expansion band. She radiated competence, efficiency, and intelligence.

Though Dan had just met her, he felt that he knew her well, for his own Aunt Kay — his adoptive mother's sister, a career military officer in the WACs — was just like this woman. Dr. Gelkenshettle obviously chose her clothes for comfort, durability, and value. She didn't scorn those who were concerned about being in fashion; it had simply never occurred to her that fashion might be a consideration when it was time to replenish her wardrobe. Just like Aunt Kay. He even knew why she wore a man's watch. Aunt Kay had one too, because the face was larger than that on a woman's watch, and the numerals were easier to read.

At first he had been taken aback by her. She hadn't been his idea of the head of a major university psychology department. But then he had noticed that on one full shelf of the bookcase behind her desk were more than twenty volumes that bore her name on their spines.

'Doctor Gelkenshettle—'

She held up a hand, interrupting him. 'The name's impossible. The only people who call me Doctor Gelkenshettle are students, those colleagues whom I loathe, my auto mechanic — because you've got to keep those guys at a distance or they'll charge you a year's salary for a tune-up — and strangers. We're strangers, or the next thing to it, but we're also professionals, so let's drop the formalities. Call me Marge.'

'Is that your middle name?'

'Unfortunately, no. But Irmatrude's as bad as Gelkenshettle, and my middle name's Heidi. Do I look like a Heidi to you?'

He smiled. 'I guess not.'

'You're damned right I don't. My parents were sweet, and they loved me, but they had a blind spot about names.'

'My name's Dan.'

'Much better. Simple. Sensible. Anyone can say Dan. Now, you wanted to talk about Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz. It's hard to believe they're dead.'

'Wouldn't be so hard if you'd seen the bodies. Tell me about Dylan first. What did you think of him?'

'I wasn't head of the department when Dylan McCaffrey was here. I only moved into the top job a little more than four years ago.'

'But you were teaching here then, doing your own research. You were on the faculty with him.'

'Yes. I didn't know him well, but I knew him well enough to know I didn't want to know him any better.'

'I understand he was very dedicated to his work. His wife — she's a psychiatrist — called him a severe obsessive-compulsive.'

'He was a nut,' Marge said.

* * *

The two new Paladin agents walked away from the suspicious telephone-company van and came directly to Laura's front door. Earl Benton let them in.

One was tall, the other short. The tall one was thin and gray-faced. The short man was slightly pudgy with freckles across the bridge of his nose and on both cheeks. They didn't want to sit down or have coffee. Earl called the short one Flash, and Laura didn't know if that was his surname or a nickname.

Flash did all the talking while the tall one stood beside him, his long face expressionless. 'They're steamed that we blew their cover,' Flash said.

'If they don't want to be made, they should be more subtle,' Earl said.

'That's what I told them,' Flash said.

'Who are they?'

'They showed us FBI credentials.'

'You wrote their names down?'

'Names and ID numbers.'

'Did the ID took real?'

'Yeah,' Flash said.

'What about the men? They seem like Bureau types to you?'

'Yeah,' Flash said. 'Sharply dressed. Very cool, soft-spoken, polite even when they were angry, but that underlying arrogance. You know how they are.'

'I know,' Earl said.

Flash said, 'We're heading back to the office, check this out, see if the Bureau employs agents with those names.'

'You'll find the names, even if these guys aren't legit,' Earl said. 'What you've got to do is get photos of the real agents and see if they look like these guys.'

'That's what we figure to do,' Flash said.

'Get back to me as soon as you can,' Earl said, and the other two turned toward the door.

Laura said, 'Wait.'

Everyone looked at her.

She said, 'What did they tell you? What reason did they give for watching my house?'

'Bureau doesn't talk about its operations unless it wants to,' Earl told Laura.

'And these guys didn't want to,' Flash said. 'They'd no sooner tell us their reasons for watching you than they'd kiss us and ask us to dance.'

The tall man nodded agreement.

Laura said, 'If they were here to protect Melanie and me, they'd tell us, wouldn't they? So that means they must be here to snatch her back.'

'Not necessarily,' Flash said.

Earl put his revolver back in his shoulder holster. 'Laura, see, the situation may be just as unclear and confusing to the Bureau as it is to us. For instance, suppose your husband was working on an important Pentagon project when he disappeared with Melanie. Suppose the FBI's been looking for him ever since. Now he turns up, dead, in peculiar circumstances. Maybe it hasn't been our government funding him these last six years, in which case they're bound to wonder where he's been getting his money.'

Again, Laura felt as if the floor were tilting under her, as if the real world that she'd always taken for granted were an illusion. It almost seemed as though true reality might be the paranoid's nightmare world of unseen enemies and complex conspiracies.

She said, 'Then you're telling me they're out in that telephone-company van, watching my house, because they think someone else may come for Melanie, and they want to nab them in the act? But I still don't understand why they didn't come to me and tell me they were going to be watching.'

'They don't trust you,' Flash said.

'They were angry with us for revealing their presence not just to anyone who might've been watching out there,' Earl said, 'but to you as well.'

Puzzled, she said, 'Why?'

Earl looked uncomfortable. 'Because, as far as they know, maybe you've always been in this thing with your husband.'

'He stole Melanie from me.'

Earl cleared his throat and looked unhappy at having to explain this to her. 'From the Bureau's point of view, could be that you let your husband take your daughter, so he'd be able to experiment on her with no notice or interference from family or friends.'

Shocked, Laura said, 'That's insane! You see what's been done to Melanie. How could I be a party to that?'

'People do strange things.'

'I love her. She's my little girl. Dylan was disturbed, maybe crazy, okay, so he was too unbalanced to see or even care how he was hurting her, destroying her. But I'm not unbalanced too! I'm not like Dylan.'

'I know,' Earl said soothingly. 'I know you're not.'

She saw belief in Earl Benton's eyes, trust and compassion, but when she looked at the other two men, she saw an element of doubt and suspicion.

They were working for her, but they didn't entirely believe that she had told them the truth.

Madness.

She was caught in a whirlpool that was carrying her down into a nightmare world of suspicion, deception, and violence, into an alien landscape where nothing was what it appeared to be.

* * *

Surprised, Dan said, 'Nut? I didn't know psychologists used words like that.'

Marge smiled ruefully. 'Oh, not in the classroom, and not in published papers, and certainly not in a courtroom if we're ever asked for testimony in a sanity hearing. But this is in the privacy of my office, just between almost-strangers, and I tell you, Dan, he was a nut. Not certifiable, mind you. Not close. But not merely eccentric, either. His primary area of research was supposed to be the development and application of behavior-modification techniques that would reform the criminal personality. But he was always off on a tangent, riding one odd hobbyhorse or another. He regularly announced a deep commitment—"obsessed" is the right word — to some new line of research, but after six months or so, he would completely lose interest in it.

'What were some of those hobbyhorses?'

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her breasts. 'For a while, he was determined to find a drug therapy that would combat nicotine addiction. Does that sound sensible to you? Help smokers get off cigarettes — by getting them onto drugs? Hell's bells. Then for a while, he claimed to be convinced that subliminal suggestion, subconscious programming, could enable us to set aside our prejudices against a belief in the supernatural and help us open our minds to psychic experiences, so we'd be able to see spirits as easily as we see one another.'

'Spirits? Are you talking about ghosts?'

'I am. Or, rather, he was.'

'I wouldn't think psychologists would believe in ghosts.'

'You're looking at one who doesn't. McCaffrey was one who did.'

'I'm remembering the books we found in his house. Some of them were about the occult.'

'Probably half his hobbyhorses dealt with that,' she said. 'One occult phenomenon or another.'

'Who would pay for this kind of research?'

'I'd have to look at the files. I imagine the occult stuff was done on his own, without funds, or by cleverly misusing funds meant for other work.'

'It's possible to misuse funds that blatantly? Isn't there some accounting required?'

'The government's relatively easy to dupe if you're dishonest. Sometimes thieves make the easiest target for another thief, because they never see themselves as being the victims, only perpetrators.'

'Who financed his primary research?'

'He got some of his money from trust funds set up by alumni for research purposes. And corporate grants, of course. And as I said, the government.'

'Mostly the government?'

'I'd say mostly.'

He frowned. 'Well, if Dylan McCaffrey was a nut, why would the government want to deal with him?'

'Oh, well, he was a nut, and his interest in the occult was as peculiar as it was exasperating, but he was brilliant. I'll give him that. With a more stable personality, his intellect would've taken him all the way. He'd have been famous in his field and maybe even to the general public.'

'Did he get Pentagon funding?'

'Yes.'

'What would he have been working on for the Pentagon?'

'Can't say. For one thing, I don't know. I could check the files, but even if I knew, I couldn't say. You don't have security clearance.'

'Fair enough. What can you tell me about Wilhelm Hoffritz?'

'He was slime.'

Dan laughed. 'Doctor… Marge, you certainly don't mince words.'

'It's only the truth. Hoffritz was an elitist son of a bitch. He wanted in the worst way to be chairman of this department. Never had a chance. Everyone knew what he'd be like if he had power over us. Vicious. Abusive. He'd have run the entire department right into the ground.'

'He was doing Defense research too?'

'Almost exclusively. Can't tell you about that, either.'

'Rumor has it that he was forced out of the university.'

'That was a banner day for UCLA.'

'Why was he gotten rid of?'

'There was this young girl, a student—'

'Ah.'

'Much worse than you think,' Marge said. 'It wasn't just moral turpitude. He wasn't the first professor to sleep with a student. Half the men on the faculty would be dismissed, and maybe as much as a fifth of the women, if that rule was well enforced. He was having sex with her, yes, but he also beat her up and put her in hospital. Their relationship was… Kinky, is a kind word for it. One night, it got out of hand.'

'Are you talking about bondage games or something?' Dan asked.

'Yes. Hoffritz was a sadist.'

'And the girl cooperated? She was a masochist?'

'Yes. But she got more than she bargained for. One night Hoffritz lost control, broke her nose, three fingers, her left arm. I went to hospital, saw her. Both eyes blackened, split lip, badly bruised.'

* * *

Laura and Earl stood at the window, watching Flash and the tall man move down the walk in the deepening twilight. The telephone-company van was only a lumpish shape, all details obscured, as the oncoming night knitted together with the shadows under the curbside jacarandas.

She said, 'FBI, huh? They won't go away?'

'No.'

'Even though I'm aware of them now.'

'Well, they're not convinced you were conspiring with your husband. In fact, that would be one of the less likely possibilities in their eyes. They still figure someone — whoever was financing Dylan's research — will come after Melanie, and they want to be here when it happens.'

'But I still need you,' she said. 'In case the FBI itself takes my daughter.'

'Yes. If that's what comes down, you'll need a witness in order to go after them in the courts.'

She went to the couch and sat on the edge, shoulders hunched, head bowed, arms propped on her thighs. 'I feel as if I'm losing my mind.'

'Everything'll work out if—'

He was interrupted by Melanie's scream.

* * *

Dan winced at Marge's description of the battered student. 'But Hoffritz has no arrest record.'

'The girl wouldn't press charges.'

'He did that to her, and she let him get away with it? Why?'

Marge got up, went to the window, and stared down at the campus. The orange light of sunset had given way to the grays and blues of twilight. A few clouds had sailed in from the sea. At last, the psychologist said, 'When we put Willy Hoffritz on suspension and started looking into his previous relationships with students, we found this girl wasn't the first. There were at least four others over the years, four that we know of all undergraduates, sexually involved with Hoffritz, all playing masochist to his sadist, although none of them had been seriously injured. Until this girl, it was always more of a nasty game than anything. Those first four were willing to talk about it when we insisted, and because of our interviews with them, we uncovered some interesting, appalling… and frightening information.'

Dan didn't press her to continue. He suspected that it was painful and humiliating for her to admit that a colleague — even one she didn't like — was capable of these things and that the academic community was no more noble than the human race at large. But she was a realist who could face up to unpleasant truths, a rare creature both in and out of academia, and she would tell him everything. She just needed to do it at her own pace.

Still facing the twilight, she said, 'None of those first four girls was promiscuous, Dan. Good kids from good families, here to obtain an education, not to escape parental authority and get some kicks. In fact, two of the four were virgins before they fell under Hoffritz's spell. And none was ever involved in sado-masochistic relationships before Hoffritz, and certainly not after. They were repulsed by the memories of what they had let him do to them.'

She fell silent again.

He decided that she wanted him to ask a question now, and he said, 'Well, if they didn't like it, why did they do it?'

'The answer to that is a bit complex.'

'I can handle it. I'm a bit complex myself.'

She turned from the window and smiled, but only briefly. What she had to tell him obviated amusement. 'We discovered that each of those four girls had been voluntarily involved in undisclosed behavior-modification experiments with Hoffritz. Those experiments included posthypnotic suggestion and a variety of ego-suppressing drugs.'

'Why would they want to get involved with something like that?'

'To please a professor, to get a good grade. Or maybe because it actually interested them. Students are sometimes interested in the things they study, even these days, even the low-caliber students we've been getting lately. And Hoffritz did have a certain charm, which was more effective with some people than others.'

'Not with you.'

'When he turned on the charm, I found him even more slimy than usual. Anyway, he was teaching these girls, and he charmed them, and you mustn't forget that he was well published and well known in his field. He had earned a certain respect.'

'And it was after these experiments started that each girl found herself sexually involved with him.'

'Yes.'

'So you think he used hypnosis, drugs, subconscious programming, to… well, to convert them?'

'To program their psychological matrices to include promiscuity and masochism. Yes. That's exactly what I think.'

* * *

Melanie's shrill scream filled the house.

Shouting her daughter's name, Laura hurried behind Earl Benton, down the hall. Revolver in hand, the bodyguard entered the child's room ahead of Laura and snapped on the light.

Melanie was alone. The menace that had elicited her screams was one that only she could see.

Dressed in white socks and the pair of white cotton underpants that she had been wearing during her nap, the child was crouched in a corner, hands held in front of her to ward off an invisible enemy, shrieking so fiercely that she must have been hurting her throat. She looked so fragile, so pitifully vulnerable.

Laura was briefly overwhelmed with loathing for Dylan. She almost sagged, almost went limp, almost crumpled under the weight of her anger.

Earl holstered his gun. He reached out to Melanie, but she struck his hands and scrambled away from him, along the baseboard.

'Melanie, honey, stop! It's all right,' Laura said.

The girl didn't heed her mother. She reached the next corner, sat down, drew her legs up, fisted her small hands, and held them up defensively. She was no longer screaming, but she made a strange, rhythmic, panicky sound: 'Uh… uh… uh… uh… uh…'

Crouching in front of her, Earl said, 'It's okay, kid.'

