Praying for Sleep (31 page)

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 lay people 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 mid-twenties 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.

This was his life for the years following his expulsion from college — living at home, going on his mad sorties, dunking toys, eating junk food, reading history, watching television.

It was around his twenty-fifth birthday, in April, that Michael withdrew into his room and stopped talking to anyone. One month later he tried to burn down the house to stop the voices that came from his mother's bedroom. The following Saturday Hrubek senior dressed his son in an ill-fitting suit and took him, along with three books, a change of underwear and a toothbrush, to a state mental hospital in New York. He lied about state residency, and had the boy admitted to the facility under an involuntary-commitment order intended to last for seventy-two hours.

His father hugged Michael and told him the hospital would stabilize his condition and make him well enough to live at home. "I'll have to think about that," a frowning Michael responded, not knowing that those would be the last words ever spoken between father and son.

Upon his return to Westbury, the depleted man sold the house at a loss and moved to the Midwest, where his family had come from years before.

After six weeks the hospital's Third-Party Payments Section gave up trying to track down his father, and Michael became a guest of the state.

This hospital was bleak — an institutional desert, where the long hours were broken only by Pill Time and Meal Time and Shock Time. At this point in his illness, however, Michael was more evasive than aggressive and didn't need electroconvulsive-shock treatment. His pills calmed him down and he spent the days sitting placidly in his room until his butt grew sore then he'd stand and stare out the windows barred by wire lattice that dangled with tiny streamers of greasy dust.

Once a week he would talk to a doctor.

"You have to take your meds... Are you taking them? Good. You see, we're aiming to get you to the point where you're aware, I'm speaking of a conscious awareness, that your concerns are a function of your illness not of the reality around you..."

Michael would grunt disagreeably and remind himself to keep a suspicious eye on the fellow.

After six weeks in the hospital Michael Hrubek was diagnosed as mildly schizophrenic, nonviolent, possibly paranoid, and was among eighty-seven similar patients released when the hospital closed one of its wings due to budget cutbacks.

Because Third-Party Payments had never informed Discharge that the location of Michael's father was unknown, the release notice was sent to a fictitious address in Valhalla, New York. On the day Michael was discharged an orderly parked him on a bench in the waiting room and told him to wait for a family member to pick him up. Four hours later Michael told the duty nurse that he was going to say goodbye to one of the groundskeepers. Instead, he wandered unchallenged through the front gate — thus beginning a lengthy and harrowing journey that would lead him to cities throughout the Eastern Seaboard, to hospitals of varying degrees of renown and infamy, to idyllic Trevor Hill Psychiatric and his beloved and betraying Dr. Anne, to the snakepit of Cooperstown, to the deaths at Indian Leap, to Marsden State Mental Health Facility, to Dr. Richard... and finally — after so many miles and so very many lifetimes — to the astonishing place in which Michael found himself tonight: the driver's seat of a black, thirty-year-old Cadillac Coupe de Ville, speeding not toward Boyleston at all, but straight down Route 236 west to Ridgeton, which was now less than twenty miles away. As he drove, musical words flew from his lips:

"Cadillac, hard tack... Hard tack, horseback... Soldier boys, gray and blue..."

His hands left a residue of sweat on the white steering wheel and he kept repeating to himself which pedal was the accelerator and which was the brake. He'd sometimes find himself easing over the center line and in panic forget which lane he was supposed to be in. Then, remembering, he'd forget how to steer back into the proper lane and would drive English-style for some distance before gradually returning to the right.

On and on he drove, a steady forty miles an hour in a fifty-five zone. He swallowed and moaned often and muttered to himself, and he wanted nothing so much as to fall onto the smooth plain of the upholstered seat, cover his head and fall fast asleep. But he didn't. No, Michael remained as upright as a soldier on guard duty, looking straight into the darkness where the guns of his enemy waited.

His eyes left the asphalt only once, to glance at the sign that said, RIDGETON 17 MILES, then returned to the highway. With pleasure he inhaled the sweet smell of the heater that blasted air into his face. The memories he'd had this November evening, Michael thought with a burst of rare perception, had traveled as far as he had. And he thought now about an afternoon long ago, sitting in the library of one of his hospitals, singing a song that he himself had written. He recalled that he'd sung it over and over until the librarian asked him to stop and then he sang it in his head, silently mouthing the words.