Kill Me

by Stephen White

  She smiled just the slightest bit before she reached into her shoulder bag and lifted out an envelope, a legal-size envelope. She removed one sheet of paper from it—it’s apparent there were others that she had left behind—and handed it to him. He took the pen she was offering and he began to sign it without reading it.

  “No, read it,” she said.

  I hope I’ve made it clear that lipreading isn’t a reliable skill of mine, but I’m confident that’s what she told him. For what it’s worth, most of the bloggers agreed with my assessment. The “no, read it” translation wasn’t controversial.

  He did what he was told. He read the page, signed it, and handed it back to her. She signed it, too, and returned the paper to the envelope, which she handed to him.

  He stuck the envelope in his jacket pocket without even a glance at the rest of its contents.

  I could read his lips—everyone could—as he said, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  They stood up then, holding hands. Left to right, right to left. Their lips were so close together that the steam from their exhales fused into one little cloud.

  This part of the tape is charged, almost erotic.

  Okay, not almost erotic. Definitely erotic.

  She’s the one who made the next move. She opened the back doors of the ambulance, but he climbed up inside the vehicle first. She stepped up right after him.

  Behind them, she left the door open about three inches.

  I think it was intentional. Leaving the door ajar.

  A hospital resident, a husky young black woman wearing baggy green scrubs with her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of a quilted down jacket, walked into view at the bottom of the screen as Lizzie was climbing up into the ambulance. The young doctor turned her head and opened her mouth as though she was going to say something. I imagined her saying, “Hey, you can’t go in there.”

  But she didn’t say anything. Her shift was over; she was heading home. She probably didn’t want the hassle. She probably wanted to forget the last twenty-four hours of her life. She wanted a bed. She wanted a dream. The resident didn’t even break stride. She put her head down.

  She kept on walking.

  The surveillance video has no sound.

  No sound.

  The way that the camera was positioned, most of the action I’ve described took place on the upper part of the screen, in the right corner. The geometry of the boxy ambulance was slightly distorted by the angle, as though it had been drawn for use in a cartoon that exaggerates perspective.

  “Keep on Truckin’.”

  Like that.

  Once the young resident passed by the ambulance and exited the frame, the camera lens captured no movement at the top of the screen, nothing, not a bird flying through the sky, not a squirrel in a tree, not a stray cat darting below the vehicle chassis.

  Nothing, for a full ninety seconds.

  On the bottom of the screen, where the ER door was visible, there was some motion. A little over halfway through the time that they were together inside the ambulance, a nurse rushed out the ER door, appearing startled. She looked around, left, right, then back to her left.

  She saw what we saw on the video.

  She saw nothing. A parked ambulance. That was it.

  Did she notice that the back door of the ambulance was slightly open? She didn’t appear to. If she did notice, she didn’t care.

  On the video we can’t tell what had startled her, what drew her outside, what caused her to look around. Whatever it was, though, she didn’t see any more evidence of it.

  She stepped back into the hospital and, we suppose, returned to her post in the ER.

  The next motion we see on the video is the woman he called Lizzie as she pushed open the doors and climbed down from the ambulance. She straightened her jacket, tugged at the cuffs of her sleeves, and pulled off the floppy hat she was wearing, revealing a surprising, glossy bald head. She tossed the hat on a concrete bench that sits against a wall, below a window. She began to stride, purposefully it seems, her hands swinging by her sides, toward the emergency room doors.

  She was heading back inside.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Watching someone being assassinated by a high-powered rifle—without sound—is an eerie, terrifying thing.

  Oddly, it was more terrifying watching the assault the second time and the third than it had been the first. The first time I was more shocked. The other times I was more horrified.

  The hypersonic slug stunned Lizzie when she was about halfway to the ER door. That part is clear: She was stunned by whatever it was she felt as the metal slug sliced into her, then instantly, through her. In an odd, ironic way, the impact initially straightened her up as though she had just been ordered by someone—a teacher? her mother?—to correct her posture and she was instinctively trying to comply. But the fix to her carriage lasted for less than an eye blink.

  Before her right foot could reach out to complete another step she collapsed into a clumsy U-shape on the concrete, a dark stain immediately spreading onto the walkway from an even darker spot that was visible on her throat.

  High on her throat. An inch and a half below her ear.

  The U-shape of her body on the concrete was open toward the camera. Her legs were splayed unnaturally, her left knee folded back.

  After a couple of seconds her right hand moved once, as though she were grabbing for something that she had dropped.

  Every time I see that hand move now—on the screen, in my dreams—I wonder if it was her off hand.

  Then she was still.

  She was dead.

  On the video, the sniper shot that killed her made no sound.

  In the reality of New Haven at a few minutes after seven o’clock in the morning, the shot must have made a terrible sound. But viewers of the video are left to imagine the abrasiveness and insult of that report.

  The same nurse who had edged outside the ER moments before responded by rushing back out the door again. We can guess why this time: She must have heard the bark of the shot. This time she spotted Lizzie’s fallen body and the spreading pool of blood near her bald head. The nurse turned and she screamed back inside.

