Part 2 (1/2)

A few minutes later Adrienne got up to change into shorts and a T-s.h.i.+rt. They breakfasted on the back patio, grapefruit juice and day-old m.u.f.fins from a favorite bakery. When Sarah returned to her chair in the front room and her book - an autobiographical account of a j.a.panese woman's transition and adjustment to life under the thumb of American culture - Adrienne showered away the last of her night's s.h.i.+ft. Let her at least make a clean break before it all began again at four o'clock this afternoon.

Sarah had left the bedroom blinds down after rising, to keep the sun out, so the room was still cool. The unmade bed sat in a low frame, and Adrienne crawled into it, set the alarm for two-thirty, although she might not need it at all; how one human body could be so tired but not sleepy still made little sense to her.

Staring up then, focusing on the slow hypnotic revolution of the ceiling fan, whirling, whirling, as if to lift the entire room away. Like Dorothy, cast on the winds toward Oz. It beat counting imaginary sheep.

Alone in the bedroom on days like this, sleep could never be too quick in claiming her; days warm outside and cool in, the sun glowing brightly around the edges of the drawn blinds, and filling every crack until it became more than light, it was a luminescent presence trying to a.s.sert itself and intrude.

And did it ever take her back.

Three years and chump change ago, she had been a different Adrienne Rand. In fact, she'd not been Adrienne Rand at all, but Adrienne Wythe, a name now entirely foreign to her. Marriage had been, well ... adequate, certainly. She recalled relis.h.i.+ng the a.s.surance of someone being there to come home to, and in turn to be there for someone else. In that sense her marriage was certainly secure; but then again, so are prisons, so there you are.

Why, with all the training and fieldwork to hone those skills in pinpointing everything wrong with a stranger's life, was her own inner vision confined to hindsight? The paradox of the trade, she supposed. She and Neal never should have married; went through six months joined by love, and the rest by inertia alone. Like a pair of asteroids that never once touch, yet still hurtle through the black voids in tandem, linked by their own peculiar gravity.

In those days even her base of home and career was different. She had been born in San Francisco, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect she would eventually die there, or at least across the bay in Oakland. In the meantime, S.F. General was apt to provide all the therapeutic and research opportunities she could want. She showed a particular flair for handling violent types, and S.F. General indulged her; there was no shortage.

Adrienne had never put much credence in fate. Fate was just a convenient, catchall term for moments of truth when the laws of probability met in random collision, and left people to pick their way through the wreckage. And so it had happened, over a week's time, that the staff of S.F. General fell by the dozens to a nasty strain of summer flu. Long hours, lowered resistance - enter the virus, stage left, and her turn came. Simple cause and effect, but how tempting to believe the universe that day was plotting. Whether to try to crush her in disillusion, or liberate her at last, Adrienne had yet to decide. The universe was funny that way.

No matter. In the long run, she was glad it had happened.

She timed her commute home between bouts of wretched upheaval and pulled into the driveway in time to christen it with bile. Ahead of her was Neal's car, the Nissan sitting there alone - what's wrong with this picture? This time of day? Perhaps he had fallen victim to the same viral prankster, and she decided she'd best enter as quietly as possible. Neal ill was Neal near death, to hear him moan on about it.

As it was, such consideration became quite unwarranted. Once in the house, Adrienne had tiptoed halfway up the stairs to the second floor and the bedroom before her ears conceded the obvious: Neal was not alone.

They had no idea Adrienne was there, apparently no idea she could be there, ever. Their abandon was total, and for at least a full minute Adrienne watched from the hallway. Who the woman was, she didn't know, and even after she had the name days later, it was no one Adrienne had heard of. Healthy, though, and even Neal seemed possessed of a certain robust exuberance that he otherwise lacked in their own bedroom encounters. They were on their knees, the woman lowered to elbows as Neal coupled with her from behind, the both of them golden and glowing in shafts of sunlight that pierced the room through drawn blinds. They looked like an ad for vitamin E.

