The Door to December

by Dean Koontz

  He wanted to share his ideas with Laura, obtain her point of view as a psychiatrist. But what he would be proposing to her was so shocking, so horrible, and so hopeless that he wanted to think it through better than he had thus far. He wanted to be very sure of his chain of reasoning before he broached the subject. If what he suspected was true, Laura would need all the physical, mental, and emotional strength she could muster in order to deal with it.

  They left the motel and went to the car. Laura sat in back with Melanie, because she didn’t want to stop holding, stroking, and comforting the child, and the computer terminal left room for only two people up front.

  Dan had intended to make a brief stop at his place to change clothes. His jacket, shirt, and trousers were limp and rumpled, for he had more or less slept in them. However, now that he believed that he was on the brink of a breakthrough in the case, he no longer cared if he looked seedy. He was eager to find and talk with Howard Renseveer, Sheldon Tolbeck, and others who had been a part of the conspiracy. He wanted to confront them with the ideas that had come to him during the past hour and see how they reacted.

  Before driving out of the motel lot, he turned in his seat and studied Melanie.

  She was slumped against her mother.

  Her eyes were open but vacant.

  Am I right, kid? he wondered. Is It what I think It is?

  He half expected her to hear the unspoken questions and shift her eyes toward him, but she did not.

  I hope I’m wrong, he thought. Because if that’s what’s been killing all these people, and if it’s going to come after you when all the rest are dead, then there’s nowhere you can hide, is there, honey? Not from a thing like that. Nowhere in the world you can hope to hide.

  He shivered.

  He started the car and drove away from the motel.

  The previous night’s fog continued to linger in the city. Rain began to fall once more. As each cold drop snapped hard against the windshield, the frigid impact seemed to be transmitted through the glass, through Dan’s clothes, through his flesh and bones, and into his very soul.

  chapter thirty-four

  Dan and Laura accomplished nothing of importance that morning, though they didn’t fail for lack of trying. The renewed rainfall hampered them because it slowed traffic to a crawl throughout the city. The weather was bad, but the real problem was that the rats who could provide some answers were all deserting the ship: Neither Renseveer nor Tolbeck could be found at work or home. Dan wasted a lot of time tracking them down before he finally had sufficient reason to believe that both men had fled the city for destinations unknown.

  At one o’clock, they met Earl Benton at the coffee shop in Van Nuys, as they had arranged the night before. Fortunately, the head wound that he’d suffered at the hands of Wexlersh had not appreciably slowed him down, and his morning had been more productive than Dan’s and Laura’s. The four of them sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, as far as possible from the jukebox that was playing country music. They were beside a large plate-glass window, down which a gray film of rain rippled, blurring the world beyond. The place smelled pleasantly of french fries, sizzling hamburgers, bean soup, bacon, and coffee. The waitress was cheerful and efficient, and when she had taken their order and gone, Earl told Dan and Laura everything that he had uncovered.

  First thing that morning, he had called Mary Katherine O’Hara, the secretary of Freedom Now, and had arranged to see her at ten o’clock. She lived in a neat little bungalow in Burbank, a place half shrouded in bougainvillea, so typical of the architecture of the 1930s and in such good repair that Earl had half expected to see a Packard parked in the driveway.

  “Mrs. O’Hara is in her sixties,” Earl said, “and she’s almost as well kept as her house. She’s a very handsome woman now, and she must have been a knockout when she was young. She’s a retired real-estate saleswoman. Though she isn’t rich, I’d say she’s definitely comfortable. The house is very nicely furnished, with several superb Art Deco antiques.”

  “Was she reluctant to talk about Freedom Now?” Dan asked.

  “On the contrary. She was eager to talk about it. You see, your police file on the organization is out of date. She’s no longer an officer. She resigned in disgust several months ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s a dedicated libertarian, involved with a dozen different organizations, and when Ernest Cooper invited her to play a major role in a libertarian political-action committee that he had formed, she was happy to volunteer her time. The problem was that Cooper clearly wanted her name in order to lend some legitimacy to his PAC, and he expected her to be manipulable. But manipulating Mary O’Hara would be about as easy as playing football with a live porcupine without getting hurt.”

  Dan was surprised and pleased to hear Laura’s laughter. She had laughed so little in the past couple of days that he’d forgotten how deeply affected he could be by her delight.

  “She sounds tough,” Laura said.

  “And smart,” Earl said. “She reminds me of you.”

  “Me? Tough?”

  “Tougher than you think you are,” Dan assured her, with the same admiration that Earl evidently felt.

