Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

On F's phone, the intercom beeped, but the receptionist didn't say anything. Another beep. Like an oven timer: The goose is cooked.

"Be right back," F promised, and again she left the room. Micky wanted to tear the cat posters off the walls. Instead, she hooked a finger in the scooped neck of her pleated shell, pulled it away from her body, and blew down the front of her blouse, on her breasts. She wanted to take off her suit jacket, but somehow it seemed that to remove it would put her at an even greater disadvantage with F. Bronson. The caseworker's black outfit, in this heat, seemed to be an endurance challenge to visitors.

'This time F was out of the office only briefly. Returning to her desk, she said, "So tell me about the missing brother."

Warning herself to check her anger but not able entirely to heed her own counsel, Micky said, "So did you call off the SWAT team?"

"Excuse me?"

"You checked to see if I'm an escapee."

Unruffled, not in the least embarrassed, F met her eyes. "You'd have done the same in my position. There was no offense intended."

"That's not how it looks from my perspective," Micky replied, dismayed to hear herself pressing for an unnecessary confrontation.

"With all due respect, Ms. Bellsong, I don't live from your perspective."

A slap in the face couldn't have been more to the point. Micky burned with humiliation.

If F had been gazing at the computer, Micky might have snapped back at her. But in the woman's eyes, she saw a chilly contempt that was a match for her hot anger, obstinacy as unyielding as cold stone.

Of all the caseworkers she might have drawn, she'd been brought head-to-head with this one, as though the Fates were amused by the prospect of two women butting like a pair of rams.

Leilani. She had a duty to Leilani.

Swallowing enough anger and pride to ensure that she would still have no appetite by dinnertime, Micky pleaded, "Let me tell you about the girl's situation. And the brother. Straight through, beginning to end, instead of questions and answers."

"Give it a try," F said curtly.

Micky condensed Leilani's story but also censored from it the most outrageous details that might give F an excuse to dismiss the whole tale as fiction.

Even as she listened to this Reader's Digest version, F grew restive. She expressed her impatience by shifting constantly in her chair, by repeatedly picking up a legal pad as though she intended to make notes but replacing it on her desk without writing a word.

Each time that Preston Maddoc was mentioned, F's brow pleated.

Delicate lines tightened as though they were threads tugged by a needle, forming plicated fans of skin at the corners of her eyes, sewing her lips together as if with fine-draw stitches. Evidently she disapproved of the suggestion that Maddoc might be a murderer, and her disapproval was a subtle seamstress at work in her face.

Her dislike of Micky couldn't entirely explain her attitude. She seemed to hold some brief for Maddoc, and though she didn't argue on his behalf, her opinion of him appeared to be beyond reconsideration.

When Micky finished, F said, "If you believe there's been a murder, why would you come here instead of going to the police?"

The truth was complicated. For one thing, two cops had stretched the facts in her arrest, suggesting she'd been more than a companion to the document forger, that she'd been an accomplice, and the public defender appointed to her case by the court had been too overworked or too incompetent to correct this misrepresentation before the jury. She'd had enough of the police for a while. And she didn't entirely trust the system. Furthermore, she knew that the local authorities would not be eager to investigate a report of a murder in a far jurisdiction when they had plenty of homegrown crime to keep them busy. She couldn't claim to have known Lukipela. Her accusation was based on her faith in Leilani, and though she was convinced the cops also would find the girl credible, her own testimony was hearsay.

She kept her reply succinct: "Luki's disappearance has to be investigated eventually, sure, but right now the issue is Leilani, her safety. You don't have to wait for the cops to prove Luki was murdered before you can protect Leilani. She's alive now, in trouble now, so it seems to me that her situation has to be addressed first."

Eschewing comment, turning to her computer once more, F typed for two or three minutes. She might have been entering a version of Micky's statement or she might have been composing an official report and closing out the file without further action.

Beyond the window, the day looked fiery. A nearby palm tree wore a ruffled collar of dead brown fronds. California burning.

When she stopped typing and turned to Micky again, F said, "One more question, if you don't mind. You may consider it too personal to answer, and of course you're under no obligation."

Wary, applying a smile no more sincere than lipstick, Micky hoped that the.machinery of Child Protective Services would get the job done in spite of how badly this interview had gone. "What is it?"

"Did you find Jesus in jail?"

"Jesus?"

"Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, L. Ron Hubbard. Lots of people find religion behind bars."

"What I hope I found there was direction, Ms. Bronson. And more common sense than I went in with."

"People take up lots of things in prison that are pretty much religions, even if they aren't recognized as such," the caseworker said. "Extreme political movements, left-wing and right-wing, some of them race-based, most with a grudge against the world."

"I don't have a grudge against anyone."

"I'm sure you realize why I'm curious."

"Frankly, no."

F clearly doubted Micky's denial. "We both know Preston Maddoc inspires hatred from various factions, both religious and political."

"Actually I don't know. I really don't know who he is."

F ignored this protestation. "Lots of people who're usually at odds with one another are united on Maddoc. They want to destroy him just because they disagree with him philosophically."

Even with her bottomless reservoir of anger to draw upon, Micky wasn't able to pump up any rage at the accusation that philosophical motives drove her to character assassination. She almost laughed. "Hey, my philosophy is to make as few waves as possible, get through the day, and maybe find a little happiness in something that won't land you in a mess of trouble. That's as deep as I get."

"All right then," said F. "Thank you for coming in."

The caseworker turned to the computer.

A long moment passed before Micky realized that she'd been dismissed. She didn't get up. "You'll send someone out there?"

"It's got a case number now. There has to be follow-through."

"Today?"

F looked up from the computer, not at Micky but at one of the posters: a fluffy white cat wearing a red Santa hat and sitting in snow. "Not today, no. There's no physical or sexual abuse involved. The child isn't at immediate risk."

Feeling as though she had failed completely to be understood, Micky said, "But he's going to kill her."

Gazing wistfully at the cat, as if she wished she could crawl into the poster with it, trading the California meltdown for a white Christmas, F said, "Assuming the girl's story isn't a fantasy, you said he'll kill her on her birthday, which isn't until February."

"By her birthday," Micky corrected. "Maybe next February— maybe next week. Tomorrow's Friday. I mean, you don't work on weekends, and if you don't get out there today or tomorrow, they might be gone."

F's stare was so fixed, her eyes so glazed, that she appeared to be meditating on the image of the cat.

The caseworker was a psychic black hole. In her vicinity, you could feel your emotional energy being sucked away.