The Door to December Read online

  “You make a habit of wisecracking at every superior officer?”

  “Nope. Only you.”

  “I don’t much care for it.”

  “Didn’t think you would,” Dan said.

  “You know, I’m not going to put up with your shit forever, just because we went to the academy together.”

  Nostalgia wasn’t the reason that Mondale tolerated Dan’s abuse, and neither of them had any illusions otherwise. The truth was, Dan knew something about Mondale that, if revealed, would destroy the captain’s career, something that had happened when they had been second-year patrolmen, a vital bit of information that would have made any blackmailer swoon with joy. He would never use it against Mondale, of course; as much as he despised the man, he couldn’t bring himself to engage in blackmail.

  If their roles had been reversed, however, Mondale would have had no compunctions about blackmail or vindictive revelation. Dan’s continued silence baffled the captain, made him uneasy, encouraged him to tread carefully each time they met.

  “Let’s get specific,” Dan said. “Exactly how much longer will you put up with my shit?”

  “I don’t have to. Not for long, thank God. You’ll be back in Central after this shift,” Mondale said. He smiled.

  Dan leaned his weight against the unoiled spring-action back of the office chair, which squealed in protest, and put his hands behind his head. “Sorry to disappoint. I’ll be sticking around for a while. I caught a murder last night. It’s my case now. I figure I’ll stay with it for the duration.”

  The captain’s smile melted like ice cream on a hot plate. “You mean the triple one-eighty-seven in Studio City?”

  “Ah, now I see why you’re in the office so early. You heard about that. Two relatively well-known psychologists get wasted under mysterious circumstances, so you figure there’s going to be a lot of media attention. How do you tumble to these things so quickly, Ross? You sleep with a police-band radio beside your bed?”

  Ignoring the question, sitting on the edge of the desk, Mondale said, “Any leads?”

  “Nope. Got pictures of the victims, though.”

  He noted, with satisfaction, that all the blood drained out of Mondale’s face when he saw the ravaged bodies in the photographs. The captain didn’t even finish shuffling through the whole series. “Looks like a burglary got out of hand,” Mondale said.

  “Looks like no such a thing. All three victims had money on them. Other loose cash around the house. Nothing stolen.”

  “Well,” Mondale said defensively, “I didn’t know that.”

  “You still should’ve known burglars usually kill only when they’re cornered, and then they’re quick and clean about it. Not like this.”

  “There are always exceptions,” Mondale said pompously. “Even grandmothers rob banks now and then.”

  Dan laughed.

  “Well, it’s true,” Mondale said.

  “That’s just marvelous, Ross.”

  “Well, it is true.”

  “Not my grandmother.”

  “I didn’t say your grandmother.”

  “You mean your grandmother robs banks, Ross?”

  “Somebody’s goddamned grandmother does, and you can bet your ass on it.”

  “You know a bookie who takes bets on whether or not somebody’s grandmother will rob a bank? If the odds are right, I’ll take a hundred bucks of his action.”

  Mondale stood up. He put one hand to his tie, straightening the knot. “I don’t want you working here any longer, you son of a bitch.”

  “Well, remember that old Rolling Stones song, Ross. ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”

  “I can have your ass shipped back to Central.”

  “Not unless the rest of me gets shipped with it, and the rest of me intends to stay right here for a while.”

  Mondale’s face darkened. His lips pulled tight and went pale. He looked as if he had been pushed as far as he could be pushed for the present.

  Before the captain could do anything rash, Dan said, “Listen, you can’t take me off a case that’s mine from the start, not without some screwup on my part. You know the rules. But I don’t want to fight you on this. That’ll just distract me. So let’s just call a truce, huh? I’ll stay out of your hair, I’ll be a good boy, and you stay out of my way.”

  Mondale said nothing. He was breathing hard, and apparently he still didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “We don’t like each other much, but there’s no reason we can’t still work together,” Dan said, getting as conciliatory as he would ever get with Mondale.

  “Why don’t you want to let go of this one?”

  “Looks interesting. Most homicides are boring. Husband kills his wife’s boyfriend. Some psycho kills a bunch of women because they all remind him of his mother. One crack dealer offs another crack dealer. I’ve seen it all a hundred times. It gets tedious. This is different, I think. That’s why I don’t want to let it go. We all need variety in our lives, Ross. That’s why it’s a mistake for you to wear brown suits all the time.”

  Mondale ignored the gibe. “You think we got an important case on our hands this time?”

  “Three murders . . . that doesn’t strike you as important?”