  Outside, thunder rolled like great broken wheels of stone across the day. Driven by a gusty wind, rain pummeled the window harder than ever.

  Earl said, “Mrs. O’Hara was there almost a year but, like several legit libertarians before her, she finally walked away from it, because she found out the organization wasn’t doing what it was supposedly formed to do. It was taking in a lot of money, but it wasn’t supporting a wide array of libertarian candidates or programs. In fact, most of the funds were going to a supposedly libertarian research project headed by Dylan McCaffrey.”

  “The gray room,” Dan said.

  Earl nodded.

  Laura said, “But what was libertarian about that project?” “Probably nothing,” Earl said. “The libertarian label was just a convenient cover. That’s what Mary O’Hara finally decided.”

  “A cover for what?”

  “She didn’t know.”

  The waitress returned with three cups of coffee and a Pepsi. “Your lunch will be ready in a couple minutes,” she said. She considered Earl’s battered face and the bandage on his head, glanced at the bruise and abrasion on Dan’s forehead, and said, “You guys in a wreck or something?”

  “Fell up some stairs,” Dan said.

  “Fell up?” she asked.

  “Four flights,” Earl said.

  “Ah, you’re kidding me.”

  They grinned at her.

  Smiling, she hurried away to take an order at another table.

  As Laura unwrapped the straw, put it in the Pepsi, and tried to get Melanie to drink, Dan said to Earl, “Mrs. O’Hara sounds like the type who would’ve done more than just walk away from a situation like that. I would expect her to write the Federal Elections Commission and get that PAC closed down.”

  “She did write them,” Earl said. “Twice.”

  “And?”

  “No reply.”

  Dan shifted uneasily in the booth. “You’re saying the people behind Freedom Now have a grip on the Federal Elections Commission?”

  “Let’s just say they apparently have influence.”

  “Which means this is a secret government project,” Dan said. “And we were smart to get out from under the FBI.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “But only the government would be able to pinch off an inquiry by the elections commission, and even they would find it difficult.”

  “Patience,” Earl said, lifting his cup.

  “You know something,” Dan said.

  “I always know something,” Earl said, smiling, pausing to sip his coffee.

  Dan saw that Melanie had drunk some of her Pepsi, though not without difficulty. Laura had already used up one napkin, blotting spilled soda from the girl’s chin.

  Earl said, “First, let me back up and explain wh
ere Freedom Now gets its money. Mrs. O’Hara was only the secretary, but when she began to sense that something was rotten, she went behind Cooper’s and Hoffritz’s backs and checked the treasurer’s records. Ninety-nine percent of the PAC’s funds were received as grants from three other PACS: Honesty in Politics, Citizens for Enlightened Government, and the Twenty-second Century Group. Furthermore, when she looked into those groups, she discovered that Cooper and Hoffritz had roles in all of them and that all three of those PACs were primarily funded not, as you would expect, by contributions from ordinary citizens but by two other nonprofit organizations, two charitable foundations.”

  “Charitable foundations? Are they permitted to mix in politics?”

  Earl nodded. “Yes, as long as they tread very carefully and if they’re properly chartered to support ‘public-service and better-government programs,’ which these two foundations were.”

  “So where do these foundations get their money?”

  “Funny you should ask. Mrs. O’Hara didn’t explore any further, but I called the Paladin office from her place and had some of our people start making inquiries. Both of these foundations are funded by another, larger charitable organization.”

  Laura said, “My God, it’s a Chinese-box puzzle!”

  “Let me get this straight,” Dan said. “This larger charity funded the two smaller ones, and the two smaller ones funded three political-action committees—Honesty in Politics, uh, Citizens for Enlightened Government, and the Twenty-second Century Group—and then those committees contributed toward the funding of Freedom Now, which did virtually nothing with its money but fund Dylan McCaffrey’s work in Studio City.”

  “You got it,” Earl said. “It was an elaborate laundering system to keep the original backers well separated from Dylan McCaffrey in case anything should go wrong and the authorities should find out that he was performing a series of cruel and abusive experiments on his own child.”

  The cheerful young waitress arrived with their lunches, and they exchanged innocuous comments about the weather while she put the food in front of them.

  When she was gone, no one touched lunch. To Earl, Dan said, “What’s the name of the charitable organization at the center of this Chinese-box puzzle?”

  “Hold on to your hat.”

  “I don’t have a hat.”

  “The Boothe Foundation.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Laura said, “The same one that supports orphanages and child-welfare groups and senior-citizen aid programs?”

  “The same one,” Earl said.

