The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  “No traces of semen in the vaginal tract,” Pantangello said. “No bruising or bleeding of the labia or the vaginal walls.”

  “Which there would’ve had to’ve been in a child this young, if she were molested,” Haldane said.

  “Yes. And her hymen’s intact,” Pantangello said.

  “Then she wasn’t raped,” Haldane said.

  A bleakness settled over Laura as she saw the sorrow and pity in the physician’s gentle brown eyes.

  With a voice as sad as it was quiet, Pantangello said, “She wasn’t subjected to ordinary intercourse, no. We can rule that out. But . . . well, I can’t say for certain.” He cleared his throat.

  Laura could see that this conversation was almost as much of an ordeal for the young doctor as it was for her. She wanted to tell him to stop, but she had to hear it all, had to know, and it was his job to tell her.

  He finished clearing his throat and picked up where he had left off: “I can’t say for certain there wasn’t oral copulation.”

  A wordless sound of grief escaped Laura’s lips.

  Haldane took her arm, and she leaned against him slightly. He said, “Easy. Easy now. We don’t even know if this is Melanie.”

  “It is,” she said grimly. “I’m sure it is.”

  She wanted to see her daughter, ached to see her. But she was afraid to open the door and step into the room. Her future waited beyond that threshold, and she was afraid that it was a future filled with only emotional pain, despair.

  A nurse went by without glancing at them, pointedly avoiding their eyes, tuning out the tragedy.

  “I’m sorry,” Pantangello said. He took his hands out of the pockets of his lab coat. He wanted to comfort her, but he seemed afraid to touch her. Instead, he raised one hand to the stethoscope that hung around his neck and toyed with it absentmindedly. “Look, if it’s any help . . . well, in my opinion, she wasn’t molested. I can’t prove it. I just feel it. Besides, it’s highly unusual for a child to be molested without being bruised, cut, or visibly hurt in some way. The fact that she’s unmarked would tend to indicate she wasn’t touched. Really, I’d bet on it.” He smiled at her. At least she thought it was a smile, although it looked more like a wince. “I’d bet a year of my life on it.”

  Fighting back tears, Laura said, “But if she wasn’t molested, why was she wandering around naked in the street?”

  The answer to that question occurred to her even as she spoke.

  It occurred to Dan Haldane too. He said, “She must’ve been in the sensory-deprivation chamber when the killer—or killers—walked into that house. She would have been naked in the tank.”

  “Sensory deprivation?” Pantangello asked, raising his eyebrows.

  To Haldane, Laura said, “Maybe that’s why she wasn’t killed along with everyone else. Maybe the killer didn’t know she was there, in the tank.”

  “Maybe,” Haldane said.

  With swiftly growing hope, Laura said, “And she must’ve gotten out of the tank after the killer left. If she saw the bodies . . . all the blood . . . that would have been so traumatic. It would sure explain her dazed condition.”

  Pantangello looked curiously at Lieutenant Haldane. “This must be a strange case.”

  “Very,” the detective said.

  Suddenly, Laura was no longer afraid of opening the door to Melanie’s room. She started to push it inward.

  Halting her with a hand on her shoulder, Dr. Pantangello said, “One more thing.”

  Laura waited apprehensively while the young doctor searched for the least painful words with which to convey some last bit of bad news. She knew it would be bad. She could see it in his face, for he was too inexperienced to maintain a suitably bland expression of professional detachment.

  He said, “This state she’s in . . . I called it a ‘trance’ before. But that’s not exactly right. It’s almost catatonic. It’s a state very similar to what you sometimes see in autistic children when they’re going through their most passive moods.”

  Laura’s mouth was exceedingly dry, as if she’d spent the last half hour eating sand. There was a metallic taste of fear as well. “Say it, Doctor Pantangello. Don’t mince words. I’m a doctor myself. A psychiatrist. Whatever you’ve got to tell me, I can handle it.”

  Speaking rapidly now, words running together, anxious to deliver the bad news and be done with it, he said, “Autism, mental disorders in general, they really aren’t my field. Evidently, they’re more yours. So I probably shouldn’t say anything at all about this. But I want you to be prepared when you go in there. Her withdrawal, her silence, her detachment—well, I don’t think this condition is going to go away quickly or easily. I think she’s been through something damned traumatic, and she’s turned inward to escape from the memory. Bringing her back is going to take . . . tremendous patience.”

  “And maybe she’ll never come back?” Laura asked.

