They would demand their right to execute him properly.
It was all about keeping the confidence of people who voted for security and hard measures and the ability to act.
He turned to Sven Sundkvist, who still hadn’t left the room.
“What do you think?”
Sundkvist pulled a face.
“This job never ceases to surprise me.”
Ewert waited until they were alongside each other and then lowered his voice.
“I need your help.”
“Of course.”
“I want you to take the on-duty doctor at the detention center, whoever that is right now, to one side for a moment and tell him a bit about what we think we know. And I want him to examine Frey. I want to know what kind of state his heart’s in. If it was just part of the escape. Or if he needs due care. And I want you to report to me as soon as you have an answer.”
“I’ll see to it.”
Sven was already on his way down the corridor when Ewert called after him.
“Because we don’t want him to lie down and die in his cell, do we? It might become a habit.”
IT WAS STILL EARLY MORNING IN OHIO, THE WEDNESDAY THAT WAS
already afternoon in Stockholm was about to take form, be lived. Vernon Eriksen had just hung his senior corrections officer uniform in his locker. He had finished his night shift, the last for this rotation, grateful that he would be working days over the weekend.
When he worked nights it was more obvious how life just slipped away.
He wasn’t one for friends really, not one for going out at all; being awake all night and sleeping all day, he was constantly tired and never met anyone from the other reality, the one outside the walls.
He opened the door to the yard and walked toward the main entrance. He had phoned Greenwood and Burk. Neither of them had sounded distressed or frightened. It was as if they had both been waiting as well, had figured that it would happen, and had prepared themselves, maybe it was even a relief when the message finally came, time to stop hoping for one more day, and another after that.
Vernon went out through the gate that was opened by central security and he felt the relief.
Both doctors had known what it was about.
At their meetings, they had rattled off lists of medicines and diagnoses and possible actions, cardiomyopathy and benzodiazepine and haloperidol and Pavulon and morphine derivatives and . . . their hope to temporarily kill a person, to move him from a cell on Death Row to a morgue, to a body bag, to pathology transport, to a car heading north . . . it had worked, it had worked on every point. Afterward, they had stayed on in their posts for a few more months—to resign immediately would have aroused suspicion, but with such a high staff turnover, no one later asked why or how. John had long since been buried when Lawrence Greenwood and Bridget Burk handed in their white coats and took the bus from Marcusville to Columbus and then on to separate destinations with new IDs and doctors’ licenses in their bags.
It was snowing lightly. Vernon looked up at the sky, big snowflakes drifting through the air and making the ground soft. He was approaching the town itself, Marcusville, where he knew every street, every tree; after all, he’d lived here for as long as he could remember.
They had tried to resuscitate him, at least they had
acted
so that it looked as if they were doing just that.
No one who had seen what they did at close hand would later be able to say anything other than that the medical team had done everything they should to save a person’s life.
Greenwood had intubated John, who was then given the amount of oxygen he needed, at the same time that Burk had started CPR.
One of them had then called for a defibrillator and an officer had come running with the box under his arm; John’s heart needed a high-voltage shock.
They had talked a lot about minimizing the shock, that they would give him only a single shock and then confirm no rhythm and point to the flat line on the ECG recorder.
The final injection had been done straight into his heart, exactly where it should, but filled with table salt rather than adrenaline.
In the middle of it all—it felt almost unreal even though he had been standing right beside them—Vernon felt a strange kind of pride that made him embarrassed.
Manipulating the ECG recorder had been his medical contribution.
And he had managed this with a couple of pieces of ordinary plastic film.
The evening before, he had cut the thin, transparent plastic to exactly the same size as the machine’s electrodes. It had been that simple; to attach the plastic to the underside of each electrode and create an invisible membrane to fool the measuring instrument, and when it was put on naked skin, to prevent it from recognizing the heartbeat of a dead person.
Marcusville had just woken up, and as Vernon walked down the small streets in the falling snow, he saw families sitting around the kitchen table, candlesticks still in the window despite the fact that Christmas was long past. It was breakfast time and everyone was hurrying to finish their cereal, parents running around trying to put clothes on themselves and their children. He looked into the small houses with the small lawns and for a moment, only for a moment, he felt removed, that he wasn’t part of anything; he had no family—at least,
outside
the walls.
John had died there on the cell floor. Anyone who didn’t know the truth would not have thought otherwise. They had pronounced him dead.
Greenwood had spoken clearly,
John Meyer Frey died at zero nine thirteen at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Marcusville
, and Burk who was standing beside him had nodded slowly, looked just as dejected as they had agreed she should.
They had had eight minutes.
If they had taken any longer, John’s brain—the damage would have been serious.
In their report later, they explained that the unfortunate incident had caused considerable agitation among the other inmates and they hadn’t wanted to contribute to it anymore, they had feared that an event like this might spark and encourage disturbances; that it was always hard to predict how people who have witnessed a sudden death might react, there in particular, with people who were themselves waiting to die.
So they had hastily transported him away from Cell 8 and the inmates who had been sentenced to death in East Block.
As they walked along the prison corridors, Burk had bent down over the stretcher at two-minute intervals. Her mouth over John’s, she had discreetly ventilated his lungs, which were still totally paralyzed, when they were certain that no one could see.
A strange feeling then to leave him in the morgue.
But they didn’t have any choice. John had been forced to lie there, in the cold air. Greenwood and Burk had explained that they had to reduce his
metabolism
fast, his body’s oxygen consumption.
Vernon had stood in the doorway to the morgue for as long as he could.
So many years since he had stood here for the first time. Every dead person he had known and looked after in the section had ended up here, empty shells—he’d always thought that there should be another room, for the souls.
