Praying for Sleep

age. Sound familiar, Grimes? Delusions centered around his family. They were trying to get him, blah, blah, blah. Felt his father and aunt were having an incestuous relationship. Including bouts of televised sodomy. On network TV, if I’m not mistaken. He had a bad episode and threatened the aunt with a pitchfork. Well, he’s involuntarily committed. Insulin-shock therapy is all in vogue and his doctors put him into a hundred seventy comas.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Then the ECS department third-rails him for six months after his blood sugar becomes an embarrassment. With that much amperage, well, he came out of it rather tattered, as you’d suspect.”
    “This was when?”
    “Hardly matters. A little while after they unplugged him, he sees the senior psychiatrist, who does a new diagnostic. Webley is neat and clean and coherent. And very sharp. Astonishing indeed, considering the Smith-Kline cocktails he’s on. He’s polite, he’s responsive, he’s eager to undergo therapy. The doctor schedules the full battery of tests. Webley takes, and passes, all twenty-five of them. A miracle cure. He’ll be written up in the APA Journal. ”
    “I can guess what’s coming.”
    “Oh, can you, Grimes?” Adler fixed him with an amused gaze. “Can you guess that after he was released, he took a taxi to his aunt’s house then raped and dismembered her, looking for the hidden microphone that’d recorded the evidence used to commit him? Can you guess that her fifteen-year-old daughter walked into the house as his little search was in progress and that he did the same to her? Any inkling that the only thing that saved the eight-year-old son was that Webley fell asleep amid the girl’s viscera? You look sufficiently pale, Grimes.
    “But I have to tell you the end of the story. The shocking part: it was all calculated. Webley had an IQ of 146. After he took himself off his brain candy, he snuck into the library and memorized the correct answers to each of those twenty-five tests and, I submit, honed his delivery pretty fucking well.”
    “You think Hrubek did the same thing to Kohler? What this Webley did?”
    “Yes! Of course that’s what I mean! Kohler bought a bill of goods. Lock, stock and barrel. Callaghan’s death, any other deaths tonight—they’re ultimately Kohler’s fault. His fault, Peter.”
    “Sure. Of course.”
    “Tell me, what do you think of him? Of Kohler?”
    “Pompous little shit.”
    Adler was pleased to have someone second this sentiment though it reminded him how much he detested Grimes for being such a toady. “I think there’s more to it. Why is he being so blind? Kohler’s not stupid. Whatever else, he’s not stupid. Why?”
    “I don’t really—”
    “Peter, I’d like you to do something for me.”
    “Look, sir—”
    “Some detective work.” When the otherwise thin Adler dropped his head to look over the top of his glasses he developed an alarming double chin.
    Because it was very late in the evening and he was tired of treading lightly through hospital politics, Peter Grimes chose not to be coy. “I don’t think I’d like to do that.”
    “ ‘Like to do that’?” Adler snapped. “Don’t give me any of your bluster. I want to see fear in your face, young man. You’re not union. If I wanted your fucking balls, I’d have them in an instant and a hell of a lot easier than I could castrate those orderlies. Don’t you forget that. Now are you listening? Some detective work. Write it down if you can’t remember it. Are you ready?” he inquired sarcastically, forgetting for the moment that he was speaking not to an incompetent secretary but to a doctor of medicine.
     
    As man and dog returned to the sports car, Heck grew convinced that Hrubek had hitched a ride or snuck into the back of a repair vehicle that had answered the distress call.
    Hiding in trucks for real this time, is he? Heck wondered. He leaned against the car and shivered slightly as a breeze came up.
    Oh, man, here I give up almost a year’s salary, sounding all grandiose and righteous, and look what happens? I lose the trail completely. What would you’ve done, Jill? Tell me you’d’ve told him to stuff it too.
    But no, Heck knew. Jill would’ve skedaddled home and tucked Kohler’s check in her jewelry box. By now she’d be fast asleep.
    In her pink nightgown.
    Oh, baby . . .
    Then, suddenly, Emil’s nose shot into the air and the dog stiffened. He turned north, toward Route 236, and began to