“Find!” Heck yelled. “Find, Emil!”

The three dogs started shivering and prancing, skittering in circles, noses to the ground. They snorted as they sucked in dust and sour fumes from gasoline or grease and picked out the invisible molecules of one man’s odor from a million others.

“Find, find!”

The hound took the lead, straining the line, pulling Heck after him. The other dogs followed. Fennel was a big man but he was being dragged along by two frantic sixty-pound Labradors and he trotted awkwardly beside Heck, who himself struggled to keep up the pace. Soon both men were gasping for breath.

The bitches’ noses dropped to the ground sporadically in almost the identical spots on the asphalt of Route 236. They were step-tracking, inhaling at each place Hrubek had put a foot on the ground. Emil tracked differently; he’d scent for a few seconds then raise his head slightly and keep it off the ground for a ways. This was line-tracking, the practice of experienced tracking dogs; continually sniffing on a step-track could exhaust an animal in a couple of hours.

Suddenly Emil veered off the road, south, and started into a field of tall grass and brush, filled with plenty of cover even for a man as large as Hrubek.

“Oh, brother,” Heck muttered, surveying the murky heath into which his dog plunged. “Taking the scenic route. Here we go.”

Fennel called to the Boy and the other trooper, “Follow along the road. I’ll call on the squawker, we need you. And if I call, bring the scattergun.”

“He’s real big,” the coroner’s attendant shouted. “I mean, no fooling.”

Kohler pulled his BMW out of the Marsden state hospital parking lot and turned onto the long access road that would take him to Route 236. He waved a friendly greeting to a security guard, who was walking quickly toward an alarm bell ringing jarringly in the lot. The guard did not respond.

Although Kohler was a physician and could write prescriptions for any drug that was legally available, Adler had instituted a rule that no controlled substances-narcotics, sedatives, anesthetics-could be dispensed in greater than single-dose quantities without his or Grimes’s approval. This edict was issued after a young resident at Marsden was caught supplementing his income by selling Xanax, Miltown and Librium to local high-school students. Kohler had no time to try to bluff his way past the hospital’s night pharmacist and found the steel bumper of a German car a much more efficient means than paperwork to requisition what he needed.

As he approached the highway he pulled the car to a stop and examined the fruits of his theft. The hypodermic syringe was unlike most that you’d find in a doctor’s office or hospital. It was large, an inch in diameter and five inches long, made of stainless steel around a heavy glass reservoir. The needle mounted to it, protected by a clear plastic guard, was two inches long and unusually thick. Although no one admitted it, least of all the manufacturer, this was actually a livestock syringe. To M.D.s, however, it was marketed as a “heavy-duty model intended for use on patients in agitation-oriented situations.”

Sitting beside the instrument were two large bottles of Innovar, a general anesthetic Kohler’d picked because of its effectiveness when injected into muscle tissue-unlike most such drugs, which must be injected into the bloodstream. Familiar primarily with psychiatric drugs, Kohler knew little about Innovar other than the prescribed dosages per kilo of body weight and its contraindications. He knew too that he had enough drug to kill several human beings.

One thing he didn’t know for certain but that he figured was probably accurate was that by stealing a Class II controlled substance he’d just committed a felony.

Kohler slipped the bottles and the syringe into the rust-colored backpack he carried in lieu of a briefcase then opened a small white envelope. As a bonus he’d also stolen several chlorphentermine capsules, two of which he now popped into his mouth. The doctor put the car in gear and eased forward, hoping that the diet pills would kick in soon and that when they did they’d have the desired effect. Kohler rarely took medicine of any kind and his system sometimes responded in unexpected ways-it was possible that the amphetaminelike drug would paradoxically make him drowsy. Richard Kohler prayed that this didn’t happen. Tonight, he desperately needed his thoughts clear.

Tonight, he needed an edge.

An agitation-oriented situation indeed.

As he sped out onto Route 236, looking about him in the dark night, Kohler felt overwhelmed and helpless. He wondered if, despite their antagonisms, he should simply have leveled with Adler and enlisted the man’s aid. After all, the hospital director too was trying desperately to conceal Michael’s escape and to find him as quietly as possible; for once, the two medicos shared a common goal-though their motives were very different. But Kohler decided this would be a foolish, a disastrous thing to do, and might jeopardize Kohler’s position at Marsden, perhaps even his career itself. Oh, some of Kohler’s concern was perhaps paranoia-a junior version of what Michael Hrubek lived with daily. Yet there was a significant difference between Kohler and his patient: Michael was classified a paranoid because he acted as if enemies sought his darkest secrets while in fact his enemies and secrets were imaginary.

In his own case, Kohler reflected as his car accelerated to eighty, they were quite real.

Like a quarter horse cutting cattle from a herd, Emil would wheel and swerve, crossing back and forth through brush or over scrub grass until he picked up the scent once more.

The dog found the spot where Hrubek had tangled with the orderlies then returned to the road. Now, he leapt off the asphalt again and charged back into the brush, the Labradors following his lead.

The searchers trotted through this field for a few minutes, heading generally east, away from the hospital, and parallel to Route 236.

At one point as they were making their way through tall, whispering grass, Heck jerked the lead and growled, “Sit!” Emil stopped abruptly. Heck felt him shivering with excitement as if the track line were an electric wire. “Down!” Reluctantly the dog went horizontal. The bitches wouldn’t respond to Charlie Fennel’s similar command; they kept tugging at their lines. He pulled them back once or twice and shouted several times for them to sit but they wouldn’t. Wishing that Fennel, as well as the dogs, would keep quiet, Heck managed to ignore this bad discipline and strode ahead, playing a long black flashlight over the ground.

“Lookit what I turned up,” Heck said. He shone the light on a fresh bare footprint in the earth.

“God double damn,” Fennel whispered. “That’s size thirteen, if it’s an inch.”

“Well, we know he’s big.” Heck touched the deep indentation made by the ball of a huge foot. “What I’m saying is, he’s sprinting.”

“Sure, he’s running. You’re right. That Dr. Adler at the hospital said he’d just be wandering around in a daze.”

“He’s in some damn big hurry. Moving like there’s no tomorrow. Come on, we’ve got a lot of time to make up for. Find, Emil! Find!”

Fennel started the other dogs on the trail, following the footprints, and they ran ahead. But curiously Emil didn’t take the lead. He rose on his muscular legs but stayed put. His nose went into the air and he flared his nostrils, swiveling his head from side to side.

“Come on,” Fennel called.

Heck was silent. He watched Emil gazing right to left and back once more. The hound turned due south and lifted his head. Heck called to Fennel, “Hold up. Shut your light out.”

“What?”