The Door to December

when we found Melanie, that maybe it would be just beginning.'
     'Yeah. You were right. But at least it is a beginning.'
     She knew what he meant: They might have found Melanie's body with the other three — battered, dead. This was better. Frightening, perplexing, depressing, but definitely better.
    7
    Dan Haldane sat at the desk that he was using while on temporary assignment to the East Valley Division. The ancient wooden surface was scalloped by cigarette bums around the edge, scarred and gouged and marked by scores of overlapping dark rings from dripping mugs of coffee. The accommodation didn't bother him. He liked his job, and he could do it in a tent if he had to.
     In the hour before dawn, the East Valley Division was as quiet as a police station ever got. Most potential victims were not yet awake, and even the criminals had to sleep sometime. A skeleton crew manned the station until the day crew arrived. In these last musty minutes of the graveyard shift, the place still possessed the haunted feeling common to all offices at night. The only sounds were the lonely clatter of a typewriter in a room down the hall from the bull pen, and the knock of the janitor's broom as it banged against the legs of the empty desks. Somewhere a telephone rang; even in the hour before dawn, someone was in trouble.
     Dan zipped open his worn briefcase and spread the contents on the desk. Polaroid photographs of the three bodies that had been found in the Studio City house. A random sampling of the papers that had littered the floor in Dylan McCaffrey's office. Statements from the neighbors. Preliminary handwritten reports from the coroner's men and the Scientific Investigation Division (SID). And lists.
     Dan believed in lists. He had lists for the contents of drawers, cupboards, and closets in the murder house, a list of the titles of the books on the living-room shelves, and a list of telephone numbers taken from a notepad by the phone in McCaffrey's office. He also had names — every name that appeared on any scrap of paper anywhere in that Studio City residence. Until the case was wrapped up, he would carry the lists with him, take them out and reread them whenever he had a spare moment — over lunch, when he was on the john, in bed just before switching off the light — prodding his subconscious, with the hope of attaining an important insight or turning up a vital cross-reference.
     Stanley Holbein, an old friend and former partner from Robbery-Homicide, had once embarrassed Dan at an R&H Christmas party by telling a long and highly amusing (and apocryphal) story about having seen some of Dan's most private lists, including the ones on which he had kept track of every meal eaten and every bowel movement since the age of nine. Dan, who stood listening, amused but red-faced, with his hands deep in his jacket pockets, had finally pretended to want to strangle Stanley. But when he had withdrawn his hands from his pockets to lunge at his friend, he'd accidentally pulled out half a dozen lists that fluttered to the floor, eliciting gales of laughter from everyone present and necessitating a hasty retreat into another room.
     Now he gave his latest set of lists a quick scan, with the vague hope that something would jump out at him, like a pop-up figure in a children's book. Nothing popped. He began again, reading through the lists more slowly.
     The book titles were unfamiliar. The collection was a peculiar mix of psychology, medicine, physical science, and the occult. Why would a doctor, a man of science, be interested in clairvoyance, psychic powers, and other paranormal phenomena?
     He looked over the list of names. He didn't recognize any. As his stomach grew increasingly acidic, he kept returning to the photos of the bodies. In fourteen years with the LAPD and four years in the army before that, he had seen more than a few dead men. But these were unlike any in his experience. He had seen men who had stepped on land mines yet had been in better shape than these.
     The killers — surely there had been more than one — had possessed incredible strength or inhuman rage, or both. The victims had been struck repeatedly after they were already dead, hammered into jelly. What sort of man could kill with such unrestrained viciousness and cruelty? What maniacal hatred could have driven them to this?
     Before he could really concentrate on