by Dean Koontz
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 look 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 to nab them in the act? But I still don’t understand why they didn’t come to me and tell me they were going to be watching.”
“They don’t trust you,” Flash said.
“They were angry with us for revealing their presence not just to anyone who might’ve been watching out there,” Earl said, “but to you as well.”
Puzzled, she said, “Why?”
Earl looked uncomfortable. “Because, as far as they know, maybe you’ve always been in this thing with your husband.”
“He stole Melanie from me.”
Earl cleared his throat and looked unhappy at having to explain this to her. “From the Bureau’s point of view, could be that you let your husband take your daughter, so he’d be able to experiment on her with no notice or interference from family or friends.”
Shocked, Laura said, “That’s insane! You see what’s been done to Melanie. How could I be party to that?”
“People do strange things.”
“I love her. She’s my little girl. Dylan was disturbed, maybe crazy. Okay, so he was too unbalanced to see or even care how he was hurting her, destroying her. But I’m not unbalanced too! I’m not like Dylan.”
“I know,” Earl said soothingly. “I know you’re not.”
She saw belief in Earl Benton’s eyes, trust and compassion, but when she looked at the other two men, she saw an element of doubt and suspicion.
They were working for her, but they didn’t entirely believe that she had told them the truth.
Madness.
She was caught in a whirlpool that was carrying her down into a nightmare world of suspicion, deception, and violence, into an alien landscape where nothing was what it appeared to be.
Surprised, Dan said, “Nut? I didn’t know psychologists used words like that.”
Marge smiled ruefully. “Oh, not in the classroom, and not in published papers, and certainly not in a courtroom if we’re ever asked for testimony in a sanity hearing. But this is in the privacy of my office, just between almost-strangers, and I tell you, Dan, he was a nut. Not certifiable, mind you. Not close. But not merely eccentric, either. His primary area of research was supposed to be the development and application of behavior-modification techniques that would reform the criminal personality. But he was always off on a tangent, riding one odd hobbyhorse or another. He regularly announced a deep commitment—‘obsessed’ is the right word—to some new line of research, but after six months or so, he would completely lose interest in it.”
“What were some of those hobbyhorses?”
She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her breasts. “For a while, he was determined to find a drug therapy that would combat nicotine addiction. Does that sound sensible to you? Help smokers get off cigarettes—by getting them onto drugs? Hell’s bells. Then for a while, he claimed to be convinced that subliminal suggestion, subconscious programming, could enable us to set aside our prejudices against a belief in the supernatural and help us open our minds to psychic experiences, so we’d be able to see spirits as easily as we see one another.”
“Spirits? Are you talking about ghosts?”
“I am. Or, rather, he was.”
“I wouldn’t think psychologists would believe in ghosts.”
“You’re looking at one who doesn’t. McCaffrey was one who did.”
“I’m remembering the books we found in his house. Some of them were about the occult.”
“Probably half his hobbyhorses dealt with that,” she said. “One occult phenomenon or another.”
“Who would pay for this kind of research?”
“I’d have to look at the files. I imagine the occult stuff was done on his own, without funds, or by cleverly misusing funds meant for other work.”
“It’s possible to misuse funds that blatantly? Isn’t there some accounting required?”
“The government’s relatively easy to dupe if you’re dishonest. Sometimes thieves make the easiest target for another thief, because they never see themselves as being the victims, only perpetrators.”
“Who financed his primary research?”
“He got some of his money from trust funds set up by alumni for research purposes. And corporate grants, of course. And as I said, the government.”
“Mostly the government?”
“I’d say mostly.”
He frowned. “Well, if Dylan McCaffrey was a nut, why would the government want to deal with him?”
“Oh, well, he was a nut, and his interest in the occult was as peculiar as it was exasperating, but he was brilliant. I’ll give him that. With a more stable personality, his intellect would’ve taken him all the way. He’d have been famous in his field and maybe even to the general pu
blic.”
“Did he get Pentagon funding?”
“Yes.”
“What would he have been working on for the Pentagon?”
“Can’t say. For one thing, I don’t know. I could check the files, but even if I knew, I couldn’t say. You don’t have security clearance.”
“Fair enough. What can you tell me about Wilhelm Hoffritz?”
“He was slime.”
