There was no eulogy. No good-bye. No sentimental exchange. No meaningful looks. No expressions of gratitude or understanding or love. No paternal speech. No acknowledgment of debt. No outward acceptance of their roles. Davis inserted the IV into Justin’s right arm and attached the plastic strap to his left wrist, and Justin reached underneath the tube running across his body and pressed the yellow lever. The saline drip began.
“Now what?”
“When you’re ready, push the green one. Just keep your left arm out over the side of the bed, next to the machine. When you fall asleep, your arm will drop and the red lever will flip, and that will be it. Just don’t drop your arm before then.”
“What happens if I drop my arm early?”
“It will be a lot more painful,” Davis said in his even, practiced bedside tone. “But don’t worry about that. I’m watching you. You can start the thiopental whenever you’re ready.”
“Nuh-uh,” Justin said. “You have to do it.”
“Justin…”
“You have to. Push the green one.”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“You have to do it.”
“No, I don’t.”
“If you don’t, I’m going to stop it.” Justin lifted up his right arm and tensed it, like he was about to yank it free from the IV.
Davis said, “Then go ahead. Stop it. You’ve read a lot of books, Justin, absorbed a lot of abstract knowledge, but this doesn’t balance any cosmic scales, no matter what you think. The woman you killed has a family – a mother and father and brothers and sisters – and they’ll never know how their little girl died. They’ll never be able to look into the eyes of the person who killed her and try to understand why it happened. If you want to give them justice, then you should come clean with what you did – with what we did. Throw the whole sick story out there in the open and let people gape at the perversity of it. When they lock the two of us up, that will be something like a comeuppance.”
Davis stood, a pain like heartburn in his chest. Justin stared up at him, nothing in his expression hinting at a reply. Davis rushed into the bathroom and knelt before the toilet. If he wasn’t for certain going to throw up before, the feel of the slick, unclean linoleum triggered a gag reflex inside him and he hacked a tablespoon of stomach acid into the bowl. He sat there a moment, delaying his return by wiping down the floor and the outside of the bowl with a wet towel, wondering if the effort to remove any traces of his presence might cause suspicious zones of cleanliness in a room as dirty as this one. He flushed and wondered if Justin might have pushed the green lever in his absence and asked himself if he wished that were true, then walked back into the motel room before admitting to the answer.
Justin was still awake, staring at the ceiling.
“They can’t, but you can,” Justin said.
“What?” Davis returned to his seat at the side of Justin’s bed.
“Look into the eyes of the man who killed your daughter and try to understand why it happened.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“No, it’s not.” Justin picked up his head and turned it awkwardly in Davis’s direction. “Dr. Moore, when I killed that woman, I was him. I felt what Coyne felt when he put his hands around Anna Kat’s neck and squeezed the breath out of her. I felt powerful. Like nothing I imagined. I can’t get that from any drug. From any book. There was nothing abstract about it. I felt good. I felt invincible. And I didn’t feel any remorse. No sadness for her. No empathy. Nothing for the people she loved and left behind. The only difference between Coyne and me is I know it’s wrong to feel nothing for other people, and that’s barely a difference at all. Deirdre Thorson’s parents won’t be able to look into the eyes of the man who killed their daughter, but you can look into the eyes of the man who killed yours. These are his eyes. Exactly his eyes, and now they’ve seen what he saw. And how many times over the last twenty years did you think about looking into these eyes, about being this close, not in a courtroom, or through jailhouse glass, but alone with these eyes in a room like this one so you could make them see just for once that they aren’t always in control?” Justin waited a moment for Davis to respond, but he didn’t. Davis stared. His expression was inscrutable beyond sadness. They looked at each other, neither one moving or talking or even breathing, it seemed.
Then Justin’s right arm began to feel warm.
The heat radiated out from the needle under his skin and burned beneath his flesh, up toward his shoulder and down toward his fingertips. Justin turned slowly to look at his arm, certain it would be aflame. He couldn’t move it. It was like a heavy, fiery log attached to his body. The top of his head was numb. It felt as if all his blond hairs were standing on the ends of their itchy follicles. He drew a labored breath, but his lungs were rewarded little for it. He turned again, not to look at Davis, but to look at the machine.
The green lever had been flipped. Davis had pressed it while Justin was talking.
Justin’s face puckered. There was nothing for him to do. His left arm was suspended over the edge of the bed and if he could keep it elevated, keep it from falling, keep it from releasing the red lever and the gusher of potassium chloride it held back, he could survive.
But he knew that he couldn’t.
Davis saw shock in Justin’s face, the recognition that the undoable had been done to him. Even as the thiopental relaxed the muscles in his cheeks and around his eyes, there was still enough involuntary response to react to the horror of what was happening. Justin struggled to turn his head again, and when he met Davis’s gaze he forced a crazy, euphoric smile, as if helplessness were a drug to him – like killing, a nonreplicable high.
When it was done, Davis returned every item he came with to the blue duffel bag, crossed each one off a list he had written on a piece of paper folded down to about three inches square, and stuffed the list in his shirt pocket so he’d remember to destroy it later. He wiped down the chairs and the tables and the doorknobs and even Justin’s wrist, which he had held momentarily when looking at the veins in the boy’s arms, before he had snapped on his gloves.
He put on a baseball cap and sunglasses, not much of a disguise but, like the SPF 15 he rubbed on in the sun, it was something. When he was home he would destroy everything he wore today – his clothes, his hat, even his boots – in case someone tried to match fiber evidence he’d left behind. He had shed parts of him here, certainly, hairs and skin and traces of vomit in the bathroom, but he hoped they would be lost among the detritus of previous occupants, poor housekeeping being as effective a cover as antiseptic. And who knows, maybe Justin was right. Maybe the cops didn’t look too hard when the answer seemed so obvious at the scene. He hoped so. They hadn’t looked too hard in Northwood twenty years ago when faced with the death of a girl the same age.
No one below seemed to notice as he traversed the second-story concrete walkway, and no one peeked from behind the thick gold curtains or the identical aqua doors as he peeled the surgical gloves away from his hands and stuffed them into his bag. His car was in a self-park garage a few blocks away.
Going back to the hours he’d spent with cadavers in medical school, Davis had always felt a kind of comfort in corpses, their lifelessness a sign that we are more than a sum of our organs and tissue and blood. More than cells in some magical combination. It seemed apparent to him that whatever it is that makes us human individuals is absent in a corpse, and according to the laws of conservation must still be present somewhere else. That was the closest thing he still had to metaphysical religion, but he believed it sincerely.
As he stared at Justin’s freshly dead body, moments before he walked out the door, the old rule didn’t seem to apply. Justin seemed as lifelike as ever, his left arm nearly touching the floor, his head cocked off the pillow, drool pooling in the corner of his mouth. Whether Justin was still inside or had never been there to begin with, he couldn’t know. Justin promised Davis he’d feel exhilarated for taking a life, but he didn’t. Even now, he felt worse for having conceived Justin than he did for killing him, and he thought that feeling curious. Not right. Unless maybe creating Justin and destroying him were the beginning and the end of the same act, and the destroying had just been easier.