Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

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.