Within a month of Bobby Lee’s arrest, three bodies turned up in the countryside where he spent his teen years, the victims shot to pieces, though nothing thus far tied him to the killings. The coroner put the time of death as approximately two years earlier and the investigation was ongoing. It had been conclusively proved that Crayline was in the area at the time.

But Stone’s kidnapping did the trick: Bobby Lee received a sentence of thirty years in prison and stepped into the big cage three months ago. And there he’d remained until today.

“When’s this procedure supposed to go down?” I asked Dr Wainwright, shaking Bobby Lee Crayline from my thoughts. “The hypnosis.”

“Today at eleven.”

“Grab the reins and stop the session, Doctor,” I said. “Tell the truth: Bobby Lee Crayline is a box that should never be opened.”

“Can you help me convince the lawyers hypnosis is dangerous to their client?”

“You’re giving me too much credit, Doctor. I can’t just—”

“Ask anything. Just please come up here.” It was a plea.

The Institute was west of Montgomery, almost three hours away. I sighed and looked at the anxious eyes of my dog, Mr Mix-up, standing at the doorway with his bowl in his mouth, tail fanning behind. He wanted food and his morning walk.

“I’ll come on one condition, Doc. I can bring my dog.”

“Whatever it takes.”

I hung up and went to my closet; almost empty. I’d been waiting for today to play laundry catch-up. I plucked yesterday’s shirt from the basket to check the aroma index. The shirt got to my nose before my nose got to the shirt. I grabbed from the casual side of the closet: patched jeans and one of Harry’s cast-off shirts, penguins in sunglasses sipping martinis. He’d found it overly conservative. I found it overly large by two sizes, but comfortable. My socks having missed the wash, I went without, jamming my feet into battered running shoes.

I checked the mirror and saw my hair had gotten long again – how does that happen? The man looking back at me resembled a thirty-six-year-old refugee from a Jimmy Buffet concert.

I fed Mr Mix-up, loaded him into my old pickup, painted gray with a roller. I took a deep breath, fired up the engine and raced north toward the Institute, hoping to stop the worst idea I’d heard in a long time.

2

Pulling into the lot at the Institute, I noted two vehicles in visitor parking slots, one a big square Benz, burgundy, looking heavy enough to sink into the asphalt like stone through water, the other a gleaming silver Corvette of recent vintage. The juxtaposition reminded me of a brick beside a stiletto, blunt trauma versus puncture.

Nearby waited a brown van with a cage inside, a prisoner-transport vehicle from Holman Prison. It was early January and the temp was forty-eight degrees, the engine running to keep the heater blasting, native South Alabamians thin-blooded by nine months of what most locales called summer. When it dropped below forty degrees, we crawled into steamy bathtubs and hibernated until the magnolias blossomed.

Two bored-looking guards sat inside the van smoking cigarettes. I trotted over, flashing ID and motioning to roll the window down.

“What you boys here for?” I asked.

The driver, a tight-eyed old gunbull with buck teeth centering fat jowls, pushed back his hat. “We brought Bobby Lee Crayline up from Holman. I ’spect he’ll be back out here soon enough.”

“You know he’s here to be hypnotized?”

The gunbull’s lips curled in a sneer. “Fuckin’ legal bullshit to put him in a cushy mental hospital. Crayline should be hypnotized into thinking he’s a campfire.”

“Why’s that?”

“Then we can shovel dirt over him until he goes out.”

I sprinted back to my truck and opened the door, Mr Mix-up launching out like a torpedo, bounding at my heels, spinning in circles. Mix-up had drawn widely from the canine gene pool, his body thick and heavy in the chest, the hair tightly grained but with fluffy tufts behind his long legs and on his tail. His feet were oven mitts, his head a St Bernard with basset-length ears. His eyes were huge and inquisitive. His powerful, deep-chested body was spotted brown and white and black, the back legs brindled a rusty red. The first time I saw Mix-up I thought him a Dr Seuss character come to life.

“Hey, Detective, what the hell kinda dog is that?” the guard yelled out the window.

“’Bout every kind, I think,” I said.

“An’ probably some horse and ostrich, too,” the guard noted, shaking his head in wonder.

I passed through security and headed to the sign-in clipboard to register. The registration sheet held three signatures, two from a firm named Dunham, Krull and Slezak. The firm was from Memphis, high-powered and low-oriented, defending anyone offering big money or big publicity. Neither category seemed to fit Bobby Lee Crayline, but I’d been wrong before.

“Who’s in this meeting?” I asked Theotis Burns as he walked up. Theotis handled administrative operations of the Institute. He was forty-three, smallish in stature, and wore dark suits that flowed like liquid. Theotis reminded me of the rapper-entrepreneur Puff Daddy or P. Diddy, except P-whatever never worked in a venue with red EMERGENCY buttons spaced along the corridors.

“Dr Wainwright and three men,” Theotis said. “One looks like a guy playing a movie star, got poufy white hair and whiter teeth. He’s wrapped in two-thousand-dollar threads, pure silk. One’s a chubby guy in a blue off-the-rack threads, round glasses, Hush-fucking-Puppies over gray socks. Radiates shrinknicity, gotta be the hypnotist.”

“The third one?”

“A hard-looking guy, big, had to surrender a Glock 17 at the outside gate. Wasn’t happy about it, either.”

“What’s your take, Theo?” I asked, knowing he kept a close ear to the ground.

“You know Bobby Lee Crayline was with us for a couple months two years back, Carson? Just after he killed the guy in the ring?”

I nodded. “Vangie was studying him.”

“Crayline’s got one of those personalities that sucks everything to him. He started getting into people’s heads and causing all sorts of trouble. He was never meant to be a permanent resident. Dr Prowse sent him back to prison. Then the appellate judge set him free.”

“I figured he’d be back in the system,” I said. “Took a couple years and a kidnapping – and maybe a few bodies pulled from the dirt in Alabama – but here he is.”

“Doc Prowse thought a lot about hypnotizing Bobby Lee when he was here, Carson, but decided against it. She ever tell you why?”

I nodded. “Vangie was afraid he’d decompensate. That direct contact with his past might create conditions in which he’d become even more dangerous.”

“He’s barely wrapped as it is.”

“He siphons off the worst impulses by beating the hell out of others, Theo. It’s an escape valve.”

Theotis shook his head and retreated down the hall. I led Mix-up to a small meeting room, tossed a biscuit on the floor. When he was rolling on the biscuit, his curious pre-chow ritual, I closed the door and turned down the hall toward the conference room.

I knocked and stuck my head inside. The room was spare, the lighting indirect, the cool air tinted with false lemon. Two men were at the table, one resembling country singer Porter Wagoner, hound-dog features beneath a white pompadour. He had a booth-built tan and looked in his late fifties. Theo was right about the threads: Where Wagoner would have worn ten pounds of sequins, this guy was tucked inside three thousand bucks’ worth of sedate gray silk.

Beside Pomp’n’tan was a tall and broad-shouldered guy in his mid-thirties. His eyes were deep-set and dark and when added to his thick eyebrows suggested a Neanderthal on steroids. His black suit was cut large, allowing easy access to the Glock he’d had to surrender.