'Uh… uh… uh… uh…'

'It's okay now. It really is. It's okay, Melanie. I'll take care of you.'

'The d-d-door,' Melanie said. 'The door. Don't let it open!'

'It's shut,' Laura said, hurrying to her, kneeling by her. 'The door is shut and locked, honey.'

'Keep it shut!'

'Don't you remember, baby? There's a big, new, heavy lock on the door,' Laura said. 'Don't you remember?'

Earl glanced at Laura, obviously puzzled.

'The door is shut,' Laura continued. 'Locked. Sealed. Nailed shut. Nobody can open it, honey. Nobody.'

Fat tears welled in the child's eyes, spilled down her cheeks.

'I'll take care of you,' Earl said soothingly.

'Baby, you're safe here. No one can hurt you.'

Melanie sighed, and the fear ebbed out of her face.

'You're safe. Perfectly safe now.'

The girl put one pale hand to her head and began to twist a strand of hair in that absentminded way that any ordinary girl might twist her hair when preoccupied with thoughts of boys or horses or pajama parties or any of the other things that preoccupied kids her age. Indeed, after the bizarre behavior that she had displayed thus far, after alternating between extremes of hysteria and motionless catatonia, it was both moving and encouraging to see her playing with her hair, because that was such a normal act — a small thing, simple, hardly a breakthrough, not a crack in her hard autistic shield, but normal.

Seizing the moment, Laura said, 'Would you like to go to a beauty shop with me, baby? Hmmmm? You've never been to a real beauty shop. We'll go and get our hair done together. How would you like that?'

Although her eyes remained somewhat glassy, Melanie's brow furrowed, and she seemed to be considering the proposition.

'Lord knows, you need something done with your hair,' Laura said, anxiously trying to preserve the moment, expand upon it, deepen and broaden this unexpected contact with the girl inside the autistic shell. 'We'll get it cut and styled. Maybe curled. How would you like your hair curled, honey? Oh, you'd look just great with lots of curls.'

The girl's face softened, and a smile threatened to take possession of her mouth.

'And after the beauty shop, we could go shopping for clothes. How about that, honey? Lots of new dresses. Dresses and sweaters. Even one of the glitzy new jackets the kids are wearing. You'd like that, I bet.'

Melanie's unfinished smile stopped forming. Although Laura kept talking, the mood was gone as suddenly as it had come. The girl's placid expression gave way to a look of disgust, as if she had seen something in her private world that horrified and repulsed her.

Then she did a startling and disturbing thing: She struck herself with her small fists, struck hard at her knees and thighs, with a loud smacking sound, then pounded her chest—

'Melanie!'

— and swung both fists at the same time, pounding her withered biceps and her shoulders, pummeling herself fiercely, with unexpected strength and fury, trying to hurt herself.

'Stop it! Melanie!' Laura was shocked and frightened by her daughter's sudden self-destructive frenzy.

Melanie punched herself in the face.

'I got her!' Earl shouted.

The girl bit him as he tried to restrain her. She freed one hand and clawed her own chest with sufficient ferocity to draw blood.

'Jesus!' Earl said as the girl kicked him with her bare feet and twisted loose again.

* * *

Frowning at Marge, Dan said, 'Programmed them to be promiscuous and masochistic? Is that sort of thing possible?'

She nodded. 'If the psychologist has a deep and broad knowledge of modern brainwashing techniques, and if he's unscrupulous, and if he has either a willing subject or one he can physically detain and control for lengthy periods — then it's possible. But it usually takes a long time, a lot of patience and perseverance. The astonishing and frightening thing in this case is that Hoffritz seems to have been able to program these girls in a matter of weeks, after working with them only an hour or two a day, just three or four times a week. Apparently, he developed some new and damned effective methods of psychological conditioning. But with the first four, it wasn't long-lasting, never longer than a few weeks or months. Eventually, each girl's original personality resurfaced. First she felt guilty about her sexual acrobatics with Hoffritz but continued to take perverse pleasure in the humiliation and pain of her masochistic role. Then she gradually grew to fear and despise the whole sadomasochistic aspect of the relationship. Each of these kids said it was like waking from a dream when they finally began to want to be free to Hoffritz. All four girls eventually found the will to break it off.'

'Good God,' Dan said.

'I believe there is a good one, but sometimes I wonder why He lets men like Hoffritz walk the earth.'

'Why didn't these girls report him to the police… or at least to university officials?'

'They were deeply ashamed. And until we found and questioned them, they never suspected that their masochistic aberrations were Hoffritz's work. They all thought those twisted desires had been in them all along.'

'But that's amazing. They knew they were involved in behavior-modification experiments. So when they started behaving in ways they'd never behaved before—'

She held up one hand, stopping him. 'Willy Hoffritz probably implanted posthypnotic directives that inhibited each girl from considering the possibility that he was responsible for her new behavior.'

It scared Dan to think the brain was just so much Silly Putty that could be so easily manipulated.

* * *

Melanie scuttled past Earl and sprang to her feet and took two awkward steps into the middle of the bedroom, where she stopped and swayed and almost fell. She began once more to scourge herself, hammering herself as if she felt that she deserved to be punished or as if she were trying to drive some dark spirit from her traitorous flesh.

Stepping close, grunting as the small fists glanced off her, Laura threw her arms around her daughter, hugged her, trying to pin the child's arms at her sides.

When her hands were restrained, Melanie still didn't settle down. She kicked and screamed.

Earl Benton stepped in behind her, sandwiching her between him and Laura, so she couldn't move at all. She could only shout and weep and strain to break free. The three of them remained like that for a minute or two, while Laura spoke continuously and reassuringly to the girl, and finally Melanie stopped struggling. She sagged between them.

'She done?' Earl asked.

'I think so,' Laura said.

'Poor kid.'

Melanie looked exhausted.

Earl stepped back.

Docile now, Melanie allowed Laura to lead her to the bed. She sat on the edge of it.

She was still weeping.

Laura said, 'Baby? Are you all right?'

Eyes glazed, the girl said, 'It came open. It came open again, all the way open.' She shuddered in revulsion.

* * *

'The fifth girl,' Dan said. 'The one he beat up and put in hospital. What was her name?'

The stocky psychologist moved away from the twilight-darkened window, returned to her desk, and slumped in her chair as if these unpleasant memories had drained her in a way that a hard day's work never could. 'Not sure I should tell you.'

'I believe you have to.'

'Invasion of privacy and all that.'

'Police investigation and all that.'

'Doctor-patient privilege and all that,' she said.

'Oh? This fifth girl was your patient?'

'I visited her several times in the hospital.'

'Not good enough, Marge. Carefully worded, but not quite good enough. I visited my dad every day when he was in the hospital for a triple heart-bypass operation, but I don't figure a daily visit gives me the right to call myself his doctor.'

Marge sighed. 'It's just that the poor girl suffered so much, and now to dredge it all up again four years after the fact—'

'I'm not going to find her and dredge up the past in front of a new husband or her parents or anything like that,' Dan assured her. 'I may look big and dumb and crude, but actually I can be sensitive and discreet.'

'You don't look dumb or crude.'

'Thank you.'

'You do look dangerous.'

'I cultivate that image. It helps in my line of work.'

She hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged. 'Her name was Regine Savannah.'

'You're kidding.'

'Would Irmatrude Gelkenshettle kid about anyone's name?'

'Sorry.' He wrote 'Regine Savannah' in his small notebook. 'You know where she lives?'

'Well, at that time it all happened, Regine was a junior in the undergraduate program. She shared a large off-campus apartment in Westwood with three other girls. But I'm sure she's long gone from that address.'

'What happened after she got out of hospital? Did she drop out of school?'

'No. She finished her studies, took her degree, although there were those who wished she would have transferred. Some felt it was a continuing embarrassment to have her here.'

That sentiment baffled him. 'Embarrassment? I'd think everyone would've been happy that she recovered sufficiently — physically and psychologically — to go on with her life.'

'Except that she continued seeing Hoffritz.'

'What?'

'Amazing, huh?'

'She went on seeing him after he put her in hospital?'

'That's right. Worse, Regine wrote a letter to me, in my capacity as department head, defending Hoffritz.'

'Good God.'

'She wrote letters to the university president and to a few other faculty members on the review board. She did everything in her power to keep Willy Hoffritz from losing his job.'

A creepy feeling settled over Dan again. He was not, by nature, given to melodramatic action or thought, but somehow just talking about Hoffritz was beginning to make his blood run cold. If Hoffritz was able to acquire such control of Regine, what breakthroughs might he and Dylan McCaffrey have achieved once they had combined their demonic talents? For what purpose had they turned Melanie into a near vegetable?

Dan could no longer sit still. He got up. But it was a small office, and he was a big man, and there wasn't much of anywhere to pace. He just stood there by his chair, hands in his pockets, and said, 'You would think, after he beat Regine, she would have been able to break his hold on her.'

Marge shook her head. 'After Willy Hoffritz was booted off the faculty, Regine actually brought him to a number of campus functions as her escort.'

Dan gaped at her.

Marge said, 'And he was her only guest at graduation.'

'Good Lord.'

'Both of them enjoyed rubbing our faces in it.'

'The girl needed psychiatric help.'

'Yes.'

'Deprogramming.'

A sadness had taken possession of the psychologist's kind face. She took off her glasses as if they were suddenly much heavier than they had been heretofore, an unbearable weight. She rubbed her weary eyes.

Dan had a good idea how the woman felt. She was dedicated to her profession, and she was good at what she did, and she maintained high personal standards. She had scruples and ideals. With her well-developed conscience, she must believe that a man like Hoffritz was a discredit not only to the profession but to all of those who were his associates.

She said, 'We tried to see that Regine got the help she needed. But she refused it.'

Outside, sodium-vapor lights had come on, but they could not hold back the night.

Dan said, 'Evidently, then, the reason Regine didn't turn against Hoffritz was because she liked the beating he'd given her.'

'Evidently.'

'He had programmed her to like it.'

'Evidently.'

'He'd learned from those first four girls.'

'Yes.'

'He'd lost control of them, but he'd learned from his mistakes. By the time he'd gotten to Regine, he'd learned how to keep an iron grip.' Dan had to move, work off some energy. He took five steps to the bookshelves, returned to his chair and put his hands on the back of it. 'I'll never be able to hear the words "behavior modification" without getting sick to my stomach.'

Defensively, Marge said, 'It's a justifiable area of research, a reputable branch of psychology. Behavior modification can help us find ways to teach children more easily and make them retain what they learn far longer than they do now. It can help us reduce the crime rate, heal the sick, and perhaps even create a more peaceful world.'

As Dan grew increasingly eager for action, Marge seemed, by contrast, to seek relief in lethargy. She slumped down even farther in her chair. She was a take-charge kind of person, the sturdy type who was confident of dealing with anything, but she could not deal with inexplicably monstrous men like Hoffritz. And when she was confronted with something that she could not grasp and control, she looked less like a career WAC and more like a grandmother in need of a rocking chair and a cup of tea and honey. Dan liked her even more because of that vulnerability.

Her voice was tired: 'Behavior modification and brainwashing aren't the same thing at all. Brainwashing is a bastard offshoot of behavior modification, a twisted perversion of it, just as Hoffritz was not an ordinary man or an ordinary scientist but a perversion of both.'

'Was Regine still with him?'

'I don't know. The last I saw of her was more than two years ago, and she was with him then.'

'If she wouldn't drop him after the beating, then I suppose nothing he did would cause her to leave. So she's probably still been seeing him.'

'Unless he got tired of her,' Marge said.

'From what I've heard of him, he'd never get tired of someone he could dominate and terrify.'

Marge nodded grimly.

Checking his watch, anxious to get away now, Dan said, 'You told me Dylan McCaffrey was brilliant, a genius. Would you say the same of Hoffritz?'

'Probably. In fact, yes. But his genius was a darker variety, twisted, bent.'

'So was McCaffrey's.'

'Not half as twisted as Hoffritz,' she said.

'But if they started working together, with substantial — maybe even unlimited — funding, with a human subject, with absolutely no legal or moral restrictions, they would be a dangerous combination, wouldn't they?'

'Yes,' she said. A pause. 'Unholy.'

The word—'unholy'—seemed like uncharacteristic hyperbole, coming from Marge, but Dan was sure that she had chosen it carefully.

'Unholy,' she repeated, leaving him without a doubt as to the depth of her concern.

* * *

In the hall bathroom, with some iodine and a Big Patch Band-Aid, Laura was able to take care of the small wound on Earl Benton's hand, where Melanie had bitten him during their struggle.

'It's nothing,' he assured Laura. 'Don't worry about it.'

Melanie was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, staring at the green-tiled wall. She couldn't have been more unlike the hellion who had lashed out at them in the bedroom a few minutes ago.

'A human bite is more likely to become infected than that from a dog or cat or virtually any other animal,' Laura said.

'You soaked it good with the iodine, and there's hardly any bleeding. Just a shallow bite. Doesn't even hurt,' he said, though she knew it must sting at least slightly.

'Had a tetanus shot lately?' Laura asked.

'Yeah. I was doing skip-tracing work last month. One of the guys I tracked down took exception to being found, pulled a knife on me. He didn't do much damage. Took about seven stitches to close it. That's when I had the tetanus booster. Real recent.'

'I'm so sorry about this.'

'You already said.'

'Well, I am.'

'Listen, I know the girl didn't mean it. Besides, it's part of the job.'

Laura crouched in front of Melanie and examined the redness on the child's left cheek. It marked the spot where she had punched herself in the midst of her frenzy. It would develop into a bruise, given time. At the open neck of her blouse, scratches showed on her throat and chest, where she had clawed herself. Her lip was still puffy and sore-looking, where she'd bitten it this afternoon at the end of their hypnotic-therapy session.

Dry-mouthed with fear and worry Laura said to Earl, 'How can we possibly protect her? It's not just some faceless enemy out there that wants to get at her. It's not just government agents or Russian spies. She wants to hurt herself too. How can we protect her from herself?'

'Somebody's got to stay with her, watch her every minute.'

Laura put a hand under her daughter's chin, turned her head so their eyes met. 'This is too much, baby. Mommy can try to deal with the bad men out there who want to get their hands on you. And Mommy can try to deal with your condition, help you come out of this. But now… this is just too much. Why do you want to hurt yourself, baby? Why?'

Melanie stirred, as if she desperately wanted to answer but as if someone were restraining her. Her stricken mouth twisted, worked, but soundlessly. She shuddered, shook her head, groaned softly.

