“Heparin. Anticoagulant. That’s what I’m about to give you. We don’t want anything clogging up the system, do we, Mr. Frey?”
It sounded more absurd than intended and Wiley immediately regretted it. He was nervous, scared; every time was just as difficult and he still hadn’t learned how to talk to someone whose death he was preparing.
A few seconds more, he tried to avoid the prisoner’s eyes, concentrated like normal on the bare arms and on making sure he injected what he knew to be enough anticoagulant.
“That’s me done, Mr. Frey. I’ll go now. You won’t see me again.”
His thin hand once more, a feeble handshake and they held on until Wiley couldn’t bear it any longer.
The four guards had been standing outside waiting. When the nurse hurried off they came forward, looked at John, and asked him to leave the cell himself. He didn’t have to take many steps to get to the death chamber, but they watched every single one, people who are going to die often demand a lot of attention.
The room was hexagonal, not much more than forty square feet, the walls were actually just large glass panes through which the witnesses could watch. The gurney stretched from wall to wall and was covered in a thick white cloth that made a rasping sound when his body was secured with six separate straps, broad and black, four across and two the length of his body, the one over his rib cage pressed hardest against his skin.
The lines that would then be connected to the two cannulas were transparent, making it easy to see when the fluid was being pumped through.
HE RECOGNIZED SEVERAL OF THE FACES THAT LOOKED AT HIM FROM THE
other side of the large glass wall and who had the right to be there, in compliance with what was called Administrative Code 2949.25.
Farthest to the left was Charles Hartnett, so much older than John remembered, now a retiree, but the policeman who had arrested him that morning in his room, seventeen years old and still not properly awake, the stranger who had ordered him to stand by the bed with his legs apart.
Beside him, Jacob Holt, head of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, or ODRC, who a few hours before every execution left his spacious office in central Columbus and traveled south to Marcusville, one of his duties, to watch people die.
Shoulder to shoulder with him, the warden of Marcusville, a tall dark man of John’s age, the sort who tilted his head back when he looked at you, as if to be even more above you.
A long row of what he was certain were journalists.
A few suits that he had never seen before.
A priest, the man who many years before had visited Marvin Williams regularly, he had heard them talking in the next cell, praying together; Marv had always seemed lighter, almost absolved, afterward.
Four guards, half a step behind, the peaks of their caps even farther down over their eyes than before.
Only one woman.
He recognized her, knew her so well. Alice Finnigan. He had always liked her, she had been warm, welcoming, to the boy with a bad reputation who was courting her daughter.
He avoided looking at the father who was hate, at the red face that couldn’t get close enough.
John had been requested to choose three witnesses of his own but had refrained from exercising this right.
He didn’t want anyone he cared about to be there.
Total silence.
The four last minutes were one long wait for time to expire. They all looked at their watches and hoped that it would soon be over, it didn’t seem that any of them were in the habit of counting down.
The telephone on the wooden panel on the wall. The only thing that still existed. A call from the governor and everything would stop.
You could almost hear it, the ring that was louder than any other, the ring that never came.
Forty-five seconds left, to be on the safe side of what was absolutely nothing.
Then the warden nodded to an older man with a gray, well-groomed beard. Patrick McCarthy, proud, straight back, the longest-serving corrections officer in Marcusville. He had been waiting beside the machine that was designed to supply the drugs and now nodded back as his finger pushed in the large white plastic switch.
Sodium thiopental
, 5 grams, John yawned, lost consciousness.
Pancuronium bromide
, 100 milligrams, his muscles were paralyzed, his breathing stopped.
Potassium chloride
, 100 milliequivalents, heart attack.
WHEN THE PRISON DOCTOR EXAMINED THE BODY OF JOHN MEYER FREY
and with a faint voice announced to the warden that the execution had been successful, it was as if life came back to the people who were standing close together in the witness area. The silence, the waiting, it was over, everything else could continue now. The warden did what he usually did, clapped his hands twice to get everyone’s attention and announced that the prisoner had been proclaimed dead by the duty doctor at 21:10:07 hours.
