‘This is real life.’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘Real life isn’t a Fu Manchu novel.’
Luther shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure. You been watching the news lately?’
‘I need something better than that, Luther. I need a whole lot of help with this one.’
They stared at each other.
Then, without a trace of humor this time, Luther said, ‘But that is what it looks like, Danny. Like they were beaten to death with a hammer of air.’
18
After Laura encouraged Melanie to come out from beneath the desk, she brought the girl up from the hypnotic state. Well, not up exactly: The child didn’t rise to full consciousness. Rather, she moved out of the hypnotic trance and more or less sideways, returning to the semicatatonic state in which she’d been since the police had found her.
Laura had nurtured a small hope that termination of the hypnotic trance would snap the girl out of her catatonia as well. Briefly the child’s eyes did fix on Laura’s, and she put one hand against Laura’s cheek as if disbelieving her mother’s presence.
‘Stay with me, baby. Don’t slip away. Stay with me.’
But the girl slipped away nevertheless. The moment of contact was poignant but brief, achingly brief.
The therapy session had taken its toll from Melanie. Her face was slack with exhaustion, and her eyes were bloodshot. Laura put Melanie to bed for a nap, and the girl was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.
When Laura went out to the living room, she discovered that Earl Benton had left his chair and had taken off his suit jacket. He had also drawn the revolver from his shoulder holster and was holding it in his right hand, down at his side, not as if he would use it that very minute, but as if he thought he might have a need for it soon. He was standing at a French window, staring outside, a worried look on his broad face.
‘Earl?’ she said uncertainly.
He glanced at her. ‘Where’s Melanie?’
‘Napping.’
He returned his attention to the street in front of the house. ‘Better go sit with her.’
Her breath caught in her throat. She swallowed hard. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Maybe nothing. Half an hour ago, a telephone-company van pulled up across the street, parked there. Nobody got out.’
She stepped beside him at the window.
A gray-and-blue van with white-and-blue lettering was across from the house, slightly uphill, parked half in sunlight and half in the shade of a jacaranda. It looked like all the other phone-company vans she had ever seen: nothing special about it, nothing sinister.
‘Why’s it look suspicious to you?’ she asked.
‘Like I said, so far as I could see, nobody got out.
‘Maybe the repairman’s just taking a nap on company time.’
‘Not likely. Phone company’s too well managed to let that sort of thing go on a lot. Besides, it just … smells. I get a feeling about it. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, and what it means to me is that we’re under surveillance.’
‘Surveillance? Who?’
‘Hard to say. But phone-company vans … well, the feds often work that way.’
‘Federal agents?’
‘Yeah.’
Astonished, she shifted her attention from the van to Earl’s profile. He didn’t seem to share her surprise. ‘You mean, like FBI?’
‘Maybe. Or the Treasury Department — Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Maybe even a security arm of the Defense Department. There’re all different kinds of feds.’
‘But why would federal agents have us under surveillance? We’re the victims — the potential victims, anyway — not criminals.’
‘I didn’t say it was for sure the feds. I just said they often work this way.’
Staring at Earl while he stared at the van, Laura realized that he had changed. He was no longer the aw-shucks guy with a veneer of West L.A. polish. He looked harder, older than his twenty-six years, and his manner was more brisk and professional than before.
Confused, Laura said, ‘Well, if it’s government men, we don’t have anything to worry about.’
‘Don’t we?’
‘They aren’t the ones trying to kill Melanie.’
‘Aren’t they?’
Startled, she said, ‘Well, of course they aren’t. It wasn’t the government that killed my husband and the other two.’