Dan laughed. “Doctor . . . Marge, you certainly don’t mince words.”
“It’s only the truth. Hoffritz was an elitist son of a bitch. He wanted in the worst way to be chairman of this department. Never had a chance. Everyone knew what he’d be like if he had power over us. Vicious. Abusive. He’d have run the entire department right into the ground.”
“He was doing Defense research too?”
“Almost exclusively. Can’t tell you about that, either.”
“Rumor has it that he was forced out of the university.”
“That was a banner day for UCLA.”
“Why was he gotten rid of?”
“There was this young girl, a student—”
“Ah.”
“Much worse than you think,” Marge said. “It wasn’t just moral turpitude. He wasn’t the first professor to sleep with a student. Half the men on the faculty would be dismissed, and maybe as much as a fifth of the women, if that rule was well enforced. He was having sex with her, yes, but he also beat her up and put her in the hospital. Their relationship was . . . Kinky is a kind word for it. One night, it got out of hand.”
“Are you talking about bondage games or something?” Dan asked.
“Yes. Hoffritz was a sadist.”
“And the girl cooperated? She was a masochist?”
“Yes. But she got more than she bargained for. One night Hoffritz lost control, broke her nose, three fingers, her left arm. I went to the hospital, saw her. Both eyes blackened, split lip, badly bruised.”
Laura and Earl stood at the window, watching Flash and the tall man move down the walk in the deepening twilight.
The telephone company van was only a lumpish shape, all details obscured, as the oncoming night knitted together with the shadows under the curbside jacarandas.
She said, “FBI, huh? They won’t go away?”
“No.”
“Even though I’m aware of them now.”
“Well, they’re not convinced you were conspiring with your husband. In fact, that would be one of the less likely possibilities in their eyes. They still figure someone—whoever was financing Dylan’s research—will come after Melanie, and they want to be here when it happens.”
“But I still need you,” she said. “In case the FBI itself takes my daughter.”
“Yes. If that’s what comes down, you’ll need a witness in order to go after them in the courts.”
She went to the couch and sat on the edge, shoulders hunched, head bowed, arms propped on her thighs. “I feel as if I’m losing my mind.”
“Everything’ll work out if—”
He was interrupted by Melanie’s scream.
Dan winced at Marge’s description of the battered student. “But Hoffritz has no arrest record.”
“The girl wouldn’t press charges.”
“He did that to her, and she let him get away with it? Why?”
Marge got up, went to the window, and stared down at the campus. The orange light of sunset had given way to the grays and blues of twilight. A few clouds had sailed in from the sea.
At last, the psychologist said, “When we put Willy Hoffritz on suspension and started looking into his previous relationships with students, we found this girl wasn’t the first. There were at least four others over the years, four that we know of, all undergraduates, sexually involved with Hoffritz, all playing masochist to his sadist, although none of them had been seriously injured. Until this girl, it was always more of a nasty game than anything. Those first four were willing to talk about it when we insisted, and because of our interviews with them, we uncovered some interesting, appalling . . . and frightening information.”
Dan didn’t press her to continue. He suspected that it was painful and humiliating for her to admit that a colleague—even one she didn’t like—was capable of these things and that the academic community was no more noble than the human race at large. But she was a realist who could face up to unpleasant truths, a rare creature both in and out of academia, and she would tell him everything. She just needed to do it at her own pace.
Still facing the twilight, she said, “None of those first four girls was promiscuous, Dan. Good kids from good families, here to obtain an education, not to escape parental authority and get some kicks. In fact, two of the four were virgins before they fell under Hoffritz’s spell. And none was ever involved in sadomasochistic relationships before Hoffritz, and certainly not after. They were repulsed by the memories of what they had let him do to them.”
She fell silent again.
He decided that she wanted him to ask a question now, and he said, “Well, if they didn’t like it, why did they do it?”
“The answer to that is a bit complex.”
“I can handle it. I’m a bit complex myself.”
She turned from the window and smiled, but only briefly. What she had to tell him obviated amusement. “We discovered that each of those four girls had been voluntarily involved in undisclosed behavior-modification experiments with Hoffritz. Those experiments included posthypnotic suggestion and a variety of ego-suppressing drugs.”
“Why would they want to get involved with something like that?”
