The Door to December (22 page)
'Who pays your rent?' he asked.
'There is no rent.'
'Who owns the house?'
'A company.'
'What company?'
'What can I do for you?'
'What company?'
'Let me do something for you.'
'What company?' he persisted.
'John Wilkes Enterprises.'
'Who's John Wilkes?'
'I don't know.'
'You've never had a man here named John?'
'No.'
'How do you know about this John Wilkes Enterprises?'
'I get a check from them every month. A very nice check.'
Shakily, Dan got to his feet.
Regine was visibly disappointed.
He looked around, spotted the suitcases by the door, which he had noticed when he'd first come in. 'Going away?'
'For a few days.'
'Where?'
'Las Vegas.'
'Are you running, Regine?'
'What would I be running from?'
'People are getting killed because of what happened in that gray room.'
'But I don't know what happened in the gray room, and I don't care,' she said. 'So I'm safe.'
Staring down at her, Dan realized that Regine Savannah Hoffritz had a gray room all of her own. She carried it with her wherever she went, for her gray room was where the real Regine was locked away, trapped, imprisoned.
He said, 'Regine, you need help.'
'I need to be what you want.'
'No. You need—'
'I'm fine.'
'You need counseling.'
'I'm free. Willy taught me how to be free.'
'Free from what?'
'Responsibility. Fear. Hope. Free from everything.'
'Willy didn't free you. He enslaved you.'
'You don't understand.'
'He was a sadist.'
'There's nothing wrong with that.'
'He got inside your mind, twisted you. We're not talking about some half-baked psychology professor, Regine. This lunatic was a heavyweight. This was a guy who worked for the Pentagon, researching behavior modification, developing new methods of brainwashing. Ego-repressing drugs, Regine. Subliminal persuasion. Willy was to Big Brother what Merlin was to King Arthur. Except Willy did bad magic, Regine. He transformed you into ... into this ... into a masochist, for his amusement.'
'And that's how he freed me,' she said serenely. 'You see, when you no longer fear pain, when you learn to love pain, then you can't be afraid of anything anymore. That's why I'm free.'
Dan wanted to shake her, but he knew that shaking her would do no good. Quite the opposite. She would only beg for more.
He wanted to get her in front of a sympathetic judge and have her committed without her consent, so she could receive psychiatric treatment. But he wasn't related to her; he was virtually a stranger to her; no judge would play along with him; it just wasn't done that way. There seemed to be nothing he could do for her.
She said, 'You know something interesting? I think maybe Willy's not really dead.'
'Oh, he's dead, all right.'
'Maybe not.'
'I saw the body. We got a positive ID match from dental records and fingerprints.'
'Maybe,' she said. 'But ... well, I get the feeling he's still alive. Sometimes I sense him out there ... I feel him. It's strange. I can't explain it. But that's why I'm not as broken up as I might have been. Because I'm not convinced he's dead. Somehow, he's still ... out there.'
Her self-image and her primary reasons for continuing to live were so dependent upon Willy Hoffritz, upon the prospect of receiving his praise and his approval or at least upon hearing his voice on the telephone every once in a while, that she was never going to be able to accept his death. Dan suspected that he could take her to the morgue, confront her with the bloody corpse, force her to place her hands upon the cold dead flesh, make her stare into the grotesquely battered countenance, shove the coroner's report in front of her — and nevertheless fail to convince her that Hoffritz had been killed. Hoffritz had gotten inside her, had shattered her psyche, then had rejoined the pieces in a pattern that was more pleasing to himself, with himself as the bonding agent holding her together. If Regine accepted the reality of his death, there would be no glue binding her anymore, and she might collapse into insanity. Her only hope — or so it must seem to her — was to believe that Willy was still alive.
'Yes, he's out there,' she said again. 'I feel it. Somehow, somewhere, he's out there.'
Feeling utterly ineffectual, loathing his powerlessness, Dan headed toward the door.
Behind him, Regine rose quickly from the sofa and said, 'Please. Wait.'