Laura's heart literally ached as she watched her pale and slender daughter struggle unsuccessfully to cast off the shackles of autism.

Ned Rink, the ex-cop and former agent for the FBI, who had been found dead in his car in the hospital parking lot earlier in the day, owned a small, tidy, desert-style ranch house on the edge of Van Nuys. Dan drove there straight from his meeting with Marge Gelkenshettle. It was a low house with a flat roof that was covered with white stones, set in the middle of a particularly flat part of the San Fernando Valley, on a flat street of other low, flat houses. The shrubbery — with typical southern California, chlorophyllic exuberance — was the only thing that relieved the harsh geometry of the house and the monotonous tract around it, both of which clearly dated from the late 1950s.

The house was dark. The streetlight in front of the place had a dirty globe and didn't illuminate much. Blank black windows and patches of pale-yellow stucco walls could be glimpsed between the shadowy forms of neatly shaped plum-thorn bushes, five-foot-high hibiscus, miniature orange trees, full-size date palms, and sections of a lantana hedge.

Cars were parked along one side of the narrow street. Even though the unmarked police sedan was nestled in darkness, midway between two streetlights, under an immense overhanging laurel, Dan spotted it at once. One man sat in the nondescript Ford, behind the wheel, slumped down, watching the Rink house, barely visible.

Dan drove past the house, circled the block, returned, and parked half a block behind the department sedan. He got out of his car and walked to the Ford. The driver's window was half open. Dan peered inside.

The plainclothes cop on the surveillance detail was an East Valley Division detective, and Dan knew him. His name was George Padrakis, and he looked like that singer from the '50s and '60s, Perry Como.

Padrakis rolled the half-open window all the way down and said, 'Are you here to relieve me, or what?' He sounded like Perry Como too: His voice was soft, mellow, and sleepy. He consulted his wristwatch. 'Nope, I still have a couple hours to go. It's too early to relieve me.'

'I'm just here to have a look inside,' Dan said.

Head twisted sideways to stare up at Dan, Padrakis said, 'This your case, huh?'

'It's my case.'

'Wexlersh and Manuello already tossed the place earlier.'

Wexlersh and Manuello were Ross Mondale's right-hand men in the East Valley Division, two career-conscious detectives who had hitched their wagons to his train and were willing to do anything for him, including bend the law now and then. They were toadies, and Dan couldn't stand them.

'They on this case too?' Dan asked.

'Didn't think you had it all to yourself, did you? Too big for that. Four dead altogether. One of them a Hancock Park millionaire. Too big for the Lone Ranger approach.'

'What've they got you out here for?' Dan asked, squatting so he was face-to-face with Padrakis.

'Beats me. I guess they figure there might be something in Rink's house that'll tell them who he was working for, and maybe whoever hired him will know it's in there and will come here to get rid of the evidence.'

'At which time you nab them.'

'Ridiculous, ain't it?' Padrakis said sleepily.

'Whose idea was this?'

'Whose do you think?'

'Mondale,' Dan said.

'You win your choice of the stuffed animals.'

The chilly breeze suddenly became a chillier wind, rustling the leaves of the laurel overhead.

'You must've been working around the clock if you were at that house in Studio City last night,' Padrakis said.

'Pretty nearly around the clock.

'So what're you doing here?'

'Heard there was free popcorn.'

'You should be home, having a beer, your feet up. That's where I'd be.'

'I'm out of beer. Besides, I'm dedicated,' Dan said. 'They leave you with a key, George?'

'You're a workaholic, from what I hear.'

'You going to psychoanalyze me first, or can you tell me did they leave you with a key?'

'Yeah. But I don't know I should let you have it.'

'It's my case.'

'But the place has already been tossed.'

'Not by me.'

'Wexlersh and Manuello.'

'Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Come on, George, why're you being such a pain in the ass?'

Reluctantly, Padrakis fumbled in a coat pocket for the key to Ned Rink's house. 'From what I hear, Mondale wants to talk to you real bad.'

Dan nodded. 'That's because I'm a brilliant conversationalist. You should hear me discuss ballet.'

Padrakis found the key but didn't hand it over right away. 'He's been trying to track you down all day.'

'And he calls himself a detective?' Dan said, holding his hand out for the key.

'He's been looking for you all day, and then you waltz in here instead of going back to the station like you promised him, and I just give you the key… he won't be happy about that.'

Dan sighed. 'You think he'll be any happier if you refuse to give me the key and then I have to go smash a window to get in that house?'

'You wouldn't.'

'Pick a window.'

'This is stupid.'

'Any window.'

Finally, Padrakis gave him the key. Dan went down the sidewalk, through the gate, to the front door, favoring his weak knee. They must be in for more rain; the knee knew. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.

He was in a tiny foyer. The living room on his right was dark except for the pale-grayish glow that came through the windows from the distant streetlights. To his left, back through a narrow hall, a lamp was on in a bedroom or study. It hadn't been visible from the street. Wexlersh and Manuello had apparently forgotten to switch it off when they'd finished, which was just like them: They were sloppy.

He snapped on the hall light, stepped into the darkness on his right, found a lamp, and had a look at the living room first. It was startling. This was a modest house in a modest neighborhood, but it was furnished as though it served as a secret retreat for one of the Rockefellers. The centerpiece of the living room was a gorgeous, twelve-foot-by-twelve foot, three-inch-deep Chinese carpet with a pattern of dragons and cherry blossoms. There were midnineteenthcentury French chairs with hand-carved legs and feet, a matching sofa upholstered in a lush off-white fabric that exactly matched the color of the unpatterned sections of the carpet. Two bronze lamps with intricately worked bases had shades of crystal beads. The large coffee table was unlike anything Dan had seen before: It seemed to be entirely bronze and pewter, with a superbly etched Oriental scene on the top; the upper surface curved around to form the sides, and the sides curved under to form the legs, so that the entire piece seemed fashioned from a single flowing slab. On the walls, the landscape paintings, each ornately framed, looked like the work of a master. In the farthest corner, a period French йtagиre held a collection of crystal — figures, vases, bowls — and each piece was more beautiful than the one before it.

The living-room furnishings alone had cost more than the entire modest house. Clearly, Ned Rink had been making a good living as a hired murderer. And he knew just where to put his money. If he had bought a big house in the best neighborhood, the IRS might eventually have noticed and asked how he could afford it, but here he could appear to be in modest circumstances while living in splendor.

Dan tried to picture Rink in this room. The man had been squat and decidedly ugly. Rink's desire to surround himself with beautiful things was understandable, but sitting here, he would have looked like a roach on a birthday cake.

Dan noticed there were no mirrors in the living room, remembered there had been none in the foyer, and suspected there would be none anywhere in the house except, of necessity, in the bathroom. He almost felt sorry for Rink, the lover of beauty who couldn't stand to look at himself.

Fascinated, he went back down the hall to have a look at the rest of the place, heading first for the room where Wexlersh and Manuello had left a light burning. As he stepped through the door, it suddenly occurred to him that maybe the light couldn't be blamed on Wexlersh and Manuello, that maybe someone else was in the house right now, that maybe someone was there illegally in spite of the fact that George Padrakis was watching the front entrance, and at the same time he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye as he went through the doorway, but it was too late. He turned and saw the butt of a pistol swinging at him. Because he turned into the blow, he took it square on the forehead instead of alongside his skull.

He went down.

Hard.

The overhead light went out.

He felt as if his skull had been half crushed, but he wasn't unconscious.

Hearing movement, he realized his assailant was stepping past him toward the door. There was light in the hall, but Dan's vision was blurred, and all he could see was a shapeless form silhouetted by the glow. That silhouette seemed to be gliding up and down and going around in circles at the same time, like a figure on a carousel, and Dan knew his grip on consciousness was tenuous.

Nevertheless, he heaved forward on the floor, gasping as the pain in his head lanced all the way down into his shoulders and back, and he grabbed tenaciously at the fleeing phantom. He caught a fistful of material, a leg of the man's trousers, and jerked as hard as he could.

The stranger staggered, collided with the door frame, and said, 'Shit!'

Dan held on.

Cursing, the intruder kicked him in the shoulder.

Then again.

Dan had both hands on the guy's leg now and was trying to pull him down on the floor, where they would be more evenly matched, but the guy was holding on to the door frame and trying to shake him loose. He felt as though he were a dog attacking a mailman.

The intruder kicked him again, in the right arm this time, and his right hand went numb. He lost half his grip on the perp's leg. His vision blurred further, and the light seemed to dim. His eyes stung. He gritted his teeth as if to bite into consciousness and hold on to it with his jaws.

The stranger, still a black shape against the vague hall light, bent toward him and clubbed him again with the butt of the gun. On the shoulder this time. Then in the middle of his back. Then in the shoulder again.

Blinking, fighting to clear his burning eyes, Dan let go of the guy's leg but whipped his good left hand up and tried to grab the bastard's throat or face. He got hold of an ear and tore at it.

The stranger squealed.

Dan's hand slipped off the blood-slick ear, but he hooked his fingers in the perp's shirt collar.

The intruder hammered Dan's arm, trying to make him let go.

Dan held fast.

Some of the numbness seeped out of his right arm, and he was able to push himself up with that hand while he pulled himself up with the hand that was hooked in his adversary's shirt. Onto his knees. Then one foot on the floor. Thrusting up, shoving the guy backward. Into the hall. They staggered two or three steps, turning as they moved, like a pair of clumsy dancers. They crashed to the floor, both of them this time.

He was right on top of the guy now, but he still couldn't see what his adversary looked like. His vision wouldn't clear, and the hall light was still dimmer than it should have been. His eyes burned as if acid had gotten into them, and he figured it must be sweat and blood pouring down from the gash in his forehead.

He reached inside his coat and pulled his.38 Police Special out of his shoulder holster, but he couldn't see the other guy swinging at his hand and couldn't duck the blow that came. Something hard whacked his knuckles, and the gun flew out of his grasp.

Grappling, they rolled against the wall, and Dan tried to drive his good knee into the stranger's crotch, but the bastard blocked him. Worse, the guy either kicked or struck Dan's other knee, the bum knee, which was his weak spot. A reptile-quick flash of pain slithered up his thigh and chased its tail around and around in his stomach. Being hit on that knee could sometimes be like taking a kick in the balls; it knocked all the wind out of him, and he almost let go.

Almost.

The guy clambered over him and tried to scramble away, toward the kitchen, but Dan held on to the scumbag's jacket. The perp crawled, and Dan half crawled and was half dragged along behind him.

It might have been funny if they hadn't both been hurting and breathing like well-run horses. And if they hadn't been deadly serious.

Vision swimming and dimming, Dan launched himself forward in one last desperate effort, trying to lever himself on top of the intruder and pin him. But the perp apparently decided that the best defense was a good offense, so he stopped trying to get away and turned back on Dan, cursing so hard he sprayed spittle, pounding and flailing with what felt like four or five arms. They rolled back down the hall a few feet before finally coming to a stop with the intruder on top.

Something cold and hard poked against Dan's teeth. He knew what it was. The barrel of a gun.

'Stop this crap now!' the stranger said.

With the muzzle vibrating against his teeth, Dan said, 'If you were gonna kill me, you'd have done it already.'

'Push your luck,' the intruder said, and he sounded just angry enough to pull the trigger whether he wanted to or not. Blinking furiously, Dan cleared his vision slightly, not much, just enough so he could see the weapon, blurry, huge as a cannon, jammed into his face. He saw the man beyond the piece too, although not distinctly. The ceiling light in the hall was above and behind the son of a bitch, so his face was still pretty much in shadows. His left ear hung in an odd way, dripping blood.

Dan realized that his own eyelashes were gummed with blood. Blood was still seeping into his eyes along with copious streams of salty sweat, which was half the reason he couldn't clear them.

He stopped struggling.

'Let go… you… bulldog… bastard!' the intruder said, kneeling on top of him, heaving each word out with a new breath, as if the words were lead ingots that had to be cast off with great effort.

'Okay,' Dan said, letting go of him.

'You crazy, man?'

'All right,' Dan said.

'You half tore my fuckin' ear off!'

'All right, okay,' Dan said.

'Don't you know when you're supposed to stay down, you stupid son of a bitch?'

'Now?'

'Yeah, now!'

'Okay.'

'Stay down!'

'All right.'

The intruder eased back, still pointing the gun at him but no longer holding it against his teeth. He studied Dan warily for a moment, then stood up. Shakily.

Now Dan could see him better, but it didn't much matter, because it was no one he remembered seeing before.

The guy backed off, toward the kitchen. He held the gun with one hand and his bleeding ear with the other. Defenseless, not daring to move lest he be shot, Dan lay on his back on the hall floor, head raised, blood trickling into his eyes, smelling blood, tasting blood, heart hammering, wanting to go for it, wanting to rush the bastard in spite of the gun, having to control himself, able to do nothing but just watch the guy escape. It made him mad as hell.

The perp reached the kitchen. The back of the house was open, and he reversed through it, hesitated, then ran.

Dan scrambled after his own piece, which was on the floor by the doorway of the room where he'd been ambushed. He snatched up the revolver, heaved and stumbled to his feet, cried out as a grenade of pain went off in his bum knee, somehow shoved the pain down into a little box in his mind and clamped a lid on it, and plunged toward the kitchen.

By the time he reached the back door and stepped out into the cool night air, the intruder was gone. He had no way of knowing which side of the redwood fence the perp had jumped.

* * *

Dan washed his face in Rink's bathroom. His forehead was bruised and abraded,

His vision had drifted back into focus and had locked there. Although his head felt as though it had been used as a blacksmith's forge, he knew he wasn't suffering from concussion.

His head was not the only thing that ached. His neck, his shoulders, his back, and his left knee throbbed.

In the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink, he found a package of gauze, made a compress out of it, and set it aside. He discovered some Bactine too, and he sprayed the scraped flesh of his forehead, blotted it gingerly, sprayed it again. He picked up the gauze compress and held it firmly against his forehead with his right hand, hoping to stop the bleeding altogether, while he prowled around the house.

He went to the room where he had been ambushed, and he switched on the light. It was a study, less elegantly but just as expensively furnished as the living room. One entire wall of bookshelves was built around a television and VCR. Half the shelves were used for books; the other half were filled with videotapes.

He looked at the tapes first and saw some familiar motion-picture titles: Silver Streak, Arthur, all the Abbott-and-Costello pictures, Tootsie, The Goodbye Girl, Groundhog Day, Foul Play, Mrs. Doubtfire, several Charlie Chaplin films, two Marx Brothers pictures. All the legit movies were comedies, and it figured a professional hit man might need to laugh a little when he came home from a hard day of blowing people's brains out. But most of the movies weren't legit. Most of them were pornographic, with titles like Debbie Does Dallas and The Sperminator. There must have been two to three hundred porno titles.

