The Door to December (15 page)

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.