He glanced back at her.
She said, 'You could ... have me.'
'No, Regine.'
'Do anything to me.'
'No.'
'I'll be your animal.'
He continued to the door.
She said, 'Your little animal.'
He resisted the urge to run.
She caught up with him as he opened the door. Her perfume was subtle but effective. She put one hand on his shoulder and said, 'I like you.'
'Where are your folks, Regine?'
'You make me hot.'
'Your mother and father? Where do they live?'
She put her slender fingers to his lips. They were warm.
She traced the outline of his mouth.
He pushed her hand away.
She said, 'I really, really like you.'
'Maybe your folks could help you through this.'
'I like you.'
'Regine—'
'Hurt me. Hurt me very badly.'
He pushed her away from him as a compassionate hypochondriac might push away a grasping leper: firmly, with distaste, with fear of contagion, but with a regard for the delicacy of her condition.
She said, 'When Willy put me in the hospital, he came to visit me every day. He arranged a private room for me and always closed the door when he came, so we'd be alone. When we were alone, he kissed my bruises. Every day he came and kissed my bruises. You can't know how good his lips felt on my bruises, Lieutenant. One kiss, and each spot of soreness — each little tender contusion — was transformed. Instead of pain, each bruise was filled with pleasure. It was as if ... as if a clitoris sprang up in the place of every bruise, and when he kissed me I climaxed, again and again.
Dan got the hell out of there and slammed the door behind him.
With a cold and gusty wind blowing scraps of litter along the night streets, and with the portent of rain heavy in the air, Earl Benton took Laura and Melanie to an apartment on the first floor of a rambling three-story complex in Westwood, south of Wilshire Boulevard. It had a living room, a dining alcove, a kitchen, one bedroom, and one bath. The place didn't seem quite as small as it actually was, because big windows looked out on a lushly landscaped courtyard which, at that time of night, was illuminated by blue- and green-filtered spotlights concealed throughout the shrubbery.
The apartment was owned by California Paladin and was used as a 'safe house.' The agency was occasionally hired to retrieve teenagers and college-age kids from fanatical religious cults with which they had become entangled; immediately upon being freed, they were brought to that apartment, where they underwent several days of deprogramming before returning to their parents. The safe house also had been used as a secure way station for wives who were threatened by estranged husbands, and on several occasions high corporate executives in a variety of industries had met there for days at a time to plan secret and hostile take-over bids of other companies because they could be free of worry about electronic eavesdropping and corporate espionage. California Paladin had also once stashed a Baptist minister in those rooms after a youth gang in south-central L.A. had put out a contract on his life to repay him for testimony against one of their brothers. A rock-music star had passed through while dodging a particularly onerous subpoena in an expensive civil suit. And a big-name actress had needed just this degree of total privacy in just such an unlikely location as this, in order to recuperate from secret cancer surgery that, if revealed, would have cost her roles in upcoming pictures; producers were reluctant to hire stars who would be ineligible for completion bonds and who might get sick or even die halfway through filming.
Melanie and Laura would make use of those quiet, modest rooms, at least for the night. Laura hoped that the hideaway would be as safe from the strange force pursuing them as it was from youth gangs and process servers.
Earl turned on the heat and went into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee.
Laura tried to interest Melanie in some hot chocolate, but the girl wanted none. Melanie moved like a sleepwalker to the largest chair in the living room, climbed onto it, curled her legs beneath her, and sat staring down at her hands, which lethargically pulled and rubbed and scratched and massaged each other. Her fingers interlaced and knotted and then untied themselves and then knotted together again. She stared at her hands so raptly that it almost began to seem as if she didn't realize that they were a part of her but thought, instead, that they were two small, busy animals at play in her lap.
The coffee countered the chill they had gotten while coming from the windswept parking lot to the apartment, but it could not relieve that other chill — the one caused not by physical stimuli but by their unexpected and unwanted encounter with the unknown.