  Dan had been fumbling in a coat pocket. Now he produced the computer printout of the mailing list of customers from the Sign of the Pentagram. He leafed to the third page and showed it to them: Palmer Boothe, heir to the Boothe fortune, current head of the Boothe family, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Journal, one of the city’s most prominent citizens, the guiding force of the Boothe Foundation.

  He said, “I saw this last night, in Joseph Scaldone’s office, behind that weird occult shop he was running. It amazed me that a hardheaded businessman like Boothe would be interested in the supernatural. Of course even the hardest heads have soft spots. We all have some weakness, some foolishness in us. But considering Boothe’s reputation, his enlightened image . . . hell, it never occurred to me that he’d be involved in something like this.”

  “The devil has advocates in the least likely places,” Earl said.

  As Elton John came on the jukebox, Dan looked out at the driving gray rain. “Two days ago I didn’t even believe in the devil.”

  “But now?”

  “But now,” Dan said.

  Laura began to cut Melanie’s cheeseburger into bite-size pieces that she might be persuaded to take off a fork. The girl was staring at the wriggling patterns of rain on the window—or at something light-years beyond.

  In a far part of the restaurant, a busboy or a waitress dropped a few dishes, and the crash was followed by a burst of laughter.

  “Anyway,” Earl said, “you remember those two letters Mary O’Hara wrote to the Federal Elections Commission? Well, there’s not much mystery about why there was no follow-up. Palmer Boothe is a big contributor to both political parties, always a little more to the party currently in power, but always large contributions to both. And here several years ago, when political-action committees first came into vogue, when Boothe apparently saw how useful they could be for things like indirect funding of Dylan McCaffrey’s research, he set out to get one or two of his own men on the commission that oversees them.”

  Laura finished cutting up the cheeseburger and said, “Listen, I don’t know much about the Federal Elections Commission, but it seems to me that its members wouldn’t be political appointees.”

  “They aren’t,” Earl said. “Not directly. But the people who manage the bureaucracy that manages the elections commission are political appointees. So if you want to plant someone there, if you want it badly enough, and if you’re rich and determined enough, you can accomplish it in a roundabout fashion. Of course, you can’t get away with completely corrupting the commission, with outrageous misuse of it, because both political parties watch it intently for abuses. But if your intentions are modest—say, like keeping the commission from looking too closely at a couple of political-action committees that you’ve established for less than legitimate purposes—then no one’s going to notice or particularly care. And if you’re as resourceful as Palmer Boothe, you don’t use obvious henchmen; you arrange for civic-minded, reputable men from one of the nation’s largest charitable foundations to provide their services to the Federal Elections Commission, and everyone is delighted to see such educated, well-meaning types selflessly offering their time and energies to their government.”

  With a sigh, Dan said, “So it’s Palmer Boothe, not the government, financing McCaffrey’s research. Which means we didn’t have to worry that the FBI might want to make Melanie disappear again.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Earl said. “It’s true that the government wasn’t providing the money to support McCaffrey and Hoffritz or to pay for the research that was conducted in that gray room. But now that they’ve seen the place and had a chance to poke through the papers McCaffrey had there, they might figure there’s national-defense applications to what he was doing, and they might like to have a chance to examine and work closely with Melanie . . . unobstructed.”

  “Over my dead body,” Laura said.

  “So we’re still on our own,” Dan said.

  Earl nodded. “Besides, Boothe apparently managed to get to Ross Mondale, to use the police department against us—”

  “Not the department itself,” Dan said. “Just a few rotten apples in it.”

  “Still, who’s to say he doesn’t have friends in the FBI too? And while we’d be able to get Melanie back from the government if they took her away from us, we’d probably never find her again if Boothe regained control of her.”

  For a couple of minutes they were silent. They ate lunch, and Laura tried to feed Melanie, though with little success. A Whitney Houston number faded away on the jukebox, and in a couple of seconds Bruce Springsteen began to sing a haunting song about how everything dies but some things come back and, baby, that’s a fact.

  In their present situation, there was something decidedly macabre and disquieting about Springsteen’s lyrics.

  Dan looked at the rain and considered how this new information about Boothe helped them.

  They now knew that the enemy was powerful, but that he wasn’t as all-powerful as they had feared. That was a damned good thing to know. It improved morale. It was better to deal with an ultrawealthy megalomaniac—with one enemy, regardless of how crazy and influential he might be—than to be confronted by a monolithic bureaucracy determined to carry out a course of action in spite of the fact that it was an insane course of action. The enemy was still a giant, but he was a giant that might be brought down if they found the right sl
ingshot, the perfectly shaped stone.

