A Cruel Season for Dying (58 page)

Michael Darius parked his car in one of the spots reserved for visitors and walked up the paved drive to the entrance. The
evening was
still hot, and he could hear the splishing sound of an underground sprinkler system at work. Mueller was on the desk, and
he flashed him his identification. Merely a formality now, but still a necessary ritual in these kinds of facilities.

The building had undergone extensive renovations the past few months, and a bank of new elevators had been installed. He entered
a car, pressing the button for the top floor, watching the lighted digits pop one after another, waiting for the freeze-flash
of his number. The car glided to a stop and the doors sucked open.

Along with the new elevators, all the interior walls in the building had been resurfaced and painted a matte institutional
white. The floors had been retiled, and glass and stainless surveillance cages had been constructed on each floor as part
of the overall face-lift. He moved up to the cage now. Hodges rose to his feet.

It was a fairly short walk down the hall. There were only twelve rooms on this floor, and at present only three were occupied.
Hodges walked ahead, aiming toward the last room on the left. When he stopped, he glanced momentarily through the small window
cut into the steel door. Then he turned and gave him the go-ahead nod. Michael stepped up and looked inside.

Only Lovett’s eyes remained alive now, and only when they rested on him, his one regular visitor from the outside. And then
they were the eyes of a child, or an animal, who wants to understand why it has been so betrayed.

Severe withdrawal, Willie called it, a not unusual outcome in a subject whose psychosis was as deep-seated as Adrian Lovett’s.
The surprise, she’d said, was the degree to which he had functioned normally outside the parameters of his delusion. An atypical
paranoid psychosis was her diagnosis. And with no violent episodes prior to the head injury he’d received in the automobile
accident, it was a condition that might have been at least partly explained by damage to his brain.

Willie’s expert assessment made a lot of sense. Michael accepted it all. Except in his dreams, when once again he pushed against
the barrier toward the light, and in one slow instant between heartbeats, he remembered what it had meant to be Lucifer,
who wore them all as a garment, transcending all in knowledge and in glory.