  We see the nurse scream. We assume she screamed for help. But we don’t hear her scream. For one long moment, mouth open, eyes aflame, she is as silent as one of Munch’s tormented.

  The paramedics from the ambulance were the first to make it out the door in response to the nurse’s wail. One of the two EMTs, a woman, rushed up and knelt over Lizzie’s inert body. Her partner dashed instinctively toward their rig to retrieve some equipment, or their stretcher.

  We watch him jump up inside the ambulance and reemerge, in shock, twenty seconds later. He yelled something toward his partner. She looked up at him and mouthed, “What?”

  He said something into his radio before he repeated his words to his partner.

  In the next chaotic minutes, whatever forensic treasures law enforcement authorities might have mined at the two crime scenes were obliterated by emergency medical personnel doing what they were trained to do.

  Since my patient’s body was, conveniently, already waiting for them on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, they transported him into the ER first.

  Lizzie’s body was lifted from the sidewalk onto a gurney only seconds later.

  All the remaining docs and nurses and EMTs who had rushed outside became part of Lizzie’s escort; each of them took a spot leading the gurney, flanking it, or chasing it back inside the door.

  The last images on the surveillance video are poignant.

  Everyone was gone.

  A light snow had started falling.

  At the top of the screen, the ambulance doors stood wide open. On the left side of the picture, mid-frame, the dark stain of blood from Lizzie’s neck had spread into a pond that was about the size of a watermelon but had the asymmetry of an eggplant. Remarkably, no one had stepped in the puddle.

  Once again, the video was
still. There was no motion.

  Suddenly, a cop—New Haven? Hospital security?—rushed out the ER door in a crouch, a gun in his left hand.

  After ten seconds of tension—the pistol barrel going this way, then that—he realized there was no one to shoot.

  He straightened himself up and exhaled. He lowered the weapon to his side.

  It’s pretty clear that what he said next was “Fuck.”

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Most of what I know about what happened later I learned from simply watching the news.

  There was plenty of news. For a few hours the Yale hospital tried desperately to maintain the illusion that Adam Doe was just another patient. But because of the tantalizing video from the surveillance camera the story quickly became a national obsession.

  My patient’s body had been discovered on its side on the stretcher in the back of the ambulance. He’d suffered a single gunshot wound to his head. The entrance wound, surrounded by powder burns, was behind his right ear. The slug had almost obliterated his brain stem.

  Blood loss was minimal.

  That had been Lizzie’s plan all along, of course: to minimize blood loss. The aim of her shot, one ER doc said in an interview a couple of days later with Diane Sawyer, had been “surgically precise.” He added that his patient—my patient—“was a dead man before he heard the shot.”

  Valiant efforts inside the ER didn’t change that. Resuscitation efforts didn’t last long.

  My patient stayed dead.

  The envelope Lizzie had given him was stuffed into the waistband of his trousers when he was wheeled into the ER. On the outside of the envelope, he had written READ THIS FIRST. Inside was a printout of laboratory results of blood work that had been analyzed only the night before at a Colorado facility. The pertinent values, highlighted in fluorescent orange, confirmed a number of things.

  Among them, that my patient’s liver was healthy.

  More important, the numbers confirmed that he was a reasonably compatible organ donor for his son, Adam, who just happened to be upstairs in the ICU suffering from acute liver failure. Fulminant hepatitis, to be precise.

  The piece of paper that my patient had signed was in the envelope, too. It was the sheet that Lizzie had made certain that he read before he climbed into the ambulance to die.

  That document was an organ-donor directive that specifically bequeathed his liver to his son. Whatever other of his organs turned out to be useful, he donated to anyone else’s son or daughter who might need them as desperately as Adam needed his father’s liver.

  The ER attending read the letter and digested the laboratory data within moments of my patient’s arrival. Immediately, the doc ordered his team to take the necessary steps to preserve and prepare the body for organ and tissue harvest.

  After some contentious too-public arguments in the Emergency Department between the transplant team and the homicide detectives who had shown up to investigate the two deaths that had happened just outside the ER, surgery to harvest my patient’s organs and tissue began promptly.

  Nine different people ultimately received tissue or organ donations from his body.

  Adam received his father’s liver. The surgery, by all reports, was long, but uncomplicated.

  A hospital spokesperson said that once Adam had recovered sufficiently he planned to go back to Cincinnati to recuperate with his mother.

  My patient’s wife, Thea, refused to deal with the media. Like a vocal part of the public, I was curious about her reaction to her husband’s murder, and particularly curious about her reaction to the circumstances around her husband’s murder. But Thea stayed silent. Adam’s mother, Bella, on the other hand, liked to talk to reporters. Too much, it seemed to me. Even the media tired of her quickly—rumors of an imminent appearance on Dr. Phil’s show evaporated once she’d done a two-day marathon that included all the network morning shows and any of the cable news shows that would have her.

  Twenty-four hours after the shooting, the New Haven police still hadn’t been able to identify the location where the single sniper shot that had killed Lizzie had originated.

