Praying for Sleep

  "Yes. Go home? Are you sure?"

  "And tell him not to talk to anyone. . . . I'm curious about this woman. . . ." Adler looked for a scrap of paper, found it and handed it to Grimes. "Did Hrubek ever mention her? Anybody ever mention her?"

  Grimes read the name. "Mrs. Owen Atcheson? No. Who's she?"

  "She was at Indian Leap. She testified against Hrubek at the trial. She claims she got a threatening letter from him last September when our little boy was playing with blocks at Gloucester. The sheriff says her husband thinks Hrubek's after her."

  "Ridgeton," Grimes mused. "Forty miles west of here. Not a problem."

  "Oh?" Adler turned his red eyes on the young doctor. "Good. I'm so relieved. Now tell me why you think it's quote not a problem."

  Grimes swallowed and said, "Because most schizophrenics couldn't get three miles on their own, let alone forty."

  "Ah," Adler said, sounding like a crotchety old Oxford don. "And with what little qualifiers, dear Grimes, did you shore up your substandard assessment?"

  Grimes surrendered. He fell silent and fluffed his crinkly hair.

  "A, what if he isn't on his own, Doctor?" Adler barked. "What if there are co-conspirators, witting or un? And B, what if Hrubek isn't like most schizophrenics? How 'bout them apples, Doctor? Now, get on it. Find out exactly how the son of a bitch got out."

  Grimes had not grown so bold that he failed to say, "Yes, sir." And he said it very quickly.

  "If this . . . Hold up a minute there. If this--" Adler gestured, unable or unwilling to give a name to the potential tragedy. "If this becomes a problem . . ."

  "How's that?"

  "Get Lowe on the phone. I need to have another little talk with him. Oh, and where's Kohler?"

  "Kohler? He'll be at the halfway house tonight. He sleeps over on Sunday."

  "You think he'll be in for rounds tonight?"

  "No. He was here at four-thirty this morning. And after evaluations he went right to the halfway house. And he was dead on his feet then. I'm sure he's in bed now."

  "Good."

  "Should I call him?"

  "Call him?" Adler stared at Grimes. "Doctor, really. He's the last one we want to know about this. Don't say a word to him. Not . . . a . . . word."

  "I just thought--"

  "No, you didn't just think. You weren't thinking at all. I mean, for God's sake, do you call up the fucking lamb and say, 'Guess what? Tomorrow's Easter'?"

  7

  The steam rising from the plastic cup of coffee left a foggy ellipse on the inside of the windshield.

  Dr. Richard Kohler, slouching in the front seat of his fifteen-year-old BMW, yawned painfully and lifted the cup. He sipped the bitter liquid and replaced the carton on the dash slightly to the right of where it had been. He vacantly watched a new oval paint itself on the glass, overlapping the one that was now fading.

  He was parked in the staff lot of Marsden State Mental Health Facility. The chunky car, half hidden under an anemic hemlock, was pointed at a small, one-story building near the hospital's main structure.

  The duty nurse on E Ward, a friend and woman he used to date, had called the halfway house twenty minutes ago. She'd told Kohler about Michael's escape and warned him that Adler was stonewalling. Kohler had flushed his face with icy water, filled a thermos with coffee then run groggily to his car and driven here. He'd pulled into the parking lot and chosen this spot for his stakeout.

  He now looked up at the Gothic facade of the asylum and saw several lights. One of them, he supposed, was burning in the office of good Dr. Adler.

  The wittier orderlies called the two doctors Hatfield and McCoy and that pretty accurately described their relationship. Still, Kohler had some sympathy for the hospital director. In his five years as head of Marsden, Adler had been fighting a losing political and budgetary battle. Most of the state mental hospitals had been closed, replaced by small, community-based treatment centers. But there remained a need for places to house the criminally insane as well as indigent and homeless patients.

  Marsden was such a place.

  Adler worked hard for his chunk of the state purse, and he made sure that the poor souls in his care were treated kindly and had the best of a bad situation. It was a thankless job and one that Kohler himself would have quit medicine before taking on.

