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.
âR-rrrrrr.â
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.
âCarson Ryder,â 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 Mexicoâs waves slapped the shore a hundred paces distant.
âDetective Ryder, itâs Nancy Wainwright at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior. I need your help.â
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.
âWhat can I do for you, Doctor?â
âBobby Lee Craylineâs here at the Institute.â
I rubbed sleep from my eyes. âAgain? Why?â
âHeâs going to be hypnotized.â
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. âBobby Lee Crayline?â I knew my heart was fully awake. I could feel it pounding. âWhoâs doing this?â
âCraylineâs legal team wants to regress Bobby Lee.â
âRegressing Crayline could blow him off his hinges,â I said. âVangie told me Crayline was the tip of the one iceberg that she never wanted to see beneath the surface.â
Vangie was Dr Evangeline Prowse, psychiatrist, the former head of the Institute, which housed and studied the countryâs most dangerous psychopaths and sociopaths. Sheâd been murdered in Manhattan two years ago, the circumstances strange and sad. Nancy Wainwright had been installed as the Instituteâs full-time director some months back. I barely knew her.
âYou interviewed Bobby Lee in prison, right, Detective?â Wainwright continued. âSince you have a history with him, I thought maybe you could stop the procedure.â
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 Prisonâs 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. Iâd gone home after the unsettling interview and washed my clothes. Twice.
âCraylineâs legal team wonât listen to me, Doctor,â I explained. âItâs not much of a history and Iâm just a homicide dick from Mobile.â
âYouâre in that special unit. That has to count for something.â
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.
âI doubt that will sway anyone,â I said. âEven given Bobby Leeâs obvious psychological damage.â
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 heâd beaten two teachers a half-inch shy of death, one teacher today confined to a wheelchair. Though heâd avoided incarceration when it was proven both male teachers â a coach and an assistant â had taunted the sixteen-year-old when he didnât join the football team, Crayline was expelled from school.
Crayline spent the next few years winning amateur âToughest Manâ 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. Iâd once watched three minutes of XFL before retreating from the television, wondering if the species known as