The Door to December

someone at UCLA, you'd be able to find out just what it was Hoffritz did to make himself unwelcome.'
     She no longer felt ill, no longer minded the blood. In fact, she hardly noticed it. There was too much horror to absorb; it numbed the mind. A single corpse and a single drop of blood would have had a more lasting effect on her than this reeking slaughterhouse. She realized why cops could so quickly become inured to scenes of bloody violence; you either adapted or went mad, and the second option was really no option at all.
     Haldane said, 'I think your husband and Hoffritz were working together again. Here. In this house.'
     'Doing what?'
     'I'm not sure. That's why I wanted you to come here. That's why I want you to see the lab in the next room. Maybe you can tell me what the hell was going on.'
     'Let's have a look.'
     He hesitated. 'There's just one thing.'
     'What?'
     'Well, I think your daughter was an integral part of their experiments.'
     Laura stared at him.
     He said, 'I think they were ... using her.'
     'How?' she whispered.
     'That's something you'll have to tell me,' the detective said. 'I'm no scientist. All I know is what I read in the newspapers. But before we go in there, you should know ... it looks to me as if some parts of these experiments were ... painful.'      Melanie, what did they want from you, what have they done to you, where have they taken you?
     She drew a deep breath.
     She blotted her sweat-damp hands on her coat.
     She followed Haldane into the lab.
    4
    Dan Haldane was surprised at how well the woman was coping with the situation. Okay, she was a doctor, but most physicians weren't accustomed to wading through blood; at the scene of multiple, violent homicides, doctors could clutch up and lose control as easily as any ordinary citizen. It wasn't just Laura McCaffrey's medical training that was carrying her through this; she also had an unusual inner strength, a toughness and resilience that Dan admired — that he found intriguing and appealing. Her daughter was missing and might be hurt, might even be dead, but until she got the answers to important questions about Melanie, she wasn't, by God, going to break down or be weak in any way. He liked her.
     She was lovely too, even though she wasn't wearing any makeup and though her auburn hair was damp and frizzy from the rain. She was thirty-six, but she looked younger. Her green eyes were clear, direct, penetrating, and beautiful. And haunted.
     The woman would be even more disturbed by what she would see in the makeshift lab, and Dan disliked having to take her in there. But that was the main reason he had called her out in the middle of the night. Although she hadn't seen her husband in six years, no one knew the man better than she knew him. Since she was a psychiatrist as well, perhaps she would recognize the nature of the experiments and research that Dylan McCaffrey had been conducting. And Dan had a hunch that he wasn't going to solve these homicides — or locate Melanie — until he could figure out what Dylan McCaffrey had been doing.
     Laura followed him through the doorway.
     In the gray room, he watched her face. She registered surprise, puzzlement, and uneasiness.
     The two-car garage had been closed off and remodeled into a single large, windowless, relentlessly drab room. Gray ceiling. Gray walls. Gray carpet. Fluorescent ceiling lights glowed softly behind grayish plastic panels. Even the handles on the sliding gray closet doors were painted gray. Though the heating vents must have been bare gray metal in the first place, they also had been painted, apparently because, unpainted, they had been shiny. No spot of color or brightwork had been allowed. The effect was not merely cold and institutional, but funereal.
     The most impressive piece of equipment in the room was a metal tank that resembled an old-fashioned iron lung, although it was considerably larger than that. It was painted the same drab gray as the room. Pipes led from it, into the floor, and an electrical cable went straight up to a junction box on the ceiling. Three movable wooden steps provided access to the tank's elevated entrance hatch, which stood open.
     Laura went up the steps and peered inside.
     Dan knew what she would find: a featureless black interior that