The Key to Midnight

her head sadly. 'I don't feel a thing. No grief.'
        'Why should you?'
        'He was my father.'
        'No. He surrendered all those rights and privileges a long time ago. He didn't mourn for Lisa. He let them do… all they did to you. You don't owe him any tears.'
        'But why?' she wondered.
        'We'll find out.'
        'I don't think so. I think maybe we're in some sort of gigantic Chinese puzzle. We'll keep climbing into smaller and smaller boxes forever, and there won't be answers in any of them.'
        Alex wondered if she might go to pieces on him after all. He wouldn't blame her if she did. She was right: This was her father, after all. She appeared to be calm, but she might be suppressing her feelings.
        Realizing that he was worried about her, Joanna conjured a ghost of a smile. 'I’ll be okay. Like I told you - I don't feel a thing. I wish I did. I wish I could. But he's a stranger to me. They took away all memory of him.' She turned away from the body. 'Come on, let's get out of here.'
        'Not yet.'
        'But what if they come back-'
        'They won't be back. If they'd known Chelgrin had made contact with us, and if they'd wanted to kill us, they would've waited right here. They think they got to him before he got to us. Come on. We have to search the place.'
        She grimaced. 'Search for what?'
        'For anything. For everything. For whatever little scrap might help us solve this puzzle.'
        'If the maid walks in-'
        'The housekeeper's already been here this morning. The bed's freshly made.'
        Joanna took a deep breath. 'All right, let's finish this as fast as we can.'
        'You follow me,' Alex said. 'Double-check me, make sure I don't overlook something. But don't touch anything.'
        In the bedroom, Chelgrin's two calfskin suitcases were on a pair of folding luggage racks. One case was open. Alex pawed through the clothes until he found a pair of the senator's black socks. He pulled them over his hands: makeshift gloves.
        Chelgrin's billfold and credit-card wallet were on the dresser. Alex went through them, with Joanna watching closely, but neither the billfold nor the wallet contained anything unusual.
        The closet held two suits and a topcoat. The pockets were empty.
        Two pairs of freshly shined shoes were on the closet floor. Alex slipped the shoe trees out of them and searched inside. Nothing.
        A shaving kit stood beside the sink in the bathroom: an electric razor, shaving powder, cologne, a comb, a can of hair spray.
        Alex returned to the open suitcase. It also proved to contain nothing of interest.
        The second suitcase wasn't locked. He opened it and tossed the clothes onto the floor, piece by piece, until he found a nine-by-twelve inch manila envelope.
        He took off the makeshift gloves and emptied the contents of the envelope onto the dresser: several age-yellowed clippings from The New York Times and The Washington Post; an unfinished letter, apparently in the senator's handwriting, addressed to Joanna. Alex didn't take time to read either the letter or the newspaper pieces, but from a quick scan of the clippings, he saw that they were all fourteen or fifteen years old and dealt with a German doctor named Franz Rotenhausen. One of the articles featured a photograph of the man: thin face, sharp features, balding, eyes so pale that they appeared to be all but colorless.
        Joanna flinched as if she had been bee-stung. 'Oh, God. It's him. The man in my nightmare. The Hand.'
        'His name's Rotenhausen.'
        'I've never heard it before.' She was shaking badly. 'I… I never thought I'd s-see him again.'
        'This is what we wanted - a name.'
        She looked toward the open door between the bedroom and the drawing room, as if Rotenhausen might walk through it at any moment. 'Please, Alex, let's get out of here.'
        The face in the grainy photograph was hard, bony, vampi-ric. The pale eyes seemed to be staring into a dimension that other men couldn't see.
        Alex felt the hairs bristling on the back of his neck. Perhaps it was time to leave.
        'We'll read these later,' he said, stuffing the clippings and the unfinished letter back into the envelope.
        In the drawing room, the dead senator still lay where they had last seen him. Alex had half expected the corpse to be missing. Or standing up, swaying, grinning