  Pantangello shook his head, fingered his red-brown beard, tugged on his stethoscope. “No, no. I didn’t say that.”

  “But it’s what you were thinking.”

  His silence was a wounding confirmation.

  Laura finally pushed open the door and went into the room, with the doctor and the detective close behind her.

  Rain beat on the only window. The sound seemed like the wings of nocturnal birds beating in a frenzy against the glass. Far off in the night, out toward the unseen ocean, lightning pulsed twice, three times, then died in the darkness.

  Of the two beds, the one nearer the window was empty, and that half of the room was dark. A light was on above the first bed, and a child lay under the sheets, in a standard-issue hospital gown, her head resting on a single pillow. The upper end of the bed was tilted, raising and angling the girl’s body, so her face was entirely visible when Laura entered the room.

  It was Melanie. Laura had no doubt about that. The girl had inherited her mother’s hair, nose, delicate jawline. She had her father’s brow and cheekbones. Her eyes were the same shade of green as Laura’s but deeply set like Dylan’s. During the past six years, she had become a different child from the one Laura remembered, but her identity was confirmed by more than her appearance, by something undefinable, a familiar aura perhaps, an emotional or even psychic link that snapped into place between mother and daughter the instant that Laura walked into the room. She knew this was her little girl, though she would have had some difficulty explaining exactly how she knew.

  Melanie resembled one of those children in advertisements for international hunger-relief organizations or a poster child for some rare and debilitating disease. Her face was gaunt. Her skin was pale, with an unhealthy, grainy texture. More gray than pink, her lips were cracked and peeling. The flesh around her sunken eyes was dark, as if it had been smudged when she had wiped away tears with an inky thumb.

  The eyes themselves were the most unnerving evidence of her ordeal. She stared at the empty air above her, blinking but seeing nothing—nothing in this world. Neither fear nor pain were evident in those eyes. Just desolation.

  Laura said, “Honey?”

  The girl didn’t move. Her eyes didn’t flicker.

  “Melanie?”

  No response.

  Hesitantly, Laura moved toward the bed.

  The girl seemed oblivious of her.

  Laura put down the safety rail, leaned close to the child, spoke her name again, but again elicited no reaction. With one trembling hand, she touched Melanie’s face, which felt slightly fevered, and that contact shattered all her reservations. A dam of emotion broke within her, and she seized the girl, lifted her away from the bed, held her close, and hugged her. “Melanie, baby, my Melanie, it’s all right now, it’ll be okay, really it will, you’re safe now, safe with me now, safe with Mommy, thank God, safe, thank God.” As she spoke, tears burst from her, and she wept with a lack of self-consciousness and control that she had not experienced since she had been a child herself.

  If only Melanie had wept too. Bu
t the girl was beyond tears. She didn’t return Laura’s embrace, either. She hung limply in her mother’s arms: a pliant body, an empty shell, unaware of the love that was hers to receive, unable to accept the succor and shelter that her mother offered, distant, in her own reality, lost.

  Ten minutes later, in the corridor, Laura dried her eyes with a couple of Kleenexes and blew her nose.

  Dan Haldane paced back and forth. His shoes squeaked on the highly polished tiles. From the expression on the detective’s face, Laura guessed that he was trying to work off some of his anger over what had happened to Melanie.

  Maybe some cops cared more than she thought. This one, anyway.

  Dr. Pantangello said, “I want to keep Melanie here at least until tomorrow afternoon. For observation.”

  “Of course,” Laura said.

  “When she’s released from the hospital, she’ll need psychiatric care.”

  Laura nodded.

  “What I was wondering . . . well, you don’t intend to treat her yourself, do you?”

  Laura tucked the sodden tissues in one coat pocket. “You think it would be better for a third party, an uninvolved therapist, to work with her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Doctor, I can understand why you feel that way, and in most cases I would agree with you. But not this time.”

  “Usually, it’s a bad idea for a therapist to treat one of his own children. As her mother, you’re almost certainly going to be more demanding of your own daughter than you would be of an ordinary patient. And, excuse me, but it may even be possible that the parent is part of the problem in the first place.”

  “Yes. You’re right. Usually. But not this time. I didn’t do this to my little girl. I had no part in it. I am virtually as much a stranger to her as any other therapist would be, but I can give her more time, more care, more attention than anyone else. With another doctor, she’d be just another patient. But with me, she’ll be my only patient. I’ll take a leave of absence from Saint Mark’s. I’ll shift my private patients to some colleagues for a few weeks or even months. I won’t expect fast progress from her because I’ll have all the time in the world. Melanie is going to get all of me, everything I have to offer as a doctor, as a psychiatrist, and all the love I have to offer as a mother.”

