Praying for Sleep

the small skull. He rubbed it compulsively in his hands.
    “So,” Heck continued, “I think I gotta turn down your offer.”
    Kohler stared at the night sky for a moment then turned to Heck. “Just do me a favor. If you find him, don’t threaten him. Don’t chase him. And whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t sic that dog on him.”
    “I’m not looking at this,” Heck said coolly, “like a fox hunt.”
    Kohler handed him a card. “That’s my service. You get close to him, call that number. They’ll page me. I’d really appreciate it.”
    “If I can, I will,” Heck said. “That’s the best I can say.”
    Kohler nodded and looked around, orienting himself. “That’s 236 down there?”
    “Yessir,” Trenton Heck said, then leaned against the fender of the car and—with a slight laugh—watched the peculiar sight of this narrow man in a suit and tie, muddy as a ditchdigger, sporting a fine-looking overcoat and a backpack as he strolled down this deserted country road late on a stormy night.
     
    Dr. Ronald Adler’s eyes coursed up and down the Marsden County map. “Made it all the way to the state border. Who’d’ve thought?” He added with neither elation nor interest, “The Massachusetts Highway Patrol should have him within an hour or so. I want a worst-case plan.”
    “Are you talking about the reward?” Peter Grimes asked.
    “Reward?” the director snapped.
    “Uhm. What do you mean by worst-case?”
    Adler seemed to know exactly but didn’t speak for a moment, perhaps out of some vestigial superstition that medical training had not wholly obliterated. “If he kills a trooper when they find him. Or kills anybody else for that matter. That’s what I mean.”
    “Okay, that’s possible, I suppose,” Grimes offered. “Unlikely.”
    Adler turned his attention back to the E Ward supervisor’s reports. “Is all this accurate?”
    “Absolutely. I’m sure.”
    “Hrubek was in the Milieu Suite? Kohler was doing individual psychoanalysis with him? This delusion therapy he’s always boring people with?”
    And publishing about in the best professional journals, Grimes reflected. He said, “So it appears.”
    “NIMH guidelines. We all know them. The criteria for individual psychotherapy in schizophrenic patients are that they be young, intelligent, have a past history of achievement. And are more acute than chronic . . . Oh, and that they have some success in a sexual relationship. That’s hardly Michael Hrubek.”
    The assistant came a half breath away from saying, Not unless you call rape a successful relationship. He wondered if Adler would have fired him or laughed.
    “A history like his”—Adler riffled pages—“and still Kohler puts him in therapy. One way you could view it is that Kohler was more than negligent in this whole matter. Let’s just take that tack for a minute, shall we? Is that door open? My door there. Close it, why don’t you?”
    Grimes did, while Adler flipped through one doctor’s assessment of Hrubek, in which was recorded the patient’s plans to remove this therapist’s internal organs with a single bare hand—a process that Hrubek described articulately and, all things considered, with an impressive knowledge of human anatomy.
    When Grimes dropped again into his chair, Adler had snapped closed the file and was gazing at the ceiling. His hand dipped into his crotch, where he adjusted something. He said, “You realize what Herr Dr. Kohler has done?”
    “He—”
    “Do you know the case of Burton Scott Webley? Burton Scott Webley the Third. Or Fourth. I don’t recall. Do you know about him? Do they teach you such arcane things in . . . Where did you go to school?”
    “Columbia, sir. I’m not familiar with the case, no.”
    “Co-lum-bi-a,” Adler stretched the four syllables out with elastic disdain. “Webley the Third or Fourth. He was a patient in New York. I don’t know. Creedmoor perhaps. Or Pilgrim State. Don’t let’s quibble. No, wait. It was private. Top doctors, like our friend, Sigmund Kohler. Cum laude sort of doctors. Co-lum-bi-a sort of doctors.”
    “Got it.”
    “You see, Kohler has this idea that our mental hospitals are chockablock with van Goghs. Poets and artists. Misunderstood geniuses, vision and madness locked together—the beast with two backs.” When he noticed Grimes staring at him blankly, Adler continued, “Webley was a paranoid schizophrenic. Delusional. Monosymptomatic. Twenty-eight years of