'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.

16

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.

17

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?