  Pantangello seemed on the verge of issuing another warning or offering more advice, but he decided against it. “Well . . . good luck.”

  “Thank you.”

  When the physician had gone, leaving Laura and Haldane alone in the silent, antiseptic-scented corridor, the detective said, “It’s a big job.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  “She’ll get well.”

  “I hope she does.”

  At the nurses’ station, at the end of the hall, a muffled phone rang twice.

  Haldane said, “I’ve sent for a uniformed officer. Just in case Melanie witnessed the murders, in case someone might be looking for her, I thought it was a good idea to post a guard. Until tomorrow afternoon, anyway.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “You aren’t staying here, are you?”

  “Yes. Of course. Where else?”

  “Not long, I hope.”

  “A few hours.”

  “You need your rest, Doctor McCaffrey.”

  “Melanie needs me more. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”

  He said, “But if she’s coming home tomorrow, won’t you have to get things ready for her?”

  Laura blinked. “Oh. I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll have to prepare a bedroom. She can’t sleep in a crib any longer.”

  “Better go home,” he said gently.

  “In a little while,” she agreed. “But not to sleep. I can’t sleep. I’ll leave her alone here just long enough to get the house ready for her homecoming.”

  “I hate to bring it up, but I’d like to get blood samples from you and Melanie.”

  The request puzzled her. “Why?”

  He hesitated. “Well, with samples of your blood, your husband’s, and the girl’s, we can pretty much pin down for sure whether she’s your daughter.”

  “No need for that.”

  “It’s the easiest way—”

  “I said, there’s no need for that,” she told him irritably. “She’s Melanie. She’s my little girl. I know it.”

  “I know how you feel,” he said sympathetically. “I understand. I’m sure she is your daughter. But since you haven’t seen her in six years, six years in which she’s changed a great deal, and since she can’t speak for herself, we’re going to need some proof, not just your instincts, or the juvenile court is going to put her in the state’s custody. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “My God, no.”

  “Doctor Pantangello tells me they’ve already got a sample of the girl’s blood. It’ll take only a minute to draw a few cc’s of yours.”

  “All right. But . . . where?”

  “There’s an examination room next to the nurses’ station.”

  Laura looked apprehensively at the closed door to Melanie’s room. “Can we wait until the guard comes?”

  “Of course.” He leaned against the wall.

  Laura just stood there, staring at the door.

  The glass-smooth silence became unbearable.

  To break it, she said, “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “About what?”

  “Earlier, I said maybe the nightmare wouldn’t be over when we found Melanie, that maybe it would be just beginning.”

  “Yeah. You were right. But at least it is a beginning.”

  She knew what he meant: They might have found Melanie’s body with the other three—battered, dead. This was better. Frightening, perplexing, depressing, but definitely better.

  chapter seven

  Dan Haldane sat at the desk that he was using while on temporary assignment to the East Valley Division. The ancient wooden surface was scalloped by cigarette burns around the edge, scarred and gouged and marked by scores of overlapping dark rings from dripping mugs of coffee. The accommodations didn’t bother him. He liked his job, and he could do it in a tent if he had to.

  In the hour before dawn, the East Valley Division was as quiet as a police station ever got. Most potential victims were not yet awake, and even the criminals had to sleep sometime. A skeleton crew manned the station until the day crew arrived. In these last musty minutes of the graveyard shift, the place still possessed the haunted feeling common to all offices at night. The only sounds were the lonely clatter of a typewriter in a room down the hall from the bull pen, and the knock of the janitor’s broom as it banged against the legs of the empty desks. Somewhere a telephone rang; even in the hour before dawn, someone was in trouble.

  Dan zipped open his worn briefcase and spread the contents on the desk. Polaroid photographs of the three bodies that had been found in the Studio City house. A random sampling of the papers that had littered the floor in Dylan McCaffrey’s office. Statements from the neighbors. Preliminary handwritten reports from the coroner’s men and the Scientific Investigation Division (SID). And lists.