  But beyond that, Kohler's sympathy for his colleague stopped. Because he also knew that Adler had a $122,000-a-year job, malpractice premiums and state benefits included, and that for his paycheck he worked at most a forty-hour week. Adler didn't keep up with the current literature, didn't attend institutes or continuing-education sessions, and rarely spoke with patients except to dispense the insincere greetings of an incumbent politician.

  Mostly though Kohler resented Adler's running Marsden not as a treatment facility but as combination prison and day-care center. Containment, not improvement, was his goal. Adler argued that it wasn't the state's job to fix people--merely to keep them from hurting themselves or others.

  Kohler would respond, "Then whose job is it, Doctor ?"

  Adler would snap back, "You give me the money, sir, and I'll start curing."

  The two doctors had played oil and water since Kohler first came to Marsden, brandishing court-appointment orders and trying unusual forms of therapy on severely psychotic patients. Then, somehow--no one quite knew how--Kohler had set up the Milieu Program at Marsden. In it, noncriminal patients, mostly schizophrenics, learned to work and socialize with others, with an eye toward moving on to the halfway house outside of Stinson and eventually to apartments or homes of their own.

  Adler was just smart enough to recognize that he had a plum deal that he'd have trouble duplicating anywhere in this universe and was accordingly not the least interested in having jive New York doctors rocking his delicate boat with these glitzy forms of treatment. Recently he'd tried to have Kohler removed, claiming that the younger doctor hadn't gone through proper state civil-service channels to get the job at Marsden. But the allegation was tenuous since Kohler drew no salary and was considered an outside contractor. Besides, the patients themselves rose in rebellion when they heard the rumor that they might lose their Dr. Richard. Adler was forced to back down. Kohler continued to work his way into the hospital, ingratiating himself with the full-time staff and cultivating friends among the practical power centers--the nurses, secretaries and orderlies. The animosity between Kohler and Adler flourished.

  Many of the doctors at Marsden wondered why Kohler--who could have had a lucrative private practice--brought all this trouble on himself. Indeed, they were perplexed why he'd spend so much time at Marsden in the first place, where he received a small fee for treating patients and where the practice itself was so demanding and frustrating that it drove many physicians out of psychiatry--and some out of medicine altogether.

  But Richard Kohler was a man who'd always tested himself. An honors art-history graduate student, he'd abruptly given up that career path at the ripe age of twenty-three to fight his way into, then through, Duke Medical School. Those grueling years were followed by residencies at Columbia Presbyterian and New Haven General then private practice in Manhattan. He worked with inpatient borderline and near-functioning psychotics, then sought out the hardest cases: chronic schizophrenic and bipolar depressives. He battled bureaucratic resistance to get visiting-physician status at Marsden, Framington and other state Bedlams, where he put in twelve-, fifteen-hour days.

  It was as if Kohler thrived on the very stress that was his schizophrenic patients' worst enemy.

  Early in his career the psychiatrist developed several tricks for combatting anxiety. The most effective was a macabre meditation: visualizing that he was slipping a needle into a prominent vein rising from his arm and drawing out a searing white light, which represented the stress. The technique was remarkably successful (though it usually worked best when accompanied by a glass of Burgundy or a joint).

  Tonight, sitting in a car smelling of old leather, oil
and antifreeze, he tried his old trick, though without the chemical assist. It had no effect. He tried again, actually closing his eyes, and picturing the mystical procedure in vivid detail. Again, nothing. He sighed and gazed again at the parking lot.

  Kohler stiffened and slouched further down into the front seat as a white van, on whose side was painted Intertec Security Inc., appeared and zigzagged slowly through the parking lot, casting its spotlights on suspicious shadows.

  Kohler clicked on the penlight he used for neuro exams and returned to the papers in front of him. These sheets represented an exceedingly abridged version of Michael Hrubek's personal history. The records about the young man's life were woefully inadequate; since he was an indigent patient, very few details of his hospitalization and treatment history were available. This was another sin that Kohler couldn't lay at the hospital director's feet. Michael was the type of patient whose files were virtually nonexistent and whose past treatment was largely a mystery. He'd lived on the street so often, been expelled from so many hospitals, and used so many aliases with intake personnel that there was no coherent chronicle of his illness. He also suffered from a particular type of mental disease that left him with a jumbled and confused sense of the past; what paranoid schizophrenics reported was a stew of lies, truth, confessions, hopes, dreams and delusions.

