Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

Owen handed over his driver’s license and his attorney’s registration card.

“You don’t mind if we confirm this?”

“Not at all.”

The detective picked up the phone and called his office. A moment later he nodded and hung up. He walked back to Owen and returned the ID. “Are you armed, sir?”

“Yes.”

“I assume you have a firearm permit, Mr. Atcheson?”

“I do, yes. And four years of combat experience.” He said this because the detective was about his age and had a serenity in the face of butchery like this that comes from only one thing-surviving firefights. The detective squinted a bit of reluctant camaraderie into his face.

One cop stuck his head into the foyer and, his wide eyes on the dead woman, said to the detective, “Found something, Bob. We got motorcycle tracks. They look fresh.”

The detective asked Owen, “Yours?”

“No.”

The cop continued, “Only, the helmet’s still on the ground. It seemed-”

The policeman who’d identified the housekeeper called from the living room, “That helmet? Was hers, Mattie’s. She drove a Honda. Yellow one, I think.”

The detective called, “Where do the tracks head?”

“They go behind the garage, down a path then out over to 106. They turn south.”

Owen asked, “To 106? That’s the road to Boyleston.”

“Sure is. He was to head down 106 on a motorcycle, he’d be there in forty, fifty minutes.”

“Boyleston’s the closest Amtrak station, isn’t it?”

The detective nodded. “That’s right. Notice we got said he was making for Massachusetts. They were thinking he’d gone on foot but, sure, he could take the train. Maybe he doubled back. Like a feint, you know.”

“That makes sense to me.”

The detective barked an order to a uniformed sergeant, telling him to notify the Boyleston police about the murder and to send two of their own cars south on 106. Immediately. As the cops turned back to the body and busied themselves with fingerprints and crime-scene photos, Owen stepped outside and strolled around the property, looking for tracks. He studied the estate’s rolling pastures, a horse stable and several small barns that had been converted into garages.

“You see anything?” the detective called to him.

“Nope.”

“Say, Mr. Atcheson, we’ll need a statement from you. And I’m sure Attorney Franks, our prosecutor, will be wanting to talk to you.”

“In the morning, I’d be happy to.”

“I-”

“In the morning,” Owen said evenly.

The officer kept eye contact for a moment then chased to his wallet for a business card, which he handed to Owen. “You’ll call me then? Nine a.m. sharp?”

Owen said he would.

The detective, tours of duty aside, looked Owen up and down. “I understand what you’re going through, sir. I myself might be inclined to head off after him this minute, I was in your position. But my advice is for you to stay out of this whole thing.”

Owen merely nodded and gazed south toward the ruddy haze of lights that would be Boyleston. He stepped aside as the medics brought the woman’s body out of the door. He stared at it, seeing not so much the dark-green bag as, in his mind’s eye, the bloody black strokes of the letters that had been cut into her chest.

The words they spelled were forEVEr rEVEnge

He lost the scent on the outskirts of Cloverton.

Emil was once again quartering, zigzagging across the asphalt, his master in tow, looking for a trail he simply couldn’t find. Even Trenton Heck, who supported his dogs 110 percent, was having an uneasy time of it.

The big obedience problem with tracking was that you never knew exactly what was in the dog’s mind. Maybe just as you lowered the scent article to his nose, the hound got a whiff of deer and with the shout of “Find!” he’d bounded off in pursuit of a big buck who’d trotted nearby hours ago. The hound would be doing exactly what he believed he’d been ordered to do, and woe to the handler who failed to slip him a Bac’n Treat just the same as if he’d treed the escaping convict. Yet Heck replayed the evening and didn’t see how Emil could be mistaken. Come on, boy, he thought fervently. I got faith in you. Let’s do it.

Emil started toward a water-filled ditch but Heck ordered him back. It occurred to him that a man who’d lay traps would also poison water though Heck was more worried about natural contamination. It was his rule to let dogs drink only water from home. (When his fellow troopers would snicker at this and mutter, “Evian,” or “Perrier,” he’d tell them, “Fine, boys, just go to Mexico yourselves sometime and drink from the tap. See how you enjoy it. For your hound, anyplace that ain’t home could be Mexico.”) Tonight he took a jar from the truck and gave Emil a long drink. The hound lapped greedily. They started on the trail again.

Far distant in the west, lightning flashed in mute bands at the horizon, and a misty rain had started falling. This, Heck supposed, was what had ruined the scent. Earlier he’d been welcoming the rain but that was when Hrubek was on foot. The madman was now on a bicycle and they were following a very different type of trail. Dogs detect three different scents-body scent in the air, body scent pressed into the ground, and track scent, which is a combination of crushed vegetation and smells released by whatever the prey might step on. Rain intensifies and freshens the latter two. But add a hard rain to airborne scent on asphalt-which is chock-full of chemicals that foul dogs’ noses-and you’ve got the worst possible combination to track over.

“Come on, why don’t you get off that damn bike?” Heck muttered. “Can’t you hoof it? Like a normal escapee?”

Emil slowed and looked around him. A bad sign. I got you for your nose, boy, not your eyes. Hell, I can see better’n you.

The hound slowly strolled off the road and into a field. His leg on fire, Heck led the dog along a grid search pattern, loping in huge squares over the ground, moving slowly under the guidance of the flashlight for fear of the steel traps. Emil paused for long moments, sniffing the ground then lifting his nose. Then he ambled off and repeated the process. As Heck watched the hound his sense of futility grew.

Then Heck felt a tug on the track line and he looked down with hope in his heart. But immediately the line went slack, as Emil gave up on the false lead and returned to nosing about in the ground, breathing in all the aromas of the countryside and searching in vain for a scent that, for all Heck knew, might have vanished forever.

Michael Hrubek’s father was a grayish, somber man who had, over the years, grown dazed by the disintegration of his family. Rather than avoiding home, however, as another man might have done, he dutifully returned every evening from the clothing store in which he was the formal-wear manager.

And he returned quickly-as if afraid that in his absence some new pestilence might be threatening to destroy whatever normalcy remained in his house.

Once home though he spent the tedious hours before bed largely ignoring the chaos around him. For diversion he took to reading psychology books for laypeople and excerpts from The Book of Common Prayer and-when neither proved to be much of a palliative-watching television, specifically travel and talk shows.

Michael was then in his midtwenties and had largely given up his hopes of returning to college. He spent most of his time at home with his parents. Hrubek senior, attempting to keep his son happy and, more to the point, out of everyone’s hair, would bring Michael comic books, games, Revell models of Civil War weaponry. His son invariably received these gifts with suspicion. He’d cart them to the upstairs bathroom, subject them to a pro forma dunking to short out sensors and microphones then stow the dripping boxes in his closet.