R-rrrrrr.
R-rrrrrr.
I felt the phone before I heard it, a rusty saw rasping over my forehead, trying to rip an opening into my subconscious.
R-rrrrrr.
My eyes opened to slats of maple flooring. Chair legs. A crumpled sock. I was on the floor, head in the living room, feet in the bedroom.
“R-rrrrrr.”
Behind me I saw blanket and sheet following like a tangled umbilicus. I had tried to crawl from my dreams again. I rolled to the phone on the bedside table before the saw took another cut.
“Carson Ryder,” I mumbled, cross-legged on the floor and leaning against the bed. The clock showed 7.25 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Outside, gulls keened above my beachside home as the Gulf of Mexico’s waves slapped the shore a hundred paces distant.
“Detective Ryder, it’s Nancy Wainwright at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior. I need your help.”
I stifled a yawn as my mental Rolodex presented an image of a slender, fiftyish woman with long brown hair and penetrating, intelligent eyes behind round glasses.
“What can I do for you, Doctor?”
“Bobby Lee Crayline’s here at the Institute.”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes. “Again? Why?”
“He’s going to be hypnotized.”
It took a five-count for the words to materialize into a grammatical pattern and snap me bolt-upright with the phone tight to my ear. “Bobby Lee Crayline?” I knew my heart was fully awake. I could feel it pounding. “Who’s doing this?”
“Crayline’s legal team wants to regress Bobby Lee.”
“Regressing Crayline could blow him off his hinges,” I said. “Vangie told me Crayline was the tip of the one iceberg that she never wanted to see beneath the surface.”
Vangie was Dr Evangeline Prowse, psychiatrist, the former head of the Institute, which housed and studied the country’s most dangerous psychopaths and sociopaths. She’d been murdered in Manhattan two years ago, the circumstances strange and sad. Nancy Wainwright had been installed as the Institute’s full-time director some months back. I barely knew her.
“You interviewed Bobby Lee in prison, right, Detective?” Wainwright continued. “Since you have a history with him, I thought maybe you could stop the procedure.”
Another mental Rolodex spun, one hidden in a far corner of my skull, and I saw Bobby Lee Crayline, his green reptilian eyes studying me the moment I entered Holman Prison’s visitation room. I saw his flattened nose and his scarred hands on the far side of the Plexiglas divider, hands skittering over the counter like restless tarantulas. I smelled the stink pouring like gasoline fumes from his jittering, tattoo-smeared body. I’d gone home after the unsettling interview and washed my clothes. Twice.
“Crayline’s legal team won’t listen to me, Doctor,” I explained. “It’s not much of a history and I’m just a homicide dick from Mobile.”
“You’re in that special unit. That has to count for something.”
She was referring to PSIT, the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team. The team was me and my partner, Harry Nautilus. Few outside the Mobile PD even knew of the existence of the unit called Piss-it by everyone but Harry and me.
“I doubt that will sway anyone,” I said. “Even given Bobby Lee’s obvious psychological damage.”
Bobby Lee Crayline had been arrested seven months ago, at the age of twenty-eight, after his strange abduction of a colleague. His path had always led him in a disturbing direction, a history of breathless violence, starting in high school when he’d beaten two teachers a half-inch shy of death, one teacher today confined to a wheelchair. Though he’d avoided incarceration when it was proven both male teachers – a coach and an assistant – had taunted the sixteen-year-old when he didn’t join the football team, Crayline was expelled from school.
Crayline spent the next few years winning amateur “Toughest Man” competitions, often dragged from atop opponents after the round ended. His reputation for crowd-pleasing megaviolence bought entrée into the XFL, Extreme Fighting League, a made-for-TV motley of pro wrestling, full-contact karate, and bar-room brawling. Two combatants fought in a circular, thirty-foot-diameter cage until one was vanquished, often in a shower of blood and teeth. I’d once watched three minutes of XFL before retreating from the television, wondering if the species known as Homo Sapiens – thinking man – had been hideously misnamed.
Bobby Lee Crayline’s XFL career consisted of twenty-two bouts. He generally wounded his opponents in an early round, then toyed with them for several more, spitting insults and inflicting damage until the victim collapsed. Two opponents quit the league, humiliated. In the most notorious incident, one of Crayline’s opponents died of a brain hemorrhage after the match. Because of the viciousness of Crayline’s attack – he had to be pulled from the fighter after the bell – the incident was ruled manslaughter and Bobby Lee received a six-month prison sentence. I interviewed him the first week he was in prison, part of my ongoing research. He was scary and uncooperative and I spent less than ten minutes in his company, which was fine.
A month into his sentence, a savvy lawyer got Bobby Lee transferred to the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior. He remained there for two months before other legal wranglings