“Hey, Trenton,” one of the men called. He was a large man, large all over, not just the belly—food round, not drink round—and his weight pulled hard at the buttons and pockets of his gray uniform. He was holding back two young female Labrador retrievers, who nosed in the dirt.
“Hiya, Charlie.”
“Well, if it ain’t the Cadillac of trackers.” This, from one of the two young troopers standing on the roadside, a man Heck referred to, though not to his face, as “the Boy.” He was a narrow-jawed youngster, six years Heck’s junior in age though fifteen in appearance. Trenton Heck’s idea of dealing with a budget cutback would have been to fire this kid and keep Heck himself on the force at three-quarters salary. But they hadn’t asked his opinion and so the Boy, who though younger had hired on two months before Heck, was still a trooper while Trenton Heck had netted eighty-seven dollars last month carting old washing machines and water softeners to the Hammond Creek dump.
“Hey, Emil,” the Boy said.
Heck nodded to him and waved to the other trooper, who called back a greeting.
Charlie Fennel and Heck walked toward the tan hearse, beside which stood a young man in a pale-green jumpsuit.
“Not much of a search party,” Heck said to Fennel.
The trooper answered that they were lucky to have what they did. “There’s a concert letting out at midnight or so down at the Civic Center. You hear about that?”
“Rock ’n’ roll,” Heck muttered.
“Uhn. Don sent a buncha troopers over there. They had some boy got shot at the last one.”
“Don’t they have security guards for that sort of thing?”
“Was a guard who shot the kid.”
“Doesn’t seem like a brilliant use of taxpayers’ money, riding herd on a bunch of youngsters paying to deafen themselves.”
Then too, Fennel added, the captain had put a good portion of the troops on highway detail. “He figures what with the storm, they’ll be picking ’em off the pavement. Say, I hear there’s a reward for catching this crazy.”
Heck kept his eyes on the grass in front of him and didn’t know what to say.
“Listen,” Fennel continued in a whisper, “I heard about your situation, Trenton. I hope you get that money. I’m rooting for you.”
“Thanks there, Charlie.”
Heck had a curious relationship with Charlie Fennel. The same bullet that had left the shiny star-shaped wound in Heck’s right thigh had passed first through Fennel’s brother’s chest as he crouched beside their patrol car, killing the trooper instantly. Heck supposed that some of the man’s living blood had ridden the slug into his own body and that because of that he and Charlie Fennel were blood brothers, once removed. At times Trenton Heck thought that he and Fennel ought to be closer. The more time the men spent in each other’s company, however, the less they found they had in common. They occasionally talked about a hunting or fishing trip but the plans came to nothing. It was a secret relief to both of them.
Heck and Fennel now paused beside the coroner’s meat wagon. Heck lifted his head and inhaled air fragrant with the decomposition so prominent on damp autumn nights like this. He sniffed the air once more and Fennel looked at him curiously.
“No wood smoke,” Heck said in response.
“Nope. There don’t seem to be.”
“So wherever this Hrubek’s got himself to, it wasn’t toward a house he could smell.”
“You learn that from Emil? Heh.”
Heck asked the coroner’s attendant, “What happened exactly?”
The young man glanced at Fennel, silently asking permission to answer a civilian. Heck had gotten used to the demise of his own authority. When the attendant received a grunt of approval from Fennel, he explained how Hrubek had escaped then added, “We chased him for a ways.”
“Chased him, did you?” Heck couldn’t resist needling, “Well, it’s not hardly your job to catch him. I wouldn’t’ve blamed you if you’d just hightailed it out of here, to hell with a madman.”
“Yeah, well. We didn’t. We chased him.” The attendant shrugged, young and far above shame.
“All right. Let’s get to it.” Heck noticed that Fennel had put the tracking harnesses on his dogs some time ago. This had worked them up and confused them. If they weren’t immediately going on track, scenting dogs should wear only their regular collars. Heck almost said something to Fennel but didn’t. How the trooper ran his dogs was his business; Trenton Heck was no longer a man-tracking instructor.
