The Door to December

time for politics. Murder and murderers. Some people were capable of the most unthinkable brutality, and he was fascinated with them. Not those killers who were obviously lunatics. Not those who killed in mindless fits of rage or passion after being subjected to understandable provocation. But the others. Some husbands could kill their wives without remorse, merely because they had grown tired of them. Some mothers could kill their children, just because they no longer wanted the responsibility of raising them, and they were without grief or even a sense of guilt. Hell, some people out there could kill anybody at all for any reason, even for trivial reasons like being cut off in traffic; they were amoral sociopaths, and Dan was never bored with them or with their aberrant psychology. He wanted to understand them. Were they mentally ill — or throwbacks? Were only certain people capable of cold-blooded murder when there was no element of self-defense involved, or were these killers a special breed? If they were special, wolves in a society of sheep, he wanted to know what made them different. What was missing in them? Why were compassion and empathy unknown to them?
     He didn't entirely understand his intellectual fascination with murder. He did not have a particularly ruminative or philosophical bent — or at least he didn't think of himself in those terms. Perhaps, working day after day in a world of violence and blood and death, it was impossible not to grow philosophical with the passage of years. Maybe most other homicide cops spent a lot of time contemplating the dark side of human potential; maybe he wasn't the only one; he had no way of knowing; it wasn't the kind of thing most cops talked about.
     In his case, of course, perhaps his need to understand murder and the murderer's mind was related to the fact that both his brother and sister had been murdered. Maybe.
     Now, smelling strongly of alcohol and vaguely of other chemicals used in the pathology lab, smiling up at Dan, Luther Williams said, 'Listen, Danny, next week there's a really terrific debate between—'
     Dan interrupted him. 'Luther, I'm sorry, but I don't have time to chat. I need some information, and I need it right away.'
     'What's the big hurry?'
     'I gotta pee.'
     'Look, Danny, I know politics bores you—'
     'No, really, it isn't that,' Dan said with a straight face. 'I actually gotta pee.'
     Luther sighed. 'Someday the totalitarians will take over, and they'll pass laws so you can't pee unless you have permission from the Official Federal Urinary Gatekeeper.'
     'Ouch.'
     'Then you'll come to me with your bladder bursting, and you'll say, "Luther, my God, why didn't you warn me about these people?"'
     'No, no. I promise to crawl away somewhere, all by myself, and let my bladder burst in silence. I promise — swear — not to bother you.
     'Yeah, because you'd rather let your bladder burst than have to hear me say I told you so.'
     Luther was sitting at the lab table on a wheeled stool. Dan pulled up another stool and sat down in front of him. 'Okay. Hit me with the dazzling scientific insights, Doctor Williams. You have three special customers from last night. McCaffrey, Hoffritz, and Cooper.'
     'They're scheduled for autopsy this evening.'
     'They haven't been done already?'
     'We have a backlog here, Danny. They kill 'em faster than we can cut 'em open.'
     'Sounds like a violation of free-market principles,' Dan said.
     'Huh?'
     'You've got a lot more supply than you have demand.'
     'Isn't that the truth? Would you like to go into the cooler, see the tables where we have all the stiffs stacked on top of one another?'
     'No thanks, but it sounds like a charming excursion.'
     'Pretty soon, we'll have to start piling them in the closets with bags of ice.'
     'You at least seen the three I'm interested in?'
     'Oh, yeah.'
     'Can you tell me anything about them?'
     'They're dead.'
     'As soon as the totalitarians take over, they're going to do away with all smartass black pathologists, first thing.'
     'Hey, that's what I'm telling you,' Luther said.
     'You've examined the wounds on those three?'
     His dark face darkening even further, the pathologist said, 'Never seen anything like it. Each corpse