Edward Finnigan took another step forward. He wanted to see the body that wasn’t moving, feel the peace he so longed for. The agitation, the dark, the hate that Alice had accused him of, it should all be gone.
He looked at the face that was totally relaxed.
The hate.
It was still there.
Finnigan spat at the glass several times, at the body that was being removed from the gurney with a white sheet and black straps. Alice Finnigan surged forward and pounded her hands against her husband’s back, she screamed that he should calm down, she cried and hit him until he left the room, without turning around.
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE COLD, CLOUDLESS MORNINGS, FULL OF AIR, WHEN
winter is turning to spring.
Vernon Eriksen had woken up several hours earlier, agitated in the dark, the dream again: he was small and sitting looking down at his father from upstairs, the clothes and makeup that brought the dead back to life for a while, the grieving who were crying and waiting outside. He had gotten up, shaken off the night, warm milk and a sandwich at half past three. He had sat at his kitchen table and looked out over Marcusville’s tired streets as they slowly came to life, the newspaper boy who cycled past, the odd bird that landed on the empty asphalt, neighbors in their pajamas and slippers shuffling out to get the morning paper to read with their cornflakes and vanilla yogurt. He still had a sick note, covering the whole day until six o’clock and the back shift, no one at the prison would miss him until then.
He knew what no one else knew. That he would never go back there again.
Vernon looked around. He liked his kitchen. His parents’ home, he had always lived here. He had been nineteen when both of them had disappeared from his life without explaining why. He had then bought out his older sister; she had always been more restless, more curious than he was, and had moved to Cleveland some years before to study and had stayed there.
He had never gone anywhere.
His work as senior corrections officer on Death Row, occasional encounters with people who frightened him in their attempts to get close, a whole lot of books and long walks, the few months with Alice a long time ago, and following their breakup at the time of his parents’ death, the endless emptiness, he had not really cared about much at all. Until his growing involvement with a group of activists who were opposed to the death penalty. He liked to think of it as an opposition movement, like a soldier, to feel that he was actively taking part in the fight against a society’s old-fashioned values. Always in the background, always unofficial, he was aware that a prison guard could not be associated with things like that. And he needed his job, to be a friend to those who counted time, it felt right, and was perhaps as important as the meetings and protest lists and contact with lawyers who had to be persuaded to take an interest in the future of prisoners who had been sentenced to death, for next to no money.
Vernon waited until the clock by the oven turned eight. Then he lifted the telephone from its cradle on the wall, dialed the number for Marcusville’s outpatient clinic, and asked for Nurse Alice Finnigan. When his call was connected and she answered, he put the phone down.
He had just wanted to hear her voice one more time.
The morning chill snapped at his cheeks, the light wind making it colder than he’d thought. He wasn’t going particularly far, only a couple of minutes away, he was freezing but could cope.
There wasn’t much he needed really. He’d organized the paper bag, white with the prison’s green logo on it, the evening before. He was carrying it folded in one hand, it weighed nothing.
Finnigan’s impressive house on Mern Riffe Drive in front of him. Two months since his last visit. He had told them about John, that he was alive, that he was living in a country in northern Europe. He remembered Edward Finnigan’s reaction and it still made him feel sick. He had thought then how incredibly ugly people could become and that he had seen such ugliness when the dates for executions were set, when the victim’s family delighted, the hate and revenge that made them feel alive. He also remembered Alice’s sorrow, her shame and the distaste she had felt for her husband had been intense. Vernon had left, shaken by a married woman’s unbelievable loneliness.
Not until he had rung the bell for the third time did he hear anyone moving about in the house.
Slow, heavy steps down the stairs, an inner door being opened, more steps, and then Edward Finnigan’s blank face.
“Eriksen?”
Edward Finnigan’s skin was white, dark circles under his eyes, a terry dressing gown around his corpulent frame.
“I should perhaps have called first.”
Finnigan held the door half-open, his bare feet started to freeze.
“What do you want?”
“Can I come in?”
“It’s not the best time. I’ve taken the day off.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I was told. Aren’t you going to let me in?”
