Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

“Lis, what are you doing there?”

“Owen? Where are you?”

“I’m in Fredericks. I tried to call you before. I thought you’d left. What’re you doing there? You were supposed to be at the Inn an hour ago.”

A momentary hollowness on the line. He heard her calling, “It’s Owen.” What was going on? Through the line he heard a roll of thunder. Lis came back on and explained that she and Portia had stayed to build up the sandbags. “The dam was overflowing. We could’ve lost the house.”

“Are you all right?”

“We’re fine. But the car’s stuck in the driveway. The rain’s terrible. We can’t get out. There’re no tow trucks. What are you doing in Fredericks?”

“I’ve been following Hrubek west.”

“West! He did turn around.”

“Lis, I have to tell you… He killed someone.”

“No!”

“A woman in Cloverton.”

“He’s coming here?”

“No, it doesn’t look like it. He’s going to Boyleston. To get a train out of the state, I’d guess.”

“What should we do?”

He paused. “I’m not going after him, Lis. I’m coming home.”

He heard her exhale a sigh. “Thank you, honey.”

“Stay in the house. Lock the doors. I’m only fifteen minutes away… Lis?”

“Yes?”

He paused. “I’ll be there soon.”

Heck and Owen said goodbye to the woman and hurried out into the rain, buffeted by the terrible wind. They followed the driveway to the dim road that led back to the highway.

Owen glanced at Heck, who was trudging along morosely.

“You’re thinking about your reward?”

“I have to say I am. They’ll probably get him in Boyleston for sure. But I had to call and tell them. I’m not going to risk anybody else getting hurt.”

Owen thought for a moment. “You’re still due that money, I’d say.”

“Well, the hospital’s gonna have a different opinion on that, I’ll guarantee you.”

“Tell you what, Heck, you burn on down that highway to Boyleston, and if you get him first, fine. If not, we’ll sue the hospital for your money and I’ll handle the case myself.”

“You a lawyer?”

Owen nodded. “Won’t charge you a penny.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Surely would.”

Heck was embarrassed at Owen’s generosity and after a moment he shook the lawyer’s hand warmly. They continued in silence to the clearing where the ruined Cadillac sat.

“Okay, Emil and I’ll head south here. It’s a beige Subaru we’re looking for, right? Let’s hope he doesn’t drive Japanese any better’n he drives Detroit. Okay, let’s do it.” On impulse he added, “Say, after this’s over with, let’s stay in touch, you and me. What do you say? Do some fishing?”

“Hey, that’s a fine idea by me, Heck. Happy hunting to you.”

Heck and Emil limped, and trotted, back to the battered Chevy pickup fifty yards down the road. They climbed in. Heck started up the rattling engine, then sped through the fierce rain toward Route 315, his left foot on the accelerator and an eye on his modest prize.

The sign revolved slowly in the turbulent night sky.

Dr. Richard Kohler looked toward the flashes of light in the west and laughed out loud at the metaphor that occurred to him.

Wasn’t this how Mary Shelley’s doctor had animated his creature? Lightning?

The psychiatrist now recalled very clearly the first meeting with the patient who would play the monster to Kohler’s Frankenstein. Four months ago, two weeks after the Indian Leap trial and Michael’s incarceration in Marsden, Kohler-overcome with morbid and professional fascination-had walked slowly into Marsden’s grim, high-security E Ward and looked down at the huge, hunched form of Michael Hrubek, glaring up from beneath his dark eyebrows.

“How are you, Michael?” Kohler asked.

“They’re lis-ten-ing. Sometimes you have to keep your mind a complete blank. Have you ever done that? Do you know how hard it is? That’s the basis of Transcendental Meditation. You may know that as TM. Make your mind a complete blank, Doctor. Try it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“If I hit you with that chair your mind’d be a complete blank. But the downside is that you’d be a dead fucker.” Michael had then closed his mouth and said nothing more for several days.

Marsden was a state hospital, like Cooperstown, and offered only a few dismal activity rooms. But Kohler had finagled a special suite for patients in his program. It was not luxurious. The rooms were drafty and cold and the walls were painted an unsettling milky green. But at least those in the Milieu Suite-so named because Kohler’s goal was to ease the patients here gradually back into normal society-were separated from the hospital’s sicker patients and this special status alone gave them a sense of dignity. They also had learning toys and books and art supplies-even the dangerous and officially forbidden pencils. Art and expression were encouraged and the walls were graced by the graffiti of paintings, drawings and poems created by the patients.

In August Richard Kohler commenced a campaign to get Michael into the Milieu Suite. He chose the young man because he was smart, because he seemed to wish to improve, and because he had killed. To resocialize (one did not cure) a patient like Michael Hrubek would be the ultimate validation of Kohler’s delusion-therapy techniques. But more than precious DMH funding, more than professional prestige, Kohler saw a chance to help a man who suffered and who suffered terribly. Michael wasn’t like the many schizophrenic patients who were oblivious to their conditions. No, Michael was the most tragic of victims; he was just well enough to imagine what a normal life might be like and was tormented daily by the gap between who he was and who he so desperately wanted to be. Exactly the sort of patient Kohler wished most to work with.

Not that Michael leapt at the chance to join the psychiatrist’s program.

“No fucking way, you fucker!”

Paranoid and suspicious, Michael refused to have anything to do with the Suite, or Kohler, or anyone else at Marsden for that matter. He sat in the corner of his room, muttering to himself and suspiciously eyeing doctors and patients alike. But Kohler persisted. He simply wouldn’t leave the young man alone. Their first month together-and they saw each other daily-they argued bitterly. Michael would rant and scream, convinced Kohler was a conspirator like the others. The doctor would parry with questions about Michael’s fantasies, trying to break him down.

Finally, tuckered out by Kohler’s aggressiveness and by massive dosages of medicine, Michael reluctantly agreed to join his program. He was gradually introduced to other patients, first one on one, then in larger groups. To get the young patient to talk about his past and his delusions, Kohler would bribe him with history books, filching them from the library at Framington hospital because the collection at Marsden was almost nonexistent. In their individual sessions Kohler kept pushing the young man, turning up the emotional heat and forcing him to spend time with other patients, probing into his delusions and dreams.

“Michael, who’s Eve?”

“Oh, yeah, right. Like I’m going to tell you. Forget about it.”

“What did you mean by ‘I want to stay ahead of the blue uniforms’?”

“Time for bed. Lights out. Nighty-night, Doctor.” So it went.

One cold, wet day six weeks ago, Michael was in Marsden’s secluded exercise area, walking laps under the surly eyes of the guards. He gazed through the chain-link fence at the bleak, muddy New England farm on the hospital grounds. Like most schizophrenics Michael suffered from blunted affect-hampered display of emotion. But that day he was suddenly swept up by the bleak and sorrowful scenery and started to cry. “I was feeling sorry for the poor damp cows,” Michael later told Kohler. “Their eyes were broken. God should do something for them. They’ll have a hard time.”