He took the red nylon harness and quarter-inch nylon track line from his pocket. Emil tensed immediately though he stayed rump-to-ground. Heck hooked him up and wrapped the end of the line around his own left wrist, contrary to the general practice of right-hand grip; drugged up and giddy though this big fellow might be, Heck remembered Haversham’s warning and he wanted his shooting hand free. He then took the bag from his other jacket pocket. He opened it, pulling back the plastic from the wad of cotton shorts.
“Jesus,” the Boy said, wrinkling his nose. “Dirty Jockeys?”
“Musk is the best,” Heck muttered. “Yum . . .” He pushed the dingy underwear toward the young trooper, who danced away.
“Trenton, stop that! They got crazy-man jism on ’em! Keep ’em away!”
Charlie Fennel laughed hard. Heck subdued his own laughter and then called sternly to Emil, “Okay,” which meant for the dog to stand.
They let Emil and the bitches sniff each other, muzzle and ass, as they exchanged their complicated greetings. Then Heck held Hrubek’s shorts down toward the ground, taking care not to rub the cloth on the dogs’ noses—just letting them get to know a smell that to a human would vanish in an instant, if it was detectable at all.
“Find!” Heck yelled. “Find, Emil!”
The three dogs started shivering and prancing, skittering in circles, noses to the ground. They snorted as they sucked in dust and sour fumes from gasoline or grease and picked out the invisible molecules of one man’s odor from a million others.
“Find, find!”
The hound took the lead, straining the line, pulling Heck after him. The other dogs followed. Fennel was a big man but he was being dragged along by two frantic sixty-pound Labradors and he trotted awkwardly beside Heck, who himself struggled to keep up the pace. Soon both men were gasping for breath.
The bitches’ noses dropped to the ground sporadically in almost the identical spots on the asphalt of Route 236. They were step-tracking, inhaling at each place Hrubek had put a foot on the ground. Emil tracked differently; he’d scent for a few seconds then raise his head slightly and keep it off the ground for a ways. This was line-tracking, the practice of experienced tracking dogs; continually sniffing on a step-track could exhaust an animal in a couple of hours.
Suddenly Emil veered off the road, south, and started into a field of tall grass and brush, filled with plenty of cover even for a man as large as Hrubek.
“Oh, brother,” Heck muttered, surveying the murky heath into which his dog plunged. “Taking the scenic route. Here we go.”
Fennel called to the Boy and the other trooper, “Follow along the road. I’ll call on the squawker, we need you. And if I call, bring the scattergun.”
“He’s real big,” the coroner’s attendant shouted. “I mean, no fooling.”
Kohler pulled his BMW out of the Marsden state hospital parking lot and turned onto the long access road that would take him to Route 236. He waved a friendly greeting to a security guard, who was walking quickly toward an alarm bell ringing jarringly in the lot. The guard did not respond.
Although Kohler was a physician and could write prescriptions for any drug that was legally available, Adler had instituted a rule that no controlled substances—narcotics, sedatives, anesthetics—could be dispensed in greater than single-dose quantities without his or Grimes’s approval. This edict was issued after a young resident at Marsden was caught supplementing his income by selling Xanax, Miltown and Librium to loca
l high-school students. Kohler had no time to try to bluff his way past the hospital’s night pharmacist and found the steel bumper of a German car a much more efficient means than paperwork to requisition what he needed.
As he approached the highway he pulled the car to a stop and examined the fruits of his theft. The hypodermic syringe was unlike most that you’d find in a doctor’s office or hospital. It was large, an inch in diameter and five inches long, made of stainless steel around a heavy glass reservoir. The needle mounted to it, protected by a clear plastic guard, was two inches long and unusually thick. Although no one admitted it, least of all the manufacturer, this was actually a livestock syringe. To M.D.s, however, it was marketed as a “heavy-duty model intended for use on patients in agitation-oriented situations.”
Sitting beside the instrument were two large bottles of Innovar, a general anesthetic Kohler’d picked because of its effectiveness when injected into muscle tissue—unlike most such drugs, which must be injected into the bloodstream. Familiar primarily with psychiatric drugs, Kohler knew little about Innovar other than the prescribed dosages per kilo of body weight and its contraindications. He knew too that he had enough drug to kill several human beings.
