Praying for Sleep

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 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