The books were of more interest because that was what the intruder apparently had been after. A cardboard carton stood on the floor in front of the bookcases; several volumes had been plucked off the shelves and piled in the box. First, Dan examined the collection and saw that every one of the books was a nonfiction study of one branch of the occult or another. Then, still holding the gauze to his forehead with one hand, he pawed through the seven volumes in the carton and saw they were all by the same author, Albert Uhlander.

Uhlander?

He reached into an inner jacket pocket and pulled out the small address book that he had taken from the Studio City house last night, from Dylan McCaffrey's wrecked office. He paged to the U listings and found only one.

Uhlander.

McCaffrey, who was interested in the occult, had known Uhlander. Rink, who was interested in the occult, had at least read Uhlander; maybe he had known Uhlander too. This was a link between McCaffrey and Ned Rink. But were they on the same side, or were they enemies? And what did the occult have to do with this?

His thoughts were spinning, and not merely because he had been clubbed on the forehead.

Anyway, Uhlander was evidently a key to understanding what was going on. Apparently, the intruder had broken in there only to remove those books from the house, to conceal the Uhlander connection.

Pressing the gauze to his forehead, Dan left the study. Like an electric current, the pain seemed to pass through the gauze, into his hand, up his arm, into his right shoulder, down to the middle of his back, up to his left shoulder, into his neck, along the side of his face, completing the circuit by returning to his forehead, starting all over again.

Favoring his left knee, sorting through things with one hand, feeling like a big crippled bug, he searched the place perfunctorily and found nothing more of interest. Rink was a hit man, and hit men didn't assist police investigations by keeping handy little address books and paper records of their affairs.

In the bathroom again, he removed the compress and saw that the superficial bleeding had, indeed, finally stopped.

He looked like hell. But that was fitting, because he felt like hell too.

When Dan limped out to the curb, carrying the small box of books, George Padrakis was still behind the wheel of the unmarked sedan, sitting in darkness, his window half open. He cranked it all the way down when he saw Dan.

'I was just on the squawk-box. Mondale wants… Hey, what happened to your forehead?'

Dan told him about the intruder.

Padrakis opened the door and got out of the car. He looked and sounded like Perry Como, and he moved like him too: lazily, casually, with unconscious grace. He was even casual as he reached inside his coat and drew his revolver.

'The guy's gone,' Dan said as Padrakis took a step toward Rink's house. 'Long gone.'

'But how'd he get in there?'

'Through the back.'

'This street's been quiet, and I had my window down,' Padrakis protested. 'I'd have heard breaking glass, anything like that.'

'I didn't find a broken window,' Dan said. 'I think he came in by the kitchen door, probably with a key.'

'Well, hell, then they can't blame it on me,' Padrakis said, holstering his revolver. 'I can't be two places at once. They want to watch the back of the house too, they should have put two men on the place. You get a good look at the joker who jumped you?'

'Not real good.' Dan returned the key Padrakis had given him. 'But if you see a guy with a badly mangled ear, that's him.'

'Ear?'

'I nearly tore his ear off.'

'Why'd you do that?'

'For one thing, because he was trying to bash my brains in,' Dan said impatiently. 'Besides, I'm sort of like a matador. I always try to take a trophy home with me, and this guy didn't have a tail.'

Padrakis looked baffled.

A gigantic motor home turned the corner, engine roaring, and lumbered down the block, like a dinosaur.

Frowning at the box in Dan's hands, Padrakis raised his voice above the shrieking engine of the nature lovers' vehicle. 'What's that you've got there?'

'Books.'

'Books?'

'Assembled sheets of paper with words on them, for the purpose of conveying information or providing entertainment. Now what about the squawk-box? What's Mondale,want?'

'You taking those books with you?'

'That's right.'

'Don't know if you can do that.'

'Don't worry. I can manage. They aren't that heavy.'

'That's not what I mean.'

'What's Mondale want?'

Staring unhappily at the box in Dan's arms, Padrakis waited until the motor home had passed like a brontosaurus making its way through a primeval swamp. Its wake of cold air and exhaust fumes washed over them.

'I called in to let Mondale know you were here.'

'How thoughtful of you, George.'

'He was about to head over to the Sign of the Pentagram on Ventura.'

'Good for him.'

'He really wants you to meet him there.'

'What the hell's the Sign of the Pentagram? Sounds like a bar where werewolves hang out.'

'I think it's a bookstore or something,' Padrakis said, still frowning at the box of books. 'Guy's been killed over there.'

'What guy?'

'The owner, I think. Name's Scaldone. Mondale says it's like the bodies in Studio City.'

'There goes dinner,' Dan said. He headed along the sidewalk, through alternating pools of purple-black shadows and wan amber light, toward his own car.

Padrakis followed him. 'Hey, about those books—'

'Do you read, George?'

'They're the property of the deceased—'

'Nothing like curling up with a good book, though they're not nearly so entertaining when you're deceased.'

'And this isn't like a crime scene where we can just cart away anything that might be evidence.'

Dan balanced the box on the bumper of his car, unlocked the trunk, put the box inside, and said, '"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." Mark Twain said that, George.'

'Listen, until a member of his family has been located and gives approval, I really don't think you should—'

Slamming the lid of the trunk, Dan said, '"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island." Walt Disney. He was right, George. You should read more.'

'But—'

'"Books are not merely lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves." Gilbert Highet.' He clapped George Padrakis on the shoulder. 'Expand your narrow existence, George. Bring color to this drab life as a detective. Read, George, read!'

'But—'

Dan got in the car, closed the door, and started the engine. Padrakis frowned at him through the window.

Dan waved as he drove away.

After he turned the corner and went a couple of blocks, he pulled the car to the curb. He got out Dylan McCaffrey's address book. Under the S listings, he found a Joseph Scaldone, followed by the word 'Pentagram,' a phone number, and an address on Ventura.

Almost certainly, the murders in Studio City, the death of Ned Rink, and now the Scaldone killing were linked. It was looking more and more as if someone out there was desperately trying to cover up a bizarre conspiracy by eliminating everybody involved in it. Sooner or later, they would either eliminate Melanie McCaffrey as well — or snatch her away from her mother. And if those faceless enemies got hold of the girl again, she would vanish forever; she would not be fortunate enough to be saved a second time.

* * *

At 7:05, Laura was in the kitchen, preparing dinner for herself, Melanie, and Earl. A big pot of water was working up to a boil on the stove, and a smaller pot of spaghetti sauce and meatballs was also heating. The room was filled with mouthwatering fragrances: garlic, onions, tomatoes, basil, and cheese. Laura rinsed off some black olives and added them to a big bowl of salad.

Melanie sat at the table, silent, unmoving, staring down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Her eyes were closed. She might have been asleep. Or perhaps she was just withdrawn farther than usual into her secret, private world.

That was the first meal Laura had made for her daughter in six years, and even Melanie's depressing condition could not entirely spoil the moment. Laura felt maternal and domestic. It had been a long time since she had experienced either of those feelings, and she had forgotten that being a mother could be as satisfying as anything that she accomplished in her profession.

Earl Benton had prepared the table with plates, glasses, silverware, and napkins. Now he sat across the table from Melanie, in his shirtsleeves — and shoulder holster — reading the newspaper. When he came across something surprising or shocking or funny in a gossip column, Dear Abby, or Miss Manners, he would read it aloud to Laura.

Pepper, the calico cat, was curled comfortably in the corner by the refrigerator, lulled by the humming and the vibrations of the motor. She knew that she wasn't allowed on kitchen counters or tables, and she usually kept a low profile while in the room, to avoid being chased out altogether. Abruptly, however, the cat shrieked and popped onto her feet. Her back arched. Her fur bristled. She was wild-eyed, and she spat angrily.

Putting down the newspaper, Earl said, 'What's wrong, puss?'

Laura turned from the cutting board where she was making the salad.

Pepper was alarmingly agitated. The calico's ears were flat against her skull, and her lips were drawn back in a snarl, fangs revealed.

'Pepper, what's wrong with you?'

The cat's eyes seemed to bulge in terror from its head and fixed for an instant on Laura. There was nothing of the domestic pet in those eyes, nothing but sheer wildness.

'Pepper…?'

The calico bolted out of the corner, squealing in fear or rage or both. She dashed toward a row of cabinets but suddenly wheeled away from them as though she'd seen something monstrous. She streaked toward the sink instead, then shrieked and abruptly changed direction again, claws ticking and scraping on the tile. She chased her own tail for half a dozen revolutions, spitting, and snapping her jaws, then leaped straight into the air as if she'd been stung or swatted. Slashing at the air with her claws, she pranced and twisted on her hind paws in a weird Saint Vitus's dance, came down on all fours, and was moving even as her forepaws touched the tile. She flashed under the table as if running for her life, between the chairs, out the kitchen door, into the dining room. Gone.

It had been an incredible display. Laura had never seen anything quite like it.

Melanie had been unaffected by the cat's performance. She still sat with her hands in her lap, head bowed, eyes closed. Earl had dropped the newspaper and had risen from his chair. In another part of the house, Pepper let out one last miserable cry. Then silence.

* * *

The Sign of the Pentagram was a little shop in a bustling block that was the very essence of Southern California hopes and dreams. Photographs of this portion of Ventura Boulevard could have been used in a dictionary as the sole definition of 'bootstrap capitalism.' One small store or restaurant shouldered up against another, block after block of enterprises owned and managed by entrepreneurs of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, and there was something for every interest and taste, both the exotic and the mundane: a Korean restaurant with maybe fifteen tables; a feminist bookshop; a purveyor of handmade knives; something called the Gay Resource Center; a dry cleaner and a party-supply store and a frame shop and a couple of delis and an appliance store; a bookstore that sold only fantasy and science fiction; Ching Brothers Finance, 'Loans to the Reliable'; a tiny restaurant offering 'Americanized Nigerian cuisine' and another specializing in 'chinois, French-Chinese cooking'; a merchant who sold military paraphernalia of all kinds, although not weapons. Some of these entrepreneurs were getting rich, and some never would, but all of them had dreams, and it seemed to Dan that, in the early evening darkness, Ventura Boulevard was nearly as well lighted by hope as it was by streetlamps.

He parked almost a block from the Sign of the Pentagram and walked past the Eyewitness News van, similar vehicles from the news departments of KNBC and KTLA, marked and unmarked police cars, and a coroner's wagon. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, including curious locals, punk and gangsta-rap kids who wanted to look like street people but probably lived with their parents in three-hundred-thousand-dollar Valley homes, and sensation-hungry media people with the quick-eyed look that always made them seem (to Dan) like jackals. He pushed through the crowd, saw the beat man from the Los Angeles Times, and tried to stay out of the range of the active minicam in front of which a reporter and his crew were filming a segment for the eleven o'clock news on Channel Four. Dan edged past a teenage girl with blue-and-green-striped hair twisted into punk spikes; she was wearing knee-high black boots, a minuscule red skirt, and a white sweater with a bizarre pattern of dead babies. The entire front of the shop was covered with amateurishly painted but colorful occult and astrological symbols, and a uniformed LAPD officer was standing directly under a faded red pentagram, guarding the entrance. Dan flashed his badge and went inside.

The extent of the wreckage was familiar. The berserk giant who had smashed his way through that house in Studio City last night had come down his beanstalk again and had stomped through this shop as well. The electronic cash register looked as if someone had slammed a sledgehammer into it; somehow, a current of life remained in its battered circuitry, and one red number flickered in its cracked digital readout window, an inconstant 6, which seemed analogous to a dying victim's last word, as if the cash register were trying to tell the cops something about its killer. Some of the bookshelves were splintered, and all the volumes were on the floor in mangled heaps of rumpled dust jackets and bent covers and torn pages. But books hadn't been the only merchandise offered by the Sign of the Pentagram, and the floor was also littered with candles of all shapes and sizes and colors, Tarot decks, broken Ouija boards, a couple of stuffed owls, totems, tikis, and hundreds of exotic powders and oils. The place smelled of attar of roses, strawberry incense, and death.

Detectives Wexlersh and Manuello were among the cops and SID technicians in the shop, and they spotted Dan as soon as he entered. They headed toward him, wading through the debris. Their icy smiles were identical, with no humor in either of them. They were a couple of land sharks, as cold-blooded and predatory as any real sharks in any sea.

Wexlersh was short with pale-gray eyes and a waxy white face that seemed out of place in California even in winter. He said, 'What happened to your head?'

'Walked into a low tree branch,' Dan said.

'Looks more like you were beating up some poor innocent suspect, violating his civil rights, and the poor innocent suspect was foolish enough to resist.'

'Is that how you handle suspects in the East Valley Division?'

'Or maybe it was a hooker who wouldn't come across with a free sample just 'cause you flashed your badge at her,' Wexlersh said, grinning broadly.

'You shouldn't try to be amusing, Dan told him. 'You have about as much wit as a toilet seat.'

Wexlersh continued to smile, but his gray eyes were mean. 'Haldane, what kind of maniac you think we have on our hands here?'

Manuello, in spite of his name, was not Hispanic in appearance, but tall and blond and square-featured, with a Kirk Douglas dimple in the center of his chin. He said, 'Yeah, Haldane, share with us the wisdom of your experience.

And Wexlersh said, 'Yeah. You're the lieutenant. We're just lowly detectives, first-grade.'

'Yes, please, we await your observations and your profound insights into this most heinous crime,' Manuello said mockingly. 'We are breathless with anticipation.'

Although Dan was a superior officer, they could get away with this sort of petty insubordination because they were from the East Valley Division, not Central, where Dan usually worked, and most of all because they were Ross Mondale's pets and knew the captain would protect them.

Dan said, 'You know, you two made the wrong career decision. I'm sure you'd be much happier breaking the law than enforcing it.'

'But really, now, Lieutenant,' said Wexlersh, 'you must have some theories by this time. What sort of maniac would go around beating people into piles of strawberry preserves?'

'For that matter,' Manuello said, 'what sort of maniac was this particular victim?'

'Joseph Scaldone?' Dan said. 'He ran this place, right? What do you mean he was a maniac?'

'Well,' Wexlersh said, 'he sure to God wasn't your ordinary businessman.'

'Don't think they'd have wanted him in the Chamber of Commerce,' Manuello said.

'Or the Better Business Bureau,' Wexlersh said.

'A definite lunatic,' Manuello said.

'What are you two babbling about?' Dan asked.

