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tightened around Lyssy’s shoulders. He shrugged out from under it, crossed over to the small window, and put his nose against the glass so he could make out the arboretum through the steel mesh.
    Not surprisingly, this little pocket park with its bright ground flowers and dramatic contrasts of light and shade had become Lyssy’s favorite place in his admittedly circumscribed world. Here he had practiced walking hour after hour, rain or shine—he’d have worn his stump raw if they’d have let him—until by now he knew every flower, bird, and squirrel, every meander of the gravel path, every sharp-scented, rough-barked pine, every board of the Japanese footbridge, and every stone in the cement-banked brook as well as he knew his own room. “How long do I have?” he asked eventually.
    “Hard to say,” replied Corder. “I spoke to O’Hare this morning.” F. Frank O’Hare, slick, expensive, and media-savvy, was Lyssy’s defense attorney. “He says they’ll probably issue an arrest warrant in Umpqua County as soon as Dr. Trotman turns in her report. If she finds you competent to stand trial, of course, but nobody realistically sees her going any other way.
    “Once that happens, some officers will arrive here to take you into custody and drive you down to Umpqua City. You’ll be held in the county jail before and during the trial. O’Hare says they’ll probably be housing you in a private cell, so that’s, ah, something, anyway.”
    “If you’re trying to cheer me up, Dr. Al, that’s just not going to cut it.”
    “Now don’t give up hope yet,” said Corder, partly to alleviate his own sense of guilt—on some level he must have known that he’d only been fattening the calf for slaughter these last few years. “O’Hare and his team are preparing a vigorous psychiatric defense—he thinks you stand an excellent chance of avoiding the death penalty.”
    “At least in Oregon.” Lyssy understood perfectly well that if he didn’t get the death penalty here, they’d ship him down to California to try him for however many murders he was supposed to have committed there.
    “If you’d like, I could give you some medication to help you deal with any anxiety you might be experiencing.” Corder glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, Lyss, I have a new patient to meet. It’s almost lunchtime—do you want me to get you a psych tech to escort you down to the dining hall?”
    “I’m not very hungry,” said Lyssy through clenched teeth.
    “I understand. Look, Lyssy, it’s okay to be upset. This is a lousy rotten deal you’re getting, it’s okay to be upset about it.”
    But it wasn’t, thought Lyssy. Not for him. Because the more upset he got, the louder the muttering in the dark place. By now it was already loud enough that he could almost make out the words—and whoever it was in there, he didn’t sound happy.

CHAPTER TWO

    1

    “Basically, you had this couple living way the hell and gone on a ridgetop in Oregon,” explained retired FBI Special Agent E. L. Pender, sitting in the copilot seat of the air ambulance transporting himself, Dr. Cogan, and her sedated patient from Redding to Portland. The pilot, recognizing Pender from the book tour he’d taken to promote his ghostwritten autobiography a few years ago, had invited him up to the cockpit for a chat; as happened more often than not, the conversation had turned to the most notorious case of Pender’s career. “Maxwell, he was so crazy he thought he was ten different people, and his foster mother/lover/accomplice, she was so crazy she made him look sane.
    “Only in her case she had a pretty good excuse. The bad news was, about half the skin on her body had been burned off—the worse news was, it was the front half. A real horror show—not much face left to speak of, and no more hair than yours truly.”
    Pender lifted his brown Basque beret and rubbed a hand the size of an oven mitt across the barren expanse of his scalp by way of