  Dan believed in lists. He had lists of the contents of drawers, cupboards, and closets in the murder house, a list of the titles of the books on the living-room shelves, and a list of telephone numbers taken from a notepad by the phone in McCaffrey’s office. He also had names—every name that appeared on any scrap of paper anywhere in that Studio City residence. Until the case was wrapped up, he would carry the lists with him, take them out and reread them whenever he had a spare moment—over lunch, when he was on the john, in bed just before switching off the light—prodding his subconscious, with the hope of attaining an important insight or turning up a vital cross-reference.

  Stanley Holbein, an old friend and former partner from Robbery-Homicide, had once embarrassed Dan at an R&H Christmas party by telling a long and highly amusing (and apocryphal) story about having seen some of Dan’s most private lists, i
ncluding the ones on which he had kept track of every meal eaten and every bowel movement since the age of nine. Dan, who stood listening, amused but red-faced, with his hands deep in his jacket pockets, had finally pretended to want to strangle Stanley. But when he had withdrawn his hands from his pockets to lunge at his friend, he’d accidentally pulled out half a dozen lists that fluttered to the floor, eliciting gales of laughter from everyone present and necessitating a hasty retreat into another room.

  Now he gave his latest set of lists a quick scan, with the vague hope that something would jump out at him, like a pop-up figure in a children’s book. Nothing popped. He began again, reading through the lists more slowly.

  The book titles were unfamiliar. The collection was a peculiar mix of psychology, medicine, physical science, and the occult. Why would a doctor, a man of science, be interested in clairvoyance, psychic powers, and other paranormal phenomena?

  He looked over the list of names. He didn’t recognize any.

  As his stomach grew increasingly acidic, he kept returning to the photos of the bodies. In fourteen years with the LAPD and four years in the army before that, he had seen more than a few dead men. But these were unlike any in his experience. He had seen men who had stepped on land mines yet had been in better shape than these.

  The killers—surely there had been more than one—had possessed incredible strength or inhuman rage, or both. The victims had been struck repeatedly after they were already dead, hammered into jelly. What sort of men could kill with such unrestrained viciousness and cruelty? What maniacal hatred could have driven them to this?

  Before he could really concentrate on those questions, he was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Ross Mondale stopped at Dan’s desk. The division captain was a stocky man, five-eight, with a powerful upper body. As usual, everything about him was brown: brown hair, thick brown eyebrows; brown, watchful, narrow eyes; a chocolate-brown suit, beige shirt, dark brown tie, brown shoes. He was wearing a heavy ring with a bright ruby, which was the only spark of color that he allowed.

  The janitor had gone. They were the only two in the big room.

  “You still here?” Mondale asked.

  “No. This is a clever cardboard facade. The real me is in the john, shooting heroin.”

  Mondale didn’t smile. “I thought you’d be gone back to Central by now.”

  “I’ve become attached to the East Valley. The smog’s got a special savory scent to it out here.”

  Mondale glowered. “This cutback in funds is a pain in the ass. Used to be, I had a man out sick or on vacation, there were plenty of others to cover for him. Now we got to bring subs in from other divisions, loan out our own men when we can spare them, which we never really can. It’s a crock.”

  Dan knew that Mondale would not have been so displeased about loaned manpower if the loanee had been anyone else. He didn’t like Dan. The animosity was mutual.

  They had been at the police academy together and later had been assigned to the same patrol car. Dan had requested a new partner, to no avail. Eventually, an encounter with a lunatic, a bullet in the chest, and a stay in the hospital had done for Dan what formal requests had not been able to achieve: By the time he got back to work, he had a new and more reliable partner. Dan was a field cop by nature; he enjoyed being on the streets, where the action was. Mondale, on the other hand, stayed close to the office; he was a born public-relations man as surely as Itzhak Perlman was born to play the violin. A master of deception, ass-kissing, and flattery, he had an uncanny ability to sense pending changes in the currents of power in the department’s hierarchy, aligning himself with those superiors who could do the most for him, abandoning former allies who were about to lose power. He knew how to smooth-talk politicians and reporters. Those talents had helped him obtain more promotions than Dan. Rumor ranked Ross Mondale high on the mayor’s list of candidates for police chief.

  However, as ingratiating as he was with everyone else, Mondale could find no words of praise or flattery for Dan. “You got a food stain on your shirt, Haldane.”

  Dan looked down and saw a rust-colored spot the size of a dime.

  “Chili dog,” he said.

  “You know, Haldane, each of us represents the entire department. We have an obligation—a duty—to present a respectable image to the public.”

  “Right. I’ll never eat another chili dog until I die and go to Heaven. Only croissants and caviar from now on. A higher quality of shirt stains henceforth. I swear.”