Manuello said, 'Don't you think it'd take a lunatic to run a shop'—and he reached into a coat pocket, withdrew a small bottle the same size and shape as those that olives often came in—'a shop selling stuff like this.'

At first the bottle did, indeed, appear to contain small olives, but then Dan realized they were eyeballs. Not human eyes. Smaller than that. And strange. Some had yellow irises, some green, some orange, some red, but although they differed in color, they all had approximately the same shape: They were not round irises, as in human and most animal eyes, but oblong, elliptical, supremely wicked.

'Snake eyes,' Manuello said, showing him the label.

'And how about this?' Wexlersh said, taking a bottle from his jacket pocket.

This one was filled with a grayish powder. The neatly typed label read BAT GUANO.

'Bat shit,' Wexlersh said.

'Powdered bat shit,' Manuello said, 'snake eyes, tongues of salamanders, necklaces of garlic, vials of bull blood, magic charms, hexes, and all sorts of other weird crap. What kind of people come in here and buy this stuff, Lieutenant?'

'Witches,' Wexlersh said before Dan could speak.

'People who think they're witches,' Manuello said.

'Warlocks,' Wexlersh said.

'People who think they're warlocks.'

'Weird people,' Wexlersh said.

'Maniacs,' Manuello said.

'But this place, it accepts Visa and MasterCard,' said Wexlersh. 'With, of course, acceptable ID.'

Manuello said, 'Yeah, these days, warlocks and maniacs have MasterCard. Isn't that amazing?'

'They pay off their bat-shit and snake-eye bills in twelve easy installments,' Wexlersh said.

'Where's the victim?' Dan asked.

Wexlersh jerked a thumb toward the rear of the shop. 'He's back there, auditioning for a major role in a sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'

'Hope you guys at Central have strong stomachs,' Manuello said as Dan headed toward the back of the store.

'Don't barf in here,' Wexlersh said.

'Yeah, no judge is going to allow evidence into court if some cop barfed on it,' Manuello said.

Dan ignored them. If he felt like barfing, he'd be sure to do it on Wexlersh and Manuello.

He stepped over a heap of mangled books that were saturated with spilled jasmine oil, and he moved toward the assistant medical examiner who was crouched over a shapeless crimson thing that was the last of Joseph Scaldone.

* * *

Working on the theory that the calico cat might have detected a stealthy sound too soft to be detected by human hearing and might have been frightened by the presence of an intruder in another part of the house, Earl Benton went from room to room, checking windows and doors. He searched in closets and behind the larger pieces of furniture. But the house was secure.

He found Pepper in the living room, no longer frightened but wary. The cat was lying on top of the television. She allowed herself to be petted, and she began to purr.

'What got into you, puss?' he asked.

After being petted awhile, she stretched one leg over the side of the TV and pointed at the controls with one paw. She gave him a look that seemed to inquire if he would be so kind as to switch on the heater-with-pictures-and-voices, so her chosen perch would warm up a bit.

Leaving the TV off, he returned to the kitchen. Melanie was still sitting at the table, as animated as a carrot.

Laura was at the counter where Earl had left her, still holding a knife. She didn't seem to have been working on dinner while he'd been gone. She'd just been waiting, knife in hand, in case someone else returned in Earl's place.

She was obviously relieved when she saw him, and she put the knife down. 'Well?'

'Nothing.'

The refrigerator door suddenly came open of its own volition. The jars, bottles, and other items on the glass shelves began to wobble and rattle. As though touched by invisible hands, several cupboard doors flew open.

Laura gasped.

Instinctively, Earl reached for the gun in his holster, but he had no one to shoot at. He stopped with his hand on the butt of the weapon, feeling slightly foolish and more than a little perplexed.

Dishes jiggled and clattered on the shelves. A calendar, hanging on the wall by the back door, fell to the floor with a sound like frantic wings.

After ten or fifteen seconds, which seemed like an hour, the dishes stopped rattling, and the cupboard doors stopped swinging on their hinges, and the contents of the refrigerator grew still.

'Earthquake,' Earl said.

'Was it?' Laura McCaffrey said doubtfully.

He knew what she meant. It had been similar to the effects of a moderate earthquake yet… somehow different. An odd pressure change had seemed to condense the air, and the sudden chill had been too harsh to be attributed entirely to the open refrigerator door. In fact, when the trembling stopped, the air warmed up in an instant, even though the refrigerator door was still open.

But if not a quake, what had it been? Not a sonic boom. That wouldn't explain the chill or the pressure in the air. Not a ghost. He didn't believe in ghosts. And where the hell had such a thought come from, anyway? He'd run Poltergeist on his VCR a couple nights ago. Maybe that was it. But he was not so impressionable that one good scary movie would make him reach for a supernatural explanation here, now, when a considerably less exotic answer was so evident.

'Just an earthquake,' he assured her, although he was far from convinced of that.

* * *

They figured he was Joseph Scaldone, the owner, because all the paper in his wallet was for Scaldone. But until they got a dental-records confirmation or a fingerprint match, the wallet was the only way they could peg him. No one who knew Scaldone would be able to make a visual identification because the poor bastard didn't have a face left. There wasn't even much hope of getting an ID based on scars or on other identifying marks, because the body was smashed and torn and flayed and gouged so badly that old scars or birthmarks were lost in the bloody ruins. Splintered ribs poked up through holes in his shirt, and a jagged lance of bone had pierced both his leg and trousers.

He looked… squashed.

Turning from the body, Dan encountered a man whose biological clock seemed to be suffering from chronological confusion. The guy had the smooth, unlined, wide-open face of a thirty-year-old, the graying hair of a fifty-year-old, and the age-rounded shoulders of a retiree. He wore a well-cut dark-blue suit, a white shirt, a dark-blue tie, and a gold tie chain instead of a clip or tack. He said, 'You're Haldane?'

'That's right.'

'Michael Seames, FBI.'

They shook hands. Seames's hand was cold and clammy. They moved away from the corpse, into a corner that was clear of debris.

'Are you guys on this one now?' Dan asked.

'Don't worry. We aren't pushing you out of it,' Seames assured him diplomatically. 'We just want to be part of it. Just observers… for the time being.'

'Good,' Dan said bluntly.

'I've talked to everyone else working on the case, so I just wanted to tell you what I've told them. Please keep me informed. Any development at all, no matter how unimportant it seems, I want to be informed.'

'But what justification does the FBI have for stepping into this at all?'

'Justification?' Seames's face creased with a pained smile. 'Whose side are you on, Lieutenant?'

'I mean, what federal statutes have been broken?'

'Let's just say it's a national-security matter.'

In the middle of his young face, Seames's eyes were old, ancient, and watchful. They were like the eyes of a reptilian hunter that had been around since the Mesozoic Era and knew all the tricks.

Dan said, 'Hoffritz used to work for the Pentagon. Did research for them.'

'That's right.'

'Was he doing defense research when he was killed?'

'No.'

The agent's voice was flat, without emotion or inflection, and Dan couldn't be sure if he was lying or telling the truth.

'McCaffrey?' Dan asked. 'Was he doing defense-type research?'

'Not for us,' Seames said. 'At least not lately.'

'For someone else?'

'Maybe.'

'Russians?'

'More likely to be Iraq or Libya or Iran these days.'

'You're saying it was one of them who financed him?'

'I'm saying no such thing. We don't know,' Seames claimed in that same bland voice that might easily conceal deception. 'That's why we want in on this. McCaffrey was on a Pentagon-funded project when he disappeared six years ago with his daughter. We investigated him back then, at the request of the Defense Department, and decided he hadn't run off with any new, valuable information related to his research. We figured it was nothing more than what it seemed to be — entirely a personal matter having to do with a nasty childcustody dispute.'

'Maybe it was.'

'Yes, maybe it was,' Seames said. 'At first, anyway. But after a while McCaffrey apparently got involved in something important… maybe something dangerous. At least that's certainly how it seems when you get a look at that gray room in Studio City. As for Willy Hoffritz… eighteen months after McCaffrey disappeared, Hoffritz finished a long-running Pentagon project and declined to accept any additional defense-related work. He said that kind of research had begun to bother his conscience. At the time, the military tried to persuade him to change his mind, but eventually they accepted his refusal.'

'From what I know of him,' Dan said, 'I don't believe Hoffritz had a conscience.'

Seames's penetrating, hawkish eyes never left Dan's. He said, 'You're right about that, I think. At the time Hoffritz did his mea culpa routine, the Defense Department didn't ask us to verify his sudden turn toward pacifism. They accepted it at face value. But today I've been looking more closely at Willy Hoffritz. I'm convinced he stopped taking Pentagon grants only because he no longer wanted to be subject to random, periodic security investigations. He didn't want to worry that anyone might be watching him. He needed anonymity for some project of his own.'

'Like torturing a nine-year-old girl,' Dan said.

'Yes. I was in Studio City a few hours ago, had a look in that house. Nasty.'

Neither the expression on his face nor that in his eyes matched the distaste and disapproval in his voice. Judging from his eyes, in fact, one might suspect that Michael Seames found the gray room more interesting than repulsive.

Dan said, 'Why do you think they were doing those things to Melanie McCaffrey?'

'I don't know. Bizarre stuff,' Seames said, wide-eyed, shaking his head with amazement. But his sudden expression of innocence seemed calculated.

'What effect were they trying to obtain?'

'I don't know.'

'They weren't just involved in behavior-modification studies at that house.'

Seames shrugged.

Dan said, 'They were into brainwashing, total mind control… and something else… something worse.'

Seames appeared to be bored. His gaze drifted away from Dan, and he watched the SID technicians as they sifted through the blood-spattered rubble.

Dan said, 'But why?'

'I really don't know,' Seames said again, impatiently this time. 'I only—'

'But you're desperate to find out who was funding this whole hellish project,' Dan said.

'I wouldn't say desperate. I'd say frantic. Quietly frantic.'

'Then you must have some idea of what they were up to. You know something that's making you frantic.'

'For Christ's sake, Haldane,' Seames said angrily, but even his anger seemed calculated, a ruse, calculated misdirection. 'You've seen the condition of the bodies. Prominent scientists, formerly funded by the Pentagon, wind up murdered in an inexplicable fashion… hell, of course, we're interested!'

'Inexplicable?' Dan said. 'It's not inexplicable. They were beaten to death.

'Come on, Haldane. It's more complicated than that. If you've talked to your own coroner's office, you've learned they can't figure what the hell kind of weapon it was. And you've learned the victims never had a chance to fight back — no blood, skin, or hair under their fingernails. And many of the blows couldn't have been struck by a man wielding a club, because no man would have the strength to crush another man's bones like that. It would take tremendous force, mechanical force… inhuman force. They weren't just beaten to death, they were smashed like bugs! And what about the doors here?'

Dan frowned. 'What doors?'

'Here, this shop, the front and back doors.'

'What about them?'

'You don't know?'

'I just got here. I've hardly talked with anyone.'

Seames nervously adjusted his tie, and Dan was unsettled by the sight of a nervous FBI agent. He had never seen one before. And Michael Seames's nervousness was one thing that he didn't appear to be faking.

'The doors were locked when your people arrived,' the agent said. 'Scaldone had closed up for the day just before he was killed. The back door had probably been locked all along, but just before he was killed, he'd closed the front door, locked it as well, and pulled down the shade. He would most likely have left the place by the rear door — his car's out back — once he'd finished totaling the day's receipts. But he didn't finish. He was hit while the doors were still locked. First officer on the scene had to kick out the lock on the front door.'

'So?'

'So only the victim was inside,' Seames said. 'Both doors were locked when the first cops arrived, but the killer wasn't here with Scaldone.'

'What's so amazing about that? It just means the killer must have had a key.'

'And paused to lock up after himself when he left?'

'It's possible.'

Seames shook his head. 'Not if you know how the doors were locked. In addition to a pair of deadbolts on each, there was a bolt latch, a manually operated bolt latch that could be engaged only from inside the shop.'

'Bolt latches on both doors?' Dan asked.

'Yes. And there're only two windows in the shop. The big show window there, which is fixed in place. Nobody could leave that way without first throwing a brick through it. The other window is in the back room, the office. It's a jalousie window for ventilation.'

'Big enough for a man?'

'Yes,' Seames said. 'Except there're bars on the inside of it.'

'Bars?'

'Bars.'

'Then there must be another way out.'

'You find it,' Seames said in a tone of voice that meant that it couldn't be found.

Dan surveyed the wreckage again, put a hand to his face as if he might be able to wipe off his weariness, and winced as his fingertips brushed the still-sticky wound on his forehead. 'You're telling me Scaldone was beaten to death in a locked room.'

'Killed in a locked room, yes. I'm still not sure about the "beaten" part.'

'And there's no way the killer could have gotten out of here before the first squad car arrived?'

'No way.'

'Yet he isn't here now.'

'Right. Seames's too-young face seemed to be straining toward a more harmonious relationship with his graying hair and his stooped shoulders: It appeared to have aged a few years in just the past ten minutes. 'You see why I'm frantic, Lieutenant Haldane? I'm frantic because two top-notch former defense researchers have been killed by persons or forces unknown, by a weapon that can reach through locked doors or solid walls and against which there seems to be absolutely no defense.'

* * *

Something about it had been different from an earthquake, but Laura couldn't precisely define the difference. Well, for one thing, she couldn't remember the windows rattling, although in an earthquake strong enough to fling open the cupboard doors, the windows would have been thrumming, clattering. She'd had no sense of motion either, no rolling; of course, if they had been far enough from the epicenter, ground movement wouldn't have been easy to detect. The air had felt strange, oppressive, not stuffy or humid, but… charged. She'd been through a number of quakes before, and she didn't remember the air feeling like that. But something else still argued against the earthquake explanation, something important on which she couldn't quite put her finger.

Earl returned to the table and newspaper, and Melanie continued to stare down at her hands. Laura finished making the salad. She put it in the refrigerator to chill while the spaghetti was cooking.

The water had begun to boil. Steam plumed from it. Laura was just taking the vermicelli out of the Ronzoni box when Earl glanced up from the newspaper and said, 'Hey, that explains the cat!'

Laura didn't understand. 'Huh?'

'They say animals usually know when an earthquake is coming. They get nervous and act strange. Maybe that's why Pepper got hysterical and chased ghosts all over the kitchen.

Before Laura even had time to consider what Earl had said, the radio clicked on as if an unseen hand had twisted the knob. Living by herself, as she had for the past six years, Laura sometimes found the silence and emptiness of the house to be more than she could bear, and she kept radios in several rooms. The one in the kitchen, by the bread box, only a few feet away from where Laura was standing, was a Sony AM-FM with a clock, and when it snapped on all by itself, it was tuned to KRLA, where she had set the dial the last time that she'd used it. Bonnie Tyler was singing 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.'

