Praying for Sleep

by Deaver, Jeffrey

  “You seem to be saying his disease isn’t anybody’s fault.” She waved her arm at the clouds speeding past. “Well, neither are tornadoes but we’d stop them if we could. We should stop Hrubek. Somebody should . . . lock him up and throw away the key.” She’d come a split second away from saying, track him down and shoot him. “He’s just a psychopath!”

  “No, he isn’t. That’s a very different diagnosis from schizophrenia. Psychopaths adapt well to society. They seem normal—they have jobs and families—but they’re completely detached from morality and emotion. They’re evil. A psychopath would kill you because you took his parking place or wouldn’t give him ten dollars. And he wouldn’t think twice about it. Michael would only kill for the same reasons you would—self-defense, for instance.”

  “Please, Doctor. Michael’s harmless? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No, of course not. But . . .” Kohler’s voice faded. “I’m sorry. I’ve upset you.”

  After a moment Lis said, “No. We see things differently, that’s all.” But she said it quite coolly.

  “It’s late. I’ve used up my twenty minutes.” He rose and walked toward the kitchen. When they approached the back door, he asked, “One thing I’m still curious about. Why would he associate you with betrayal? ‘The Eve of betrayal.’ ‘Revenge.’ ‘Forever.’ Why?”

  “Well, I suppose because I testified against him.” She lifted her palms at the simplicity of this deduction.

  “You think that’s it?”

  “I suppose. I really don’t know.”

  Kohler nodded and fell silent. A moment later his mind made another of its odd leaps, punctuated by a stab at his pale scalp with a nervous finger. “There’s a car lot outside of town, isn’t there?”

  She thought she’d misheard him. “A car lot? What did you say?”

  “Cars. A dealership.”

  “Well, yes. But . . .”

  “I’m thinking of the big one. All lit up. A Ford dealership.”

  “Klepperman’s Ford, that’s right.”

  “Where is it exactly?”

  “Half mile outside of town. On Route 236. Just over the hills east of town. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  She waited for an explanation but none came and it was clear that the interview, or interrogation, or whatever it had been, was over. Kohler cleared his throat and thanked her. She was grateful he was leaving; the visit had angered her. But she was confused too. What had he learned that was so helpful?

  And what had he not told her?

  Outside, walking to his car, they both looked up at the thick clouds. The wind was fierce now and whipped her hair in an irritating way, flinging it into her face.

  “Doctor?” Lis stopped him, touching his bony upper arm. “Tell me, what are the odds that he’s on his way here?”

  Kohler continued to gaze at the clouds. “The odds? The odds are that they’ll find him soon, and even if not, that he’d never make it this far alone. But if you want my opinion I think you should go to that hotel you mentioned.”

  He glanced at her for a moment then it was clear that his thoughts were elsewhere, maybe wandering with his terrified, mad patient through brush and forests, lost on highways, sitting in a deserted cabin somewhere. As she watched him walk to his car, she pushed aside her anger for a moment and saw Kohler for the ambitious young physician that he was, and tough and devoted. And undoubtedly damn smart too. But she sensed something else about him and was unable for a few moments to fathom exactly what that might be. His car had disappeared down the long driveway before she understood. Dr. Richard Kohler, Lis decided, was a very worried man.

  The ambulance and the police car arrived simultaneously, their urgent lights painting the underside of the trees with peculiar metallic illumination. The brakes squealed and the yard was filled with uniformed men and women, equipment, stretchers, electric boxes dotted with lights and buttons. The medics trotted toward the large colonial house. The police too, holstering their long flashlights as they ran.

  Owen Atcheson sat on the back steps beside the kitchen door, which was still open. His head was in his hands as he watched the medics run toward the doorway. One said to him, “You called nine-one-one? Reported a woman was attacked?”

  He nodded.

  “Where is she?”

  “In the kitchen,” Owen said, exhaustion and discouragement thick in his voice. “But you can take your time.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I said there’s no rush. The only place she’s going tonight is the morgue.”

  3/

  The Spirits of the Dead

  19

  “Who is it? Not Mary Haddon? Jesus, not their daughter ?”

  “No, that’s not her.”

  “That’s not Mary?”

  “Look at her, for God’s sake! It’s not Mary.”

