Praying for Sleep (11 page)

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 local 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."

Fennel and the bitches bounded back toward the road.

"Come, Emil," Heck called. The hound hesitated just a moment longer and slowly followed his master, clearly reluctant to forsake the grassy fields, damp and cold though they were, for the slippery plastic bench seat of an old, smelly Chevrolet.

When she heard the deliberate footfalls coming up from the basement stairs, the heavy steps, the dull clink of metal, Lis Atcheson understood immediately, and the mood of the night at once turned icy.

Owen walked into the doorway of the greenhouse and looked at his wife, who was pulling more burlap bags from the stack near the lath house.

"Oh, no!" Lis whispered. She shook her head and then sat on a bench made of hard cherry wood. Owen paused then sat beside her, smoothing her hair over her ear the way he did when he explained things to her — business things, estate things, legal things. But no explanation was necessary tonight. For Owen was no longer in his work clothes. He wore a dark-green shirt and matching baggy pants — the outfit he wore under a bright-orange slicker when he went hunting. On his feet were his expensive waterproof boots. And in his hands, a deer rifle and a pistol. "You can't do it, Owen."

He set the guns aside. "I just talked to the sheriff again. They've got four men out after him. Only four goddamn men! And he's already in Watertown."

"But that's east of here. He's going away from us."

"That doesn't matter, Lis. Look how far he's traveled. That's seven or eight miles from where he escaped. On foot. He's not wandering around in a daze at all. He's up to something."

"I don't want you to do this."

"I'm just going to see exactly what they're doing to catch him." He spoke in an austere, assured voice. It was her father's voice. It was a voice that could hypnotize her. Still, she said, "Don't lie to me, Owen."

And like Andrew L'Auberget, Owen's eyes contracted, hard as a tick's back. He had a faint smile on his face but she didn't believe it for a second. She might very well have been speaking to one of the marble-eyed trophies Owen had nailed up on his den wall, for all the effect her words had on him. She touched his arm and let her fingers linger on the thick cloth. He pressed his hand over hers.

"Don't go," she said. She pulled him to her. She felt a surge of unfocused ardor. It was more than the memory of their liaison earlier. His strength, his gravity, the hunger in his face — they were all immensely seductive. She kissed him hard, open-mouthed. She wondered if the arousal she felt was truly lust, or was rather an attempt to keep him encircled in her arms all this long night until the danger was past.

Whatever her motives might have been, though, the embrace had no effect. He held her for a moment then stepped to the window. She rose and stood behind him. "Why don't you say it? You're going to hunt him down."

She studied her husband's back and the reflection of a face that should, she supposed, be vastly troubled. Yet he seemed very much at peace with himself. "I'm not going to do anything illegal."