The Door to December

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