  “I mean something really big,” Mondale said impatiently. “Like the Manson Family or the Hillside Strangler or something?”

  “Could be. Depends on how it develops. But, yeah, I suspect this is going to be the kind of story that sells newspapers and pumps up the ratings on TV news.”

  Mondale thought about that, and his eyes swam out of focus.

  “One thing I insist on,” Dan said, leaning forward on his chair, folding his hands on the desk, and assuming an earnest expression. “If I’m going to be in charge of this case, I don’t want to have to waste time talking to reporters, giving interviews. You’ve got to keep those bastards off my back. Let them film all the bloodstains they want, so they’ll have lots of great footage for the dinner-hour broadcast, but keep them away. I’m no good at dealing with them.”

  Mondale’s eyes swam back into focus. “Uh . . . yeah, of course, no problem. The press can be a royal pain in the ass.” To Mondale, the cameras and publicity were as nourishing as the food of the gods, and he was delighted by the prospect of being the center of media attention. “You leave them to me.”

  “Fine,” Dan said.

  “And you report to me, nobody but me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Daily, up-to-the-minute reports.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Mondale stared at him, disbelieving but unwilling to challenge him. Every man liked to dream. Even Ross Mondale.

  “With this manpower shortage and everything,” Dan said, “don’t you have work to do?”

  The captain walked off toward his own office, stopped after a few steps, glanced back, and said, “So far we’ve got two moderately prominent psychologists dead, and prominent people tend to know other prominent people. So you might be moving in different circles from those you muck around in when a dope dealer gets wasted. Besides, if this does get to be a hot case with lots of press attention, you and I will probably have meetings with the chief, with members of the commission, maybe even with the mayor.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t step on any toes.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Ross. I wouldn’t ever dance with any of those guys.”

  Mondale shook his head. “Christ.”

  Dan watched the captain walk away. When he was alone again, he returned to his lists.

  chapter eight

  The sky was brightening from black to gray-black. Dawn hadn’t crawled out of its hole yet, but it was creeping close, and it would crest the hilly horizon in ten or fifteen minutes.

  The public parking lot of Valley Medical was nearly deserted, a patchwork of shadows and evenly spaced pools of jaundiced light from the sodium-vapor lamps.

  Sitting behind the wheel of his Volvo, Ned Rink hated to se
e the night end. He was a night person, an owl rather than a lark. He was not able to function well or think clearly until midafternoon, and he didn’t begin to hit his stride until after midnight. That preference was no doubt programmed into his genes, for his mother had been the same way; his personal biological clock was out of sync with those of most people.

  Nevertheless, living at night was also a matter of choice: He felt more at home in the darkness. He was an ugly man, and he knew it. He felt conspicuous in broad daylight, but he believed that the night softened his ugliness and made it less noticeable. His forehead was too narrow and sloped, suggesting limited intelligence, although he was actually far from stupid. His small eyes were set too close, and his nose was a beak, and his other features were crudely formed. He was five-seven, with big shoulders and long arms and a barrel chest that were disproportionate to his height. As a child, he’d had to endure the cruel taunting of other kids who had nicknamed him Ape. Their ridicule and harassment had made him so tense that he’d developed an ulcer by the time he was thirteen years old. These days, Ned Rink didn’t take that sort of crap from anyone. These days, if somebody gave him a hard time, he just killed his tormentor, blew his brains out with no hesitation and no remorse. That was a great way to deal with stress; his ulcers had healed long ago.

  He picked up the black attaché case from the seat beside him. It contained a white lab coat, a white hospital towel, a stethoscope, and a silencer-equipped Walther .45 semiautomatic loaded with hollow-point cartridges that were coated with Teflon to ensure penetration of even bulletproof vests. He didn’t have to open the attaché case to make sure that everything was there; he had packed it himself less than an hour ago.

  He intended to walk into the hospital, go directly to the public restrooms off the lobby, slip out of his raincoat, put on the white lab coat, fold the towel around the pistol, and head straight to Room 256, where they had taken the girl. Rink had been told to expect a police guard on duty. All right. He could handle that. He would pretend that he was a doctor, make up some excuse to get the cop out of the hallway and into the girl’s room, where the nurses couldn’t see, then shoot the jerk, shoot the girl. Then the coup de grâce: a bullet in the ear for each of them, just to make sure they were stone dead. The job done, Rink would leave immediately, return to the public restroom, pick up his raincoat and attaché case, and get the hell out of the hospital.

