The Door to December

office on the telephone, she said, 'I assume you're armed.'
     'Oh, yes, ma'am.'
     'Good.'
     'I'll be with you till midnight,' Earl said, 'and then a new man'll come on duty.'
     'Fine.'
     A moment later, Laura brought Melanie into the hall, and Earl hunkered down to her level. 'What a pretty girl you are.'
     Melanie said nothing.
     'Fact is,' he said, 'you remind me a lot of my sister, Emma.' Melanie stared through him.
     Taking the girl's slack hand, engulfing it in his two enormous hands, Earl continued to speak directly to her, as though she were holding up her end of the conversation. 'Emma, she's nine years younger than me, in her junior year of high school. She's raised up two prize calves, Emma has. She's got a collection of prize ribbons, probably twenty of them, from all sorts of competitions, including livestock shows at three different county fairs. You know anything about calves? You like animals? Well, calves are just the
     cutest things. Real gentle faces. I'll bet you'd be good with them, just like Emma.'
     Watching him with Melanie, Laura liked Earl Benton even more than she had on first meeting him.
     He said, 'Now, Melanie, don't you worry about anything, okay? I'm your friend, and as long as old Earl's your friend, nobody's going to so much as look crosswise at you.'
     The girl seemed utterly unaware of his presence.
     He released her hand, and her thin arm dropped back to her side, limp.
     Earl stood and rolled his shoulders to settle his jacket in place, and he looked at Laura. 'You say her daddy was responsible for making her like this?'
     'He's one of the people responsible,' Laura said.
     'And he's ... dead?'
     'Yes.'
     Some of the others are still alive, though?'
     'Yes.'
     'Sure would like to meet one of them. Like to talk to one of them. Just me and him alone for a while. Sure would like that,' Earl said. There was a hard edge in his voice, a chilling light in his eyes that hadn't been there before: an anger that, for the first time, made him look dangerous.
     Laura liked that too.
     'Now, ma'am — Doctor McCaffrey, I guess I should call you — when we leave here, I'll go out the door first. I know that's not gentlemanly behavior, but from now on, most times, I'll be just a couple feet ahead of you wherever we go, sort of scouting the way ahead, you might say.'
     'I'm sure no one's going to start shooting at us in broad daylight or anything like that,' Laura said.
     'Maybe not. But I still go first.'
     'All right.'
     'When I tell you to do something, you right away do it, and no questions asked. Understand?'
     She nodded.
     He said, 'I might not yell at you. I might tell you to get down or to run like hell, and I might say it in a soft voice the same way I might say what a nice day it is, so you have to be alert.'
     'I understand.'
     'Good. I'm sure everything'll work out just fine. Now, are you two ladies ready to go home?'
     They headed toward the elevator that would take them down to the lobby.
     At least a thousand times over the past six years, Laura had dreamed about the wonderful day when she would bring Melanie home. She had imagined that it would be the happiest day of her life. She'd never thought it would be like this.
    13
    At Central, Dan Haldane took two folders from the clerk in Records and carried them to one of the small writing tables along the wall.
     The name on the first file was Ernest Andrew Cooper. By his fingerprints, he had been identified as the John Doe victim found the previous night with Dylan McCaffrey and Wilhelm Hoffritz in the Studio City house.
     Cooper was thirty-seven years old, stood five-eleven, and weighed one hundred and sixty pounds. There were mug shots, related to a particularly serious DUI arrest, but they were of no use to Dan, because the victim's face had been battered into featureless, bloody pulp. He would have to rely on the fingerprint match.
     Cooper lived in Hancock Park, on a street of million-dollar and multimillion-dollar homes. He was chairman of the board and majority stockholder of Cooper Softech, a successful computer software firm. He'd been arrested three times within the city limits of Los Angeles, always for drunken driving, and on all three occasions,