One thing he didn’t know for certain but that he figured was probably accurate was that by stealing a Class II controlled substance he’d just committed a felony.
Kohler slipped the bottles and the syringe into the rust-colored backpack he carried in lieu of a briefcase then opened a small white envelope. As a bonus he’d also stolen several chlorphentermine capsules, two of which he now popped into his mouth. The doctor put the car in gear and eased forward, hoping that the diet pills would kick in soon and that when they did they’d have the desired effect. Kohler rarely took medicine of any kind and his system sometimes responded in unexpected ways—it was possible that the amphetaminelike drug would paradoxically make him drowsy. Richard Kohler prayed that this didn’t happen. Tonight, he desperately needed his thoughts clear.
Tonight, he needed an edge.
An agitation-oriented situation indeed.
As he sped out onto Route 236, looking about him in the dark night, Kohler felt overwhelmed and helpless. He wondered if, despite their antagonisms, he should simply have leveled with Adler and enlisted the man’s aid. After all, the hospital director too was trying desperately to conceal Michael’s escape and to find him as quietly as possible; for once, the two medicos shared a common goal—though their motives were very different. But Kohler decided this would be a foolish, a disastrous thing to do, and might jeopardize Kohler’s position at Marsden, perhaps even his career itself. Oh, some of Kohler’s concern was perhaps paranoia—a junior version of what Michael Hrubek lived with daily. Yet there was a significant difference between Kohler and his patient: Michael was classified a paranoid because he acted as if enemies sought his darkest secrets while in fact his enemies and secrets were imaginary.
In his own case, Kohler reflected as his car accelerated to eighty, they were quite real.
8
Like a quarter horse cutting cattle from a herd, Emil would wheel and swerve, crossing back and forth through brush or over scrub grass until he picked up the scent once more.
The dog found the spot where Hrubek had tangled with the orderlies then returned to the road. Now, he leapt off the asphalt again and charged back into the brush, the Labradors following his lead.
The searchers trotted through this field for a few minutes, heading generally east, away from the hospital, and parallel to Route 236.
At one point as they were making their way through tall, whispering grass, Heck jerked the lead and growled, “Sit!” Emil stopped abruptly. Heck felt him shivering with excitement as if the track line were an electric wire. “Down!” Reluctantly the dog went horizontal. The bitches wouldn’t respond to Charlie Fennel’s similar command; they kept tugging at their lines. He pulled them back once or twice and shouted several times for them to sit but they wouldn’t. Wishing that Fennel, as well as the dogs, would keep quiet, Heck managed to ignore this bad discipline and strode ahead, playing a long black flashlight over the ground.
“Lookit what I turned up,” Heck said. He shone the light on a fresh bare footprint in the earth.
“God double damn,” Fennel whispered. “That’s size thirteen, if it’s an inch.”
“Well, we know he’s big.” Heck touched the deep indentation made by the ball of a huge foot. “What I’m saying is, he’s sprinting.”
“Sure, he’s running. You’re right. That Dr. Adler at the hospital said he’d just be wandering around in a daze.”
“He’s in some damn big hurry. Moving like there’s no tomorrow. Come on, we’ve got a lot of time to make up for. Find, Emil! Find!”
Fennel started the other dogs on the trail, following the footprints, and they ran ahead. But curiously Emil didn’t take the lead. He rose on his muscular legs but stayed put. His nose went into the air and he flared his nostrils, swiveling his head from side to side.
“Come on,” Fennel called.
Heck was silent. He watched Emil gazing right to left and back once more. The hound turned due south and lifted his head. Heck called to Fennel, “Hold up. Shut your light out.”
“What?”
“Just do it!”
With a soft click the two men and three dogs were enveloped in darkness. It occurred to Heck, as it must have to Fennel, that they were totally vulnerable. The madman might be downwind, ten feet away, with a tire iron or broken bottle.
“Come on, Trenton.”
“Let’s don’t be in too big of a hurry here.”
