The Door to December

professionals, so let's drop the formalities. Call me Marge.'
     'Is that your middle name?'
     'Unfortunately, no. But Irmatrude's as bad as Gelkenshettle, and my middle name's Heidi. Do I look like a Heidi to you?'
     He smiled. 'I guess not.'
     'You're damned right I don't. My parents were sweet, and they loved me, but they had a blind spot about names.'
     'My name's Dan.'
     'Much better. Simple. Sensible. Anyone can say Dan. Now, you wanted to talk about Dylan McCaffrey and Willy Hoffritz. It's hard to believe they're dead.'
     'Wouldn't be so hard if you'd seen the bodies. Tell me about Dylan first. What did you think of him?'
     'I wasn't head of the department when Dylan McCaffrey was here. I only moved into the top job a little more than four years ago.'
     'But you were teaching here then, doing your own research. You were on the faculty with him.'
     'Yes. I didn't know him well, but I knew him well enough to know I didn't want to know him any better.'
     'I understand he was very dedicated to his work. His wife — she's a psychiatrist — called him a severe obsessive-compulsive.'
     'He was a nut,' Marge said.
    * * *
    The two new Paladin agents walked away from the suspicious telephone-company van and came directly to Laura's front door. Earl Benton let them in.
     One was tall, the other short. The tall one was thin and gray-faced. The short man was slightly pudgy with freckles across the bridge of his nose and on both cheeks. They didn't want to sit down or have coffee. Earl called the short one Flash, and Laura didn't know if that was his surname or a nickname.
     Flash did all the talking while the tall one stood beside him, his long face expressionless. 'They're steamed that we blew their cover,' Flash said.
     'If they don't want to be made, they should be more subtle,' Earl said.
     'That's what I told them,' Flash said.
     'Who are they?'
     'They showed us FBI credentials.'
     'You wrote their names down?'
     'Names and ID numbers.'
     'Did the ID took real?'
     'Yeah,' Flash said.
     'What about the men? They seem like Bureau types to you?'
     'Yeah,' Flash said. 'Sharply dressed. Very cool, soft-spoken, polite even when they were angry, but that underlying arrogance. You know how they are.'
     'I know,' Earl said.
     Flash said, 'We're heading back to the office, check this out, see if the Bureau employs agents with those names.'
     'You'll find the names, even if these guys aren't legit,' Earl said. 'What you've got to do is get photos of the real agents and see if they look like these guys.'
     'That's what we figure to do,' Flash said.
     'Get back to me as soon as you can,' Earl said, and the other two turned toward the door.
     Laura said, 'Wait.'
     Everyone looked at her.
     She said, 'What did they tell you? What reason did they give for watching my house?'
     'Bureau doesn't talk about its operations unless it wants to,' Earl told Laura.
     'And these guys didn't want to,' Flash said. 'They'd no sooner tell us their reasons for watching you than they'd kiss us and ask us to dance.'
     The tall man nodded agreement.
     Laura said, 'If they were here to protect Melanie and me, they'd tell us, wouldn't they? So that means they must be here to snatch her back.'
     'Not necessarily,' Flash said.
     Earl put his revolver back in his shoulder holster. 'Laura, see, the situation may be just as unclear and confusing to the Bureau as it is to us. For instance, suppose your husband was working on an important Pentagon project when he disappeared with Melanie. Suppose the FBI's been looking for him ever since. Now he turns up, dead, in peculiar circumstances. Maybe it hasn't been our government funding him these last six years, in which case they're bound to wonder where he's been getting his money.'
     Again, Laura felt as if the floor were tilting under her, as if the real world that she'd always taken for granted were an illusion. It almost seemed as though true reality might be the paranoid's nightmare world of unseen enemies and complex conspiracies.
     She said, 'Then you're telling me they're out in that telephone-company van, watching my house, because they think someone else may come for Melanie, and they want