They had all come to the hospital in Dan’s car, but now Dan didn’t want to go back to the safe house. He didn’t want Laura and Melanie to be near any other cops, so they called a taxi for Earl.
“Don’t wait with me,” Earl said. “You guys get out of here.”
“We might as well wait,” Dan said, “because we’ve got a few things to talk over anyway.”
Without discussing it, they grouped around Melanie, shielding her. They stood just inside the front entrance of the medical center, where they could see the rain-lashed night and the place where the taxi would pull up. Half the fluorescent lights in the lobby were switched off, for it was well after visiting hours, and the other half cast fuzzy bars of cold, unpleasant light across the large room. The air smelled vaguely of rose-scented disinfectant. Except for the four of them, the place was deserted.
“You want Paladin to send someone out here to take over for me?” Earl asked.
“No,” Dan said.
“Didn’t think you would.”
“Paladin’s damned good,” Dan said, “and I’ve never had reason to doubt their integrity, and I still don’t have reason—”
“But, in this particular case, you don’t trust anyone at Paladin any more than you trust anyone on the police force,” Earl said.
“Except you,” Laura said. “We know we can trust you, Earl. Without you, Melanie and I would be dead.”
“Don’t credit me with anything heroic,” Earl said. “I was plain stupid. I opened the door to Manuello.”
“But you had no way of knowing—”
“But I opened the door,” Earl said, and the expression of self-disgust on his face was unmistakable in spite of the way his injuries distorted his features.
Laura could see why Dan and Earl were friends. They shared a devotion to their work, a strong sense of duty, and a tendency to be excessively self-critical. Those were qualities seldom found in a world that seemed daily to put more stock in cynicism, selfishness, and self-indulgence.
To Earl, Dan said, “I’ll find a motel, get a room, and hole up there with Laura and Melanie the rest of the night. I thought of taking them back to my place, but someone might be expecting me to do just that.”
“And tomorrow?” Earl asked.
“There’re several people I want to see—”
“Can I help?”
“If you feel up to it when you get out of bed in the morning.”
“I’ll feel up to it,” Earl assured him.
Dan said, “There’s a woman named Mary Katherine O’Hara, in Burbank. She’s secretary of an organization called Freedom Now.” He gave Earl the address and outlined the information he wanted from O’Hara. “I also need to find out about a company called John Wilkes Enterprises. Who are its officers, majority stockholders?”
“Is it a California corporation?” Earl asked.
“Most likely,” Dan said. “I need to know when the incorporation papers were filed, by whom, what business they’re supposed to be in.”
“How’s this John Wilkes outfit come into it?” Earl asked, which was something Laura wondered about too.
“It’ll take a while to explain,” Dan said. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Let’s get together for a late lunch, say one o’clock, and try to make something out of the information we’ve gathered.”
“Yeah, I should have dug up what you want by then,” Earl said. He suggested a coffee shop in Van Nuys because, he said, it was a place in which he had never seen anyone from Paladin.
“It’s not a cop hangout, either,” Dan said. “Sounds good.”
“Here’s your cab,” Laura said as headlights swept across the glass doors and briefly sparkled in the raindrops that quivered on those panes.
Earl looked down at Melanie and said, “Well, princess, can you give me a smile before I go?”
The girl peered up at him, but Laura saw that her eyes were still strange, distant.
“I’m warning you,” Earl said, “I’m going to hang around and bother you until you finally give me a smile.”
Melanie just stared.
To Laura, Earl said, “Keep your chin up. Okay? It’s going to work out.”
Laura nodded. “And thanks for—”
“For nothing,” Earl said. “I opened the door for them. I’ve got to make up for that. Wait until I make up for that before you start thanking me for anything.” He stepped to the lobby doors, started to push one open, then glanced back at Dan and said, “By the way, what the hell happened to you?”
“What?” Dan asked.
“Your forehead.”
“Oh.” Dan glanced at Laura, and she could tell by his expression that he’d come by his injury while working on the case, and she could also tell that he didn’t want to say as much and make her feel at all responsible. He said, “There was this little old lady . . . she hit me with her cane.”
“Oh?” Earl said.
“I helped her across the street.”
“Then why would she hit you?”
“She didn’t want to cross the street,” Dan said.
