The Door to December

latent prints that're going to help us?'
     Porteau opened a desk drawer and withdrew a pouch of tobacco. He began to prepare his pipe. 'Lots of prints belonging to the three victims. All over the house. Others belonging to the little girl — although those were in the converted garage.'
     'The lab.'
     'The gray room, as one of my men called it.'
     'Then she was always kept in that room?'
     'That's certainly the most logical deduction, yes. We do have a few partials from the hall bathroom that conceivably could be hers, but none anywhere else in the house.'
     'And nothing else? No prints at all that might've belonged to the killers?'
     'Oh, certainly, we found numerous other prints, mostly partials. We're putting them through the new high-speed computerized comparison program, trying to match them with prints of known criminals on file, but we've had no luck so far. Not likely to have any, either.' He paused, having tamped the tobacco into the generous bowl of his pipe, and searched his pockets for a match. 'In your experience, Daniel, how many times has a murderer left clear, unsmudged, and easily identifiable fingerprints at the scene of his crime?'
     'Twice,' Dan said. 'In fourteen years. So we'll get no help from prints. What have we got?'
     Porteau got his pipe fired up, exhaled sweetish smoke, and shook out the match. 'No weapon was found—'
     'One of the victims had a fireplace poker.'
     Porteau nodded. 'Mr. Cooper intended to defend himself with it, apparently. But it was never used to strike anyone. The only blood on it was Cooper's own, and only a few drops of that, all part of the natural spray pattern that spotted the walls and the floor around the body.'
     'So Cooper didn't manage to land any blows on his assailant, and he wasn't hit with the poker himself.'
     'Precisely.'
     'Did the vacuum crew come up with anything besides dirt?'
     'The results are being analyzed. Frankly, I'm not optimistic.'
     Porteau usually was optimistic, another Holmesian trait, so his pessimism in the current case was especially disturbing. Dan said, 'What about the scrapings from under the victims' fingernails?'
     'Nothing of interest. No skin, no hair, no blood but their own under their nails, which probably means they didn't get a chance to claw at their assailants.'
     'But the killers had to move in close. I mean, Felix, they beat these people to death.'
     'Yes. But although they had to get close, none of them seems to have been wounded. We took scores of blood samples from every surface in those rooms, only to discover that all of it belonged to the victims.'
     They sat in silence.
     Porteau puffed clouds of fragrant smoke into the air above his head. A distant look came into his eyes as he pondered the evidence in the case, and if he, like Sherlock, had played a violin, he would have reached for it now.
     At last Dan said, 'I assume that you saw the photographs of the bodies.'
     'Yes. Horrible. Incredible. Such fury.'
     'Do you get the feeling that this one is going to be really weird?'
     'Daniel, I find all murder to be weird,' Porteau said.
     'But this one seems weirder than usual.'
     'Weirder than usual,' Porteau agreed, and smiled, as if pleased by the challenge.
     'I'm beginning to get the creeps.'
     'Look out for that falling boulder, Mr. Coyote.'
     Dan left the SID lieutenant in his aromatic haze and rode the elevator back down, this time to the basement, where Pathology was located.
    16
    Still in a hypnotic state, the girl said, 'No!'
     'Melanie, honey, take it easy, take it easy now. Nobody's going to hurt you.
     The girl tossed her head, drawing the quick shallow inhalations indicative of panic. A half-born wail of fear and dread was trapped in her throat and issued only as a thin, high-pitched eeeeeeee. She squirmed and tried to push herself off her mother's lap.
     Laura held her. 'Stop struggling, Melanie. Relax. Be still. Be calm.'
     Suddenly the girl struck out at an imaginary assailant, flailing with both hands. Unintentionally she struck her mother on the breast, then on the face, two hard and painful blows.
     For an instant Laura was stunned. The blow to the face was hard enough to bring involuntary tears of pain to her