While Earl called his office to report their move from the house in Sherman Oaks, Laura stood at the living-room window, holding the coffee mug in both hands, breathing in the fragrant vapors. As she stared out at the lakes of shadow, at the sprays and pools of green and blue light, the first fat droplets of rain began to snap against the palm fronds.
Somewhere in the night, something was stalking Melanie, something beyond human understanding, an invulnerable creature that left its victims looking as if they had gone through half the cycle in a trash compactor before someone had pushed the emergency-stop button. Laura's university degrees, her doctorate in psychology, might make it possible for her to eventually bring Melanie out of quasi-autistic withdrawal, but nothing taught and nothing learned in any university could help her deal with
It
. Was it demon, spirit, psychic force? Those things did not exist. Right? Did not exist. Yet ... what had Dylan and Hoffritz unleashed? And why?
Dylan had believed in the supernatural. Periodically, he had been obsessed with one aspect of the occult or another, and during those periods he had been more intense and nervous and argumentative than usual. In fact, when thus obsessed, he reminded Laura of her mother because his adamant belief in — and constant preaching about — the reality of the occult was akin to the religious fanaticism and superstitious mania that had made Beatrice such a terror; it was this, as much as anything, that had driven Laura to divorce, for she could not abide anything that reminded her of her fear-ridden childhood.
Now, she tried to remember specific enthusiasms that had gripped Dylan, theories that had obsessed him. She strove to recall something that might explain what was happening now, but she could not remember anything important, because she had always refused to listen to him when he had spoken of those things that had seemed, to her, like the sheerest flights of fancy — or madness.
In reaction to her mother's irrationality and gullibility, Laura had built a life strictly on logic and reason, trusting in only those things that she could see, hear, touch, smell, and feel. She did not believe that a cracked mirror meant seven years of bad luck, and she did not throw spilled salt over her shoulder. Given the choice, she would always walk
under
a ladder rather than around it, merely to prove that there was nothing of her mother in her. She didn't believe in devils, demons, possession, and exorcism. In her heart, she felt there was a God, but she didn't attend church or identify with any particular religion. She didn't read ghost stories, had no interest in movies about vampires and werewolves. She didn't believe in psychics, premonitions, clairvoyant visions.
She was profoundly unprepared for the events of the past twenty-four hours.
While logic and reason made the most solid foundation on which to construct a life, she realized that the mortar ought to be mixed with a sense of wonder, with a respect for the unknown, or at least leavened with open-mindedness. Otherwise, it would be brittle mortar that would dry, crack, and flake away. Her mother's extreme reliance on religion and superstition was undoubtedly sick. But perhaps it wasn't wise to have rushed to the other extreme of the philosophical spectrum. The universe seemed considerably more complicated than it had been before.
Something was out there.
Something she couldn't understand.
And it wanted Melanie.
But even as she stood by the window and studied the rainy night with a new respect for things mysterious and uncanny, her mind sought more rational explanations, tangible villains of flesh and blood. She heard Earl talking on the telephone with someone at his office, and suddenly it occurred to her that no one except California Paladin knew where she and her daughter were. For a terrible moment, she felt that she had done something very wrong, very stupid, in allowing herself to be spirited away from the watchful eyes of the FBI, from contact with friends and neighbors and the police. Melanie had not been targeted solely by the unseen It of which they had been warned, but by real people too, people like that hired killer who had been found in the hospital parking lot. And what if those people had contacts inside California Paladin? What if Earl himself was the executioner?
Stop!
She took a deep breath. Another.
She was standing on a slope of slippery emotions, sliding toward hysteria. For Melanie's sake, if not her own, she had to maintain control of herself.
Dan stepped out of Regine's house and slammed the door behind him, but he didn't head down the walk. He waited, listening at the door, and his suspicion was confirmed when he heard a man's voice: She hadn't been alone.
The man was furious. He shouted, and she called him Eddie and responded in a meek and wheedling voice. The flat, hard, unmistakable sound of a slap was followed by her cry — a bleat composed partly of pain, partly of fear, but also partly of pleasure and excitement.