Earl grinned—it was a macabre expression on his battered face—pushed the door open, ran through the rain, and disappeared into the waiting taxi.
Laura zipped up Melanie’s jacket. She and Dan kept the girl between them as they hurried out to his unmarked department sedan.
The air was chilly.
The rain was cold.
The darkness seemed to breathe with malevolent life.
Out there, somewhere, It waited.
The motel room had two queen-size beds with purple-and-green spreads that clashed with the garish orange-and-blue drapes that, in turn, clashed with the loud yellow-and-brown wallpaper. There was a certain kind of eye-searing decor to be found in about one-fourth of the hotels and motels in every state of the union, from Alaska to Florida, an unmistakable bizarre decor of such a particular nature that it seemed, to Dan, that the same grossly incompetent interior decorator must be traveling frantically from one end of the country to the other, papering walls and upholstering furniture and draping windows with factory-rejected patterns and materials.
The beds had mattresses that were too soft, and the furniture was scarred, but at least the place was clean. On the credit side of the ledger, the management provided a percolator and complimentary foil packets of Hills Brothers and Mocha Mix. Dan made coffee while Laura put Melanie to bed.
Although the girl had seemed to drift through the day with all the awareness of a sleepwalker, expending little energy, it was late, and she fell asleep even as her mother was tucking the covers around her.
A small table and two chairs stood by the room’s only window, and Dan brought the coffee to it. He and Laura sat mostly in shadow, with one small lamp burning just inside the door. The drapes were partly open to reveal a section of the rain-swept parking lot, where ghostly bluish light from mercury-vapor lamps made strange patterns on the glass and chrome of the cars and shimmered eerily on the wet macadam.
While Dan listened with growing amazement and disquiet, Laura told him the rest of the story that she had begun in the car: the levitating radio that seemed to broadcast a warning, the whirlwind filled with flowers that had burst through the kitchen door. She clearly found it difficult to credit these apparently supernatural events, though she had witnessed them with her own eyes.
“What do you make of it?” he asked when she had finished.
“I was hoping you could explain it to me.”
He told her about Joseph Scaldone being killed in a room where all the windows and doors had been locked from inside. “Considering that impossibility on top of what you’ve told me happened at your place, I guess we’ve got to accept that there’s something here—some power, some force that’s beyond human experience. But what the hell is it?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it all evening, and it seems to me that whatever . . . whatever possessed that radio and carried those flowers into the kitchen is not the s
ame thing that’s killing people. In retrospect, scary as it was, the presence in my kitchen wasn’t fundamentally threatening. And like I said, it seemed to be warning us that what killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the others is eventually going to come for Melanie too.”
“So we’ve got both good spirits and bad spirits,” Dan said.
“I guess you could think of them that way.”
“Good ghosts and bad ghosts.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said.
“Neither do I. But, somehow, in their experiments in that room, your husband and Hoffritz seem to have tapped into and then unleashed occult entities, some of which are murderous and some of which are at least benign enough to issue warnings about the bad ones. And until I can think of something better . . . well, ‘ghosts’ seems to be the best word for them.”
They fell silent. They sipped the last of their coffee.
The rain came down hard, harder. It roared.
At the far end of the room, Melanie murmured in her sleep and shifted under the covers, then grew still and quiet again.
At last Laura said, “Ghosts. It’s just . . . crazy.”
“Madness.”
“Insanity.”
He switched on the dim light over the table. From a jacket pocket, he withdrew the printout of the Sign of the Pentagram’s mailing list. He unfolded it and put it in front of her. “Aside from your husband, Hoffritz, Ernest Cooper, and Ned Rink, is there anyone on this list with whom you’re familiar?”
She spent ten minutes scanning names and found four additional people who she knew.
“This one,” she said. “Edwin Koliknikov. He’s a professor of psychology at USC. He’s a frequent recipient of Pentagon grants for research, and he helped Dylan make some connections at the Department of Defense. Koliknikov’s a behaviorist with a special interest in child psychology.”
Dan figured that Koliknikov was also the “Eddie” who had been at Regine’s house in the Hollywood Hills and who had, by now, taken her to Las Vegas.
She said, “Howard Renseveer. He represents some foundation with lots of money to spend. I’m not sure which one, but I know he backed some of Hoffritz’s research and talked with Dylan several times about a grant for his work. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed to be a thoroughly unpleasant man, distant and arrogant.”