  Yet, for someone with Kohler's experience, the file he now scanned allowed him to reconstruct in some detail a portion of Michael's life. This fragment was startlingly illuminating. He was vaguely familiar with the file, having acquired it four months before, when Michael came under his care. Kohler now wished he'd paid more attention to its contents when he first read it. He wished too that he had more time now to review the material it contained. But having skimmed the pages once, he noticed that the white van had left the parking lot. Richard Kohler set the folder on the BMW's floor.

  He started the car and drove over the wet asphalt to the one-story building he'd been watching for the past half hour. He circled behind it and located the back door, which was near a battered green Dumpster. He braked to a stop, debated for a moment and then--after wisely clipping on his seat belt--drove the right front bumper of the auto into the door at what seemed to him a leisurely rate of speed. Still, the impact shattered the wood so violently that the door cracked free of both hinges and flew deep into the darkness inside.

  He pulled the Chevy onto the shoulder of Route 236. The battered truck listed hard to the left and an Orange Crush empty rolled against the door. The brakes squealed as the truck stopped.

  Trenton Heck pushed the door open and stepped out. The soda can fell clattering to the road's rocky shoulder and Heck stooped painfully and pitched the empty under the seat.

  "Come," he said to Emil, who, already aimed down the incline of the seat, relaxed some muscle or another and slid forward then out the door. He landed on the ground and stretched then blinked at the flashing lights of a state-police car across the highway.

  Next to the lit-up Dodge cruiser sat another black-and-white, and beside that was a tan county-coroner's meat wagon. Four men looked up as Heck crossed the wide strip of black pebbly asphalt. He led Emil away from the cars--he always got the dog out of the truck as soon as possible at a search scene and kept him far from car engines; exhaust dulls dogs' noses.

  "Sit," Heck commanded when they were in a patch of grass upwind from the cars. "Down." Emil did as instructed, even though he eagerly noted the presence of some four-legged ladies nearby.

  "Hey, Trenton," one of the men called. He was a large man, large all over, not just the belly--food round, not drink round--and his weight pulled hard at the buttons and pockets of his gray uniform. He was holding back two young female Labrador retrievers, who nosed in the dirt.

  "Hiya, Charlie."

  "Well, if it ain't the Cadillac of trackers." This, from one of the two young troopers standing on the roadside, a man Heck referred to, though not to his face, as "the Boy." He was a narrow-jawed youngster, six years Heck's junior in age though fifteen in appearance. Trenton Heck's idea of dealing with a budget cutback would have been to fire this kid and keep Heck himself on the force at three-quarters salary. But they hadn't asked his opinion and so the Boy, who though younger had hired on two months before Heck, was still a trooper while Trenton Heck had netted eighty-seven dollars last month carting old washing machines and water softeners to the Hammond Creek dump.

  "Hey, Emil," the Boy said.

  Heck nodded to him and waved to the other trooper, who called back a greeting.

  Charlie Fennel and Heck walked toward the tan hearse, beside which stood a young man in a pale-green jumpsuit.

  "Not much of a search party," Heck said to Fennel.

  The trooper answered that they were lucky to have what they did. "There's a concert letting out at midnight or so down at the Civic Center. You hear about that?"

  "Rock 'n' roll," Heck muttered.

  "Uhn. Don sent a buncha troopers over there. They had some boy got shot at the last one."

  "Don't they have security guards for that sort of thing?"

  "Was a guard who shot the kid."

  "Doesn't seem like a brilliant use of taxpayers' money, riding herd on a bunch of youngsters paying to deafen themselves."

  Then too, Fennel added, the captain had put a good portion of the troops on highway detail. "He figures what with the storm, they'll be picking 'em off the pavement. Say, I hear there's a reward for catching this crazy."

  Heck kept his eyes on the grass in front of him and didn't know what to say.

  "Listen," Fennel continued in a whisper, "I heard about your situation, Trenton. I hope you get that money. I'm rooting for you."

  "Thanks there, Charlie."

