'You have to do better.'

'I just don't know. He's the kind of guy who could be a conduit for the government, or maybe he financed it himself.'

'Rich?'

'I'm not giving you his name, and I'm not giving you so many details you could guess his name. Hell, I'd be signing my own death warrant.'

Dan thought a moment. Then: 'He say anything about what they were trying to prove in that gray room?'

'No.'

'This guy, this one who got to you, this one who financed that crazy research ... is he doing the killing, Ross?'

Silence.

'Is he, Ross? Come on. Don't be afraid to talk. You've already said too much. I'm not insisting on his name, but I've got to have an answer to this one. Is he responsible for Scaldone and those bodies in Studio City?'

'No, no. Just the opposite. He's scared that he's going to be the next target.'

'Well, who's he afraid of?'

'I don't think it's a who.'

'What?'

'This is crazy ... but the way these people talk, they're so scared you'd think it was Dracula who was after them. I mean, from things I've heard, I somehow get the idea it's not a person they're afraid of. It's a thing. Some thing is killing everyone connected with the gray room. I know that sounds like horseshit, but it's the feeling I get. Now, damn it, do we have a deal or not? I back out of this, give you the McCaffreys, and you give me Wexlersh and Manuello. Is that agreeable?'

Dan pretended to think about it. Then: 'Okay.'

'We got a deal?'

'Yeah.'

Mondale laughed nervously. His laughter had a filthy edge to it, as well. 'You realize what this means, Haldane?'

'What's it mean?'

'You make a deal like this, you drop charges against men you believe to have intended murder ... well, then you're just as dirty as anybody.'

'Not as dirty as you. I could float in a sewer for a month and eat whatever drifted by, and I still wouldn't be half as dirty as you, Ross.'

He hung up. He had eliminated one threat. No one would be using police badges to get close to Melanie. They still had an army of enemies, but now there was one less variety of them.

And the beauty of it was that he had not given up anything in return for Ross Mondale's retreat, had not even slightly dirtied his hands, because he didn't intend to uphold his end of the bargain. He would never ask Earl to withdraw his accusations against Wexlersh and Manuello. In fact, when the case was finally broken and it was safe for Laura and Melanie to appear in public, Dan would encourage them to testify, as well, against the two detectives, and he would add his own testimony to the record. Manuello and Wexlersh were finished—and by extension, so was Ross Mondale.

30

At twenty-five past midnight, the hospital released Earl Benton.

Laura was shocked by the bodyguard's battered appearance even after the blood had been cleaned off his face. On the side of his head, doctors had shaved a spot half as large as the palm of a hand and had closed the wound with seven sutures. Now it was covered with a bandage. His lips were purple and swollen. His mouth was distorted. One eye was black. He looked as if he'd had a close encounter with a truck.

His appearance affected Melanie. The girl's eyes cleared. She seemed to swim up from her trance to peer more closely at him, as if she were a fish rising to the surface of a lake to examine a curious creature standing on the shore.

'Ahhh,' she said sadly.

She seemed to want to say something more to Earl, so he leaned toward her.

She touched his battered face with one hand, and her gaze moved slowly from his bruised chin to his split lips, to his black eye, to the bandage on his head. As she studied him, she chewed worriedly on her lower lip. Her eyes filled with tears. She tried to speak, but no sound came from her.

'What is it, Melanie?' Earl asked.

Laura stooped beside her daughter and put one arm around her. 'What're you trying to tell him, honey? Think one word at a time. Take it nice and slow. You can get it out. You can do it, baby.'

Dan, the doctor who had treated Earl, and a young Latino nurse were watching attentively, expectantly.

The child's tear-blurred gaze continued to move over Earl's face, from one battle scar to another, and at last she said, 'For m-m-me.'

'Yes,' Laura said. 'That's right, baby. Earl was fighting for you. He risked his life for you.'

'For me,' Melanie repeated with awe, as if being loved and protected was an entirely new and amazing concept to her. Excited by this crack in Melanie's autistic armor, hoping to widen it or even shatter the armor completely, Laura said, 'We're all fighting for you, baby. We want to help. We will help you, if you'll let us.'