  The plan was clean and uncomplicated. There was almost nothing about it that could go wrong.

  Before opening the door and getting out of the Volvo, he looked carefully around the parking lot to be sure that he wasn’t observed. Although the storm had passed and the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago, light fog marked the direction of a gentle breeze and eddied in lazy patterns off from the main current, shrouding some objects, distorting others. Every depression in the macadam was filled with a pool of rainwater, and the many wind-stirred puddles shimmered with yellow reflections of the light from the tall sodium-vapor lamps.

  Except for the drifting fog, the night was perfectly still.

  Rink decided he was alone, unseen.

  To the east, the gray-black sky had a pale, opalescent, pinkish-blue tint. The first faint glow of dawn’s radiant face. In another hour, the quiet night routine of the hospital would begin to give way to the business and busyness of day. It was time to go.

  He was looking forward to the work ahead. He had never killed a child before. It ought to be interesting.

  chapter nine

  Alone, the girl woke. She sat straight up in bed, trying to scream. Her mouth was open wide, the muscles in her neck were taut, the blood vessels in her throat and temples throbbed with the effort that she was making, but she couldn’t produce a sound.

  She sat like that for half a minute, her small fists full of sweat-soaked sheets. Eyes wide. She wasn’t looking at or reacting to anything in the room. The terror lay beyond those walls.

  Briefly, her eyes cleared. She was no longer oblivious of the hospital room.

  She realized for the first time that she was alone. Remembered who she was. She desperately desired company, someone to hold, human contact, comfort.

  “Hello?” she whispered. “S-s-somebody? Somebody? Somebody? Mommy?”

  If people had been with her, perhaps her attention would have been altogether captured by them and drawn permanently away from the things that so frightened her. Alone, however, she could not shake the nightmare that had its talons in her, and her eyes glazed over again. Her gaze fixed once more on a scene elsewhere.

  Finally, with a desperate, wordless whimper, she clambered over the safety railing and got out of bed. She tottered a few steps. Went down on her knees. Breathing hard, wheezing with panic, she crawled into the darker half of the room, past the untenanted bed, into the corner where friendly shadows offered consolation. She put her back to the wall and faced into the room, knees drawn up. The hospital gown bunched at her hips. She wrapped her arms around her thin legs and pulled herself into a tight ball.

  She remained in the corner only a minute before she began to whimper and mewl like a frightened animal. She raised her hands and covered her face, striving to block out a hideous sight.

  “Don’t, please, please, please.”

  Breathing rapidly and shallowly, with ever-increasing panic, she lowered her hands and squeezed them into fists. She pounded her own breast, hard, harder.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she said.

  She was pounding hard enough to hurt herself, yet she couldn’t feel the blows.

  “The door,” she said softly. “The door . . . the door . . .”

  It wasn’t the hospital-room door or the door to the adjoining bath that frightened her. She was looking at neither. She was dimly aware of the world around her, but she was focused instead on things no one else could have seen from any vantage point in that room.

  She raised both hands, held them out in front of her, as though pressing on the unseen door, frantically attempting to hold it shut.

  “Stop.”

  The meager muscles in her frail arms popped up, and then her elbows bent, as if the invisible door actually had substantial weight and was swinging open against all her protests. As if something big pushed relentlessly against the other side of it. Something inhuman and unimaginably strong.

  Abruptly, with a gasp, she scrambled out of the shadow-shrouded corner and across the floor. She went under the unused bed. Safe. Or maybe not. Nowhere was safe. She stopped and curled into the fetal position, murmuring, hopelessly trying to hide from the thing beyond the door.

  “The door,” she said. “The door . . . the door to December . . .”

  With her arms crossed on her breast, her fingertips pressing hard into her own bony shoulders, she began to weep quietly.

  “Help me, help me,” she said, but she spoke in a whisper that did not carry to the hall, where nurses might have heard it.

  If someone had responded to her cry, Melanie might have clung to him in terror, unable to cast off the cloak of autism that protected her from a world too cruel to bear. Nevertheless, even that much contact with another human being, when she wanted it, would have been a small first step toward recovery. But with the best of intentions, they had left her alone, to rest, and her plea for solace and for a reassuring voice went unanswered.

  She shuddered. “Help me. It’s coming open. It’s . . . open.” The last word faded into a low moan of pure black despair. Her anguish was terrible, bleak.

  Eventually her breathing grew less agitated, less ragged, and finally normal. The weeping subsided.