He had stood there and looked at the immobile body that was drifting in and out of consciousness, that couldn’t move and couldn’t comprehend what had actually happened. The fear, the three of them could only imagine the sheer terror that would take hold of him when they shut the door: to wake up after a while alone in the freezing cold, not knowing whether he was dead or alive, gradually to remember bits of what had happened and still not understand.
He stopped and knocked his shoes on the edge of the sidewalk to dislodge some of the snow, waited for a moment, then continued on, the final steps.
Mern Riffe Drive looked like all the other streets in Marcusville.
Even though it was so close, he had in fact not come here very often, just got into the habit of looking into their house as he passed. He lived on the other side of town himself, the houses here were a bit more expensive, a bit bigger; even in a small community like this there was a place for people who were that little bit better off.
The Finnigans’ house was at the end of the street, the last house on the left-hand side. He had known Edward Finnigan all his life—there weren’t many years between them and they had gone to school at the same time—but they didn’t really
know
each other, they didn’t have anything in common other than a lifetime and a love for the same woman in a small town in Ohio.
He had avoided visiting this place; that’s what had happened, he didn’t have the strength to see her in a home that wasn’t his.
He tried to remember as he opened the gate in the picket fence. Twice.
He had lived in the town for fifty years and he had come to this house only twice. The first time when Edward got his job with the governor in Columbus and had invited everyone who was anyone to a kind of cocktail party one Friday afternoon. Vernon, the senior corrections officer at Marcusville’s most dominant workplace, was obviously one of them, people who in Finnigan’s eyes were important. He had been reluctant to go, uncomfortable as he was with parties that breathed emptiness, but he had eventually gone and given his congratulations on the new job and had a few sweet drinks and then sneaked off as fast as he could. The second time was when Elizabeth had been found murdered, he had gone the next day to offer his sincere condolences. He had watched her grow up, a beautiful, happy, and outgoing girl, and he had understood their loss.
The white snow was falling thicker. He knocked on the door.
It was Alice who opened it.
“Vernon. Come in.”
She was an exceptional woman, Alice. Overshadowed by her dominant husband, but whenever he met her in town, in the shop or the post office, she had always been as easy to talk to as he remembered. And then she was beautiful, like before, she could smile, even laugh—he had never seen her do that in her husband’s presence.
Edward Finnigan wasn’t just a bad person; he was a bad husband.
Now they looked at each other—she had tired but friendly eyes. Vernon wondered if she ever thought about the past, that she had made the wrong choice, about how things could have been.
“Take off your coat. I was just making some tea.”
“I won’t stay long. I’m sorry that I called so early, but I knew that you’d want to hear what I have to say, both of you.”
“I’m sure we’ve got time for a cup of tea. Come on in and sit yourself down.”
Vernon looked around at the large hall and the rest of the house. Just as he remembered it. The wallpaper, the furniture, the thick carpets on the floor, they hadn’t changed anything. Eighteen years since the last time. They had found her on the floor and like a reflex he looked into the room, as if she were still lying there. Their grief hadn’t diminished; if anything it was maybe even greater now. It certainly felt like that—he went in and it was impossible not to feel it thrust in your face.
He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Is Edward at home?”
“In the cellar. You remember that he likes shooting?”
“He showed me the range the first time I came here.”
“He normally does.”
It smelled of cinnamon tea and some sort of pie, maybe apple. Vernon caught a glimpse of the large porcelain dish through the glass window of the oven.
“I’ll go and get him, if you like. And have a look, for the second time.”
He smiled at her, she smiled back. It wasn’t difficult to see that she hated the cellar and the shooting range down there.
He opened the cellar door, a faint smell of damp, of enclosed air that should be let out. The corridor was about sixty-five feet long and wide enough to be able to walk down it while someone else stood and fired. At the far end, a target, five holes with frayed edges close to the middle. Finnigan was about to fire five more, stood completely still, took a deep breath each time he fired the pistol. Vernon watched: it was a good series, ten hits close to each other.
Finnigan had realized that he had a visitor now and signaled to him to wait a moment, then pressed a red button at shoulder height on the light concrete wall. The target ran on a wire, a quiet squeak. He unhooked it with one hand, looked at it, added up.
Vernon studied his satisfied face.
“You shoot well.”
“Particularly in the mornings. If I concentrate. If I come straight down here after a long night and imagine Frey’s face, if I picture it then fire at the target.”
His eyes. Vernon worked with psychos and people who’d been sentenced to death, but it wasn’t often that he saw eyes with so much hate.
“I wanted to speak to you and Alice.”
“We’ve never really spoken much, you and me. What’s it about?”
“I’d rather tell you upstairs. When you’re both listening.”
Finnigan nodded, took the magazine out of the pistol, and did a recoil operation to remove the last bullet. He went over to the gun safe that was screwed to the wall.
Vernon looked at him. All these guns, he thought, semiautomatics and automatics and pistols of various sizes, all the weapons in all the guns safes in this country. And that pistol there that he was locking in behind the glass, it had his fingerprints on it.
Finnigan turned toward Vernon, he was ready, folded the target into his pocket, pointed up and they walked together toward the stairs.
To begin with there was the kind of awkward silence that sometimes occurs. Each with a cup of tea, a piece of the warm apple pie, a bit too sweet for this time in the morning, but Vernon ate it, it felt best to.
One hundred fifty thousand dollars it had cost. To escape his death.
He looked at them, their faces.
The Finnigans didn’t know that.
Nor did they know that there was still a man somewhere in Canada who regularly received payment for a passport and a past.
They chatted: a little about the snow that kept falling, a little about the new café by the post office with the rather odd Mexican decor, a little about the neighbors next door who had a great black dog that barked at everything and everyone who happened to pass.