  A vehicle, some theorized. Something large enough to allow a sniper room to move. A witness came forward who said he’d seen a black Hummer on York Street just after dawn.

  The Humvee never showed up on any surveillance video.

  No one stepped forward claiming to have witnessed the shot. No evidence was discovered to identify the location of the sniper’s lair.

  The same was true after a week. No progress.

  And after two.

  The doorman at Lizzie’s New York apartment—a man named Gaston Rezzuti—called one of the national newspaper tabloids and offered them a peek inside his infamous tenant’s apartment for two hundred thousand dollars. He’d ultimately accepted seventy grand for the little tour and walked away from his doorman job before he was fired.

  The tabloid photographer he’d led inside Lizzie’s home discovered a bubble-wrapped trove of family memorabilia secreted away in the door-less credenza of her tiny office.

  The photographer displayed some of the dozens of photographs he found in the stash on Lizzie’s teak desktop and took pictures of the photos for his publisher. Most of the images were of two small children. Girls. Andrea and Zoe. Some were of the same two children with their parents.

  There were also love letters from a man named Roger.

  The two small children were hers, and Roger’s.

  I never saw a single mention anywhere in the news about the Death Angels, not even an allusion.

  The juicy parts of the story, as far as the national media was concerned, were the dual provocative murder mysteries. Both had to do with Lizzie. One mystery had her as victim—a young woman with advanced breast cancer who had been shot to death by an unknown sniper on the sidewalk outside the ER at Yale–New Haven Hospital. The other mystery had her as perpetrator—fingerprints and gunshot residue seemed to establish that she had shot a man in the head in the privacy of the back of an ambulance that had been parked outside Yale–New Haven Hospital. Like herself, her victim—a man she’d apparently barely known—wasn’t too far from natural death at the time of his murder.

  She’d shot the man, a wealthy medical-technology businessman, the story went, so that his gravely ill son could have his liver.

  But why?

  I heard a lot of theories. None of them was even close to the truth.

  How could they be close to the truth? I wondered. Who could have guessed the truth?

  A stolen BMW M3 recovered at an airport in suburban Denver, and interviews with a couple of pilots, seemed to tie the pair murdered in Connecticut to an abandoned, beat-up old Porsche 911 and a wrecked pickup truck with a body beneath it in the eastbound bore of the Eisenhower Tunnel, and to other still-perplexing events that had taken place the evening before in the long hollow that traversed the Continental Divide in Colorado on I-70.

  Once again, I heard a lot of theories. A few of them tried to link my patient to the sniper murders that had been terrifying drivers in Colorado in recent days. The fact that the sniper took no more victims after the day of the New Haven tragedies only fueled that speculation.

  But nothing really made sense.

  Unless I added in the Death Angels. Only then could I make it all make any sense.

  But I never mentioned the Death Angels to anyone. I didn’t tell my wife, a D.A. Or my best friend, a Boulder cop. My patient’s caution—“They know you have a daughter”— continued to resonate in my head like a loop of lyrics from the most irritating pop song ever written.

  I learned a lot about the woman he called Lizzie from the news. But everything I learned stopped almost five years before her death.

  Her real name was Jolie Borden. Her husband, Roger, it turned out, was actually a Jordanian American who had been born Raja and had originally come to the United States on a student visa. He was an anesthesiologist currently making his living as an “investor and developer.�
� He surfaced at a news conference at his lawyer’s office in Rancho de something, California, a week after the events in New Haven. Roger’s lawyer did all the talking to the press. Her client and his two daughters, the attorney maintained, had been abandoned eight years before by the woman who had been killed by the sniper outside the emergency room. After looking for his wife for a few years, her client had started a new life with his kids. He hadn’t spoken to his ex-wife in ages.

  I observed Roger’s silent performance with jaded, psychologist’s eyes. I was, I was certain, watching a man who lied with the same facility that I breathed. A man who could lie without saying a single word.

  The lawyer asked that the press allow her client and his children privacy so that they might grieve.

  Ha, I thought, watching him clinically. If that is grief, I am a unicorn.

  A correspondent for CNN, also of Jordanian descent, revealed that Roger’s given name, Raja, roughly translated, means “hope.”

  The reporter didn’t seem to recognize the irony.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  I attended a public memorial service in Denver that was held for my patient five days after his death. Had anyone at the service asked me how I knew him, I was prepared to make something up.

  Adam was still convalescing in New Haven and wasn’t at the memorial, but I did see my patient’s two lovely daughters. I also laid my eyes on Thea for the first time. His description of his wife had been so accurate I felt as though I already knew her. She was accompanied throughout the long service by a man about her husband’s age who stayed within whisper range of her. Some part of his body seemed to always be in contact with some part of hers. He had bright eyes and a quick, engaging smile. I could tell she felt safe with him. During an upbeat gospel song I whispered a question to the woman sitting next to me. “Do you know who that is? With Thea?”

  She told me it was a family friend. His name was Jimmy Lee.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  A little less than three months after the events in New Haven, my partner, Diane, stuck her head into my office at the end of a long Tuesday. She told me that a young man in the waiting room wanted to see me.