It was 7:15 a.m. when Elizabeth came down the stairs into the kitchen and paused in surprise when she saw her sister standing behind the kitchen island. "Good morning?"

With a smile, Katherine turned to the detective and pushed a steaming cup of coffee toward her across the kitchen island. "Good morning."

Elizabeth's eyebrows drew together as she eyed her seemingly good-humored sister suspiciously. "I ... don't want to know about your sex last night," she said suddenly.

Katherine paused, pulling the corners of her mouth down as she looked into her cup. "Too bad, I thought we would discuss everything in detail. Like Nick --"

"Stop," Elizabeth said with a chuckle, taking a sip of the hot brew after she was sure she was true to the fact with her joking assumption that Katherine had slept with Nick last night. However, she also knew that the psychiatrist was not prone to sharing details of her sex life with her or other family members. Quite the opposite, in fact, of the beginning of Katherine's adult life. But often, the current doctor talked about it mainly with Elizabeth since she was still inexperienced and was afraid that Jane or even Maura would freak out if they learned that Katherine was no longer interested in making out on the couch with her school crush. In a way, at the time, Elizabeth had done the talk with her little sister, including the advice that it would be better for Katherine to turn to their mothers on the matter since they were older and more experienced. They would also make an appointment with a gynecologist after the storm had passed. After all, she had to get through this time before Katherine did.

Katherine grinned widely and took a deep breath. "Did you actually accuse Nick of cheating on me with hookers?"

Elizabeth rolled her eyes and took a sip from her cup. "Oh, wow, you guys are talking."

Katherine wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, we don't just have sex with each other."

Elizabeth made a face, and her sister laughed. "I don't know where I got that idea. Maybe because it seemed a little like he was flirting with Viola, and no matter what corner we shine a light on in this case, women everywhere seem to be selling themselves for money instead of working a regular job."

"And because Nick and I are going through a tough time right now, it seemed to make sense that he would turn to prostitutes."

The detective took a deep breath and slumped her shoulders. "For some reason, it was obvious to me at that moment. And for some reason, I blocked out the fact that he had been with Vice and the Sex Crimes Unit before Homicide."

Katherine nodded slowly and looked at her sister in depth with a smile. "Nick is a good man, Liz."

"I know he is," Elizabeth replied, smiling. "If I didn't, I would have made his life a living hell by now."

Katherine laughed out loud and looked at her cell phone after it vibrated. "Bonnie's ranch!"

Elizabeth furrowed her brows. "Galloway?"

The psychiatrist nodded slowly. "Looks like it. I'd better call Claire." After a few seconds, she ended the call. "You'd better get changed. We have an appointment."

"The nameless junkie?"

The doctor raised her eyebrows and nodded. "The one who just woke up."

xxx

"Let's go see Jack Seward, then," Katherine said after getting behind the wheel of her red Audi and buckling up.

Elizabeth did the same but made a face since she was the passenger this time. She hated not being in control of a car. "Jack Seward?"

"John 'Jack' Seward is the mad doctor in Bram Stroker's Dracula." Katherine grinned to herself. "He has one of the book's most modern asylums in London. One of his most interesting patients is Renfield, a man who is completely insane, eats flies and is always waiting for his master to return."

"And the master is very likely Dracula?" Elizabeth hadn't read the classic but had seen the movie starring Gary Oldman, Keanu Reeves, and Anthony Hopkins a seeming eternity ago.

"Yes. And he has his Carfax Abbey estate very close to Seward's asylum, too." Katherine looked in the rearview mirror and changed lanes.

"What would Galloway think of the comparison?"

"Oh, it's well known to Claire," Katherine replied. "She gave a guest lecture on vampirism in the mentally illness back when I was in medical school. After all, the good Professor Galloway is a few days older. She even has a quote from Bram Stoker's Dracula framed in her office, supposedly a printout of the second edition signed by Bram Stroker himself."

Elizabeth looked at her sister and quirked her eyebrows. "I didn't even notice. "Pay attention to it later," the doctor replied. "Or I'll show you. Oh ha, and then Galloway wrote her post-doctoral thesis on Vincent Verzeni."