Dan was certain that this was the “Howard” whom Regine had mentioned.
“This one too,” Laura said, indicating another name on the list. “Sheldon Tolbeck. His friends call him Shelby. He’s a heavyweight, a psychologist and a neurologist, who’s done definitive research on various forms of dissociative behavior.”
“What’s that?” Dan asked.
“Dissociative behavior? Psychological withdrawal, catatonia, autism—conditions of that sort.”
“Like Melanie.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve reason to believe these three men were all involved with your husband and with Hoffritz in the research being done in that damned gray room.”
She frowned. “I could believe it of Koliknikov and Renseveer, but not Sheldon Tolbeck. His reputation is spotless.” She was still looking at the list. “Here’s another. Albert Uhlander. He’s an author, writes strange—”
“I know. That box I brought in from the car is full of his books.”
“He and Dylan carried on an extensive correspondence.”
“About what?”
“Various aspects of the occult. I’m not sure exactly.”
She found no other familiar name on the long list, but she had identified every member of the conspiracy except that tall, white-haired, distinguished-looking man whom Regine knew only as “Daddy.” Dan had a hunch that “Daddy” was more than just a sadistic pervert, that he was more than just another member of Dylan McCaffrey’s ad hoc research team, that he was the key to the entire case, the central figure behind the conspiracy.
Dan said, “I think these men—Koliknikov, Renseveer, Tolbeck, and Uhlander—are all going to die. Soon. Something is methodically killing everyone involved with the project in that gray room, the something we’re calling a ‘ghost’ for want of a better word. It’s something that they themselves unleashed but couldn’t control. If I’m correct, these four men don’t have much time left.”
“Then we should warn them—”
“Warn them? They’re responsible for Melanie’s condition.”
“Still, as much as I’d like them all punished . . .”
“Anyway, I think they already know something’s coming for them,” Dan said. “Eddie Koliknikov left town tonight. And the others are probably getting out too, if they’re not already gone.”
She was silent a moment. Then: “And whatever wants them . . . once it’s gotten them . . . it’s also coming after Melanie.”
“If we can believe the message that came through your radio.”
“We can believe it,” she said grimly.
Melanie began to murmur again, and the murmurs quickly escalated into groans of fear. As the girl thrashed under the blankets, Laura got up and took a step toward the bed—but halted suddenly and looked around anxiously.
“What’s wrong?” Dan asked.
“The air,” she said.
He felt it even as she spoke.
The air was getting colder.
chapter thirty-one
The late shuttle flight from LAX landed in Las Vegas before midnight, and Regine and Eddie went straight to the Desert Inn, where they had a room reserved. They were registered and unpacked by one o’clock in the morning.
She had been to Vegas with Eddie twice before. They always registered under her name, so she never learned his name from the desk clerks or the bellmen.
One thing that she had learned was that something about Vegas was a turn-on for Eddie. Maybe it was the lights and the excitement, maybe the sight and smell and sound of money. Whatever the cause, his sexual appetite was substantially greater in Vegas than it was back in L.A. Each evening, when they went to dinner and a show, she would wear a low-cut dress that he picked out for her, and he would put her on display, but the rest of the time he made her stay in the room, so she would always be available to him when he came back from a session at the craps or blackjack tables. Two or even three times a day, he would return to the room, keyed-up, his eyes a little wild, tense but not nervous, and he would use her to work off his excess energy. Sometimes he would stop just inside the room, standing with his back against the door, unzip, make her come to him, make her get on her knees, and when he was finished, he would push her away and leave without saying a word. Sometimes he would want to do it in the shower, or on the floor, or in bed but in weird positions that ordinarily would not have interested him. In Vegas, he found greater satisfaction in sex, approached it almost fiercely, and exhibited an even more delicious cruelty than he did back in Los Angeles.
Therefore, when they got settled into their room at the Desert Inn, she expected him to jump her, but he wasn’t interested tonight. He had been on edge since he’d come to her house several hours ago, and then he had relaxed a bit when their flight had taken off from LAX, but his relaxation had been short-lived. Now he seemed almost . . . frantic.