“To please a professor, to get a good grade. Or maybe because it actually interested them. Students are sometimes interested in the things they study, even these days, even the low-caliber students we’ve been getting lately. And Hoffritz did have a certain charm, which was more effective with some people than others.”
“Not with you.”
“When he turned on the charm, I found him even more slimy than usual. Anyway, he was teaching these girls, and he charmed them, and you mustn’t forget that he was well published and well known in his field. He had earned a certain respect.”
“And it was after these experiments started that each girl found herself sexually involved with him.”
“Yes.”
“So you think he used hypnosis, drugs, subconscious programming to . . . well, to convert them?”
“To program their psychological matrices to include promiscuity and masochism. Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”
Melanie’s shrill scream filled the house.
Shouting her daughter’s name, Laura hurried behind Earl Benton, down the hall. Revolver in hand, the bodyguard entered the child’s room ahead of Laura and snapped on the light.
Melanie was alone. The menace that had elicited her screams was one that only she could see.
Dressed in white socks and the pair of white cotton underpants that she had been wearing during her nap, the child was crouched in a corner, hands held in front of her to ward off an invisible enemy, shrieking so fiercely that she must have been hurting her throat. She looked so fragile, so pitifully vulnerable.
Laura was briefly overwhelmed with loathing for Dylan. She almost sagged, almost went limp, almost crumpled under the weight of her anger.
Earl holstered his gun. He reached out to Melanie, but she struck his hands and scrambled away from him, along the baseboard.
“Melanie, honey, stop! It’s all right,” Laura said.
The girl didn’t heed her mother. She reached the next corner, sat down, drew her legs up, fisted her small hands, and held them up defensively. She was no longer screaming, but she made a strange, rhythmic, panicky sound. “Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . uh . . .”
Crouching in front of her, Earl said, “It’s okay, kid.”
“Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . uh . . .”
“It’s okay now. It really is. It’s okay, Melanie. I’ll take care of you.”
>
“The d-d-door,” Melanie said. “The door. Don’t let it open!”
“It’s shut,” Laura said, hurrying to her, kneeling by her. “The door is shut and locked, honey.”
“Keep it shut!”
“Don’t you remember, baby? There’s a big, new, heavy lock on the door,” Laura said. “Don’t you remember?”
Earl glanced at Laura, obviously puzzled.
“The door is shut,” Laura continued. “Locked. Sealed. Nailed shut. Nobody can open it, honey. Nobody.”
Fat tears welled in the child’s eyes, spilled down her cheeks.
“I’ll take care of you,” Earl said soothingly.
“Baby, you’re safe here. No one can hurt you.”
Melanie sighed, and the fear ebbed out of her face.
“You’re safe. Perfectly safe now.”
The girl put one pale hand to her head and began to twist a strand of hair in that absentminded way that any ordinary girl might twist her hair when preoccupied with thoughts of boys or horses or pajama parties or any of the other things that preoccupied kids her age. Indeed, after the bizarre behavior that she had displayed thus far, after alternating between extremes of hysteria and motionless catatonia, it was both moving and encouraging to see her playing with her hair, because that was such a normal act—a small thing, simple, hardly a breakthrough, not a crack in her hard autistic shield, but normal.
Seizing the moment, Laura said, “Would you like to go to a beauty shop with me, baby? Hmmmm? You’ve never been to a real beauty shop. We’ll go and get our hair done together. How would you like that?”
Although her eyes remained somewhat glassy, Melanie’s brow furrowed, and she seemed to be considering the proposition.
“Lord knows, you need something done with your hair,” Laura said, anxiously trying to preserve the moment, expand upon it, deepen and broaden this unexpected contact with the girl inside the autistic shell. “We’ll get it cut and styled. Maybe curled. How would you like your hair curled, honey? Oh, you’d look just great with lots of curls.”
The girl’s face softened, and a smile threatened to take possession of her mouth.
“And after the beauty shop, we could go shopping for clothes. How about that, honey? Lots of new dresses. Dresses and sweaters. Even one of the glitzy new jackets the kids are wearing. You’d like that, I bet.”
Melanie’s unfinished smile stopped forming. Although Laura kept talking, the mood was gone as suddenly as it had come. The girl’s placid expression gave way to a look of disgust, as if she had seen something in her private world that horrified and repulsed her.