Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

Grimes was surprised Adler didn’t know. “Yes, he does. It’s part of the arrangement with Framington. We supply facilities for the attendings.”

“He’s not an attending,” Adler snapped.

“In a manner of speaking, he is.” With the trooper absent, Grimes inexplicably felt bolder.

“I want to find out what the hell is going on here and I want to know in the next hour. Who’s the E Ward resident on call?”

“I’m not exactly sure. I think-”

“Peter, you’ve got to get on top of this,” Adler snapped. “Find out who it is and tell him to go home. Tell him to take the evening off.”

“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’?”

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 façade 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.