Elizabeth nodded slowly. "Uh-huh, and who was that again? Certainly not a UNICEF ambassador?"

"Certainly not," Katherine replied with a slight frown. "He was a serial killer in Italy. Lived in the 19th century. He drained women of their blood while they were still alive. Galloway has traveled to all the Italian cities where this guy went on the rampage. Padua, Mantua, Florence." She looked at the detective. "Hardly anybody knows about that case anymore. It's not even on Google or Wikipedia. And what isn't there doesn't exist these days." After a while, they saw the neoclassical facade of Bonnie's ranch again. "In the 17th century, Bonnie's Ranch was also called Rudolf Virchow, after a city councilman. He analyzed acutely ill lunatics at that time. So Bonnies Ranch was also called at that time, according to the spirit of the times, politically incorrect: Lunatic asylum and idiot hospital. The doctors were the lunatic experts."

"A lot happened in the eighteenth century in terms of medicine and justice, didn't it?"

Katherine nodded slowly. "Indeed. The 17th and 18th centuries had been the turning points. The medieval torture and martyrdom days of pillories, wheels, and stakes were over. The body was no longer the main target of punishment. On the contrary, justice freed itself from the discomfort of having to punish at all by burying punishment in bureaucracy. Even in the death penalty case, the condemned had to be accompanied by a doctor. It was no longer a matter of publicly killing those dangerous to society. The point of this turning point in the 17th and 18th centuries was to reform and treat these people. Even if, for the inmates, eternal vegetation in a padded cell was perhaps no better than a quick death. But that was the spirit of the times. And that's still the way it is today. The torture of the body was followed by the torture of the mind."

"And Bonnie's Ranch --"

"... is an impressive manifestation of this thinking. Then as now."

Again, the two passed through the gate.

xxx

They first met Claire Galloway in her office. Elizabeth also noticed the large picture frame in which a printed and signed page was carefully framed. It was actually a passage from Bram Stroker's Dracula. It described the scene in which Dr. Seward talked to his patient Renfield.

"How is he?" the detective asked.

Galloway took a deep breath. "You better ask how we're doing."

"Has he been causing trouble?" wanted to know Katherine with furrowed brows.

Galloway looked at her former student and also frowned. "He immediately started rioting in his room. We then restrained him and put him under sedation. Not so much that he went back to sleep, though."

Elizabeth furrowed her brows. "So we can see him?"

Galloway nodded slowly. "We can get to him in a minute. But don't expect too much."

The sisters exchanged a look.

"So nothing substantive came out?"

Galloway pinched her lips together. "Hardly. Unless you've got some inside info waiting for just the right set piece that this patient then happens to spit out. But probably nothing will come. Because I'm guessing he didn't throw in something a while back that doesn't fall under the typical drugs we usually deal with."

Katherine exhaled loudly. "You mean beyond LSD, magic mushrooms, and meth?"

Galloway's voice lowered. "I mean Blubbr."

Katherine's eyebrows drew together. "Heard of it."

The term meant nothing to Elizabeth, however. It sounded like a brand of bubble gum to her, but she was sure Galloway meant no such thing.

"B L U B R?" spelled Katherine.

"Right." Galloway nodded again. "Can't find it on Google. And that's probably how it's supposed to be. Nastiest stuff. I don't know how it gets here. It's usually cooked up in Africa. Some say refugees bring it to the U.S. as body packers." She closed her desk drawer and put the key in her white doctor's coat pocket. "Gets child soldiers in the Ivory Coast and Liberia. Or Sierra Leone, Congo, Somalia. They forget everything. Become killing machines. Kill even their own parents. And when the effect wears off, they don't see what they've done until it's over."

"And then --" Elizabeth began but already guessed what came next.

"Do they kill themselves. Because, of course, they can't handle what they've done." Galloway pressed her lips together again. "Blubbr makes suicide bombers out of normal people. And that's without hate preachers, ISIS tweets, or home office radicalization."

"And get that our junkie too?"

Galloway shrugged. "I don't know. But he's acting very ... strange."