“But it is lying,” Sam insisted during courthouse press conferences. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t kill Deirdre Thorson, or any of those girls.” Observers and television pundits agreed that Coyne sounded sincere.
Nevertheless, after six days, the jury found Coyne guilty of four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to die by lethal injection.
In the motel room, Justin kicked the sheet away and sat cross-legged on the bed. His chest and his feet were bare. His jeans were unbuttoned, revealing just the thin, logoed waistband of his white briefs. He examined the machine as Davis assembled it.
“Yellow, green, then red,” he said. “Hello, old bean, you’re dead.”
Davis removed the phone and the digital alarm clock and the heavy lamp from the nightstand. Watching Justin on the sidelines of his field of vision, Davis tried to reconcile Justin’s relaxed and indifferent pose with what the boy was about to do. Last night, awake in bed next to slumbering Joan, and again in the car on the way here, he had rehearsed a speech designed to talk Justin out of this. This isn’t necessary, he would tell him. Of course, he knew Justin would say the fact that it’s unnecessary is also what makes it right. And Davis recognized that although he could not want this for Justin, he selfishly wanted Justin to want it for himself.
Davis sat on the hard mattress with his back to Justin. “If you want to make it look like an overdose, then why don’t you just overdose?”
“Overdosing is hard. It’s like killing yourself with a hammer.” The boy laughed into Davis’s back and his mildewed breath stung through Davis’s cotton shirt. “You still haven’t figured it out. You still don’t know why I need to do this, and yet you’re still here. That’s you. Loyal. Reliable. Just like a real dad. Just the way I want it.”
“It’s not the way I want it,” Davis said. “Explain it to me. Convince me this is what you want.”
Justin put his hand on Davis’s shoulder and spun him gently onto the mattress so his polished black wing tips rested on the starchy pillowcases and he propped his weight awkwardly on his arms at the foot of the bed. They were facing each other now in a way that, to Davis, felt inappropriately casual. Executions should have a formality to them, he thought. A formality befitting their finality.
“I don’t want to commit suicide,” Justin said. “There’s no justice when a bad man goes out on his own terms. Deirdre Thorson needs someone to avenge her. Just as AK did.”
“But Justin, these are your terms,” Davis said, dodging the opportunity to tell Justin he wasn’t a bad man. “I’m here because you asked me to be. As much as I hate what you’ve become, if you changed your mind right now, I’d pack all this up and leave.” That was true. What he’d do next, he had no idea.
Justin said, “I have to do this. And I need you to do it because you want me dead.”
“It’s not true.”
“Yeah, it is.” Justin picked up the IV attached to Davis’s death machine and pressed the capped point of it into his palm, stopping himself before he broke the skin. “We caught Coyne. He’ll get a needle in his arm, even if it’s not anytime soon. But you’re angry and you’re sad at the lengths I had to go to, to get him. Measures you were unwilling to take. And now I’m a liability to you. I am evidence of your crime, your seventeen-year-old crime, in the same way that I was evidence of Coyne’s. The only way you can put all this behind you, all the pain from the last twenty years, is if I’m dead. And the only way Deirdre Thorson can have justice is if somebody kills me. Somebody who wants me dead.”
“You don’t have to die. You could go to prison.”
“Would it have been good enough for Anna Kat if Coyne got thirty-five to life?” Davis didn’t answer. “Ten years from now the state’d just put a needle in my arm, anyway, with a lot less dignity and a lot more agony and a lot more shame for my mom. Not to mention that they’d put you in prison with me. That ain’t right.” With a finger he touched the metal skeleton and its poisonous plastic organs. “Set up this scary death thingy and everyone gets what they want. Everyone gets what they deserve.”
“Not me,” Davis said softly, putting his feet on the floor again.
“But you don’t have to be in a hurry,” Justin said. Davis expelled a quiet laugh.
They talked for another hour. About books. About philosophy. About the chemicals in the plastic bags and what they did. How long it would be between the time he fell asleep and the time his heart stopped, and how long after his heart stopped before he was dead.
“If they do an autopsy they’ll catch this,” Davis warned, his conscience still pushing him half-heartedly to act as if he cared. “They’ll know it wasn’t heroin.”
“Doubtful,” Justin said. “Cook County Coroner is way understaffed. They hardly do autopsies anymore – like maybe one in ten corpses that come through. Cause of death is almost always declared on the scene. I read it in Time magazine. If it looks like an overdose, if it smells like an overdose-” He reached into a backpack on the other side of the bed and pulled out a small bag of white powder and a pocket-knife. He opened the knife and sliced the bag open, spilling it onto the polyester flowered-print bedspread.
“I guess I’ve never seen heroin before,” Davis said. It sounded almost like a confession. “I thought I had but I hadn’t. Not like that, anyway. They showed it to us in med school but it wasn’t so, so white. ”
Running his fingers in a tight pattern through it, Justin said, “Ninety-eight percent pure. This shit’ll kill ya.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Around. Another of those things you shouldn’t know,” Justin said. “Hand me all that stuff over there.”
Davis dug into his own bag and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Then he grabbed the spoon and the lighter and the leather strap and the can bottom and the syringe and a distended cigarette filter, and he took them to Justin. Justin tossed them on top of the spilled heroin and bounced gently on the mattress a few times so the tableau would appear less arranged. He took a sip of water from the nightstand and spilled the rest on the sheet and on the floor next to the bed, tossing the plastic cup after it. There wasn’t enough of the powder to cause a cloud, but Davis waved his arm around in front of his face and wished he’d brought a surgical mask.
“Let’s do this now,” Justin said. He put his head back on the pillow and dropped his arms to his sides.
The tubes and the valves and the salt water and the poison, all connected to Justin’s heart through a narrow needle in a blue vein. Davis tightened Justin’s belt around his forearm to help him find a way in, and he swabbed the area with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. Looking at his young, pale skin, Davis wondered if anyone would believe Justin was an addict. That this was an OD. Maybe they would if they tasted the white powder on the bed and realized his stuff was too strong. Stronger than he knew, they’d conclude. But who would sell a kid like him pure heroin? What would be the point? (And yet, in truth, somebody had.) Still, any cop with a second thought in his head would see right through this, he was certain. There was no stopping it, though. Nothing to do but finish it. He thought about something Justin had once told him about the illusion of free will and realized that he, Davis, made the choice to be here twenty years ago, when he first held Sam Coyne’s DNA in his hands. When he didn’t destroy it along with that first evil notion.
“All right, then,” Davis said.
“It’s the right thing,” Justin said again, and Davis was embarrassed that the boy should be comforting him.