Around Dan, the wind huffed noisily and the branches of the trees were scraped against one another, and it wasn't possible to hear exactly what was being said in the house. He picked up enough words to know that Eddie was angry because Regine had revealed too much. In a miserable, servile voice, Regine tried to explain that she'd had no choice but to tell Dan what she knew; Dan hadn't asked for answers, he had
demanded
answers — and, more important, he had demanded in a way that pushed all her buttons. She was an obedient creature who found meaning, purpose, and joy only in doing what she was told to do. Eddie and his friends liked her that way, she said, wanted her that way, she said, and it wasn't possible for her to be that way with them and not that way with other people. 'Don't you understand, Eddie? Don't you understand?' He might have understood, but her explanation did nothing to ameliorate his fury. He slapped her again, again, and her tortured but dismayingly eager cry did not bear contemplation.
Dan moved away from the door, along the front of the house, to the first window. He wanted to get a look at Eddie. Through a gap in the drapes, he saw a portion of the living room and a man of about forty-five. The guy had red hair, a mustache, and doughy features. He was dressed in black slacks, white shirt, gray sweater-vest, and bow tie. His face was that of an aging, spoiled child. He had an effete quality, and he moved with a bantam-rooster strut that wasn't natural to him, as if he thought that authority must always be expressed by a puffing of the chest, a rolling of the shoulders, and a cocky attitude. In spite of his posturing, he looked weak and ineffectual, like a wimpy high-school English teacher who had trouble controlling his students. He was not at all the kind of man who would slap a woman around; very likely, he would not have been slapping Regine if she'd been any other woman than she was, for another woman might have slapped him back.
More than anything else, Eddie was distressed that Regine had told Dan about John Wilkes Enterprises, the company that was her keeper, that owned the house in which she lived, and that sent her a check each month. Regine was on her knees before him, head bowed, like a vassal humbling herself before her feudal lord, and he loomed over her, shifting from foot to foot, gesticulating with nervous energy, repeatedly castigating her for having such a loose tongue.
John Wilkes Enterprises.
Dan knew he had been given another key to another lock in this many-doored mystery.
He turned away from the house and returned to the street where he had parked the car. He opened the trunk and plucked one of the seven Albert Uhlander books from the carton that he had carried out of Ned Rink's house earlier in the evening. Regine had said that a man named Albert had visited her once and, unlike the others who used her, had never visited her again; she had said that he'd had a bony face with sharp features, hawklike. Now, in the ghostly radiance of a mercury-vapor streetlight and in the even more eldritch glow of the bulb in the car's trunk, Dan studied the photograph of the author on the book jacket. Uhlander's face was long, narrow, almost cadaverous, with prominent brow, cheekbones, and jawline; his eyes were cold and predatory, at least in the context of his hooked and beakish nose, and he did indeed have the aspect of a hawk or some other ferocious bird of prey.
So it had been Uhlander who had visited Regine, but only on one occasion, not motivated by overpowering and perverse sexual needs, as were the others, but perhaps by curiosity, as if he needed to see for himself that she was real and that Hoffritz had thoroughly enslaved her. Maybe Uhlander had wished to satisfy himself as to Hoffritz's genius in these matters before joining him and Dylan McCaffrey on the strange project that they had undertaken with Melanie.
Whatever the case, Dan wanted to talk to him. He added Uhlander to the mental list of those whom he intended to question, a list that already included Mary O'Hara, Ernest Andrew Cooper's wife, Joseph Scaldone's wife (if he had one), the executives and/or owners of John Wilkes Enterprises, the silver-haired and distinguished pervert who visited Regine regularly and whom she knew only as 'Daddy,' and the other men who used her — Eddie, Shelby, and Howard.
