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.'

18

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

Laura had nurtured a small hope that termination of the hypnotic trance would snap the girl out of her catatonia as well. Briefly the child's eyes did 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.'