Dark Rivers of the Heart

Stars were beginning to appear in the deep purple of the eastern sky as it curved down to the horizon.
        While Spencer drove the Bronco, Rocky panted in Ellie's ear from the cargo area behind her seat. They found the way overland toward the highway with no difficulty. The route was clearly marked by the tire tracks in the snow that the truck had made on its trip into the picturesque basin.
        "Why'd you tell them we'd call the police?" Spencer wondered.
        "You want them to freeze?"
        "I don't think there's much chance of that."
        "I won't risk it."
        "Yeah, but these days, it's possible-maybe not likely, but possible-that any call you make to a police department is going to be received on a caller-ID line, not just if you punch nine-one-one. Fact is, a smaller city like Grand Junction, with not so much street crime or so many demands on resources, is a lot more likely to have money to spend on fancy communications systems with all the bells and whistles.
        You call them, then they know right away the address you're phoning from. It comes up on the screen in front of the police operator. And then they'll know what direction we went, what road we left Grand Junction on."
        "I know. But we're not going to make it that simple for them," she said, and explained what she had in mind.
        "I like it," he said.
        The Rocky Mountain Prison for the Criminally Insane had been constructed in the Great Depression, under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration, and it looked as solid and formidable as the Rockies themselves. It was a squat, rambling building with small, deep-set, barred windows even in the administration wing. The walls were faced with iron-gray granite. An even darker granite had been used for lintels, window stools, door and window surrounds, coins, and carved cornices. The whole pile slumped under a gabled attic and a black slate roof The general effect, Roy Miro felt, was as depressing as it was ominous.
        Without hyperbole, the structure could be said to brood high upon its hillside, as if it were a living creature. In the late-afternoon shadows of the steep slopes that rose behind the prison, its windows were filled with a sour-yellow light that might have been reflected through connecting corridors from the dungeons of some mountain demon who lived deeper in the Rockies.
        Approaching the prison in the limousine, standing before it, and walking its public corridors to Dr. Palma's office, Roy was overcome with compassion for the poor souls locked away in that heap of stone.
        He grieved as well for the equally suffering warders who, in looking after the deranged, were forced to spend so much of their lives in such circumstances.
        If it had been within his authority to do so, he would have sealed up eve last window and vent, with all the inmates and attendants inside, and put them out of their misery with a gentle-acting but lethal gas.
        Dr. Sabrina Palma's reception lounge and office were so warmly and luxuriously furnished that, by contrast with the building that surrounded them, they seemed to belong not only in another and more exalted place-a New York penthouse, a Palm Beach bayside mansion-but in another age than the 1930s, a time warp in which the rest of the prison seemed still to exist. Sofas and chairs were recognizably by J. Robert Scott, upholstered in platinum and gold silks. Tables and mirror frames and side chairs were also by j. Robert Scott, done in a variety of exotic woods with bold grains, all either bleached or whitewashed.
        The deeply sculpted, beige-on-beige carpet might have been from Edward Fields.
        At the center of the inner office was a massive Monteverde & Young desk, in a crescent-moon shape, that must have cost forty thousand dollars.
        Roy had never seen an office of any public official to equal those two rooms, not even in the highest circles of official Washington. He knew at once what to make of it, and he knew that he had a sword to hold over Dr. Palma if she gave him any resistance.
        Sabrina Palma was the director of the prison medical staff. By virtue of its being as much hospital as prison, she was also the equivalent of a warden in any ordinary correctional facility. And she was as striking as her office. Raven-black hair. Green eyes. Skin as pale and smooth as pooled milk. Early forties, tall, svelte but shapely. She wore a