  Heck had a curious relationship with Charlie Fennel. The same bullet that had left the shiny star-shaped wound in Heck's right thigh had passed first through Fennel's brother's chest as he crouched beside their patrol car, killing the trooper instantly. Heck supposed that some of the man's living blood had ridden the slug into his own body and that because of that he and Charlie Fennel were blood brothers, once removed. At times Trenton Heck thought that he and Fennel ought to be closer. The more time the men spent in each other's company, however, the less they found they had in common. They occasionally talked about a hunting or fishing trip but the plans came to nothing. It was a secret relief to both of them.

  Heck and Fennel now paused beside the coroner's meat wagon. Heck lifted his head and inhaled air fragrant with the decomposition so prominent on damp autumn nights like this. He sniffed the air once more and Fennel looked at him curiously.

  "No wood smoke," Heck said in response.

  "Nope. There don't seem to be."

  "So wherever this Hrubek's got himself to, it wasn't toward a house he could smell."

  "You learn that from Emil? Heh."

  Heck asked the coroner's attendant, "What happened exactly?"

  The young man glanced at Fennel, silently asking permission to answer a civilian. Heck had gotten used to the demise of his own authority. When the attendant received a grunt of approval from Fennel, he explained how Hrubek had escaped then added, "We chased him for a ways."

  "Chased him, did you?" Heck couldn't resist needling, "Well, it's not hardly your job to catch him. I wouldn't've blamed you if you'd just hightailed it out of here, to hell with a madman."

  "Yeah, well. We didn't. We chased him." The attendant shrugged, young and far above shame.

  "All right. Let's get to it." Heck noticed that Fennel had put the tracking harnesses on his dogs some time ago. This had worked them up and confused them. If they weren't immediately going on track, scenting dogs should wear only their regular collars. Heck almost said something to Fennel but didn't. How the trooper ran his dogs was his business; Trenton Heck was no longer a man-tracking instructor.

  He took the red nylon harness and quarter-inch nylon track line from his pocket. Emil tensed immediately though he stayed rump-to-ground. Heck hooked him up
and wrapped the end of the line around his own left wrist, contrary to the general practice of right-hand grip; drugged up and giddy though this big fellow might be, Heck remembered Haversham's warning and he wanted his shooting hand free. He then took the bag from his other jacket pocket. He opened it, pulling back the plastic from the wad of cotton shorts.

  "Jesus," the Boy said, wrinkling his nose. "Dirty Jockeys?"

  "Musk is the best," Heck muttered. "Yum . . ." He pushed the dingy underwear toward the young trooper, who danced away.

  "Trenton, stop that! They got crazy-man jism on 'em! Keep 'em away!"

  Charlie Fennel laughed hard. Heck subdued his own laughter and then called sternly to Emil, "Okay," which meant for the dog to stand.

  They let Emil and the bitches sniff each other, muzzle and ass, as they exchanged their complicated greetings. Then Heck held Hrubek's shorts down toward the ground, taking care not to rub the cloth on the dogs' noses--just letting them get to know a smell that to a human would vanish in an instant, if it was detectable at all.

  "Find!" Heck yelled. "Find, Emil!"

  The three dogs started shivering and prancing, skittering in circles, noses to the ground. They snorted as they sucked in dust and sour fumes from gasoline or grease and picked out the invisible molecules of one man's odor from a million others.

  "Find, find!"

  The hound took the lead, straining the line, pulling Heck after him. The other dogs followed. Fennel was a big man but he was being dragged along by two frantic sixty-pound Labradors and he trotted awkwardly beside Heck, who himself struggled to keep up the pace. Soon both men were gasping for breath.

  The bitches' noses dropped to the ground sporadically in almost the identical spots on the asphalt of Route 236. They were step-tracking, inhaling at each place Hrubek had put a foot on the ground. Emil tracked differently; he'd scent for a few seconds then raise his head slightly and keep it off the ground for a ways. This was line-tracking, the practice of experienced tracking dogs; continually sniffing on a step-track could exhaust an animal in a couple of hours.

  Suddenly Emil veered off the road, south, and started into a field of tall grass and brush, filled with plenty of cover even for a man as large as Hrubek.