The beds had mattresses that were too soft, and the furniture was scarred, but at least the place was clean. On the credit side of the ledger, the management provided a percolator and complimentary foil packets of Hills Brothers and Mocha Mix. Dan made coffee while Laura put Melanie to bed.
Although the girl had seemed to drift through the day with all the awareness of a sleepwalker, expending little energy, it was late, and she fell asleep even as her mother was tucking the covers around her.
A small table and two chairs stood by the room’s only window, and Dan brought the coffee to it. He and Laura sat mostly in shadow, with one small lamp burning just inside the door. The drapes were partly open to reveal a section of the rain-swept parking lot, where ghostly bluish fight from mercury-vapor lamps made strange patterns on the glass and chrome of the cars and shimmered eerily on the wet macadam.
While Dan listened with growing amazement and disquiet, Laura told him the rest of the story that she had begun in the car: the levitating radio that seemed to broadcast a warning, the whirlwind filled with flowers that had burst through the kitchen door. She clearly found it difficult to credit these apparently supernatural events, though she had witnessed them with her own eyes.
‘What do you make of it?’ he asked when she had finished.
‘I was hoping you could explain it to me.’
He told her about Joseph Scaldone being killed in a room where all the windows and doors had been locked from inside. ‘Considering that impossibility on top of what you’ve told me happened at your place, I guess we’ve got to accept that there’s something here — some power, some force that’s beyond human experience. But what the hell is it?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it all evening, and it seems to me that whatever … whatever possessed that radio and carried those flowers into the kitchen is not the same thing that’s killing people. In retrospect, scary as it was, the presence in my kitchen wasn’t fundamentally threatening. And like I said, it seemed to be warning us that what killed Dylan and Hoffritz and the others is eventually going to come for Melanie too.’
‘So we’ve got both good spirits and bad spirits,’ Dan said.
‘I guess you could think of them that way.’
‘Good ghosts and bad ghosts.’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said.
‘Neither do I. But, somehow, in their experiments in that room, your husband and Hoffritz seem to have tapped into and then unleashed occult entities, some of which are murderous and some of which are at least benign enough to issue warnings about the bad ones. And until I can think of something better … well, “ghosts” seems to be the best word for them.’
They fell silent. They sipped the last of their coffee. The rain came down hard, harder. It roared.
At the far end of the room, Melanie murmured in her sleep and shifted under the covers, then grew still and quiet again. At last Laura said, ‘Ghosts. It’s just … crazy.’
‘Madness.’
‘Insanity.’
He switched on the dim light over the table. From a jacket pocket, he withdrew the printout of the Sign of the Pentagram’s mailing list. He unfolded it and put it in front of her. ‘Aside from your husband, Hoffritz, Ernest Cooper, and Ned Rink, is there anyone on this list with whom you’re familiar?’
She spent ten minutes scanning names and found four additional people who she knew.
‘This one,’ she said. ‘Edwin Koliknikov. He’s a professor of psychology at USC. He’s a frequent recipient of Pentagon grants for research, and he helped Dylan make some connections at the Department of Defense. Koliknikov’s a behaviorist with a special interest in child psychology.’
Dan figured that Koliknikov was also the ‘Eddie’ who had been at Regine’s house in the Hollywood hills and who had, by now, taken her to Las Vegas.
She said, ‘Howard Renseveer. He represents some foundation with lots of money to spend. I’m not sure which one, but I know he backed some of Hoffritz’s research and talked with Dylan several times about a grant for his work. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed to be a thoroughly unpleasant man, distant and arrogant.’