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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 passages 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 assault. Fined for discharge of a firearm in his apartment. Some property damage, as well. Arrested last year for demolishing a BMW with a length of pipe; charges dropped due to lack of evidence. Arrested three years ago for breaking four glass 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, pronounce 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 god 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.
    God 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