Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

In the course of a long, disjointed therapy session that day, Michael had lowered his voice and, eyes averted, whispered, “The reason is, I want to get my clothes to you. Don’t tell anyone. It’s very risky. You have no idea how risky.”

Clothes to you. Close to you. I want to get close to you. Muller bolted from her bed and drove immediately to her office, where she dictated a lengthy report that began with a subdued introduction tantamount to a psychiatrist’s shout of joy:

Major breakthrough yesterday. Pt. expressed desire for emotional connection with Dr., accompanied by animated affect.

As the treatment continued, Michael’s paranoia diminished further. The thefts stopped. He grew more sociable and cheerful and he required less medication than before. He enjoyed his group-therapy sessions and looked forward to outings that had previously terrified him. He started doing chores around the hospital, helping out the library and gardening staffs. Michael, Muller reported, had even driven her car several times.

Kohler now looked up from the report and gazed across the gritty parking lot. Lightning flashed in the west. Then he read the final entry in the file, written in a hand other than Anne Muller’s. He found he could picture the scene upon which these notes were based only too well:

Michael lies on his bed, looking through a history book, when a doctor comes into his room. He sits on the bed and smiles at the patient, inquiring about the book. Michael immediately stiffens. Little sparks of his paranoia begin to burn.

“Who’re you, what do you want?”

“I’m Dr. Klein… Michael, I’m afraid I have to tell you that Dr. Muller is sick.”

“Sick? Dr. Anne is sick?”

“I’m afraid she’s not going to be meeting with you.”

Michael doesn’t know what to say. “Tomorrow?” he manages to blurt, wondering what this man has done with his doctor and friend. “Will I see her tomorrow?”

“No, she’s not coming back to the hospital.”

“She left me?”

“Actually, Michael, she didn’t leave you. She left all of us. She passed away last night. Do you know what it means, ‘passed away’?”

“It means some fucker shot her in the head,” he answers in an ominous whisper. “Was it you?”

“She had a heart attack.”

Michael blinks a number of times, trying to comprehend this. Finally a bitter smile snaps onto the patient’s face. “She left me.” He begins nodding, as if relieved to hear long-anticipated bad news.

“Your new doctor is Stanley Williams,” the man continues soothingly. “He’s an excellent psychiatrist. He trained at Harvard and he worked at NIMH. That’s the National Institutes for Mental Health. How’s that for credentials, Michael? Very sharp fellow, you’ll be pleased to know. He’s going to-”

The doctor manages to dodge the chair, which splinters against the wall with the sound of a gunshot. He leaps into the corridor. The heavy oak door restrains Michael for about ten seconds then he finishes kicking his way into the hall and storms through the hospital to find his Dr. Anne. He breaks the arm of an orderly who tries to subdue him and they finally net him like an animal, a nineteenth-century technique that had been used at Trevor Hill only once since it opened.

One week later, his advocate and therapist dead, Michael Hrubek and his sole material possessions-toothbrush, clothes and several books of American history-were shipped to a state mental hospital.

His life was once again about to become an endless stream of Pill Time and Meal Time and Shock Time. And it would have too, except that after sitting in the hospital’s intake waiting room for two hours, temporarily forgotten about, he grew agitated and strolled out the front door. He waved goodbye to a number of patients and orderlies he’d never met and continued through the gate, never to return.

Dr. Richard Kohler noted that the date of that disappearance had been exactly fourteen months ago; the next official record about Michael Hrubek was an arrest report written by the unsteady hand of a trooper at Indian Leap State Park on the afternoon of May 1.

The psychiatrist set aside Anne Muller’s file and picked up the small notebook filled with the jottings he had made at Lis Atcheson’s house. But before he read he stared for a moment outside at the drops of thick rain that rattled on the windshield, and he wondered just how much longer he’d have to wait.

“Where’d you find this?”

Under the bed, up a tree, in between Mona the Moaner’s legs…

Peter Grimes didn’t respond and to his great relief the hospital director seemed to forget the question.

“My God. He’s been talking to DMH for three months ? Three fucking months! And look at all of this. Look!” Adler seemed almost more astonished at the volume of paperwork that Richard Kohler had generated than by the contents of those papers.

Grimes noticed that his boss was touching the sheets rather gingerly, as if afraid of getting his fingerprints on them. This was perhaps Grimes’s imagination but it made the young doctor extremely uncomfortable-largely because it seemed like an excellent idea, one he wished had occurred to him earlier, before he’d left the evidence of his identity imprinted all over the documents.

Adler looked up, his thoughts hovering, and to keep him from asking again where the papers had come from, Grimes read from the sheet that happened to be faceup in front of the two men. “ ‘Dear Dr. Kohler: Further to your proposal dated September 30 of this year, we are pleased to inform you that the Finance Division of the State Department of Mental Health has provisionally agreed to fund a program for inpatient treatment of severely psychotic individuals according to the guidelines you have set forth in the aforementioned proposal…’ ”

“God damn him,” Adler interjected with such vehemence that Grimes was afraid to stop reading.

“ ‘A preliminary budget of 1.7 million dollars covering the first year’s financial needs for your program has been provisionally approved. As agreed, funding will come from existing allocations to the state mental-health hospital system, in order to bypass the necessity of a public referendum.’ ”

But stop he did when Adler muttered “bypass” as if it were an obscenity and snatched away the sheet to read the final paragraph himself. “ ‘This is to confirm that your proposal is conditioned upon approval by the Board of Physicians of the State Department of Mental Health, following your final presentation of the six case studies and verbatims upon which your proposal was based (Allenton, Grosz, Hrubek, McMillan, Green, Yvenesky). A representative of the Board will contact you directly regarding times for oral presentations of those case studies… ’ ”

Adler slammed the paper to the desk and Grimes decided that, while his fingerprint paranoia was perhaps misplaced, the hospital director should be somewhat more careful. If Kohler noticed damaged pages he might complain of a suspected theft-to which, Grimes was painfully aware, there’d been a witness. A half hour before, the assistant had summoned an irritable Slavic janitor to open the door of Kohler’s office. Not a seasoned burglar, Grimes had neglected to send him away and had failed to notice that the squat man planted himself on the threshold to watch with amusement the young doctor’s heist from start to finish.

“Our money. He’s getting our money, on top of everything else! And, look at this. Look at it, Grimes. He’s using our patients to fuck us! He’s selling us out-our patients, our money-for his program.”