Earl had put down his paper. He was standing again.

Laura stared at the radio in disbelief.

Of its own accord, the volume knob began to rotate to the right. She could see it moving.

Bonnie Tyler's throaty voice grew louder, louder.

Earl said, 'What the hell?'

Melanie drifted unaware in her private darkness.

The voice of Bonnie Tyler and the music enfolding her words now bounced back and forth off the kitchen walls and made the windows rattle in a way that the 'earthquake' hadn't done.

Aware that a chill had settled over the room once more, Laura took a step toward the radio.

In another part of the house, Pepper was screeching again.

* * *

As Dan was turning away from Michael Seames, the FBI agent said, 'By the way, what happened to your forehead?'

'I was trying on hats,' Dan said.

'Hats?'

'Tried on one that was too small for me. Had a hell of a time getting it off. Pulled skin right along with it.'

Before Seames could respond, Ross Mondale stepped through a door at the back of the store, behind the sales counter. He spotted Dan, and he said, 'Haldane, come here.'

'What is it, Chief?'

'I want to talk to you.'

'What about, Chief?'

'Alone,' Mondale said fiercely.

'Be right there, Chief.'

He left Seames blinking and puzzled. He picked his way through the wreckage, past the corpse, around the counter. Mondale motioned him through the door back there, then followed him.

The rear room was as wide as the store but only ten feet deep, with concrete-block walls. It doubled as an office and storage area. On the left were piles of boxes, apparently filled with merchandise. On the right were a desk, an IBM PC, a few file cabinets, a small refrigerator, and a worktable on which stood a Mr. Coffee machine. No violence had been done there; everything was neat and orderly.

Mondale had been going through the desk drawers. Several items, including a slim little address book, were piled on the blotter.

As the captain closed the door, Dan went around behind the desk and sat down.

'What do you think you're doing?' Mondale asked.

'Taking a load off my feet. It's been a long day.'

'You know that's not what I mean.'

'Oh?'

As usual, Mondale was wearing a brown suit, light-beige shirt, brown tie, brown socks and shoes. His brown eyes seemed to flicker with a murderous light similar to that refracted within his ruby ring. 'I wanted to see you in my office by two-thirty.'

'I never got your message.'

'I know you damn well did.'

'No. Really. I'd have come running.'

'Don't screw with me.'

Dan just stared at him.

The captain stood several steps from the desk, his neck stiff, his shoulders tense, arms straight down at his sides, hands flexing and twitching as if he had to struggle to keep from forming them into fists and coming for Haldane. 'What have you been doing all day?'

'Contemplating the meaning of life.'

'You were at Rink's place.'

'You don't need to be in a church. It's possible to contemplate the meaning of life almost anywhere.'

'I didn't send you to Rink's place.'

'I'm a full-fledged detective-lieutenant. I usually follow my own instincts in an investigation.'

'Not in this one. This one's big. In this one, you're just part of the team. You do what I tell you, go where I tell you. You don't even shit unless I tell you it's okay.'

'Careful, Ross. You're beginning to sound power crazy.'

'What happened to your head?'

'I've been taking karate lessons.'

'What?'

'Tried to break a board with my head.'

'Like hell.'

'Okay, then what happened was George Padrakis told me you wanted to see me here, and at the mention of your name, I dropped to my knees and bowed down so fast I scraped my head on the sidewalk.'

For a moment Ross couldn't speak. His brown face had flushed. He was breathing hard.

Dan more closely examined the items that Mondale had taken from the drawers and piled on the blotter: the address book, a ledger-size checkbook for an account in the name of the Sign of the Pentagram, an appointments calendar, and a thick sheaf of invoices. He picked up the address book.

'Put that down and listen to me,' Mondale said sharply, finally recovering his voice.

Dan favored him with a sweet smile of innocence and said, 'But it might contain a clue, Captain. I'm investigating this case, and I wouldn't be doing my job well if I didn't pursue every possible clue.'

Mondale came toward the desk, furious. His hands had finally tightened into twin hammers of flesh and bone.

Ah, at last, Dan thought, the showdown we've both been wanting for years.

* * *

Laura stood in front of the Sony, staring at it, afraid to touch it, shivering in the chilly air. The cold seemed to be radiating from the radio, carried on the pale-green light that shone forth from the AM-FM dial.

That was a crazy thought.

It was a radio, not an air conditioner. Not a… Not anything. Just a radio. An ordinary radio.

An ordinary radio that had turned itself on without help from anyone.

Bonnie Tyler's song had faded into a new tune. It was a golden oldie: Procul Harum singing 'A Whiter Shade of Pale.' That was at top volume too. The radio vibrated against the tile counter on which it stood. The thunderous song reverberated in the windows, hurting Laura's ears.

Earl had moved up behind her.

If Pepper was still squealing in another part of the house, the cat's voice was lost in the explosively loud music. Hesitantly, Laura put her fingers on the volume knob. Freezing. Shuddering, she nearly snatched her hand away, not simply because the plastic was impossibly cold but because it was a different kind of coldness from any she'd felt before, a strangeness that chilled not only the flesh but the mind and soul as well. Nevertheless, she held on to it and tried to reduce the volume, but the knob wouldn't budge. She couldn't turn Procul Harum down, and since the volume control was also the ON-OFF switch, she couldn't shut the music off either. She strained hard, felt the muscles bunching in her arm, but still the knob would not respond.

She was shaking.

She let go of the knob.

Although 'Whiter Shade of Pale' was a melodic and appealing song, it sounded harsh and even curiously ominous at that volume. Each thump of the drums was like the approaching footsteps of some threatening creature, and the wailing of the horns was the same beast's hostile cries. She grabbed the cord of the radio, jerked on it. The plug popped out of the wall socket.

The music died instantly.

She had been half afraid that it would go on playing, even without power.

* * *

When Dan didn't put down Joseph Scaldone's address book — a pocket-size booklet, actually — Mondale reached across the desk, clamped his right hand over Dan's right hand, and squeezed hard, trying to make him drop the thing.

Mondale was not a tall man, but he was thick in the shoulders and chest. He had powerful arms out of proportion to the rest of him, thick wrists, big hands. He was strong.

Dan was stronger. He didn't let go of the address book. His eyes fixed unwaveringly on Mondale's eyes, and he put his left hand on Mondale's hand and tried to pry the bastard's fingers loose.

The situation was ludicrous. They were like a couple of idiot teenagers determined to prove that they were macho: Mondale trying to crush Dan's right hand, and Dan refusing to flinch or in any way reveal his pain while he struggled to free himself.

He got a grip on one of Mondale's fingers and began to bend it backward.

Mondale's jaw clenched. The muscles popped up, quivering.

The finger bent back and back. Mondale resisted that effort even as he attempted to apply a stronger grip to Dan's right hand, but Dan wouldn't relent, and the finger bent back farther, farther.

Sweat had appeared on Mondale's brow.

My dog's better than your dog, my mom's prettier than your mom, Dan thought. Jesus! How old are we, anyway? Fourteen? Twelve?

But he kept his eyes on Mondale's eyes, and he refused to let the captain see that he was hurting. He bent that goddamned finger back farther, until he was sure that it would snap, then farther, and abruptly Mondale gasped and let go. Dan remained in possession of the address book.

He kept a grip on Mondale's finger for a second or two, long enough so there could be no mistake about who had relented first. The contest had been silly and juvenile, but that was no reason to believe Ross Mondale didn't take it seriously. He was dead serious. And if the captain thought he could teach Dan a lesson with physical force, then perhaps — just perhaps — he could learn a lesson himself by the same method of instruction.

* * *

They stood in the silent kitchen, staring at the radio. Then Earl said, 'How could it—'

'I don't know,' Laura said.

'Has it ever—'

'Never.'

The radio had ceased to be a harmless appliance. Now it was a brooding, menacing presence.

Earl said, 'Plug it in again.'

Laura was irrationally afraid that if they brought the radio back to life, it would sprout crablike legs of plastic and begin to crawl across the counter. That was an uncharacteristically bizarre thought, and she was surprised at herself, startled by the sudden rush of superstitious dread, for she thought of herself as a woman of science, always logical and reasonable. Yet she couldn't shake the feeling that some malignant force was still within the radio, and that it waited eagerly for the plug to be reinserted in the wall socket.

Nonsense.

Nevertheless, stalling, she said, 'Plug it in? Why?'

'Well,' Earl said, 'I want to see what it does. We can't just leave it like this. It's too damned weird. We've got to figure it out.'

Laura knew he was right. Hesitantly, she reached for the cord. She half expected it to wriggle in her hand and feel slimy-cold like an eel. But it was only a power cord: lifeless, nothing unusual about it.

She touched the volume control on the radio, and she found that it could be moved now. She twisted it all the way down, clicked it to the OFF position.

With considerable apprehension, she put the plug in the socket again.

Nothing.

Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.

Earl said, 'Well, whatever it was—'

The radio snapped on.

The dial lit up.

The air was arctic again.

Laura stepped away from the counter, backed toward the table, afraid that the radio would fling itself at her. She stopped beside Melanie and put one hand on the girl's shoulder, to reassure her, but Melanie appeared to be as oblivious of these strange events as she was of everything else.

The volume dial moved. This time, the dial didn't peg out at the top, but stopped halfway. The latest piece of gangsta-rap crap thumped from the radio. The beat-heavy music was loud, although not unbearable.

Another knob spun as if an invisible hand were adjusting it. This one was the frequency selector. The red indicator dot glided fast across the luminous green dial, leaving the rap song behind, flitting rapidly to the right end of the scale, bringing them only flashes of songs, commercials, news reports, and deejay voices on a score of other stations. It reached the end of the radio band and moved back to the left, all the way, then swept to the right again, faster, so that the snatches of various broadcasts blended together in an eerie electronic ululation.

Earl moved closer to the Sony.

'Careful,' Laura said.

She realized it was ridiculous to be warning him about a mere radio. It was an inanimate object, for God's sake, not a living creature. She'd owned it for three or four years. It had brought her music and kept her company. It was only a radio.

* * *

When Mondale got his hand back, he didn't rub it or even try to flex the pain out of it. Like a simpleminded highschool jock with wounded pride, he went right on pretending that he was the toughest. He casually put his hand in his pocket, as if checking for change or keys, and he kept it there.

He poked his other hand toward Dan, pointed a finger at him. 'Don't you screw this up for me, Haldane. This is an important case. It's going to mean heat, lots of heat. We're gonna feel like we're working in a damned furnace. I've got the press nipping at my heels and the FBI on my back, and I've already had calls from the mayor and from Chief Kelsey, wanting results. I don't intend to screw this one up. My career might ride on this one. I'm keeping control, Haldane, tight control. I'm not letting some hotshot Lone Ranger type put my ass in a sling for me. If my ass ends up in a sling, it'll be because I put it there. This is a team effort, see, and I'm the captain and coach and quarterback, all rolled into one, and anybody who can't play it as a team effort just isn't even going to get on the field. You got me?'

So this wasn't going to be the final showdown, after all. Ross was just going to bluster and fume. He felt tough and important when he could point his finger at a subordinate, glower, and chew ass for a while.

Dan sighed with some disappointment, and leaned back in the office chair, folding his hands behind his head. 'Furnaces, football fields… Ross, you're getting your metaphors mixed up. Face it, old buddy, you'll never be an inspiring speaker… or a disciplinarian. General Patton, you ain't.'

Glaring at him, Mondale said, 'At Chief Kelsey's request, I'm putting together a special task force to handle this case, just like they did for the Hillside Strangler business several years back. All assignments come straight from me, and I'm assigning you to a desk at HQ for the duration. You'll coordinate the files on some aspects of the investigation.'

'I'm not a desk man.'

'Now you are.'

'I'm a deskophobic. You force me to work at a desk, I'll have a complete nervous breakdown. It's going to mean a major worker's compensation claim.'

'Don't screw with me,' Mondale warned again.

'I'm scared of desk blotters too — and those can-type holders for pencils just spook the bejesus out of me. So I thought, first thing tomorrow, I'd start looking into this Freedom Now group and maybe—'

'Wexlersh and Manuello are going to handle that,' Mondale said. 'They'll also be talking to the head of the psychology department at UCLA. But you will be at your desk, Haldane — at your desk, doing what you're told.'

Dan didn't reveal that he had already been to UCLA and that he'd spoken with Irmatrude Heidi Gelkenshettle. He wasn't giving Mondale anything right now.

Instead, he said, 'Wexlersh is no detective. Hell, he has to paint his pecker bright yellow so he can find it when he has to pee. And Manuello drinks.'

'The hell he does,' Mondale said sharply.

'He drinks on duty more often than not.'

'He's an excellent detective,' Mondale insisted.

'Your definition of "excellent" is the same as your definition of "obedient." You like Manuello because he sucks up to you. You're a tremendous self-promoter, Ross, but you're a lousy cop and a worse leader. For your sake as much as anyone's, I'm going to have to ignore the desk assignment you've given me and play the investigation my own way.'

'That's it, you insolent bastard. That's it! You're through. You're finished here. I'll call your boss, I'll call Templeton, and have him yank your insubordinate ass back to Central, where you belong!'

The captain swung away from Dan and started toward the door. Dan said, 'If you make Templeton pull me off this assignment, I'll have to tell him — and everyone else — about Cindy Lakey.'

Mondale stopped with his hand on the doorknob, breathing hard, but he didn't face Dan.

To Mondale's back, Dan said, 'I'll have to tell them how little Cindy Lakey, that poor little eight-year-old girl, would still be alive today, a young woman now, maybe married with a girl of her own, if it wasn't for you.'

* * *

Laura stayed at Melanie's side, one hand on the girl's shoulder, ready to grab her and run if it came to that.

Earl Benton leaned close to the radio and seemed mesmerized by the magically spinning knob and the floating red station selector that whipped back and forth across the lighted dial.

Abruptly the red dot stopped, but only for a moment, only long enough to let a deejay speak one word—

'… something's…'

— and then spun across the dial and stopped again at another frequency. Again it only dipped into the announcer's patter for a single word—

'… coming…'

— then zipped farther along the glowing green band, paused once more, this time plucking one word out of the middle of a song—

'… something's…'

— then spun away to a new station, popped into the middle of an advertisement—

'… coming…'

— and swept on down the band again.

Laura suddenly realized there was an intelligent purpose to the pauses of the frequency selector.

We're being sent a message, she thought.

Something's coming.

But a message from whom? From where?