'For me,' Melanie said again, but she would say no more. Although Laura and Earl continued to coax her, Melanie did not speak again. Her tears dried, and she lowered her hand from Earl's injured face, and that faraway look returned to her eyes. She bowed her head, weary.

Laura was disappointed but not despairing. At least the child seemed to want to come back from her dark and private place, and if she had a strong desire to recover, she would probably do so, sooner or later.

The emergency-room physician suggested that Earl stay overnight for observation, but in spite of the drubbing that he had taken, Earl resisted. He wanted to return to the safe house and make a statement to the police, thereby pounding a few nails into a tandem coffin for Wexlersh and Manuello.

They had all come to the hospital in Dan's car, but now Dan didn't want to go back to the safe house. He didn't want Laura and Melanie to be near any other cops, so they called a taxi for Earl.

'Don't wait with me,' Earl said. 'You guys get out of here.'

'We might as well wait,' Dan said, 'because we've got a few things to talk over anyway.'

Without discussing it, they grouped around Melanie, shielding her. They stood just inside the front entrance of the medical center, where they could see the rain-lashed night and the place where the taxi would pull up. Half the fluorescent lights in the lobby were switched off, for it was well after visiting hours, and the other half cast fuzzy bars of cold, unpleasant light across the large room. The air smelled vaguely of rose-scented disinfectant. Except for the four of them, the place was deserted.

'You want Paladin to send someone out here to take over from me?' Earl asked.

'No,' Dan said.

'Didn't think you would.'

'Paladin's damned good,' Dan said, 'and I've never had reason to doubt their integrity, and I still don't have reason—'

'But, in this particular case, you don't trust anyone at Paladin any more than you trust anyone on the police force,' Earl said.

'Except you,' Laura said. 'We know we can trust you, Earl. Without you, Melanie and I would be dead.'

'Don't credit me with anything heroic,' Earl said. 'I was plain stupid. I opened the door to Manuello.'

'But you had no way of knowing—'

'But I opened the door,' Earl said, and the expression of self-disgust on his face was unmistakable in spite of the way his injuries distorted his features.

Laura could see why Dan and Earl were friends. They shared a devotion to their work, a strong sense of duty, and a tendency to be excessively self-critical. Those were qualities seldom found in a world that seemed daily to put more stock in cynicism, selfishness, and self-indulgence.

To Earl, Dan said, 'I'll find a motel, get a room, and hole up there with Laura and Melanie the rest of the night. I thought of taking them back to my place, but someone might be expecting me to do just that.'

'And tomorrow?' Earl asked.

'There're several people I want to see—'

'Can I help?'

'If you feel up to it when you get out of bed in the morning.'

'I'll feel up to it,' Earl assured him.

Dan said, 'There's a woman named Mary Katherine O'Hara, in Burbank. She's secretary of an organization called Freedom Now.' He gave Earl the address and outlined the information he wanted from O'Hara. 'I also need to find out about a company called John Wilkes Enterprises. Who are its officers, majority stockholders?'

'Is it a California corporation?' Earl asked.

'Most likely,' Dan said. 'I need to know when the incorporation papers were filed, by whom, what business they're supposed to be in.'

'How's this John Wilkes outfit come into it?' Earl asked, which was something Laura wondered about too.

'It'll take a while to explain,' Dan said. 'I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Let's get together for a late lunch, say one o'clock, and try to make something out of the information we've gathered.'

'Yeah, I should have dug up what you want by then,' Earl said. He suggested a coffee shop in Van Nuys because, he said, it was a place in which he had never seen anyone from Paladin.

'It's not a cop hangout, either,' Dan said. 'Sounds good.'

'Here's your cab,' Laura said as headlights swept across the glass doors and briefly sparkled in the raindrops that quivered on those panes.

Earl looked down at Melanie and said, 'Well, princess, can you give me a smile before I go?'

The girl peered up at him, but Laura saw that her eyes were still strange, distant.

'I'm warning you,' Earl said, 'I'm going to hang around and bother you until you finally give me a smile.'

Melanie just stared.

To Laura, Earl said, 'Keep your chin up. Okay? It's going to work out.'

