The Door To December

Staring into the shadowy recess beneath the desk, watching her little girl weep and gibber, reaching back in there, touching the child, Laura shared some of Melanie's feelings, especially grief and frustration, but she was also filled with a powerful curiosity. The door to December?

'Mama?'

'Here. Right here.'

They were so close yet they remained separated by an immense and mysterious gulf.

17

Luther Williams was a young black pathologist working for the LAPD. He dressed as though he were the ghost of Sammy Davis, Jr. — leisure suits and too much jewelry — but was as articulate and amusing as Thomas Sowell, the black sociologist. Luther was an admirer of Sowell and of other sociologists and economists in the burgeoning conservative movement within the black intellectual community, and could quote from their books at length. Too great a length. Several times, he had lectured Dan on pragmatic politics and had expounded upon the virtues of free-market economics as a mechanism for lifting the poor out of poverty. He was such a fine pathologist, with such a sensitive eye for the anomalous details that were important in forensic medicine, that it was almost worth tolerating his tedious political dissections in order to obtain the information he collected from his dissections of the flesh. Almost.

Luther was sitting at a microscope, examining a tissue sample, when Dan entered the green-tiled lab. He looked up and grinned when he saw who was visiting him. 'Danny boy! Did you use those tickets I gave you?'

For a moment, Dan didn't know what the pathologist was talking about, but then he remembered. Luther had bought two tickets to a debate between G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary, and then something had come up to prevent him from going. He had run into Dan in the hall a week ago and had insisted that Dan take the tickets. 'It'll raise your consciousness,' he had said.

Now, Dan fidgeted. 'Well, I told you last week that I probably couldn't make it. I asked you to give the tickets to someone else.'

'You didn't go?' Luther asked, disappointed.

'No time.'

'Danny, Danny, you've got to make time for these things. There's a battle raging that'll shape our lives, a battle between those who love freedom and those who don't, a quiet war between freedom-loving libertarians and freedom-hating fascists and leftists.'

Dan hadn't voted — or even registered to vote — in twelve years. He didn't much care which party or ideological faction was in power. It wasn't that he thought Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, were all screwups; they probably were, but he didn't really care, and that wasn't the reason for his stubborn political indifference. He figured society would muddle through regardless of who was in charge, and he had no time to listen to boring political arguments.

His main interest, his consuming interest, was murder, which was why he had no 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 is a mass of overlapping contusions, scores of them, maybe hundreds. Such a mess. Jesus. Yet no two of those blows have the same configuration. Dozens of points of fracture too, but there's no pattern to the bone injuries. The autopsy will tell us for sure, but based on just a preliminary examination, I'd say the bones sometimes look snapped, sometimes splintered, sometimes… crushed. Now, there's no damn way a blunt instrument, used as a club, can pulverize bone. A blow will crack or splinter bone, but that's strictly impact. Impact doesn't crush — unless it's tremendous impact, like you get when a car rams a pedestrian and pins him against a brick wall. Generally, you can only crush bone by applying pressure, by squeezing, and I'm talking a lot of pressure.