My bed. That's my bed, Adrienne had thought. Perfectly calm, unG.o.dly calm, every thought and impulse under control. Shouldn't I at least hate them and start screaming?

She left the hall, quietly, and eased down the stairway and back out the front door and stood for a few moments overlooking a lawn so green and smooth a golfer could have used it for putting practice. She disconnected a hundred-foot coil of garden hose from the lawn sprinkler, then reattached the regular nozzle head. Went back in the house, trailing the hose after her like some snake that just kept coming, sliding through the doorway and up the stairs.

Neal and the mystery woman still didn't notice she was there, not until she unleashed the fury of the hose upon them. It was the most humiliating form of coitus interruptus she could devise on the spur of the moment, wetting them down not like husband and mistress, but rather a pair of mongrels rutting on the front lawn.

After that day, she refused to see him without having first consulted a lawyer about it. And whenever, in the ensuing battle over communal property, she was p.r.o.ne to despair with frustration over Neal's own legal firepower, one recollection of him on his side, legs kicking impotently, screeching apologies and clutching his privates from the bruising force of the spray, was usually enough to bring a smile. And perspective...

Still more of which came later when she realized that the whole of northern California had a taint, and might for years to come. Too lush, too hilly, too many secret enclaves in the land itself where she might run to contemplate the changes wrought in her life, only to find she was hiding from herself, as well.

She wanted - needed - a simpler, less cluttered environment for a while. The austerity of the desert beckoned, clean and wind-scoured, like a cleared foundation on which to rebuild. Arizona would do nicely, and if she wasn't yet convinced she wanted to die here, she nevertheless owed this place debts she could never pay.

Here was where she relearned that love need not stifle, nor grow complacent; that pa.s.sion need not grow stale. That you really could link hands and hearts with another, whose life became a precious complement to your own. As long as there was love, there was life, and Arizona was just fine that way.

Sarah was from here, after all, and that counted for much.

The ancient Middle East wasn't the only place where saviors walked in the desert.

Three.

Even in her off-hours, of which there were many that weekend, Adrienne frequently found her thoughts turning to Clay Palmer, and the mysteries buried inside him: poisons in need of draining, psychological boils awaiting the lance.

On Friday, Ferris Mendenhall had okayed the removal of Clay's restraints. Later that day he'd prescribed a regimen of lithium to get Clay stabilized and defuse any aggressive tendencies he might still harbor. He was already on pain medication for his hands, but Mendenhall preferred taking no chances; for someone who liked to use his fists, those casts were tantamount to giving him a pair of bludgeons.

Shortly thereafter the tide of paperwork began.

The name and other information Clay had given her had been verified and his records accessed from two Denver-area hospitals. All dated from the past four years, though along with these came records from Minneapolis, compiled over the several years prior to his relocation to Denver. On Sunday, Adrienne came in to her office an hour early to go through it all, uninterrupted.

Eleven times over the past seven years he had made trips to emergency rooms; st.i.tches in his shoulder, his thigh, his cheek; a few broken bones - ribs alone, three times - and once a dislocated elbow. In Minneapolis he had thrice been brought in for alcohol poisoning. Twice in Denver he had been involuntarily committed for a week of psychological evaluation, then released. Lithium had been prescribed once before, and Carbamazepine another time, in an attempt to combat poor impulse control, but there was no follow-up to see how these affected him, or even if he had taken them on any regular schedule.

One scribbled note caught her attention: Some resistance to Thorazine.

The dry understatement of the weekend.

In his evaluations, Adrienne found brief pa.s.sages of interest: Professes an inability to form close interpersonal attachments yet still speaks with affection of a small number of friends ... reports frequent sleep disturbances, with insomnia and night terrors most common ... exhibits preoccupation with undergoing vasectomy ... spent 5 1/2 hours in apparent self-induced trance this afternoon but emerged with full knowledge of break - schizophrenia not indicated ... body exhibits scars from self-mutilation but all appear to date from patient's teens, with no recent manifestations visible.