Finnigan made some coffee in a percolator that coughed loudly. He wasn’t used to doing it, that was obvious, it was the sort of thing Alice normally did.
“Black?”
“A little milk.”
They drank from white porcelain cups with an expensive stamp on the bottom and avoided looking at each other. Vernon had known Finnigan all his life, and yet he had no idea who he really was.
“What was it you wanted?”
“I want to talk about Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
“Not today.”
“Today.”
Finnigan thumped his cup down, a big brown stain on the light tablecloth.
“Do you have any idea what happened yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then you can damn well figure out that today of all days I have absolutely no wish to talk about my dead daughter to someone I don’t really care about.”
There was a clock in the large, elegant sitting room. The kind that ticked loudly, every second was a stroke of lightning. Vernon had always wondered how people could stand it, but right now the sound was comforting, it hid the intense silence.
“You can’t possibly understand.”
For the first time since they’d sat down, Finnigan looked straight at Vernon.
“You have no idea of what it’s like to go around thinking about a person’s death, every hour, every day for nearly twenty years. You have no fucking idea of how much you can hate when you have to.”
Finnigan’s eyes were red, shiny, the bitter man was close to tears.
“You don’t get it! He’s dead now! I saw him die! And it doesn’t help!”
He put his hand to his eyes and rubbed hard.
“It doesn’t help a fucking iota! She was right. Alice was right all along. Do you know how hard it is to accept that? That you can’t hate a dead person. That it doesn’t help. My daughter isn’t here. She still isn’t here!”
Edward Finnigan bent forward toward the coffee table, his face close to the top. So he didn’t see Vernon’s fleeting smile before he spoke.
“The toilet? Could I use it?”
Vernon went in the direction that Finnigan pointed, out through the kitchen, into the hall. But when he got to the toilet, he kept going, hasty steps down into the cellar and the shooting range where he had waited for Finnigan the last time. He stood in front of the gun cabinet that hung on the wall, put a plastic bag on his hand and opened it. The pistol he was looking for was at the back on the second shelf. He remembered that Finnigan had emptied it of ammunition and then put it back there. He carefully lifted it up, with the plastic bag still on his hand—he wanted to preserve the fingerprints that were already there.
It had taken a minute, no more.
He went up again, put the gun in the paper bag he had left on the hall carpet and then went into the toilet and flushed. Finnigan was still sitting where he’d left him, his empty eyes fixed on the tabletop.
“I’m here to talk about Elizabeth.”
“So you said. And I said that today is not a good day.”
“It is a good day. You’ll think so too, afterward. But first, just a bit about John.”
“Not a word about him in this house!”
He hit his hand on the table and a glass candlestick that had been standing close to the edge jumped onto the parquet and broke in two.
“Never again!”
Vernon was calm, his voice low.
“I’m not going to leave. Not until you listen to what I have to say.”
It had nearly turned into a fight. They had stood facing each other, Finnigan’s white face was now red and he was panting, but Vernon Eriksen was a big man and Finnigan had glared at him for a while before more or less collapsing onto the sofa.
Vernon watched him closely now, wanted to be absolutely sure he saw his reaction.
“I was responsible for John Meyer Frey’s escape from Marcusville.”
Edward Finnigan deflated as the senior corrections officer in front of him told the story of how a prisoner who had been sentenced to death, his daughter’s murderer, had escaped from his cell on Death Row and then lived in freedom in another part of the world for six years. Eriksen took almost thirty minutes to describe the escape in detail, the medical preparations and drugs that were used to create the illusion of death and then the journey via Canada and Russia to the capital of Sweden. He spent considerable time describing the transport from the prison morgue to a car that was waiting outside, he liked that bit best, the actual escape from inside the prison walls was closer to his heart than medicines and false passports. He even smiled broadly when he described the body bag requested by the two doctors for transportation to the medical examiner in Columbus, no one would open it to look at a dead person, and when the van had been unloaded and was on its way back to Marcusville, it hadn’t taken long to lift the body bag and put it in the back of the other car that was waiting farther along the same loading dock.