A young man, the driver wore his Dolphins cap backwards and Nike Pumps on his feet. In the Blaupunkt was a grunge tape, backed up by a half dozen rap and hip-hop cassettes (a secret never to be shared with any blood relation). He climbed out of the cab, pausing long enough to glance in the side mirror with discouragement at the constellation of acne on his cheek, then dropped to the ground. He was halfway to the diner when the voice barked, “Hey, John Driver!”
The huge man was suddenly next to him, hovering on legs like tree trunks. The driver stopped, astonished, as he looked up into the glistening round face, the spit-flecked grin, the eyes as excited as a kid’s at a ball game.
“Howdy,” the driver stammered.
The big man suddenly grew awkward and seemed to look for something to say. “That’s quite a machine, it is,” he offered though he didn’t look toward the truck but kept his eyes fixed downward on the driver.
“Uhn, thanks. You excuse me, I’m pretty beat and I’m gonna get some chow.”
“Chow, chow. Sure. It’s lucky seven. See. One, two, three, four, five, six . . .” His arm was making a circuit of the vehicles in the parking lot. “Seven.” The man adjusted the wool tweed cap that was perched on his bowling ball of a head. He seemed bald and the driver wondered if he was a Nazi skinhead. He said, “Lucky,” and laughed too loud.
“Uh-oh. That’s eight.” The fellow was pointing to another truck just pulling into the lot. His mouth twisted up in a smirking grin. “Always some fucker who ruins it.”
“That does happen. You bet.” The driver decided he could outrun this bozo but was as troubled by the thought of looking like a fool in front of fellow truckers as he was of getting stomped. “Well. Yessir. G’ night now.” He sidled toward the diner.
The big man’s eyes flashed with concern. “Wait wait wait! Are you going east, John Driver?”
The young man looked up into the murky eyes. “That’s not truly my name,” he said cautiously.
“I’m going to Boston. That’s the home of our country. I really have to get to Boston.”
“I’m sorry but I can’t give you a lift. I work for—”
“A lift?” the man asked with great curiosity. “A lift?”
“Uhn, I can’t give you a ride? You know what I’m saying? I work for a company and they’d fire me I was to do that.”
“No such luck, huh? No such luck?”
“A rule, I’m saying.”
“But what am I going to do?”
“They don’t like it too much you try for rides in truck stops?” This wasn’t a question but he was too frightened to offer the man a declarative sentence. “You might go up the road a spell and thumb?”
“Up the road and thumb.”
“Somebody might pick you up.”
“Up the road and thumb. I could do that. Can I get to Boston that way?”
“That intersection up there, see the light? That’s 118, turn left, that’d be north. It’ll get you to the Interstate and that’ll put you in Boston in no time.”
“Thank you, John Driver. God bless you. Up the road and thumb.”
The big man started through the lot in a muscular, awkward lope. The driver said a short prayer of thanks—both for surviving this encounter and, equally important, for ending up with a good story to tell to his fellow truckers, one that needed hardly any embellishment at all.
Peter Grimes returned to the hospital director’s office and sat in a desk chair. Adler asked casually, “He did what?” as if resuming a conversation recently interrupted.
“I’m sorry?”
Adler slapped a green file folder. “The nurses’ duty report. Hrubek was authorized to be in C Ward. He had access to the grounds. He just walked right into the morgue. That’s how he got there. He just strolled into the freezer. Oh, Peter, Peter, Peter . . . This is not good.” Adler had conceded the dankness of his office and was now wearing a beige cardigan into whose bottom buttonhole he poked his little finger.
“And I found out why,” Grimes announced. “He was part of Dick Kohler’s program.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, not the halfway house?”
“No. Restricted to the grounds here. Milieu Suite and the work program. For some reason he had a job at the farm. Milking cows, or something, I suppose.” The assistant gazed out the black window toward the part of the grounds where the hospital’s nonprofit farm, operated by volunteers and staffed by patients, spread for some ten acres into the rocky hills.
