The Door to December

Page 14

The two men who got out of the Chevy went to opposite sides of the van.
'Better go see about Melanie,' Earl repeated.
'She's okay.'
'Then at least step back from the window.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm paid to take risks, and you aren't. And I warned you at the start you'd have to do what I told you to do.'
She retreated from the window, but she didn't move completely away from it. She wanted to see what was happening at the phone-company van.
One of the Paladin agents was still at the driver's door. The other man had gone around to the rear of the van.
'If they're federal agents, there won't be any shooting,' she said. 'Not even if they want Melanie.'
'That's right,' Earl agreed. 'We'd have to give her up.'
'No,' she said, alarmed.
'Yes, I'm afraid we wouldn't have a choice. They're the law. But then at least we'd know who had her, and we could fight to get her back through the courts. But like I said, these guys might not be feds.'
'And if they're ... someone else?' she asked, unable to bring herself to say 'Russians.'
'Then it might get nasty.'
His large, strong hand curled tightly around the revolver.
Laura looked past him, out the window, which was streaked and spotted from the previous night's rain.
The late-afternoon sunlight painted the street in shades of brass and copper.
Squinting, she saw one of the rear doors swing open on the phone-company van.
19
Dan left the pathology department but took only a few steps along the hall before a thought stopped him. He went back, opened the door, and leaned into the office as Luther looked up from the microscope again.
'Thought you had to pee,' the pathologist said. 'You've only been gone ten seconds.'
'Peed right here in the hall,' Dan said.
'Typical homicide detective.'
'Listen, Luther, you're a libertarian?'
'Well, yeah, but there's all kinds of libertarians. You've got your libertarian conservatives, your libertarian anarchists, and your basic orthodox libertarians. You've got libertarians who believe that we should—'
'Luther, look at me, and you'll see the definition of "boredom."'
'Then why'd you ask—'
'I just wanted to know if you'd ever heard of a libertarian group called Freedom Now.'
'Not that I remember.'
'It's a political-action committee.'
'Means nothing to me.'
'You're pretty active in libertarian circles, aren't you? You would have heard of Freedom Now if they were really a bunch of movers and shakers, wouldn't you?'
'Probably.'
'Ernest Andrew Cooper.'
'One of the three stiffs from Studio City,' Luther said.
'Yeah. Ever hear of him before this?'
'No.'
'You sure?'
'Yeah.'
'He's supposed to be a big wheel in libertarian circles.'
'Where?'
'Here in L.A.
'Well, he's not. Never heard of him before this.'
'You sure?'
'Of course I'm sure. Why're you acting like a homicide dick with me?'
'I am a homicide dick.'
'You're a dick, that's for sure,' Luther said, grinning. 'All the people you work with say so. Some of 'em use different words, but they all mean "dick."'
'Dick, dick, dick ... are you fixated on that word or something? What's wrong with you, Luther? Are you lonely, maybe need a new boyfriend?'
The pathologist laughed. He had a hearty laugh and a smile that made you want to smile back at him. Dan couldn't figure why such a good-natured, vital, optimistic, energetic man as Luther Williams had chosen to spend his working life with corpses.
*  *  *
Dr. Irmatrude Gelkenshettle, chairperson of the Department of Psychology at UCLA, had a corner office with lots of windows and a view of the campus. Now, at 4:45 in the afternoon, the short winter day was already fading, casting a muddy orange light like that of a fire settling into embers. Outside, the shadows were growing longer by the minute, and students were hurrying in deference to the evening chill, which was creeping in ahead of the darkness.
Dan sat in a Danish-modern chair, while Dr. Gelkenshettle went around the desk to a spring-backed chair behind it. She was a short, stocky woman in her fifties. Her iron-gray hair was chopped without any sense of style, and although she had never been beautiful, her face was appealing and kind. She wore blue slacks and a man's white shirt, with pocket flaps and epaulets; the sleeves were rolled up, and she even wore a man's watch, a plain but dependable Timex on an expansion band. She radiated competence, efficiency, and intelligence.
