‘Not long at all,’ he agreed.
‘Makes you think he had sources.’
‘Sources? In the police department, you mean?’
‘Could be. And it didn’t take Rink’s enemies long to learn he was after her,’ Laura said. ‘They all move damn fast, both groups, whoever they are.’
She stood at the front doors to the hospital and studied the traffic moving on the street, as well as the shops and offices on the other side of the avenue. Sun shining in big plate-glass windows. Sun glinting off the windshields and chrome of the passing cars and trucks. In all that revealing sunlight, she hoped to spot someone suspicious, someone Haldane could chase and catch, but there were only ordinary people doing ordinary things. She was angered by their ordinariness, by the enemy’s failure to step up and identify himself.
Irrationally, even the sunshine and the warm air angered her. Haldane had just told her that someone out there wanted her daughter dead and that someone else wanted to snatch Melanie and shove her back into a sensory-deprivation chamber or maybe into another jerry-built electric chair where they could continue to torture her for God knew what purpose. For that kind of news, the atmosphere was all wrong. The storm shouldn’t have passed already. The sky should still be low, gray, full of churning clouds; rain should be falling, and the wind should be cold and blustery. It just didn’t seem right that the world around her was balmy, that other people were whistling and smiling and strolling in sunshine and having fun, while she was plunging deeper into a bleak, dark, living nightmare.
She looked at Dan Haldane. A breeze stirred his sandy hair, and sunlight sharpened his pleasant features, rendering him more handsome than he really was. Even disregarding the flattery of the sun and shadow, however, he was good-looking. In other circumstances, she might have been interested in him. The contrast between his brutish size and gentleness lent him a certain mystique. The lost potential of this relationship was one more thing she held against the unknown ‘them’.
‘Why were you so eager to reach me?’ she asked. ‘Why were you calling my place for an hour and a half? It wasn’t just to tell me about Rink. You knew I’d be showing up here. You could’ve waited till then to give me the bad news.’
He glanced toward the parking lot, where the morgue wagon was pulling away from the crime scene. When he focused on Laura again, his face was lined, his mouth grim, his eyes direct and dark with worry. ‘I wanted to tell you to call a private security firm and arrange for an around-the-clock guard at your house, for after you take Melanie home.’
‘A bodyguard?’
‘More or less, yeah.’
‘But if her life’s in danger, won’t the police department provide protection?’
He shook his head. ‘Not in this case. There’s not been any direct threat against her. No phone calls. No notes.’
‘Rink—’
‘We don’t know he was here to get Melanie. We only suspect.’
‘Just the same—’
‘If the state and city weren’t always going through a budget crisis, if police funding hadn’t been cut, if we weren’t chronically short of manpower, maybe we could stretch a point and have your house put under surveillance. But given the current situation, I couldn’t justify it. And if I arrange the surveillance without my captain’s approval, he’ll sell my butt to the Alpo people, and I’ll wind up in cans of dog food. He and I don’t get along so well to begin with. But a security service, professional bodyguards … that’s as good as any protection we could supply you even if we had the men to do it. Can you afford to hire them, just for a few days?’
‘I suppose so. I don’t know how much something like that costs, but I’m not poor. If you think it’ll be for only a few days—’
‘I have a hunch this one’s going to unravel fast. All this killing, all the chances someone’s been taking — it indicates they’re under a lot of pressure, that there’s a time limit of some kind. I haven’t the faintest goddamned idea what they’ve been doing to your kid or why they’re so desperate to get their hands on her again, but I sense this situation’s like a giant snowball, rolling fast down a mountain, fast as an express train, getting bigger and bigger as it goes. Right now, already, it’s real big, gigantic, and it’s not far from the bottom of the mountain. When it finally hits, it’s going to bust into hundreds of pieces.’