She knew that he was running from someone, from whomever or whatever had killed the others. But the depth and tenacity of his fear surprised her. In her experience, he was always cool, detached, superior. She hadn’t thought that he was susceptible to the stronger emotions like joy and terror. If Eddie was afraid, then the threat must be truly horrendous. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t afraid. Even if someone learned that Eddie had gone to hide in Vegas and came all the way there to get Eddie, and even if she was in danger while with him, she would not be afraid. She had been freed from all fear. Willy had freed her.
But Eddie had not been freed, and he was so afraid that he didn’t want to screw or sleep. He wanted to go downstairs to the casino and gamble for a while, but—and this was the unusual part—he wanted her to go with him.
He didn’t want to be alone among strangers, not even in a crowded public place like a casino.
Indirectly, he was asking her for moral and emotional support, which was something neither he nor any of his friends had ever wanted from her before, and it was something that she was not equipped to give them—not since Willy had changed her. Indeed, she could relate to Eddie only when he used her, when he was dominant and abusive. She was actually disgusted and repelled by his expression of weakness and need.
Nevertheless, at 1:15 in the morning, she accompanied him downstairs to the casino. He wanted her companionship, and she always provided what was wanted of her.
The casino was relatively busy now but would be jammed in half an hour, when the showroom had emptied from the midnight performance. At the moment there were hundreds of people at the blinking-flashing-sparkling slot machines, at the semielliptical blackjack tables, and standing around the craps tables: people in suits and evening gowns; people in slacks and jeans; conscientiously rustic cowboy types standing next to people who looked as if they had just survived an explosion in a polyester factory; grandmothers and young hookers; Japanese high rollers in from Tokyo on a junket flight and a flock of secretaries from San Diego; the rich and the not-so-rich; losers and winners; more losers; a three-hundred-pound lady in a bright yellow caftan and a matching turban, who was betting a thousand dollars a hand at blackjack, but who knew so little about the game that she was routinely splitting pairs of tens; an inebriated oilman from Houston who was betting fifty dollars a hand, every hand, for the dealer, and only twenty-five dollars a hand for himself; uniformed security guards so big that they looked as if they ate furniture for breakfast, but who were soft-spoken and unfailingly polite; blackjack and craps dealers in black slacks and white shirts and black string ties; a tuxedo-clad crew at the baccarat table; pit bosses and their assistants, all in well-tailored dark suits, all with the same sharp, quick, suspicious eyes. It was a people-watcher’s paradise.
Staying at Eddie’s side as he prowled restlessly around the enormous room, drifting from game to game but playing at none of them, Regine reacted to the Vegas turmoil in a way that was, for her, uncommon. A quickening of the pulse, a sudden rush of adrenaline, a strange electric crackle of excitement that made her skin tingle—all led her to believe that something big was going to happen. She didn’t know what it would be, but she knew it was coming. She sensed it. Maybe she would win a lot of money. Maybe this was what people meant when they said they “felt lucky.” She had never felt lucky before. She had never been lucky before. Maybe she wouldn’t be lucky tonight, either, but she sensed that something was going to happen. Something big. And soon.
The air in the motel room grew colder.
Though apparently still asleep, Melanie writhed and kicked her legs beneath the covers. She gasped and whimpered softly and said, “The . . . door . . . the door . . .”
Dan went to the door, checked the lock, because the girl seemed to sense that something was coming.
“. . . keep it shut!”
The door was locked.
The air temperature dropped even lower.
Softly but urgently: “Don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t let it out!”
In, Laura thought. She should be afraid of it getting in.
Melanie thrashed, gasped, shuddered violently, but didn’t wake.
Oppressed by a feeling of utter helplessness, Laura surveyed the small room, wondering which inanimate objects, like the radio in her kitchen, might abruptly come to life.
Dan Haldane had drawn his revolver.
Laura turned, expecting the window to explode, expecting the door to burst into splinters, expecting the chairs or the television to be infused with sudden malevolent life.
Dan stayed near the door, as if anticipating trouble from that quarter.
But then, as abruptly as the disturbance had begun, it ended. The air grew warm again. Melanie stopped whimpering and gasping, ceased speaking. She was also utterly motionless on the bed, and her breathing was unusually slow and deep.
“What happened?” Dan asked.
Laura said, “I don’t know.”
The room was now as warm as it had been before the disturbance.
“Is it over?” Dan asked.