  And now Dan knew the identity of “Daddy,” the white-haired and oh-so-distinguished pervert who regularly visited Regine Savannah Hoffritz in that Hollywood Hills house that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Tudor or Spanish.

  “What about John Wilkes Enterprises?” he asked Earl. Even as he voiced the question, he saw what he should have seen earlier, and in part he answered his own inquiry: “There’s no John Wilkes. It’s entirely a corporate name, right? John Wilkes Boothe. The man who assassinated Lincoln, although I think that was spelled B-O-O-T-H, without the E. So this is another company owned by Palmer Boothe, and he called it John Wilkes Enterprises as—what?—a joke?”

  Earl nodded. “Seems like an inside joke to me, but I guess you’d have to ask Boothe himself if you want an explanation. Anyway, Paladin looked into the corporation this morning. It’s no deep dark secret or anything. Boothe is listed as sole stockholder. He uses John Wilkes Enterprises to manage a collection of small endeavors that don’t fit under his other corporate or foundation umbrellas, one or two of which don’t even turn a profit.”

  “John Wilkes Press,” Dan said.

  Earl raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, that’s one of them. They publish only occult-related books, and they break even some years, lose a few bucks other years. John Wilkes also owns a small legit theater in the Westwood area, a chain of three shops that sells homemade chocolates, a Burger King franchise, and several other things.”

  “Including the house where Boothe keeps his mistress,” Laura said.

  “I’m not sure he thinks of her as his mistress,” Dan said with considerable distaste. “More like his pet . . . a pretty little animal with some really good tricks in its repertoire.”

  They finished lunch.

  The rain beat on the windows.

  Melanie remained silent, empty-eyed, lost.

  At last Laura said, “Now what?”

  “Now I go see Palmer Boothe,” Dan said. “If he hasn’t run like all the other rats.”

  chapter thirty-five

  Before they paid their check and left the coffee shop, they decided that Earl would take Laura and Melanie to a movie. The girl needed a place to hide for a few hours, until Dan had a chance to speak with Palmer Boothe either in person or on the telephone, and seeking shelter in yet another motel room was too depressing to consider. Neither the FBI nor the police—not even the minions that Boothe could marshal—would think of looking for them at an anonymous shopping-center multiplex, and there was virtually no chance that they would be accidentally spotted by someone in the darkness of a theater. In addition, Laura suggested that the right film might hold therapeutic value for Melanie: The forty-foot images, unnaturally bright color, and overwhelming sound of a motion picture sometimes gained the attention of an autistic child when nothing else could.

  Newspaper vending machines stood in front of the restaurant, and Dan dashed into the rain to buy a Journal for its film listings. The irony of using Palmer Boothe’s own publication for the purpose of finding a place to hide from him was not lost on any of them. They settled on a Steven Spielberg adventure fantasy and a theater in Westwood. It was a multiplex that was showing a second film suitable for Melanie, so after the Spielberg picture they could take in another feature and pass the rest of the afternoon and the early evening there if necessary. Their intention was to remain at the theater until Dan had either found Boothe or had given up searching for him, at which time he would return for them and relieve Earl.

  When they went outside to Earl’s car, Dan got in with them for a moment. While the rain fell from a roiling gray sky, he said to Laura, “There’s something you’ve got to do for me. When you’re in the theater, I want you to keep an even closer watch on Melanie than you’ve done so far. Whatever happens, don’t let her go to sleep. If she closes her eyes for any length of time longer than a blink, shake her, pinch her, do whatever you have to do to make sure she’s awake.”

  Laura frowned. “Why?”

  Not answering the question, he said, “And even if she remains awake but just seems to be slipping into an even deeper catatonic state, do what you can to pull her back. Talk to her, touch her, demand more of her attention. I know what I’m asking isn’t easy. The poor kid’s already extremely detached, so it’s not going to be easy to tell that she’s drifting off a little further, especially not in a dark theater, but do the best you can.”

  Earl said, “You know something, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” Dan admitted.

  “You know what was going on in that gray room.”

  “I don’t know. But I have some . . . vague suspicions.”

  “What?” Laura leaned forward from the backseat with pathetic eagerness, so desperate to understand what was happening, so frantic for any knowledge that would shed light on Melanie’s ordeal, that she gave no thought to the possibility that knowing might be even worse than not knowing, that knowledge might be a far greater horror than mystery. “What do you suspect? Why is it so important for her to stay awake, alert?”

  “It would take too long to explain right now,” he lied. He wasn’t certain that he knew what was happening, and he didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily. And there was no doubt, if he were to tell her what he suspected, she would be