The Door to December
Page 9

She headed away from the parking lot, toward the front entrance of the hospital.
Haldane walked beside her, limping slightly but apparently not in pain.
'You have an accident?' she asked.
'Huh?'
'Your leg.'
'Oh. No. Just an old football injury from college. Banged the knee up pretty bad my senior year. Sometimes it acts up in humid weather. Listen, there's more about the guy in the Volvo, Rink.'
'What?'
'He had an attach case with him. Inside, there was a white lab coat, a stethoscope, and a pistol fitted with a silencer.'
'He shoot his assailant? Are you looking for someone with a bullet wound?'
'Nope. The piece wasn't fired. But do you see what I'm driving at? The lab coat? The stethoscope?'
'He wasn't a doctor, was he?'
'No. What it looks like to us is that maybe he was going to go into the hospital, put on the lab coat, hang the stethoscope around his neck, and pretend to be a doctor.'
She glanced at him as they reached the curb and stepped up onto the sidewalk. 'Why would he do that?'
'From a preliminary look, the assistant medical examiner thinks Rink was killed between four and six o'clock this morning, though he wasn't found until nine-forty-five. Now, if he was figuring to visit someone in the hospital at, say five o'clock in the morning, he'd almost have to try to pass himself off as a doctor, because visiting hours don't start until one in the afternoon. If he tried to get on one of the medical floors in civilian clothes at that hour, there's a good chance a nurse or maybe a security guard would stop him. But in a lab coat, with a stethoscope, he could probably breeze right through.
They had reached the front entrance of the hospital. Laura stopped on the sidewalk. 'When you say "visit" you don't mean "visit".'
'No.'
'So you believe he intended to go into the hospital and kill someone.'
'A man doesn't carry a pistol with a silencer unless he means to use it. A silencer's illegal. Law comes down on you hard for that. You get caught with one, you're in deep sh ... deep soup. Besides, I haven't learned any details yet, but I'm told Rink has a criminal record. He's suspected of being a freelance hitman for the past few years.'
'A hired killer?'
'I'd almost bet on it.'
'But that doesn't mean he came here to kill Melanie. Could be someone else in the hospital ...'
'We already considered that. We've been checking the patient list to see if there's anyone here with a criminal record, or maybe someone who's a material witness in a case that's going to trial soon. Or any known dope dealers or members of any organized-crime family. We haven't found anything so far. Nobody who might've been Rink's target ... except Melanie.'
'Are you saying maybe this Rink killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the other man in Studio City—then came here to kill Melanie because she saw him do the others?'
'Could be.'
'But then who killed Rink?'
He sighed. 'That's where the logic falls apart.'
'Whoever killed him didn't want him to kill Melanie,' Laura said.
Haldane shrugged.
She said, 'If that's the case, I'm glad.'
'What's to be glad about?'
'Well, if someone killed Rink to stop him from killing Melanie, it must mean she doesn't only have enemies out there. It means she has friends too.'
With unconcealed pity, Haldane said, 'No. That isn't necessarily what it means. The people who killed Rink probably want Melanie just as much as he did—except they want her alive.'
'Why?'
'Because she knows too much about the experiments conducted in that house.'
'Then they'd want her dead too, just like Rink.'
'Unless they need her to continue those experiments.'
Laura knew it was true as soon as he said it, and her shoulders slumped under the weight of this new fear. Why had Dylan been working with a discredited fanatic like Hoffritz? And who was financing them? No legitimate foundation, university, or research institute would give a grant to Hoffritz, not since he had been forced out of UCLA. Nor would any reputable institute fund Dylan, a man who had stolen his own child and was hiding from his wife's attorneys, a man who was using his daughter as a guinea pig in experiments that had left her on the verge of autism. Whoever provided the money to support Dylan and to conduct that kind of research was insane, every bit as insane as Dylan and Hoffritz.
She wanted it to be over and done with. She wanted to take Melanie out of the hospital, go home, and live happily ever after, because if anyone on earth deserved peace and happiness it was her little girl. But now 'they' weren't going to allow it. 'They' were going to try to snatch Melanie away again. 'They' wanted the child for reasons and purposes that only 'they' understood. And who in the hell were they' anyway? Faceless. Nameless. Laura couldn't fight an enemy she couldn't see or, seeing, recognize.