Earl looked at her, and the astonishment on his face made it clear that the same questions were in his mind.

She wanted to move, run, get out of here. She could not lift her feet. Her bones had locked at every joint. Her muscles had petrified.

The red dot stopped moving for no more than a second, perhaps only a fraction of a second. This time Laura recognized the tune from which the word was plucked. The Beatles were singing. Before the red dot continued on its way, the single word that came from the radio's speaker was also the title of the song: 'Something…'

The selector glided farther along the green-lit band, paused for an instant: '… is…'

It slipped off that station, sped to another: '… coming…'

The air was frigid, but that wasn't the only reason Laura was shivering.

Something… is… coming…

Those three words were not merely a message. They were a warning.

* * *

Without opening it, Mondale had turned away from the door that connected the late Joseph Scaldone's office to the sales room at the Sign of the Pentagram. He faced Dan again, and both his anger and indignation had given way to a more fundamental emotion. Now his face was carved and his eyes were colored by pure hatred.

Dan had mentioned Cindy Lakey for the first time in more than thirteen years. This was the dirty secret that they shared, the ever-spreading malignancy at the core of their relationship. Now, having brought it into the open, Dan was exhilarated by the prospect of forcing Mondale to face up to the consequences of his actions at long last.

In a low, intense voice, the captain said, 'I didn't kill Cindy Lakey, damn it!'

'You allowed it to happen when you could have prevented it.'

'I'm not God,' Mondale said bitterly.

'You're a cop. You have responsibilities.'

'You smug bastard.'

'You're sworn to protect the public.'

'Yeah? Really? Well, the fuckin' public never cries over a dead cop,' Mondale said, still speaking softly in spite of his ferocity, guarding this conversation from the ears of those in the nearby shop.

'You've also got a duty to stand up for a buddy, to protect your partner's backside.'

'You sound like some half-baked little Boy Scout,' Mondale said scornfully. 'Esprit de corps. One for all and all for one. Crap! When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, it's always every man for himself, and you know it.'

Already, Dan wished he had never mentioned Cindy Lakey's name. The exhilaration that had lifted him a moment ago was gone. In fact, his spirits sank lower than they had been. He felt bone weary. He had intended to make Mondale face up to his responsibilities after all these years, but it was too late. It had always been too late, because Mondale had never been the kind of man who could admit weakness or error. He always slipped out from under his mistakes or found a way to make others pay his penance for him. His record was clean, spotless, and probably would always remain spotless, not just in the eyes of most others but in his own eyes as well. He couldn't even admit his weaknesses and errors to himself. Ross Mondale was incapable of guilt or self-reproach. Right now, standing before Dan, he clearly felt no responsibility or remorse for what had happened to Cindy Lakey; the only emotion boiling through him now was irrational hatred directed at his ex-partner.

Mondale said, 'If anyone was responsible for the death of that girl, it was her own mother.'

Dan didn't want to continue the battle. He was as weary as a centenarian who had danced away his birthday night.

Mondale said, 'Crucify her goddamned mother, not me.'

Dan said nothing.

Mondale said, 'Her mother was the one who dated Felix Dunbar in the first place.'

Staring at the captain as if he were a pile of some noxious and not-quite-identifiable substance found on a city sidewalk, Dan said, 'Are you actually telling me Fran Lakey should have known Dunbar was unstable?'

'Hell, yes.'

'He was a nice guy, by all accounts.'

'Blew her fuckin' head off, didn't he?' Mondale said.

'Owned his own business. Well dressed. No criminal record. A steady churchgoer. By all appearances, he was a regular upstanding citizen.'

'Upstanding citizens don't blow people's heads off. Fran Lakey was dating a loser, a creep, a real screwball. From what I heard later, she dated a lot of guys, and most of them were losers. She put her daughter's life in danger, not me.'

Dan watched Mondale the way he might have watched a particularly ugly insect crawl across a dinner table. 'Are you saying she should have been able to see the future? Was she supposed to know that her boyfriend would go off his rocker when she finally broke up with him? Was she supposed to know he would come to her house with a gun and try to kill her and her daughter just because she wouldn't go to a movie with him? If she could see the future that well, Ross, she'd have put every psychic and palm reader and crystal-ball gazer out of business. She'd have been famous.'

'She put her daughter's life in danger,' Mondale insisted.

Dan leaned forward, hunching over the desk, lowering his voice further. 'If she could've seen into the future, she would have known it wouldn't help to call the cops that night. She'd have known you'd be one of the officers answering the call, and she'd have known you'd choke up, and—'

'I didn't choke up,' Mondale said. He took a step toward the desk, but as a threatening gesture it was ineffective.

* * *

'Something's… coming…'

Fascinated, Earl watched the radio.

Laura looked at the door that opened onto the patio and the rear lawn. It was locked. So were the windows. The blinds were drawn. If something did come, where would it come from? And what would it be, for God's sake, what would it be?

The radio said: 'Watch…' Then: 'Out…'

Laura fixated on the open door to the dining room. Whatever was coming might already be in the house. Maybe it would come from the living room, through the dining room…

The frequency selector stopped again, and a deejay's voice boomed through the speaker. It was swift patter with no purpose but to fill a few seconds of dead air between tunes, yet for Laura it had an unintended ominous quality: 'Better beware out there, my rock-'n'-roll munchkins, better beware, 'cause it's a strange world, a mean and cold world, with things that go bump in the night, and all you got to protect you is your Cousin Frankie, that's me, so if you don't keep that dial where it is, if you change stations now, you better beware, better be on the lookout for the gnarly old goblins who live under the bed, the ones who fear nothing but the voice of Uncle Frankie. Better look out!'

Earl put one hand on top of the radio, and Laura half expected a mouth to open in the plastic and bite off his fingers.

'Cold,' he said as the tuning knob moved toward another station.

Laura shook Melanie. 'Honey, come on, get up.'

The girl didn't stir.

One clear word burst from the radio as the tuning knob stopped again in the middle of a news report: '… murder…'

* * *

Dan wished that he could magically transport himself out of the dreary spook-shop office and into Saul's Delicatessen, where he could order a huge Reuben sandwich and drink a few bottles of Beck's Dark. If he couldn't have Saul's, he'd settle for Jack-in-the-Box. If he couldn't have Jack-in-the-Box, then he'd rather be at home, washing the dirty dishes that he had left in the kitchen. Anywhere but in a confrontation with Ross Mondale. Dredging up the past was pointless and depressing.

But it was too late to stop now. They had to go through the whole Lakey killing again, pick at it as if it were a scab, peel and pick and pluck at it to see if the wound was healed underneath. And of course that was a waste of time and emotional resources, for both of them knew already that it wasn't healed and never would be.

Dan said, 'After Dunbar shot me there on the front lawn of the Lakey house—'

'I suppose that was my fault too,' Mondale said.

'No,' Dan said. 'I shouldn't have tried to rush him. I didn't think he'd use the gun, and I was wrong. But after he shot me, Ross, he was stunned for a moment, stupefied by what he'd done, and he was vulnerable.'

'Bullshit. He was as vulnerable as a runaway Sherman tank. He was a maniac, a flat-out lunatic, and he had the biggest goddamned pistol—'

'A thirty-two,' Dan corrected. 'There're bigger guns. Every cop comes up against bigger guns than that, all the time. And he was vulnerable for a moment, plenty long enough for you to take the son of a bitch.'

'You know one thing I always hated about you, Haldane?'

Ignoring him, Dan said, 'But you ran.'

'I always hated that wide, wide streak of self-righteousness.'

'If he'd wanted to, Dunbar could have put another slug in me. No one to stop him after you ran off behind the house.'

'As if you never made a mistake in your goddamned life.'

They were both almost whispering now.

'But instead he walked away from me—'

'As if you were never afraid.'

'—and he shot the lock off the front door—'

'You want to play the hero, go ahead. You and Audie Murphy. You and Jesus Christ.'

'—and he went inside and pistol-whipped Fran Lakey—'

'I hate your guts.'

'—and then made her watch—'

'You make me sick.'

'—while he killed the one person in the world she really loved,' Dan said.

He was being relentless now because there was no way to stop until it had all been said. He wished he had never begun, wished he'd left it buried, but now that he had started, he had to finish. Because he was like the Ancient Mariner in that old poem. Because he had to purge himself of an unrelenting nightmare. Because he was driven to follow it to the end. Because if he stopped in the middle, the unsaid part would be as bitter as a big wad of vomit in his throat, unheaved, wedged there, and he'd choke on it. Because — and here it was, here was the truth of it, no easy euphemisms this time — after all these years, his own soul was still shackled to a ball of guilt that had been weighing him down since the death of the Lakey child, and maybe if he finally talked about it with Ross Mondale, he might find a key that would release him from that iron ball, those chains.

* * *

The radio was at full volume again, and each word exploded like one round of a cannonade.

'… blood…'

'… coming…'

'… run…'

More urgently than she had spoken before, afraid of what might be coming, wanting Melanie to be on her feet and ready to flee, Laura said, 'Honey, get up, come on.'

From the radio: '… hide…'

And: '… it…'

And: '… coming…'

The volume grew louder.

'… it…'

Jarring, ear-splitting: '… loose…'

Earl put his hand on the volume knob.

'… it…'

At once, Earl jerked his hand off the knob as if he had taken an electric shock. He looked at Laura, horrified. He vigorously wiped his hand on his shirt. It hadn't been an electric shock that had sizzled through him; instead, he had felt something weird when he touched the knob, something disgusting, repulsive.

The radio said: '… death…'

* * *

Mondale's hatred was a dark and vast swamp into which he could retreat when the uncomfortable truth about Cindy Lakey rose to haunt him. As the truth drew nearer and pressed upon him more insistently, he withdrew farther into his all-encompassing black hatred and hid there amid the snakes and bugs and muck of his psyche.

He continued to glare at Dan, to loom threateningly over the desk, but there was no danger that his hatred would propel him to action. He would not throw a single punch. He didn't need or want to relieve his hatred by striking out at Dan. Instead, he needed to nurture that hatred, for it helped him to hide from responsibility. It was a veil between him and the truth, and the heavier the veil, the better for him.

That was how Mondale's mind worked. Dan knew him well, knew how he thought.

But, though Ross might try to hide from it, the truth was that Felix Dunbar had shot Dan — and Mondale had been too scared to return the fire. The truth was that Dunbar then went inside the Lakey house, pistol-whipped Fran Lakey, and shot eight-year-old Cindy Lakey three times while Ross Mondale was God-knew-where, doing God-knew-what. And the truth was that wounded and bleeding badly, Dan had retrieved his own gun, crawled into the Lakey house, and killed Felix Dunbar before Dunbar could blow off Fran Lakey's head too. All the while, Ross Mondale was maybe puking in the shrubbery or losing control of his bladder or sprawled flat on the rear lawn and striving hard to look like a natural feature of the landscape. He had come back when it was all over, sweat-damp and slug-white, shaky, reeking of the sour smell of cowardice.

Now, still behind Joseph Scaldone's desk, Dan said, 'You try forcing me off this case or you try keeping me out of the action, and I'll tell the whole rotten story about the Lakey shootings, the truth, to anyone who'll listen, and that'll be the end of your dazzling career.'

With a smugness that would have been infuriating if it hadn't been so boringly predictable, Mondale said, 'If you were going to tell anyone, you'd have told them years ago.'

'That must be a comforting thought,' Dan said, 'but it's wrong. I covered for you then because you were my partner, and I figured everyone has a right to screw up once. But I've lived to regret the way I handled it, and if you give me a good excuse, I'd enjoy setting the record straight.'

'It all happened a long time ago,' Mondale said.

'You think no one cares about dereliction of duty just because it happened thirteen years ago?'

'No one'll believe you. They'll think it's sour grapes. I've moved up, made friends.'

'Yeah. And they're the kind of friends who'd sell their mothers for lunch money.'

'You've always been a loner. A wiseass. No matter what you think of them, I have people who'll rally around me.'

'With a lynching rope.'

'Power makes people loyal, Haldane, even if they'd rather not be. Nobody'll believe any crap you care to throw at me. Not a rotten wiseass like you. Not a chance.'

'Ted Gearvy will believe me,' Dan said, and if he had spoken any more quietly, he would have been inaudible. Yet, in spite of his quiet delivery, he might as well have swung a hammer at Mondale instead of those five words. The captain looked stricken.

Gearvy, ten years their senior, was a veteran patrolman and had been Mondale's partner during his probationary rookie year. He had seen Mondale make a few mistakes — although nothing as serious as what happened at the Lakey house later, when Dan had replaced Gearvy as Mondale's partner. Just disquieting errors of judgment. A too-meager sense of responsibility. Gearvy had thought he detected cowardice in Ross too, but had covered up for him, just as Dan would do in times to come. Gearvy was a big, gruff, easygoing guy, three-quarters Irish, with too much sympathy for rookies. He had not given Mondale high ratings in his rookie year; the Irishman was good-natured and sympathetic but not irresponsible. But he didn't give Mondale really bad ratings, either, because he was too softhearted for that.

A few months after the Lakey incident, when Dan was back at work with a new partner, Ted Gearvy had come around, quietly feeling Dan out, dropping hints, worried that he had made a serious mistake in covering up for Ross. Eventually, they had swapped information and discovered they had both been misguidedly shielding Mondale. They realized his misconduct was not just a rare or even a some-time thing. But by then it had seemed too late to come forth with the truth. In the eyes of the department brass, Gearvy's and Dan's failure — even temporary failure — to report Mondale's dereliction of duty would be nearly as bad as that dereliction itself. Gearvy and Dan would have found themselves standing in the dock beside Mondale. They weren't prepared to damage or perhaps even destroy their own careers.

Besides, by then Mondale had wheedled an assignment to the Community Relations Division; he was no longer working on the street. Gearvy and Dan figured Ross would do well in community relations and would never return to a regular beat, in which case he would never again be in a position to hold someone else's life in his hands. It seemed best — and safest — to leave well enough alone.

Neither of them imagined that Mondale would one day be a serious contender for the chief's office. Maybe they would have taken action if they could have foreseen the future. Their failure to act was the thing that both of them most regretted in all their years of service.

Clearly, Mondale had not known that Gearvy and Dan had compared notes. Their consultation was a nasty shock to him.

* * *

The radio boomed:

'IT!'

'COMING!'

'HIDE!'

'COMING!'

The disconnected words exploding from the Sony were impossibly loud, delivered with considerably more volume than the speakers were capable of providing. Thunderous, volcanic. Wall-shaking. The speakers should have disintegrated or burned out as those tremendous bursts of sound smashed through them, but they continued to function. The radio vibrated against the counter.