  But nobody wanted to look. They’d look at the wall calendar, the Post-it notes, the shattered teacup, the scraps of paper clinging to the avocado-colored refrigerator door under fruit-shaped magnets. They’d look everywhere but at the terrible creature tied with bell wire to the maple captain’s chair. The senior medic walked carefully into the room, minding the huge slick of blood on the tile floor. He bent down and studied the intricately tied knots. Her head, loosened by the deep cut to her throat, lolled backwards, and her blouse was pulled open. The awkward letters cut into her skin were stark against her blue-white chest.

  “Fucking mess,” one of the young cops said.

  “Hey, let’s don’t have any of that talk here,” a plainclothes detective said. “Check out the house. All the bedrooms.”

  “I think Joe and Mary’re over at the church. The charity auction’s tomorrow and he’s chairman. I heard they’re working late. Oh, I hope their daughter’s with them. Man, I hope that.”

  “Well, call ’em up or get a car over there. Let’s get on with this.”

  One cop entered and looked at the corpse. “Lord, that’s Mattie! Mattie Selwyn. She’s the Haddons’ housekeeper. I know her brother.”

  The nervous banter continued. “Oh, this is a bad thing. What’s that in her lap, that little white thing? . . . Jesus, some kind of skull or something. A badger?”

  “Why tonight?” a deputy lamented. “Storm’ll be here any time. Already had a twister in Morristown. Couple people died. You hear? Man—”

  Owen stood in the doorway and looked again at the carnage. He shook his head.

  “You the one who called us, sir?” the detective asked, running his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.

  Owen nodded and wiped sweat from his face. After calling 911 he’d glanced into a window and seen on his face the mud smeared on his cheekbones and forehead to mask the glossiness of his skin. He had washed his face before the police arrived. Still, his handkerchief now came away from his forehead dirty and he supposed he looked a mess. He explained about Hrubek’s escape, the bicycle, following him here. The detective said, “Yessir, we had a notice about that runaway. But we thought he was heading east.”

  “I told them he wasn’t,” Owen said heatedly. “I told them he’d turn west. They wouldn’t listen. Nobody took this thing seriously from the start. And now look. . . .”

  “We also heard he was harmless,” the detective said bitterly, staring at the body. Then he glanced at Owen. “What’s your role in this exactly?”

  He told them that he’d come out to see what the state police were doing to capture the escapee, who appeared to have a grudge against his wife. As he spoke he realized that the story was outlandish and he was neither surprised nor offended when the officer asked, “Could I see some ID, please?”

  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 ar
med, 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.

  “Michael, look: Candyland. How ’bout a game later, son? After supper?”

  “Candyland? Candyland? Do you know anybody who plays Candyland? Have you ever met a single person in the fucking world who plays Candyland? I’m going upstairs and taking a bath.”

  For his part, Michael avoided his father as he avoided everyone else. His rare forays outside the house were motivated by pathetic missions. He once spent a month looking for a rabbi who would convert him to Judaism and he devoted three fervent weeks to hounding an anxious Armed Forces recruitment officer, who couldn�
��t shake the young man even after explaining a dozen times that there was no longer a Union Army. He took a commuter train to Philadelphia, where he stalked an attractive black newscaster and once cornered her on the street, demanding to know if she was a slave and if she enjoyed pornographic films. She got a restraining order that the police seemed eager to enforce with whatever vigor was necessary but Michael soon forgot about her.

  On Saturday mornings his father would make a big pancake breakfast and the family would eat amid such ranting from Michael that his parents eventually tuned out the noise. Michael’s mother, most likely still in her nightgown, would pick at her food until she could face the plate no longer. She would rise slowly, put on lipstick, because that’s what proper ladies did after meals, and after spending several frantic minutes looking for the TV Guide or the remote control, she would return to bed and click on the set. His father did the dishes then took Michael to a doctor whose small office was above an ice-cream parlor on Main Street. All that Michael remembered about this man was that with almost every sentence he said, “Michael.”

  “Michael, what I’d like to do today is for you to tell me what some of your earliest memories are. Can you do that, Michael? An example would be: Christmas with your family. Christmas morning, Michael, the very first time—”

  “I don’t know, fucker. I can’t remember, fucker. I don’t know anything about Christmas, fucker, so why do you keep asking me?”

  Michael said “fucker” even more often than the doctor said “Michael.”

  He stopped seeing this psychiatrist after his father’s insurance company refused to reimburse the family for any more visits. He spent more and more time in his room, sometimes reading history, sometimes wearing his mother’s clothing, sometimes screaming out the windows at people who walked past. The Hrubeks’ pale-blue home became a renowned house of terror among the children of Westbury, Pennsylvania.