'They're well informed,' she said. 'And they don't waste time, either.'
Haldane blinked. 'What do you mean?'
'Melanie was here at the hospital only a couple of hours before Rink came after her. Didn't take him long to find out where she'd gotten to.'
'Not long at all,' he agreed.
'Makes you think he had sources.'
'Sources? In the police department, you mean?'
'Could be. And it didn't take Rink's enemies long to learn he was after her,' Laura said. 'They all move damn fast, both groups, whoever they are.'
She stood at the front doors to the hospital and studied the traffic moving on the street, as well as the shops and offices on the other side of the avenue. Sun shining in big plate-glass windows. Sun glinting off the windshields and chrome of the passing cars and trucks. In all that revealing sunlight, she hoped to spot someone suspicious, someone Haldane could chase and catch, but there were only ordinary people doing ordinary things. She was angered by their ordinariness, by the enemy's failure to step up and identify himself.
Irrationally, even the sunshine and the warm air angered her. Haldane had just told her that someone out there wanted her daughter dead and that someone else wanted to snatch Melanie and shove her back into a sensory-deprivation chamber or maybe into another jerry-built electric chair where they could continue to torture her for God knew what purpose. For that kind of news, the atmosphere was all wrong. The storm shouldn't have passed already. The sky should still be low, gray, full of churning clouds; rain should be falling, and the wind should be cold and blustery. It just didn't seem right that the world around her was balmy, that other people were whistling and smiling and strolling in sunshine and having fun, while she was plunging deeper into a bleak, dark, living nightmare.
She looked at Dan Haldane. A breeze stirred his sandy hair, and sunlight sharpened his pleasant features, rendering him more handsome than he really was. Even disregarding the flattery of the sun and shadow, however, he was good-looking. In other circumstances, she might have been interested in him. The contrast between his brutish size and gentleness lent him a certain mystique. The lost potential of this relationship was one more thing she held against the unknown 'them'.
'Why were you so eager to reach me?' she asked. 'Why were you calling my place for an hour and a half? It wasn't just to tell me about Rink. You knew I'd be showing up here. You could've waited till then to give me the bad news.'
He glanced toward the parking lot, where the morgue wagon was pulling away from the crime scene. When he focused on Laura again, his face was lined, his mouth grim, his eyes direct and dark with worry. 'I wanted to tell you to call a private security firm and arrange for an around-the-clock guard at your house, for after you take Melanie home.'
'A bodyguard?'
'More or less, yeah.'
'But if her life's in danger, won't the police department provide protection?'
He shook his head. 'Not in this case. There's not been any direct threat against her. No phone calls. No notes.'
'Rink—'
'We don't know he was here to get Melanie. We only suspect.'
'Just the same—'
'If the state and city weren't always going through a budget crisis, if police funding hadn't been cut, if we weren't chronically short of manpower, maybe we could stretch a point and have your house put under surveillance. But given the current situation, I couldn't justify it. And if I arrange the surveillance without my captain's approval, he'll sell my butt to the Alpo people, and I'll wind up in cans of dog food. He and I don't get along so well to begin with. But a security service, professional bodyguards ... that's as good as any protection we could supply you even if we had the men to do it. Can you afford to hire them, just for a few days?'
'I suppose so. I don't know how much something like that costs, but I'm not poor. If you think it'll be for only a few days—'
'I have a hunch this one's going to unravel fast. All this killing, all the chances someone's been taking—it indicates they're under a lot of pressure, that there's a time limit of some kind. I haven't the faintest goddamned idea what they've been doing to your kid or why they're so desperate to get their hands on her again, but I sense this situation's like a giant snowball, rolling fast down a mountain, fast as an express train, getting bigger and bigger as it goes. Right now, already, it's real big, gigantic, and it's not far from the bottom of the mountain. When it finally hits, it's going to bust into hundreds of pieces.'