Though Dan had just met her, he felt that he knew her well, for his own Aunt Kay—his adoptive mother's sister, a career military officer in the WACs—was just like this woman. Dr. Gelkenshettle obviously chose her clothes for comfort, durability, and value. She didn't scorn those who were concerned about being in fashion; it had simply never occurred to her that fashion might be a consideration when it was time to replenish her wardrobe. Just like Aunt Kay. He even knew why she wore a man's watch. Aunt Kay had one too, because the face was larger than that on a woman's watch, and the numerals were easier to read.
At first he had been taken aback by her. She hadn't been his idea of the head of a major university psychology department. But then he had noticed that on one full shelf of the bookcase behind her desk were more than twenty volumes that bore her name on their spines.
'Doctor Gelkenshettle—'
She held up a hand, interrupting him. 'The name's impossible. The only people who call me Doctor Gelkenshettle are students, those colleagues whom I loathe, my auto mechanic—because you've got to keep those guys at a distance or they'll charge you a year's salary for a tune-up—and strangers. We're strangers, or the next thing to it, but we're also professionals, so let's drop the formalities. Call me Marge.'
'Is that your middle name?'
'Unfortunately, no. But Irmatrude's as bad as Gelkenshettle, and my middle name's Heidi. Do I look like a Heidi to you?'
He smiled. 'I guess not.'
'You're damned right I don't. My parents were sweet, and they loved me, but they had a blind spot about names.'
'My name's Dan.'
'Much better. Simple. Sensible. Anyone can say Dan. Now, you wanted to talk about Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz. It's hard to believe they're dead.'
'Wouldn't be so hard if you'd seen the bodies. Tell me about Dylan first. What did you think of him?'
'I wasn't head of the department when Dylan McCaffrey was here. I only moved into the top job a little more than four years ago.'
'But you were teaching here then, doing your own research. You were on the faculty with him.'
'Yes. I didn't know him well, but I knew him well enough to know I didn't want to know him any better.'
'I understand he was very dedicated to his work. His wife—she's a psychiatrist—called him a severe obsessive-compulsive.'
'He was a nut,' Marge said.
*  *  *
The two new Paladin agents walked away from the suspicious telephone-company van and came directly to Laura's front door. Earl Benton let them in.
One was tall, the other short. The tall one was thin and gray-faced. The short man was slightly pudgy with freckles across the bridge of his nose and on both cheeks. They didn't want to sit down or have coffee. Earl called the short one Flash, and Laura didn't know if that was his surname or a nickname.
Flash did all the talking while the tall one stood beside him, his long face expressionless. 'They're steamed that we blew their cover,' Flash said.
'If they don't want to be made, they should be more subtle,' Earl said.
'That's what I told them,' Flash said.
'Who are they?'
'They showed us FBI credentials.'
'You wrote their names down?'
'Names and ID numbers.'
'Did the ID took real?'
'Yeah,' Flash said.
'What about the men? They seem like Bureau types to you?'
'Yeah,' Flash said. 'Sharply dressed. Very cool, soft-spoken, polite even when they were angry, but that underlying arrogance. You know how they are.'
'I know,' Earl said.
Flash said, 'We're heading back to the office, check this out, see if the Bureau employs agents with those names.'
'You'll find the names, even if these guys aren't legit,' Earl said. 'What you've got to do is get photos of the real agents and see if they look like these guys.'
'That's what we figure to do,' Flash said.
'Get back to me as soon as you can,' Earl said, and the other two turned toward the door.
Laura said, 'Wait.'
Everyone looked at her.
She said, 'What did they tell you? What reason did they give for watching my house?'
'Bureau doesn't talk about its operations unless it wants to,' Earl told Laura.
'And these guys didn't want to,' Flash said. 'They'd no sooner tell us their reasons for watching you than they'd kiss us and ask us to dance.'
The tall man nodded agreement.
Laura said, 'If they were here to protect Melanie and me, they'd tell us, wouldn't they? So that means they must be here to snatch her back.'
'Not necessarily,' Flash said.