“Why wasn’t any of this in the file?” Adler slapped the folder once again, as if disciplining a puppy.
“I think there’re some other files we don’t have. I don’t know what happened to them. Something funny’s going on.”
“Did the board recommend Hrubek for the program?” Adler, as a member of the Marsden Board of Directors, prayed for one particular answer to this question.
“No,” Grimes said.
“Ah.”
“Maybe Dick Kohler slipped him in somehow.”
“ ‘Slipped him in’?” Adler pounced. “We have to be very buttoned up about this, my friend. Did you mean that: ‘slipped him in’? Think now. Think carefully.”
“Well, I don’t know. Hrubek was always closely supervised. It’s not quite clear who okayed it. The paperwork’s sketchy.”
“So maybe he wasn’t,” Adler reflected, “‘slipped in’ after all? Maybe some other idiot here dropped the ball.”
Grimes wondered if he was being insulted.
The hospital director breathed slowly. “Wait a moment. Kohler’s not on staff. Does he have an office here?”
Grimes was surprised Adler didn’t know. “Yes, he does. It’s part of the arrangement with Framington. We supply facilities for the attendings.”
“He’s not an attending,” Adler snapped.
“In a manner of speaking, he is.” With the trooper absent, Grimes inexplicably felt bolder.
“I want to find out what the hell is going on here and I want to know in the next hour. Who’s the E Ward resident on call?”
“I’m not exactly sure. I think—”
“Peter, you’ve got to get on top of this,” Adler snapped. “Find out who it is and tell him to go home. Tell him to take the evening off.”
“Yes. Go home? Are you sure?”
“And tell him not to talk to anyone. . . . I’m curious about this woman. . . .” Adler looked for a scrap of paper, found it and handed it to Grimes. “Did Hrubek ever mention her? Anybody ever mention her?”
Grimes read the name. “Mrs. Owen Atcheson? No. Who’s she?”
“She was at Indian Leap. She testified against Hrubek at the trial. She claims she got a threatening letter from him last September when our little boy was playing with blocks at Gloucester. The sheriff says her husband thinks Hrubek’s after her.”
“Ridgeton,” Grimes mused. “Forty miles west of here. Not a problem.”
“Oh?” Adler turned his red eyes on the young doctor. “Good. I’m so relieved. Now tell me why you think it’s quote not a problem.”
Grimes swallowed and said, “Because most schizophrenics couldn’t get three miles on their own, let alone forty.”
“Ah,” Adler said, sounding like a crotchety old Oxford don. “And with what little qualifiers, dear Grimes, did you shore up your substandard assessment?”
Grimes surrendered. He fell silent and fluffed his crinkly hair.
“A, what if he isn’t on his own, Doctor?” Adler barked. “What if there are co-conspirators, witting or un? And B, what if Hrubek isn’t like most schizophrenics? How ’bout them apples, Doctor? Now, get on it. Find out exactly how the son of a bitch got out.”
Grimes had not grown so bold that he failed to say, “Yes, sir.” And he said it very quickly.
“If this . . . Hold up a minute there. If this—” Adler gestured, unable or unwilling to give a name to the potential tragedy. “If this becomes a problem . . .”
“How’s that?”
“Get Lowe
on the phone. I need to have another little talk with him. Oh, and where’s Kohler?”
“Kohler? He’ll be at the halfway house tonight. He sleeps over on Sunday.”
“You think he’ll be in for rounds tonight?”
“No. He was here at four-thirty this morning. And after evaluations he went right to the halfway house. And he was dead on his feet then. I’m sure he’s in bed now.”
“Good.”
“Should I call him?”
“Call him?” Adler stared at Grimes. “Doctor, really. He’s the last one we want to know about this. Don’t say a word to him. Not . . . a . . . word.”
“I just thought—”
“No, you didn’t just think. You weren’t thinking at all. I mean, for God’s sake, do you call up the fucking lamb and say, ‘Guess what? Tomorrow’s Easter’?”