Still, the bulk of it was simplistic and cursory and nothing she hadn't already surmised from having spent ten minutes with him the morning after a violent spell.

If only his mind had been treated as thoroughly as his body. Typical.

Since it had required the police to get him to the hospital in the first place, Adrienne also had the local force obtain a transcript of his record from Denver. It was nothing she didn't already expect: primarily a history of petty violent altercations in which he was lucky enough that no one was seriously injured. On three separate occasions he had done a month or two of jail time for misdemeanor a.s.sault. Fined for discharge of a firearm in his apartment. Some property damage, as well. Arrested last year for demolis.h.i.+ng a BMW with a length of pipe; charges dropped due to lack of evidence. Arrested three years ago for breaking four gla.s.s display-case windows in a convenience store; charges dropped because of failure to establish positive ID.

And where there were records, odds were there were incidents never reported.

I didn't finally kill someone, did I? he had asked.

No. He hadn't. But the probability that he was headed in that direction was too likely. One slip of his broken hands the other night, and a jagged shank of exposed bone could easily have opened someone's jugular or carotid.

Prime objective: The last thing she was going to do was repeat the mistakes of her predecessors. It wasn't enough to look over Clay Palmer for a few days, p.r.o.nounce him competent to deal with the outer world, prescribe some pills he may not even bother taking, and send him back into the feeding frenzy of modern society.

She closed the files.

Adrienne tapped a fingernail on her desktop and took a long look at herself, the mirror inside. This growing interest in her mysterious wandering pugilist wasn't merely a therapist's concern, was it? Admit it - the clinician was rising up within her too. Clay Palmer was part of an entire fascinating field ripe for study, something she had long been interested in, if not always actively. Sometimes the field seemed prevalent enough without having to seek it out. She'd grown up within a culture of accelerated war and its glorification, had been educated in a time when a campus rape no longer came as a surprise when announced on the morning news; she now lived in an age when in so many factions it had become socially acceptable sport to beat others half to death because of their ancestry or who they liked to sleep with or what G.o.d they prayed to, or didn't.

She could wallow in statistics and never tire of them. Ninety percent of violent crimes were committed by men. Each Super Bowl Sunday, domestic violence against wives and girlfriends made a leap averaging forty percent. The previous year, twenty-five percent of all deaths of males aged fifteen to twenty-four were by gunshot.

Why? She really wanted to know. Testosterone could shoulder only so much of the blame.

G.o.d bless - in a wholly non-denominational way - every woman who actively crusaded in opposition to violence against other women; but too many took such statistics and hammered them into a license to condemn all things male. It couldn't be that simple. Their outrage was understandable, but nothing was ever understood that way, much less resolved.

If she was seen as sympathizing with the enemy, so be it. Not every blow, regardless of the recipient's gender, was struck out of purely evil intent. She had observed too many perpetrators of violence an hour or two after the act, shedding genuine tears of anguish and resembling nothing so much as little boys, bewildered at what their growing bodies had been capable of.

Sometimes they hurt, too, these bringers of pain. They deserved to pay for their acts, yes, but how much better for everyone if they lived in a culture in which they were better able to understand such destructive impulses in the first place, and learn to master them. Preventative medicine - no crime, no victim.

Adrienne had to wonder if her renewed fascination with violence in men didn't coincide with the dissolution of her marriage and the subsequent lapsing - for the time being, at least - of the hetero side of her s.e.xuality. Since she had initiated divorce proceedings against Neal, she had gone to bed with only one other man, a dreadful one-night stand born as much of wine as of desire. Since moving to Tempe, and with Sarah's eventual entrance into the picture two and a half years ago, she'd not even had any real impulse to make it with another man.

Was she sufficiently distanced from intimacy with men that now they had a.s.sumed the fascinating aura of creatures to be studied? Perhaps so. Live in a rain forest, and you take it for granted; live in a city, and that forest exudes a powerful allure to the explorer of terra incognita.

And for some explorers, there is no territory so enticing as that which can kill them.