Earl put his revolver back in his shoulder holster. 'Laura, see, the situation may be just as unclear and confusing to the Bureau as it is to us. For instance, suppose your husband was working on an important Pentagon project when he disappeared with Melanie. Suppose the FBI's been looking for him ever since. Now he turns up, dead, in peculiar circumstances. Maybe it hasn't been our government funding him these last six years, in which case they're bound to wonder where he's been getting his money.'
Again, Laura felt as if the floor were tilting under her, as if the real world that she'd always taken for granted were an illusion. It almost seemed as though true reality might be the paranoid's nightmare world of unseen enemies and complex conspiracies.
She said, 'Then you're telling me they're out in that telephone-company van, watching my house, because they think someone else may come for Melanie, and they want to nab them in the act? But I still don't understand why they didn't come to me and tell me they were going to be watching.'
'They don't trust you,' Flash said.
'They were angry with us for revealing their presence not just to anyone who might've been watching out there,' Earl said, 'but to you as well.'
Puzzled, she said, 'Why?'
Earl looked uncomfortable. 'Because, as far as they know, maybe you've always been in this thing with your husband.'
'He stole Melanie from me.'
Earl cleared his throat and looked unhappy at having to explain this to her. 'From the Bureau's point of view, could be that you let your husband take your daughter, so he'd be able to experiment on her with no notice or interference from family or friends.'
Shocked, Laura said, 'That's insane! You see what's been done to Melanie. How could I be a party to that?'
'People do strange things.'
'I love her. She's my little girl. Dylan was disturbed, maybe crazy, okay, so he was too unbalanced to see or even care how he was hurting her, destroying her. But I'm not unbalanced too! I'm not like Dylan.'
'I know,' Earl said soothingly. 'I know you're not.'
She saw belief in Earl Benton's eyes, trust and compassion, but when she looked at the other two men, she saw an element of doubt and suspicion.
They were working for her, but they didn't entirely believe that she had told them the truth.
Madness.
She was caught in a whirlpool that was carrying her down into a nightmare world of suspicion, deception, and violence, into an alien landscape where nothing was what it appeared to be.
*  *  *
Surprised, Dan said, 'Nut? I didn't know psychologists used words like that.'
Marge smiled ruefully. 'Oh, not in the classroom, and not in published papers, and certainly not in a courtroom if we're ever asked for testimony in a sanity hearing. But this is in the privacy of my office, just between almost-strangers, and I tell you, Dan, he was a nut. Not certifiable, mind you. Not close. But not merely eccentric, either. His primary area of research was supposed to be the development and application of behavior-modification techniques that would reform the criminal personality. But he was always off on a tangent, riding one odd hobbyhorse or another. He regularly announced a deep commitment—"obsessed" is the right word—to some new line of research, but after six months or so, he would completely lose interest in it.
'What were some of those hobbyhorses?'
She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her breasts. 'For a while, he was determined to find a drug therapy that would combat nicotine addiction. Does that sound sensible to you? Help smokers get off cigarettes—by getting them onto drugs? Hell's bells. Then for a while, he claimed to be convinced that subliminal suggestion, subconscious programming, could enable us to set aside our prejudices against a belief in the supernatural and help us open our minds to psychic experiences, so we'd be able to see spirits as easily as we see one another.'
'Spirits? Are you talking about ghosts?'
'I am. Or, rather, he was.'
'I wouldn't think psychologists would believe in ghosts.'
'You're looking at one who doesn't. McCaffrey was one who did.'
'I'm remembering the books we found in his house. Some of them were about the occult.'
'Probably half his hobbyhorses dealt with that,' she said. 'One occult phenomenon or another.'
'Who would pay for this kind of research?'
'I'd have to look at the files. I imagine the occult stuff was done on his own, without funds, or by cleverly misusing funds meant for other work.'
'It's possible to misuse funds that blatantly? Isn't there some accounting required?'
'The government's relatively easy to dupe if you're dishonest. Sometimes thieves make the easiest target for another thief, because they never see themselves as being the victims, only perpetrators.'