'LOOSE!'

'COMING!'

Each word crashed through Laura and seemed to pulverize more of her self-control. Panic and fear surged through her. The kitchen lights pulsed, dimmed. At the same time, the green glow that illuminated the radio dial became brighter, unnaturally bright, as if the Sony had acquired both a consciousness and a greedy thirst for electricity, as if it were drawing off all available power for itself. But that didn't make sense, because regardless of how much power the radio received, the dial was still equipped with a low-wattage bulb that couldn't produce this brilliant glow. Yet it did. As the ceiling lights grew dimmer still, dazzling emerald beams sprayed out through the Plexiglas panel on the front of the radio, painting Earl Benton's face, glinting off the chrome on the stove and refrigerator, imparting to the air a rippling murkiness: The room seemed to be underwater.

'… RIPPING…'

'… APART…'

The air was freezing.

'… TEARING…'

'… APART…'

Laura didn't understand that portion of the message — unless it was a threat of physical violence.

The Sony was vibrating faster than the stones in a rattlesnake's rattle. Soon it would be bouncing across the counter.

'… SPLITTING… IN… TWO…'

* * *

Dan said, 'If I go public, Ted Gearvy probably will too. And maybe there's even someone else out there who's seen you at your worst, Ross. Maybe they'll come forward when we do. Maybe they'll have a conscience too.'

Judging by the expression on Mondale's face, there evidently was someone else who could blow his career out of the water. He was no longer smug when he said, 'One cop never rats on another, damn it!'

'Nonsense. If one of us is a killer, we don't protect him.'

'I'm no killer,' Mondale said.

'If one of us is a thief, we don't protect him.'

'I've never stolen a goddamned dime.'

'And if one of us is a coward who wants to be chief, we have to stop protecting him too, before he gets into the front office and plays fast and loose with other men's lives, the way some cowards do when they get enough power to be above the fight themselves.'

'You take the goddamned cake! You're the snottiest, most self-satisfied son of a bitch I've ever seen.'

'Coming from you, I'll take that as a compliment.'

'You know the code. It's us against them.'

'Why, for heaven's sake, Ross, just a minute ago, you told me it was always every man for himself.'

Irrationally trying to separate his own conduct at the Lakey house from the code of honor that he now so strenuously professed to embrace, Mondale could do no more than repeat himself: 'It's us against them, damn it!'

Dan nodded. 'Yes, but when I say "us," I don't include you. You and I can't possibly belong to the same species.'

'You'll destroy your own career,' Mondale said.

'Maybe.'

'Definitely. The Internal Affairs Division is gonna want to know why the hell you covered up this so-called dereliction of duty.'

'Misguided allegiance to another man in uniform.'

'That won't be good enough.'

'We'll see.'

'They'll have your ass for breakfast.'

Dan said, 'You're the one who actively screwed up. My moral irresponsibility was a passive act, passive sin. They might suspend me for that, reprimand me. But they're not going to throw me off the force because of it.'

'Maybe not. But you'll never get another promotion.'

Dan shrugged. 'Doesn't matter. I've gone as far as I really care to. Ambition doesn't rule me, Ross, the way it does you.'

'But… no one'll trust you after you've done a thing like this.'

'Sure they will.'

'No, no. Not after you've ratted on another cop.'

'If the cop was anyone but you, that might be true.'

Mondale bristled. 'I have friends!'

'You're well liked by the high brass,' Dan said, 'because you always tell them what they want to hear. You know how to manipulate them. But the average cop on the beat thinks you're a jerk-off.'

'Bullshit. I have friends everywhere. You'll be frozen out, isolated, shunned.'

'Even if that's true — and it isn't — so what? I'm just a loner, anyway. Remember? You said so yourself. You said I'm a loner. What do I care if I'm shunned?'

For the first time, more worry than hatred was evident in Ross Mondale's face.

'You see?' Dan said. He smiled again, more broadly than before. 'You don't have any choice. You have to let me work on this case the way I want to work on it, without any interference, just as long as I want. If you mess with me, I'll destroy you, so help me God, even if it means problems for me too.'

* * *

The overhead lights grew even dimmer. But the radio's eerie green radiance was now so bright that it hurt Laura's eyes.

'… STOP… HELP… RUN… HIDE… HELP…'

The Plexiglas that shielded the radio dial suddenly cracked down the middle.

The Sony vibrated so violently that it began to move across the counter.

Laura remembered the nightmarish image that had come to her a few minutes ago: crablike legs sprouting from the plastic casing…

The refrigerator door flew open again all by itself.

With a hiss and squeak of hinges, with scattered thumping sounds, every cupboard door in the room abruptly and simultaneously flung itself wide open. One of them banged against Earl's legs, and he almost fell.

The radio had stopped emitting selected words from various stations. Now it was simply spewing out a shrill electronic noise at higher than full volume, as if attempting to shatter their flesh and bones as a perfectly sung and sustained high-C could shatter fine crystal.

* * *

Ross Mondale sat on a shipping crate and buried his face in his hands, as if weeping.

Dan Haldane was startled and disconcerted. He had been certain that Mondale was incapable of tears.

The captain didn't sob or wheeze or make any other sounds, and when he looked up again, after half a minute or so, his eyes were perfectly dry. He hadn't been weeping after all — merely thinking. Desperately thinking.

He had also been putting on a new expression, a conscious act not unlike exchanging one mask for another. The fear and worry and anger were completely gone. Even the hatred was fairly well hidden, although a dark rime of it was still visible in the captain's eyes, like a film of black ice on a shallow puddle at the edge of winter. Now he was wearing his patented friendly-and-humble face, which was transparently insincere.

'Okay, Dan. Okay. We were friends once, and maybe we can be friends again.'

We were never really friends, Dan thought.

But he said nothing. He was curious to see how conciliatory Ross Mondale would pretend to be.

Mondale said, 'At least we can start by trying to work together, and I can help by acknowledging that you're a damned good detective. You're methodical, but you're also intuitive. I shouldn't try to rein you in, because that's like refusing to let a natural-born hunting dog follow its own nose. Okay. So you're on your own in this case. Go wherever you want, see who you want, when you want. Just try to fill me in once in a while. I'd appreciate it. Maybe if we both give a little, both of us bend a little, then we'll find that we not only can work together but can even be friends again.'

Dan decided that he liked Mondale's anger and unconcealed hatred better than his smarmy appeasement. The captain's hatred was the most honest thing about him. Now, the honey in his voice and manner didn't soothe Dan: in fact, it made his skin crawl.

'But can I ask you one thing?' Mondale said, leaning forward from his perch on the packing crate, looking earnest.

'What's that?'

'Why this case? Why're you so passionately committed to it?'

'I just want to do my job.'

'It's more than that.'

Dan gave nothing.

'Is it the woman?'

'No.'

'She's very good looking.'

'It's not the woman,' Dan said, though Laura McCaffrey's beauty had not escaped his attention. It did indeed play at least a small role in his determination to stay with the case, though he would never reveal as much to Mondale.

'Is it the kid?'

'Maybe,' Dan said.

'You've always worked hardest on cases where a child was abused or threatened.'

'Not always.'

'Yes, always,' Mondale said. 'Is that because of what happened to your brother and sister?'

* * *

The radio vibrated harder, faster. It rattled against the counter with sufficient force to chip the tiles — and abruptly floated into the air. Levitated. It hung up there, swaying, bobbing at the end of its cord as a helium-filled balloon might bobble at the end of a string.

Laura was beyond surprise. She watched, immobilized by awe, no longer even terribly afraid, simply numb with cold and with incredulity.

The electronic whine became more shrill, thin, spiraled up, like the tape-recorded descent of a bomb played in reverse. Laura looked down at Melanie and saw that the girl had at last begun to rise out of her stupor. She hadn't opened her eyes yet — in fact, she was now squeezing them shut — but she had raised her small hands to her ears, and her mouth was open too.

Snakes of smoke erupted from the miraculously suspended radio. It exploded.

Laura closed her eyes and ducked her head just as the Sony blew up. Bits of broken plastic rained over her, snapped against her arms, head, hands.

A few large chunks of the radio, still attached to the cord, fell straight to the floor — the invisible hands no longer providing support — and hit the tiles with a clank and clatter. The plug pulled from the wall, and the cord slithered across the counter; it dropped onto the floor with the rest of the shattered Sony, and was still.

When the explosion had come, Melanie had finally responded to the chaos around her. She erupted from her chair, and even before the flying debris had finished falling, she scurried on hands and knees into the corner by the back door. Now she cowered there, head sheltered under her arms, sobbing.

In the silence following the cessation of the radio's banshee wail, the child's sobs were especially penetrating. Each, like a soft blow, landed on Laura's heart, not with physical force but with enormous emotional impact, hammering her alternately toward despair and terror.

* * *

When Dan didn't respond, Mondale repeated the question in a tone of innocent curiosity, but his undertone was taunting and mean. 'Do you work harder on those cases involving child abuse because of what happened to your brother and sister?'

'Maybe,' Dan said, wishing he had never told Mondale about those tragedies. But when two young cops share a squad car, they usually spill their guts to each other during the long night patrols. He had spilled too much before he'd realized that he didn't like Mondale and never would. 'Maybe that's part of why I don't want to let go of this case. But it's not the whole story. It's also because of Cindy Lakey. Don't you see that, Ross? Here's another case where a woman and child are in danger, a mother and her daughter threatened by a maniac, maybe more than one maniac. Just like the Lakeys. So maybe it's a chance for me to redeem myself. A chance to make up for my failure to save Cindy Lakey, to finally get rid of a little of that guilt.'

Mondale stared at him, astonished. 'You feel guilt because the Lakey kid was killed?'

Dan nodded. 'I should have shot Dunbar the moment he turned toward me with that gun. I shouldn't have hesitated, shouldn't have given him a chance to drop it. If I'd wasted him right away, he'd never have gotten into that house.'

Amazed, Mondale said, 'But, Christ, you know what it was like back then. Even worse than now. The grand jury was looking into half a dozen charges of police brutality, whether the accusations had substance or not. Every half-assed political activist had it in for the whole department in those days. Even worse than now. Even when a cop shot someone in a clear-cut act of self-defense, they howled for his head. Everyone was supposed to have rights — except cops. Cops were supposed to just stand there and take bullets in the chest. The reporters, politicians, the ACLU — they all talked about us like we were bloodthirsty fascists. Shit, man, you remember!'

'I remember,' Dan said. 'And that's why I didn't shoot Dunbar when I should have. I could see the guy was unbalanced, dangerous. I knew, intuitively, that he was going to kill somebody that night, but in the back of my mind I was thinking about all the heat we were under, all the accusations about being trigger-happy cops, and I knew if I shot him, I'd have to answer for it. In the climate we had back then, I figured nobody would listen to me. I'd be sacrificed. I was worried about losing my job, being booted off the force. I was afraid of destroying my career. And so I waited until he brought the gun around, waited until he pointed it right straight at me. But I gave him just a second too long, and he got me, and because I didn't go with my instincts or with my intellect, he had a chance to get Cindy Lakey too.'

Mondale shook his head adamantly. 'But none of that was your fault. Blame the goddamned social reformers who take sides without any understanding of the goddamned situation we face, without knowing what it's like out there on the streets. They're to blame. Not you. Not me.'

Dan glared at him. 'Don't you dare put yourself in the same boat with me. Don't you dare. You ran, Ross. I screwed up because I was thinking about my own ass — about my pension, for God's sake! — when I should have been thinking about nothing other than doing the job the best way I could. That's why I have guilt to live with. But don't you ever imply the burden lies equally on you and me. It doesn't. That's crap, and you know it.'

Mondale was trying to look earnest and concerned, but he was having increasing difficulty suppressing his hatred.

'Or maybe you don't know it,' Dan said. 'That's even scarier. Maybe you aren't just covering your own backside. Maybe you really think that looking out for number one is the only moral position that makes sense.'

Without replying, Mondale got up and went to the door.

Dan said, 'Is your conscience actually clear, Ross? God help you, I think maybe it is.'

Mondale glanced back at him. 'You do what you want to do on this case, but stay out of my way.'

'You haven't lost a single night's sleep over Cindy Lakey, have you, Ross?'

'I said, stay out of my way.'

'Happily.'

'I don't want to have to listen to any more of your carping and whining.'

'You're incredible.'

Without replying, Mondale opened the door.

'What planet are you from, Ross?'

Mondale walked out.

'I'll bet there's only one color on his home planet,' Dan said to the empty room. 'Brown. Everything must be brown on his world. That's why his clothes are all brown — they remind him of home.'

It was a weak joke. Maybe that was why he couldn't make himself smile. Maybe.

* * *

The kitchen was still.

The silence held.

The air was warm once more.

'It's over,' Earl said.

Paralysis relaxed its grip on Laura. A circuit board from the demolished radio crunched under her foot as she stepped across the kitchen and knelt beside Melanie.

With soothing words, with much patting and stroking, she calmed her daughter. She wiped the tears from the child's face.

Earl began picking through the debris, studying the pieces of the Sony, mumbling to himself, baffled and fascinated. Sitting on the floor with Melanie, pulling the girl onto her lap, holding her, rocking her, immensely relieved that the child was still there to be comforted, Laura would like to have wished away the events of the past few minutes. She would have given anything to be able to deny the reality of what she had seen. But she was too good a psychiatrist to allow herself to indulge in any of the little mind games that would minimize this bizarre development; nor would she permit herself to rationalize it away with the standard jargon of her profession. She hadn't been hallucinating. This paranormal episode — this supernatural phenomenon — couldn't be explained away as just sensory confusion, either; her perceptions had been accurate and reliable in spite of the impossibility of what she had perceived. She had not been overlaying a logical series of events with an illogical and subjective fantasy, in the manner of many schizophrenics. Earl had seen it too. And this wasn't a shared hallucination, a mass delusion. It was crazy, impossible — but real. The radio had been… possessed. Some of the pieces of the Sony were still smoking. The air was thick with an acrid, charredplastic odor.

Melanie moaned softly. Twitched.

'Easy, honey, easy.'

The girl looked up at her mother, and Laura was jolted by the eye contact. Melanie was no longer gazing through her. She had come back from her dark world again, and Laura prayed that this time the girl was back for good, although that was unlikely.

'I… want,' Melanie said.

'What is it, honey? What do you want?'

The girl's eyes searched Laura's. 'I… need.'

'Anything, Melanie. Anything you want. Just tell me. Tell Mommy what you need.'

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

Earl had looked up from the smoldering scraps 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 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 reassurance. 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.