The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  “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 child-custody 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 out 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 dead bolts 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.”

&nb
sp; 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.

  As Dan was turning away from Michael Seames, the FBI agent said, “By the way, what happened to your forehead?”

  “I was trying on hats,” Dan said.

  “Hats?”

  “Tried on one that was too small for me. Had a hell of a time getting it off. Pulled skin right along with it.”

  Before Seames could respond, Ross Mondale stepped through a door at the back of the store, behind the sales counter. He spotted Dan, and he said, “Haldane, come here.”

  “What is it, Chief?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “What about, Chief?”

  “Alone,” Mondale said fiercely.

  “Be right there, Chief.”

  He left Seames blinking and puzzled. He picked his way through the wreckage, past the corpse, around the counter. Mondale motioned him through the door back there, then followed him.

  The rear room was as wide as the store but only ten feet deep, with concrete-block walls. It doubled as an office and storage area. On the left were piles of boxes, apparently filled with merchandise. On the right were a desk, an IBM PC, a few file cabinets, a small refrigerator, and a worktable on which stood a Mr. Coffee machine. No violence had been done there; everything was neat and orderly.

  Mondale had been going through the desk drawers. Several items, including a slim little address book, were piled on the blotter.

  As the captain closed the door, Dan went around behind the desk and sat down.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Mondale asked.

  “Taking a load off my feet. It’s been a long day.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “Oh?”

  As usual, Mondale was wearing a brown suit, light beige shirt, brown tie, brown socks and shoes. His brown eyes seemed to flicker with a murderous light similar to that refracted within his ruby ring. “I wanted to see you in my office by two thirty.”

  “I never got your message.”

  “I know damn well you did.”

  “No. Really. I’d have come running.”

  “Don’t screw with me.”

  Dan just stared at him.

  The captain stood several steps from the desk, his neck stiff, his shoulders tense, arms straight down at his sides, hands flexing and twitching as if he had to struggle to keep from forming them into fists and coming for Haldane. “What have you been doing all day?”

  “Contemplating the meaning of life.”

  “You were at Rink’s place.”

  “You don’t need to be in a church. It’s possible to contemplate the meaning of life almost anywhere.”

  “I didn’t send you to Rink’s place.”

  “I’m a full-fledged detective-lieutenant. I usually follow my own instincts in an investigation.”

  “Not in this one. This one’s big. In this one, you’re just part of the team. You do what I tell you, go where I tell you. You don’t even shit unless I tell you it’s okay.”

  “Careful, Ross. You’re beginning to sound power crazy.”

  “What happened to your head?”

  “I’ve been taking karate lessons.”

  “What?”

  “Tried to break a board with my head.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Okay, then what happened was George Padrakis told me you wanted to see me here, and at the mention of your name, I dropped right to my knees and bowed down so fast I scraped my head on the sidewalk.”

  For a moment Ross couldn’t speak. His brown face had flushed. He was breathing hard.

  Dan more closely examined the items that Mondale had taken from the drawers and piled on the blotter: the address book, a ledger-size checkbook for an account in the name of the Sign of the Pentagram, an appointments calendar, and a thick sheaf of invoices. He picked up the address book.

  “Put that down and listen to me,” Mondale said sharply, finally recovering his voice.

  Dan favored him with a sweet smile of innocence and said, “But it might contain a clue, Captain. I’m investigating this case, and I wouldn’t be doing my job well if I didn’t pursue every possible clue.”

  Mondale came toward the desk, furious. His hands had finally tightened into twin hammers of flesh and bone.

  Ah, at last, Dan thought, the showdown we’ve both been wanting for years.

  Laura stood in front of the Sony, staring at it, afraid to touch it, shivering in the chilly air. The cold seemed to be radiating from the radio, carried on the pale green light that shone forth from the AM-FM dial.

  That was a crazy thought.

  It was a radio, not an air conditioner. Not a . . . Not anything. Just a radio. An ordinary radio.

  An ordinary radio that had turned itself on without help from anyone.

  Bonnie Tyler’s song had faded into a new tune. It was a golden oldie: Procul Harum singing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” That was at top volume too. The radio vibrated against the tile counter on which it stood. The thunderous song reverberated in the windows, hurting Laura’s ears.

  Earl had moved up behind her.

  If Pepper was still squealing in another part of the house, the cat’s voice was lost in the explosively loud music.

  Hesitantly, Laura put her fingers on the volume knob. Freezing. Shuddering, she nearly snatched her hand away, not simply because the plastic was impossibly cold but because it was a dif
ferent kind of coldness from any she’d felt before, a strangeness that chilled not only the flesh but the mind and soul as well. Nevertheless, she held on to it and tried to reduce the volume, but the knob wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t turn Procul Harum down, and since the volume control was also the on-off switch, she couldn’t shut the music off either. She strained hard, felt the muscles bunching in her arm, but still the knob would not respond.

  She was shaking.

  She let go of the knob.

  Although “Whiter Shade of Pale” was a melodic and appealing song, it sounded harsh and even curiously ominous at that volume. Each thump of the drums was like the approaching footsteps of some threatening creature, and the wailing of the horns was the same beast’s hostile cries.

  She grabbed the cord of the radio, jerked on it. The plug popped out of the wall socket.

  The music died instantly.

  She had been half afraid that it would go on playing, even without power.

  When Dan didn’t put down Joseph Scaldone’s address book—a pocket-size booklet, actually—Mondale reached across the desk, clamped his right hand over Dan’s right hand, and squeezed hard, trying to make him drop the thing.

  Mondale was not a tall man, but he was thick in the shoulders and chest. He had powerful arms out of proportion to the rest of him, thick wrists, big hands. He was strong.

  Dan was stronger. He didn’t let go of the address book. His eyes fixed unwaveringly on Mondale’s eyes, and he put his left hand on Mondale’s hand and tried to pry the bastard’s fingers loose.

  The situation was ludicrous. They were like a couple of idiot teenagers determined to prove that they were macho: Mondale trying to crush Dan’s right hand, and Dan refusing to flinch or in any way reveal his pain while he struggled to free himself.

  He got a grip on one of Mondale’s fingers and began to bend it backward.

  Mondale’s jaw clenched. The muscles popped up, quivering.

  The finger bent back and back. Mondale resisted that effort even as he attempted to apply a stronger grip to Dan’s right hand, but Dan wouldn’t relent, and the finger bent back farther, farther.

  Sweat had appeared on Mondale’s brow.

  My dog’s better than your dog, my mom’s prettier than your mom, Dan thought. Jesus! How old are we, anyway. Fourteen? Twelve?

  But he kept his eyes on Mondale’s eyes, and he refused to let the captain see