Fifty yards north they could see the slow convoy of the squad car and Heck’s pickup. Emil paced, his head wagging back and forth in the air. Heck studied him intently.
“What’s he doing?” Fennel whispered. “The track’s here. Can’t he tell?”
“He knows that. There’s something else. Airborne scent maybe. It’s not as strong as the track scent but there’s something there.”
It was possible, Heck considered, that Hrubek, huge and sweating, had given off masses of scent, which would eddy and gather here like smoke, remaining for hours on a humid night like this. Emil was probably scenting on the cloud of these molecules. Still, Heck was reluctant to pull the hound away. He had faith in the cleverness of animals. He’d seen raccoons dexterously unscrew the lids of jam jars and had once watched a cumbersome grizzly bear (the same one that had eyed him so voraciously) carefully poke not just one but two delicate claw holes in the top of a 7-Up can then drink down the soda without spilling a drop. And Emil, in his master’s informed opinion, was ten times smarter than any bear.
Heck waited a moment longer but neither heard nor saw anything.
“Come, Emil.” He turned and started away.
But Emil would not come.
Heck squinted into the night. There was a faint glow from the sky but most of the moonlight was now obscured by cloud. Come on, boy, he thought, let’s get back to work. Our reward money’s jogging east at about five miles an hour.
But Emil dropped his nose and pushed into the grass. He quivered. Heck lifted his pistol in front of him and swung aside a thick whip of green and beige shoots. They continued a few feet farther into the maze of grass. It was there that they found what Emil had been seeking.
The dog was no setter but he was as good as pointing at the quarry—a scrap of paper in a plastic Baggie.
Fennel had come up slowly. He put his back to Heck and scanned the grass nervously, his service automatic sweeping left to right. “Bait?”
This had also occurred to Heck. Felons accustomed to being hunted by dogs sometimes leave a pungent article of clothing or spray of urine in a tactical place on the trail. When the tracker and his hound stop to examine the spot, the fugitive attacks from behind. But Heck studied Emil and said, “Don’t think so. He was still around, Emil’d smell more of him.”
Still, as he picked up the bag, Heck kept his eyes not on
the plastic but on the wall of grass surrounding him, and there were several pounds of pressure on the stiff German trigger of his gun. He handed Fennel the bag and they stepped into a clearing, where they could read without fear of immediate attack.
“From a newspaper,” the trooper said. “Tore it out. One side’s part of an ad for bras, the other’s a, hey, lookie . . . A map. Downtown Boston. Historical sites, you know.”
“Boston?”
“Yep. We call the highway patrol? Tell ’em to keep the main roads to Massachusetts covered?”
And Heck, who saw his precious ten thousand dollars vanishing before him, said, “Let’s hold off for a bit on that. Maybe he left this here to lead us off.”
“Naw, Trenton. If he’d’ve wanted us to find it, he would’ve left it in the road, not in man-high grass.”
“Maybe,” Heck said, very discouraged. “But I still think—”
Crack . . .
A fierce noise like a gunshot sounded next to Heck’s ear and he swung around, heart pounding, pistol raised. The volume on Charlie Fennel’s walkie-talkie had been full on when he received the transmission. Fennel turned down the squelch and volume knobs and palmed the unit. He spoke softly into it. In the distance, on the road, the red-and-blue roof lights on the Boy’s squad car started spinning.
“Fennel here. Go ahead.” He lowered his head as he listened.
What are they doing? Heck wondered.
Fennel signed off and put the walkie-talkie back on his belt. He said, “Come on. They’ve found him.”
Heck’s heart fell. “They got him? Oh, damn.”
“Well, not quite. He got himself all the way to a truck stop in Watertown—”
“Watertown? That’s seven miles from here.”
“—and tried to hitch a ride up to, guess where, Boston. The truck driver told him no so Hrubek took off on foot heading north. We’ll drive over there and pick up the trail. Man, I hope he’s winded. I myself don’t feel like a half-hour run. Don’t go looking so sorrowful, Trenton, you’ll be a rich man yet. He’s not but a half hour away.”
Praying for Sleep Page 9