7
The steam rising from the plastic cup of coffee left a foggy ellipse on the inside of the windshield.
Dr. Richard Kohler, slouching in the front seat of his fifteen-year-old BMW, yawned painfully and lifted the cup. He sipped the bitter liquid and replaced the carton on the dash slightly to the right of where it had been. He vacantly watched a new oval paint itself on the glass, overlapping the one that was now fading.
He was parked in the staff lot of Marsden State Mental Health Facility. The chunky car, half hidden under an anemic hemlock, was pointed at a small, one-story building near the hospital’s main structure.
The duty nurse on E Ward, a friend and woman he used to date, had called the halfway house twenty minutes ago. She’d told Kohler about Michael’s escape and warned him that Adler was stonewalling. Kohler had flushed his face with icy water, filled a thermos with coffee then run groggily to his car and driven here. He’d pulled into the parking lot and chosen this spot for his stakeout.
He now looked up at the Gothic façade of the asylum and saw several lights. One of them, he supposed, was burning in the office of good Dr. Adler.
The wittier orderlies called the two doctors Hatfield and McCoy and that pretty accurately described their relationship. Still, Kohler had some sympathy for the hospital director. In his five years as head of Marsden, Adler had been fighting a losing political and budgetary battle. Most of the state mental hospitals had been closed, replaced by small, community-based treatment centers. But there remained a need for places to house the criminally insane as well as indigent and homeless patients.
Marsden was such a place.
Adler worked hard for his chunk of the state purse, and he made sure that the poor souls in his care were treated kindly and had the best of a bad situation. It was a thankless job and one that Kohler himself would have quit medicine before taking on.
But beyond that, Kohler’s sympathy for his colleague stopped. Because he also knew that Adler had a $122,000-a-year job, malpractice premiums and state benefits included, and that for his paycheck he worked at most a forty-hour week. Adler didn’t keep up with the current literature, didn’t attend institutes or continuing-education sessions, and rarely spoke with patients except to dispense the insincere greetings of an incumbent politician.
Mostly though Kohler resented Adler’s running Marsden not as a treatment facility but as combination prison and day-care center. Containment, not improvement, was his goal. Adler argued that it wasn’t the state’s job to fix people—merely to keep them from hurting themselves or others.
Kohler would respond, “Then whose job is it, Doctor ?”
Adler would snap back, “You give me the money, sir, and I’ll start curing.”
The two doctors had played oil and water since Kohler first came to Marsden, brandishing court-appointment orders and trying unusual forms of therapy on severely psychotic patients. Then, somehow—no one quite knew how—Kohler had set up the Milieu Program at Marsden. In it, noncriminal patients, mostly schizophrenics, learned to work and socialize with others, with an eye toward moving on to the halfway house outside of Stinson and eventually to apartments or homes of their own.
Adler was just smart enough to recognize that he had a plum deal that he’d have trouble duplicating anywhere in this universe and was accordingly not the least interested in having jive New York doctors rocking his delicate boat with these glitzy forms of treatment. Recently he’d tried to have Kohler removed, claiming that the younger doctor hadn’t gone through proper state civil-service channels to get the job at Marsden. But the allegation was tenuous since Kohler drew no salary and was considered an outside contractor. Besides, the patients themselves rose in rebellion when they heard the rumor that they might lose their Dr. Richard. Adler was forced to back down. Kohler continued to work his way into the hospital, ingratiating himself with the full-time staff and cultivating friends among the practical power centers—the nurses, secretaries and orderlies. The animosity between Kohler and Adler flourished.
Many of the doctors at Marsden wondered why Kohler—who could have had a lucrative private practice—brought all this trouble on himself. Indeed, they were perplexed why he’d spend so much time at Marsden in the first place, where he received a small fee for treating patients and where the practice itself was so demanding and frustrating that it drove many physicians out of psychiatry—and some out of medicine altogether.
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.
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