  She lay in silence, perfectly still, as if in a deep sleep. But in the darkness under the bed, her eyes were still open wide, staring in shock and terror.

  chapter ten

  When she got home, shortly before dawn, Laura made a pot of strong coffee. She carried a mug into the guest bedroom and sipped at the steaming brew while she dusted the furniture, put sheets on the bed, and prepared for Melan
ie’s homecoming.

  Her four-year-old calico cat, Pepper, kept getting in the way, rubbing against her legs, insisting upon being petted and scratched behind the ears. The cat seemed to sense that it was soon to be deposed from its favored position in the household.

  For four years, Pepper had been something of a surrogate child. In a way, the house also had been a surrogate child, an outlet for the child-rearing energies that Laura could not direct toward her own little girl.

  Six years ago, after Dylan had run off, cleaning out their bank accounts and leaving her with no ready cash, Laura had been forced to scramble, scrape, and scheme to keep the house. It wasn’t a mansion, but a spacious four-bedroom, Spanish two-story in Sherman Oaks, on the “right” side of Ventura Boulevard, on a curving street where some homes had swimming pools and even more had hot tubs, where children were frequently sent to private schools, and where the family dogs were not mongrels but full-bred German shepherds, spaniels, golden retrievers, Airedales, dalmatians, and poodles registered with the American Kennel Club. It stood on a large lot, half hidden by coral trees, benjaminas, bushy red and purple hibiscus, red azaleas, and a fence shrouded in bougainvillea, with thick borders of impatiens in every hue along the serpentine, mission-tile walk that led to the front door.

  Laura was proud of her home. Three years ago, when she had finally stopped paying private investigators to search for Dylan and Melanie, she had begun to put her spare money into small renovation projects: darkly stained oak base molding, crown molding, and doorframes; new, rich dark blue tile in the master bathroom, with white Sherle Wagner shell sinks and gold fixtures. She’d torn out Dylan’s Oriental garden in the back lawn because it was a reminder of him, and had replaced it with twenty different species of roses.

  In a sense, the house took the place of the daughter who had been stolen from her: she worried and fussed about it, pampered it, guided it toward maturity. Her concern for keeping the house in good repair was akin to a mother’s concern for the health of her child.

  Now she could stop sublimating all those maternal urges. Her daughter was finally coming home.

  Pepper meowed.

  Snatching the cat off the floor and holding it with its legs dangling, face-to-face, Laura said, “There’ll still be plenty of love for one pitiful cat. Don’t worry about that, you old mouse-chaser.”

  The phone rang.

  She put the cat down, crossed the hall to the master bedroom, and plucked the handset off the cradle. “Hello?”

  No answer. The caller hesitated a moment, then hung up.

  She stared at the phone, uneasy. Maybe it had been a wrong number. But in the dead hour before dawn, on this extraordinary night, a ringing phone and an uncommunicative caller had sinister implications.

  She double-checked the locks on the doors. That seemed to be an inadequate response, but she could think of nothing more to do.

  Still uneasy, she tried to shrug off the call, and at last she went into the empty room that had once been the nursery.

  Two years ago, she had disposed of Melanie’s baby furniture when she had finally admitted to herself that her missing daughter would have by that time outgrown everything. Laura had not refurnished, ostensibly because when Melanie returned, the girl would be old enough to have a say in the choice of decor. Actually, Laura had left the room empty because—though she couldn’t face her own fears—deep in her heart she’d felt that Melanie would never be coming back, that the child had vanished forever.

  She had saved a few of her daughter’s toys, however. Now she took the box of old playthings out of the closet and rummaged through it. Three-year-olds and nine-year-olds didn’t have much in common, but Laura found two items that might still be appealing to Melanie: a big Raggedy Ann doll, slightly soiled, and a smaller teddy bear with floppy ears.

  She took the bear and the doll into the guest bedroom and set them on the pillows, with their backs against the headboard. Melanie would see them the moment she came into the room.

  Pepper jumped onto the bed, approached the doll and the bear with curiosity and trepidation. She sniffed the doll, nuzzled the bear, then curled up beside them, apparently having decided that they were friendly.

  The first beams of daylight were streaming through the French windows. By the manner in which the early light fluctuated from gray to gold to gray again Laura could tell, without looking at the sky, that the rain had stopped and that the clouds were breaking up.

  Although she’d had only three hours of sleep the previous night, and though her daughter wouldn’t be leaving the hospital for six or eight hours, Laura didn’t feel like returning to bed. She was awake, energetic. From the stoop