Laura nodded. 'And thanks for—'

'For nothing,' Earl said. 'I opened the door for them. I've got to make up for that. Wait until I make up for that before you start thanking me for anything.' He stepped to the lobby doors, started to push one open, then glanced back at Dan and said, 'By the way, what the hell happened to you?'

'What?' Dan asked.

'Your forehead.'

'Oh.' Dan glanced at Laura, and she could tell by his expression that he'd come by his injury while working on the case, and she could also tell that he didn't want to say as much and make her feel at all responsible. He said, 'There was this little old lady ... she hit me with her cane.'

'Oh?' Earl said.

'I helped her across the street.'

'Then why would she hit you?'

'She didn't want to cross the street,' Dan said.

Earl grinned—it was a macabre expression on his battered face—pushed the door open, ran through the rain, and disappeared into the waiting taxi.

Laura zipped up Melanie's jacket. She and Dan kept the girl between them as they hurried out to his unmarked department sedan.

The air was chilly.

The rain was cold.

The darkness seemed to breathe with malevolent life.

Out there, somewhere, It waited.

*  *  *

The motel room had two queen-size beds with purple-and-green spreads that clashed with the garish orange-and-blue drapes that, in turn, clashed with the loud yellow-and-brown wallpaper. There was a certain kind of eye-searing decor to be found in about one-fourth of the hotels and motels in every state of the union, from Alaska to Florida, an unmistakable bizarre decor of such a particular nature that it seemed, to Dan, that the same grossly incompetent interior decorator must be traveling frantically from one end of the country to the other, papering walls and upholstering furniture and draping windows with factory-rejected patterns and materials.

The beds had mattresses that were too soft, and the furniture was scarred, but at least the place was clean. On the credit side of the ledger, the management provided a percolator and complimentary foil packets of Hills Brothers and Mocha Mix. Dan made coffee while Laura put Melanie to bed.

Although the girl had seemed to drift through the day with all the awareness of a sleepwalker, expending little energy, it was late, and she fell asleep even as her mother was tucking the covers around her.

A small table and two chairs stood by the room's only window, and Dan brought the coffee to it. He and Laura sat mostly in shadow, with one small lamp burning just inside the door. The drapes were partly open to reveal a section of the rain-swept parking lot, where ghostly bluish fight from mercury-vapor lamps made strange patterns on the glass and chrome of the cars and shimmered eerily on the wet macadam.

While Dan listened with growing amazement and disquiet, Laura told him the rest of the story that she had begun in the car: the levitating radio that seemed to broadcast a warning, the whirlwind filled with flowers that had burst through the kitchen door. She clearly found it difficult to credit these apparently supernatural events, though she had witnessed them with her own eyes.

'What do you make of it?' he asked when she had finished.

'I was hoping you could explain it to me.'

He told her about Joseph Scaldone being killed in a room where all the windows and doors had been locked from inside. 'Considering that impossibility on top of what you've told me happened at your place, I guess we've got to accept that there's something here—some power, some force that's beyond human experience. But what the hell is it?'

'Well, I've been thinking about it all evening, and it seems to me that whatever ... whatever possessed that radio and carried those flowers into the kitchen is not the same thing that's killing people. In retrospect, scary as it was, the presence in my kitchen wasn't fundamentally threatening. And like I said, it seemed to be warning us that what killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the others is eventually going to come for Melanie too.'

'So we've got both good spirits and bad spirits,' Dan said.

'I guess you could think of them that way.'

'Good ghosts and bad ghosts.'

'I don't believe in ghosts,' she said.

'Neither do I. But, somehow, in their experiments in that room, your husband and Hoffritz seem to have tapped into and then unleashed occult entities, some of which are murderous and some of which are at least benign enough to issue warnings about the bad ones. And until I can think of something better ... well, "ghosts" seems to be the best word for them.'

They fell silent. They sipped the last of their coffee. The rain came down hard, harder. It roared.

At the far end of the room, Melanie murmured in her sleep and shifted under the covers, then grew still and quiet again. At last Laura said, 'Ghosts. It's just ... crazy.'

'Madness.'

'Insanity.'