He put the book back in the carton, closed the trunk, and got into the car just as a few fat drops of rain began to splatter the pavement. Scaldone's mailing list was still in his pocket, and he was certain that he would soon find last names for Eddie, Shelby, and Howard among those three hundred customers of the Sign of the Pentagram. The light there was poor, however, and he was tired, and his eyes felt sandy, and he still wanted to talk to Laura McCaffrey before it got too late, so he left the list in his pocket, started the engine, and drove out of the Hollywood hills.
At 10:44, when he reached Laura's house in Sherman Oaks, a cold rain was falling. Although lights were on in several rooms, no one answered the door. He rang the bell, then knocked, then pounded on the door, to no avail.
Where was Earl Benton? He was supposed to remain there until midnight, when another agent from California Paladin was scheduled to relieve him.
Dan thought of the crushed and disfigured corpses in Studio City the previous night, and he thought of the dead hit man, Ned Rink, and with growing anxiety he moved away from the door, squished across the wet lawn, pushed between two flower-laden hibiscus bushes, and peered in the nearest window. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, no bodies or blood or wreckage. He went to the next window, and still he saw nothing, so he hurried to the gate at the side of the house and went through it and along the walk to the rear, his heart racing and an ulcerous pain flaring in his gut.
The kitchen door was unlocked. As he pushed it open and stepped inside, he noted that the door frame was splintered and that a ruined security chain hung from its mounting. Then he saw the mess in the room beyond: torn and wilted flowers, shredded and wadded leaves, other greenery, clods of moist earth.
No blood.
On the table were three unfinished spaghetti dinners speckled with dirt and debris.
One overturned chair.
A tangled mass of impatiens bristled from the sink.
But no blood. Thank God. No blood. So far.
He drew his revolver.
Full of dread, with incipient grief welling in anticipation of the battered corpses that must lie somewhere in the house, he edged out of the kitchen and moved cautiously from one room to the next. He found nothing but a wary cat that dashed away from him.
Checking the garage, he saw that Laura McCaffrey's blue Honda was gone. He didn't know what to make of that. When he uncovered no bodies anywhere, his relief was as great as if he had been trudging along an ocean floor with billions of tons of water pressing on him and was now abruptly transported to dry land where only air weighed on his shoulders. The extent and depth of his relief, and the great exhilaration that accompanied it, forced him to admit to himself that his feelings for this woman and her troubled child were different from his feelings for all the other victims whom he had known in fourteen years of policework. Nor could his unusual involvement and empathy be attributed to the vague parallels between this case and that of Fran and Cindy Lakey, years ago; he was not drawn to Laura McCaffrey solely because, by saving her and Melanie, he could atone for his failure to save Cindy Lakey's life. That was part of it, certainly, but he was also attracted to this woman. The influence that she had on him was not quite like anything he'd ever known before; he was drawn to her not only because of her beauty, which was undeniably affecting, and not only because of her intelligence, which was important to him since he had never shared most men's fascination with dumb blondes and airhead brunettes, but also because of her incredible strength and determination in the face of horror and adversity.
But even if she and Melanie get out of this predicament alive, Dan thought, there's probably little hope of a relationship between her and me. She's a doctor of psychology, for God's sake. I'm a cop. She's better educated than I am. She makes more money than I do. Forget it, Haldane. You're out of your class.
Nevertheless, when he found no bodies anywhere in the house, he was immensely relieved, and his heart swelled with a particular joy that he would not have felt if the escapees from death had been any other escapees than this woman and her daughter.
When he returned to the kitchen to have a closer look at the wreckage there, Dan found that he was no longer alone in the house. Michael Seames, the FBI agent he'd met a few hours ago at the Sign of the Pentagram, was standing by the table, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, studying the floral debris that filled the room. Beneath his graying hair, above his apparently aged shoulders, a troubled and puzzled expression lay upon Seames's anachronistically young face.
'Where have they gone?' Dan asked.
'I was hoping
you
could tell
me
,' Seames said.
'At my suggestion, she hired around-the-clock bodyguards—'
'California Paladin.'