As a pediatric psychiatrist, Laura was self-confident, never uncertain as to how she should proceed with a new patient. Of course she deliberated before choosing a course of therapy, but once she had decided on her approach, she implemented it without hesitation. She was a successful healer, a mender, a repairman of the psyche, and her success had given her the confidence and authority that generated more success. But now she was lost. She felt small, vulnerable, powerless. That was a feeling that she hadn't known for a few years, not since she had learned to accept Melanie's disappearance.
She said, 'I ... I don't even know how you ... how a person goes about finding bodyguards.'
Haldane pulled out his wallet, fished in it, withdrew a card. 'Most of the private investigators you sent after Dylan, years ago, probably also offer bodyguard service. We're not supposed to make recommendations. But I know these guys are good, and their rates are competitive.'
She took the card, looked at it:
CALIFORNIA PALADIN, INC.
PRIVATE INVESTIGATION
Personal Security
A phone number was provided at the bottom.
Laura tucked the card in her purse. 'Thanks.'
'Call them before you leave the hospital.'
'I will.'
'Have them send a man here. He can follow you home.'
She felt numb. 'All right.' She turned toward the hospital doors.
'Wait.' He handed her another card, his own. 'The printed number on the front is my line at Central, but you won't be able to get me there. I'm on assignment to the East Valley Division right now, so I've written that number on the back. I want you to call me if anything occurs to you, anything about Dylan's past or old research that might have a bearing on this.'
She turned the card over. 'There's two numbers here.'
'Bottom one's my home number, in case I'm not in the office.'
'Won't your office forward messages?'
'Yeah, but they might be slow about it. If you want to get me in a hurry, I want to be sure you can.'
'You usually give out your home phone like this?'
'No.'
'Then, why?'
'The thing I hate most of all...'
'What's that?'
'A crime like this. Child abuse of any kind is so infuriating and frustrating. Makes me sick. Makes my blood boil.'
'I know what you mean,' she said.
'Yeah, I guess you do.'
12
Dr. Rafael Ybarra, chief of pediatrics at Valley Medical, met with Laura in a small room near the nurses' station, where the staff took their coffee breaks. Two vending machines stood against one wall. An icemaker chugged, clinked, and clattered. Behind Laura a refrigerator hummed softly. She sat across from Ybarra at a long table on which were dog-eared magazines and two ashtrays full of cold cigarette butts.
The pediatrician—dark, slim, with aquiline features—was prim, even prissy. His perfectly combed hair seemed like a laquered wig. His shirt collar was crisp and stiff, tie perfectly knotted, lab coat tailored. He walked as though afraid of getting his shoes dirty, and he sat with his shoulders back and his head up, stiff and formal. He surveyed the crumbs and the cigarette ashes on the table, wrinkled his nose, and kept his hands in his lap.
Laura decided she didn't like the man.
Dr. Ybarra spoke with brisk authority, biting the words off: 'Physically, your daughter's in good condition, surprisingly good considering the circumstances. She is somewhat underweight, but not seriously so. Her right arm is bruised from repeated insertion of an IV needle by someone who wasn't very skilled at it. Her urethra is mildly inflamed, perhaps from catheterization. I have prescribed medication for that condition. And that's the extent of her physical problems.'
Laura nodded. 'I know. I've come to take her home.'
'No, no. I wouldn't advise that,' Ybarra said. 'For one thing, she'll be too difficult to care for at home.'
'She's not actually ill?'
'No, but—'
'She's not incontinent?'
'No. She uses the bathroom.'
'She can feed herself?'
'In a fashion. You have to start feeding her, then she'll take over. And you've got to keep watching her as she eats because after a few bites she seems to forget what she's doing, loses interest. You have to continue urging her to eat. She needs help to dress herself too.'
'I can handle all that.'
'I'm still reluctant to discharge her,' Ybarra said.
'But last night Doctor Pantangello said—'
At the mention of Pantangello, Ybarra wrinkled his nose. His distaste was evident in his voice. 'Doctor Pantangello only finished his residency last autumn and was accredited to this hospital last month. I am the head of pediatrics, and it is my opinion that your daughter should stay here.'