Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

“Yessir,” Trenton Heck said, then leaned against the fender of the car and-with a slight laugh-watched the peculiar sight of this narrow man in a suit and tie, muddy as a ditchdigger, sporting a fine-looking overcoat and a backpack as he strolled down this deserted country road late on a stormy night.

Dr. Ronald Adler’s eyes coursed up and down the Marsden County map. “Made it all the way to the state border. Who’d’ve thought?” He added with neither elation nor interest, “The Massachusetts Highway Patrol should have him within an hour or so. I want a worst-case plan.”

“Are you talking about the reward?” Peter Grimes asked.

“Reward?” the director snapped.

“Uhm. What do you mean by worst-case?”

Adler seemed to know exactly but didn’t speak for a moment, perhaps out of some vestigial superstition that medical training had not wholly obliterated. “If he kills a trooper when they find him. Or kills anybody else for that matter. That’s what I mean.”

“Okay, that’s possible, I suppose,” Grimes offered. “Unlikely.”

Adler turned his attention back to the E Ward supervisor’s reports. “Is all this accurate?”

“Absolutely. I’m sure.”

“Hrubek was in the Milieu Suite? Kohler was doing individual psychoanalysis with him? This delusion therapy he’s always boring people with?”

And publishing about in the best professional journals, Grimes reflected. He said, “So it appears.”

“NIMH guidelines. We all know them. The criteria for individual psychotherapy in schizophrenic patients are that they be young, intelligent, have a past history of achievement. And are more acute than chronic… Oh, and that they have some success in a sexual relationship. That’s hardly Michael Hrubek.”

The assistant came a half breath away from saying, Not unless you call rape a successful relationship. He wondered if Adler would have fired him or laughed.

“A history like his”-Adler riffled pages-“and still Kohler puts him in therapy. One way you could view it is that Kohler was more than negligent in this whole matter. Let’s just take that tack for a minute, shall we? Is that door open? My door there. Close it, why don’t you?”

Grimes did, while Adler flipped through one doctor’s assessment of Hrubek, in which was recorded the patient’s plans to remove this therapist’s internal organs with a single bare hand-a process that Hrubek described articulately and, all things considered, with an impressive knowledge of human anatomy.

When Grimes dropped again into his chair, Adler had snapped closed the file and was gazing at the ceiling. His hand dipped into his crotch, where he adjusted something. He said, “You realize what Herr Dr. Kohler has done?”

“He-”

“Do you know the case of Burton Scott Webley? Burton Scott Webley the Third. Or Fourth. I don’t recall. Do you know about him? Do they teach you such arcane things in… Where did you go to school?”

“ Columbia, sir. I’m not familiar with the case, no.”

“Co-lum-bi-a,” Adler stretched the four syllables out with elastic disdain. “Webley the Third or Fourth. He was a patient in New York. I don’t know. Creedmoor perhaps. Or Pilgrim State. Don’t let’s quibble. No, wait. It was private. Top doctors, like our friend, Sigmund Kohler. Cum laude sort of doctors. Co-lum-bi-a sort of doctors.”

“Got it.”

“You see, Kohler has this idea that our mental hospitals are chockablock with van Goghs. Poets and artists. Misunderstood geniuses, vision and madness locked together-the beast with two backs.” When he noticed Grimes staring at him blankly, Adler continued, “Webley was a paranoid schizophrenic. Delusional. Monosymptomatic. Twenty-eight years of age. Sound familiar, Grimes? Delusions centered around his family. They were trying to get him, blah, blah, blah. Felt his father and aunt were having an incestuous relationship. Including bouts of televised sodomy. On network TV, if I’m not mistaken. He had a bad episode and threatened the aunt with a pitchfork. Well, he’s involuntarily committed. Insulin-shock therapy is all in vogue and his doctors put him into a hundred seventy comas.”

“Jesus.”

“Then the ECS department third-rails him for six months after his blood sugar becomes an embarrassment. With that much amperage, well, he came out of it rather tattered, as you’d suspect.”

“This was when?”

“Hardly matters. A little while after they unplugged him, he sees the senior psychiatrist, who does a new diagnostic. Webley is neat and clean and coherent. And very sharp. Astonishing indeed, considering the Smith-Kline cocktails he’s on. He’s polite, he’s responsive, he’s eager to undergo therapy. The doctor schedules the full battery of tests. Webley takes, and passes, all twenty-five of them. A miracle cure. He’ll be written up in the APA Journal. ”

“I can guess what’s coming.”

“Oh, can you, Grimes?” Adler fixed him with an amused gaze. “Can you guess that after he was released, he took a taxi to his aunt’s house then raped and dismembered her, looking for the hidden microphone that’d recorded the evidence used to commit him? Can you guess that her fifteen-year-old daughter walked into the house as his little search was in progress and that he did the same to her? Any inkling that the only thing that saved the eight-year-old son was that Webley fell asleep amid the girl’s viscera? You look sufficiently pale, Grimes.

“But I have to tell you the end of the story. The shocking part: it was all calculated. Webley had an IQ of 146. After he took himself off his brain candy, he snuck into the library and memorized the correct answers to each of those twenty-five tests and, I submit, honed his delivery pretty fucking well.”

“You think Hrubek did the same thing to Kohler? What this Webley did?”

“Yes! Of course that’s what I mean! Kohler bought a bill of goods. Lock, stock and barrel. Callaghan’s death, any other deaths tonight-they’re ultimately Kohler’s fault. His fault, Peter.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Tell me, what do you think of him? Of Kohler?”

“Pompous little shit.”

Adler was pleased to have someone second this sentiment though it reminded him how much he detested Grimes for being such a toady. “I think there’s more to it. Why is he being so blind? Kohler’s not stupid. Whatever else, he’s not stupid. Why?”

“I don’t really-”

“Peter, I’d like you to do something for me.”

“Look, sir-”

“Some detective work.” When the otherwise thin Adler dropped his head to look over the top of his glasses he developed an alarming double chin.

Because it was very late in the evening and he was tired of treading lightly through hospital politics, Peter Grimes chose not to be coy. “I don’t think I’d like to do that.”

“ ‘Like to do that’?” Adler snapped. “Don’t give me any of your bluster. I want to see fear in your face, young man. You’re not union. If I wanted your fucking balls, I’d have them in an instant and a hell of a lot easier than I could castrate those orderlies. Don’t you forget that. Now are you listening? Some detective work. Write it down if you can’t remember it. Are you ready?” he inquired sarcastically, forgetting for the moment that he was speaking not to an incompetent secretary but to a doctor of medicine.

As man and dog returned to the sports car, Heck grew convinced that Hrubek had hitched a ride or snuck into the back of a repair vehicle that had answered the distress call.

Hiding in trucks for real this time, is he? Heck wondered. He leaned against the car and shivered slightly as a breeze came up.