'Yeah, that's right. But as far as I know, they weren't going to recommend that she go into hiding or anything like that. They were going to stay here with her.'
'One of them was here. An Earl Benton—'
'Yes, I know him.'
'Until about an hour ago. Then, without warning, he split with Laura McCaffrey and the girl, went out of here like a bat out of hell. We have a surveillance van across the street.'
'Oh?'
'They tried to follow Benton, but he was moving too fast,' Seames frowned. 'In fact, it seemed like he was trying to give us the slip as much as anything else. You have any idea why he'd want to do that?'
'Just a wild guess. I'm probably totally off the wall to even suggest it. But maybe he doesn't trust you.'
'We're here to protect the child.'
'You sure our government wouldn't like to have her for a while, to try to figure out what McCaffrey and Hoffritz were doing with her in that gray room?'
'We might,' Seames admitted. 'That decision hasn't been made yet. But this is America, you know—'
'So I've heard.'
'—and we wouldn't kidnap her.'
'What would you call it — "borrowing" her?'
'We'd want to have her mother's permission for whatever tests we'd run.'
Dan sighed, not sure what to believe.
Seames said, 'You didn't maybe tell Benton that he should get them out from under us, did you?'
'Why would I do that? I'm a public servant, same as you.'
'Then you always work these hours, all day and half the night, on every case you handle?'
'Not every case.'
'Most cases?'
Dan could honestly say, 'Yeah, in fact, on most cases I put in long hours. You get going on an investigation, and one thing leads to another, and it isn't always possible to stop cold at five o'clock each day. Most detectives work long hours, irregular shifts. You must know that.'
'You work harder than most, I hear.'
Dan shrugged.
Seames said, 'They say you're a bulldog, that you love your work and you really sink your teeth into it, really hang on.'
'Maybe. I guess I work pretty hard. But in a homicide, the trail can get cold fast. Usually, if you don't get a lead on your killer in three or four days, you'll never hang it on anyone.'
'But you're putting more into this case than even the average homicide detective usually does, more than even you usually do. Aren't you, Lieutenant?'
'Maybe.'
'You know you are.'
'Arf, arf.'
'What?'
'The bulldog in me.'
'Why such a bulldog on
this
case?'
'I guess I was just in the mood for some action.'
'That's no answer.'
'I just ate too much Purina Dog Chow, have too much energy, got to work it off.'
Seames shook his head. 'It's because you've got a special stake in this one.'
'Do I?'
'Don't you?'
'Not that I'm aware of,' Dan said, although an image of Laura McCaffrey's lovely face rose unbidden in his memory.
Seames regarded him with suspicion and said, 'Listen, Haldane, if someone was bankrolling McCaffrey and Hoffritz because their project had a military application, then those same — let's call them
financiers
— those same financiers might be willing to spread a lot of money around to get their hands on the girl again. But any money they spread would be dirty, damned dirty. Any guy who took it would probably come down with an infection from it. Know what I mean?'
At first it had appeared that Seames was somehow aware of Dan's romantic inclinations toward Laura. Now it was suddenly clear that a darker worry nagged the agent.
For God's sake, Dan thought, he's wondering if I've sold out to the Russians or someone!
'Jesus, Seames, are you ever on the wrong track!'
'They might be willing to pay a lot to get their hands on her, and while a police detective is reasonably well paid in this city, he's never going to get rich — unless he moonlights.'
'I resent the implication.
'And I regret your reluctance to make a plain denial of that implication.'
'No. I haven't sold out to anyone, anywhere, at any time. No,
nyet
, negative, definitely not. Is that plain enough for you?'
Seames didn't answer. Instead, he said, 'Anyway, when the surveillance team lost Benton, they drove right back here to wait, to see if the woman and girl would return, or whether maybe somebody else would show up. As an afterthought, they came to have a look around the house, found the door the way you found it — and this weird mess.'
Dan said, 'What about the mess? What do you make of it?'
'The flowers are from the garden in the back.'
But what're they doing here? Who brought them inside?'