The Door to December Read Free Page A

might smash the breastbone in an auto accident, where there are tremendous forces, sudden impacts at fifty and sixty miles an hour, crushing forces and weights... But it couldn't happen in a beating.'
     'We figure a lead pipe or—'
     'Not even that, she said. 'Smashed? Surely not.'      Melanie, my little Melanie, my God, what's happened to you, where have they taken you, will I ever see you again?
     She shuddered. 'Listen, if you don't need me to identify Dylan, then I'm not sure what help I can—'
     'Like I said, there's something I want you to see.'
     'Something weird?'
     'Yeah.'
     Yet he kept her in the foyer and even seemed to be using his body to prevent her from seeing farther into the house. Clearly, he was torn between his need for the information that she might be able to give him and his dismay at having to drag her through the scene of such bloody murders.
     'I don't understand,' she said. 'Weird? What?'
     Haldane didn't answer the question. He said, 'You and he were in the same line of work.'
     'Not exactly.'
     'He was a psychiatrist too, wasn't he?'
     'No. A behavioral psychologist. With a special interest in behavior modification.'
     'And you're a psychiatrist, a medical doctor.'
     'I specialize in the treatment of children.'
     'Yes, I see. Different fields.'
     'Very.'
     He frowned. 'Well, if you have a look at his lab, you still might be able to tell me what your husband was doing there.'
     'Lab? He was working here too?'
     'He was primarily working here. I don't think that he or your daughter led much of a real life in this place.'
     'Working? Doing what?'
     'Experiments of some sort. We can't figure it.'
     'Let's have a look.'
     'It's... messy,' he said, studying her closely.
     'I told you — I'm a doctor.'
     'Yeah, and I'm a cop, and a cop sees more blood than a doctor does, and this was so messy it made me sick.'
     'Lieutenant, you brought me here, and now you're not getting rid of me until I know what my husband and my little girl were doing in this house.'
     He nodded. 'This way.'
     She followed him past the living room, away from the kitchen, into a short hallway, where a slender, good-looking Latino in a dark suit was overseeing two men whose uniform jackets were stenciled with the word CORONER. They were stowing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag. One of the men from the coroner's office pulled up the zipper. Through the milky plastic, Laura saw only a lumpish man-shaped form, no details but a few thick smears of blood.
     Dylan?
     'Not your husband,' Haldane said, as if reading her mind. 'This one wasn't carrying any ID at all. We'll have to rely entirely on a fingerprint check.'
     More blood was spattered and streaked over the walls, pooled on the floor, lots of it, so much that it didn't seem real, like a scene in a cheap horror film.
     A plastic runner had been put down along the center of the hall, so the investigating officers and technicians wouldn't have to step in the blood and get their shoes sticky.
     Haldane glanced at her, and she tried not to let him see how scared she was.
     Had Melanie been here when the murders had taken place? If she had been, and if she was now with the man — or men — who had done this, she was marked for death too, because she had been a witness. Even if she had seen nothing, the murderer would kill her when he was ... through with her. No doubt about that. He would kill her because he would enjoy killing her. From the look of this place, he was a psychopath; a sane person would not have slaughtered with such savage, blood-spraying glee.
     The coroner's two men went outside to get a wheeled stretcher on which the body could be removed.
     The slender Latino in the dark