You Think You Know Me Pretty Well

by David Kessler

“Ladies and gentlemen, I would ask you now to take your seats. There will be no standing during the procedure and anyone who stands up or speaks while the procedure is in progress will be asked to leave. The curtain will be opened in a few minutes.”

  They had filed in and taken their seats. The execution procedure had already been explained to them and there would be no further explanation of the technical side.

  There had been some recent changes in the execution procedure in the State of California. It was still a three-drug procedure consisting of an initial injection of sodium thiopental, a barbiturate sedative to render the prisoner unconscious, followed by pancuronium bromide to paralyze the muscles and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart.

  The spectators – witnesses on behalf of society, officially – took their seats, avoiding each other’s eyes. Even among those who approved of the death penalty, there was a kind of guilty embarrassment about being part of the procedure. That was why the executioner’s identity was kept secret and not - as was sometimes falsely claimed – to protect him or her from revenge at the hands of the prisoner’s family.

  Nat took his place at the end, positioning himself in such a way so that he was close to where he thought Burrow’s head would be.

  “When the curtain is opened, the death warrant will be read out and the prisoner will be allowed to make a brief final statement. Members of the press may transcribe the final statement and, depending on the prisoner’s arrangements with the warden, written copies may be given out. Finally, we would ask that if any spectators experience any discomfort during the execution procedure, to leave the observation room as quietly as possible.”

  23:56 PDT (07:56 BST)

  “Can’t you stick the pieces of it together?”

  Susan White had been incredulous when Juanita told her what had happened to the letter that she had faxed over. So she had hastily thrown on the minimum clothing to comply with the laws of decency and raced down the road to the clinic.

  “I’ve been trying,” Juanita replied. “But we’ve only got four minutes. I need you to fax it over again.”

  “I…”

  Susan froze with fear. She could easily print out another copy. She knew that. But it was risky – in some ways riskier than the first time. At least it felt like that. She had been frightened enough yesterday. But now she was off the hook. If she printed another copy and signed it, she would be inviting trouble. It was forgery, whatever the excuse.

  But still … it was a man’s life.

  “Look, I didn’t tell you this before … but…”

  She looked up. Nurse Michaels was a few feet away. She didn’t appear to be paying attention to the conversation, but she was still within earshot.

  “Listen … it wasn’t all it seemed.”

  “What wasn’t?” asked Juanita. “I don’t understand.”

  “The letter … it wasn’t … look, it’s hard to explain.”

  Juanita had pieced together enough of the letter to see the signature.

  “Is Stuart Lloyd there?” she asked desperately.

  “Not yet. None of the admin staff is. They should arrive between eight and nine.”

  “Was he there last night? When the fax was sent?”

  The hesitation was slight but noticeable.

  “No.”

  This the time the hesitation was on Juanita’s end of the phone line.

  “It wasn’t from Stuart Lloyd, was it?” said Juanita. “The letter you faxed over, I mean. It was from you.”

  Susan White lowered her voice, realizing that the truth could be concealed no longer.

  “Look, I could lose my job.”

  “I’m sorry … but we have a man here who could lose his life.”

  Susan White thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t a case of weighing up the rights and wrongs. She was simply trying to pluck up the courage to do what she had to do.

  “Okay, I can’t get you a signed letter. But I can get you something else.”

  “What?”

  The nurse was thinking frantically about what she could gain access to that wasn’t under lock and key.

  “Dorothy’s records.”

  “Will it show the dates? When she was there? When she was discharged?”

  “Yes. All of that.”

  “Please hurry. We have only minutes.”

  “All right.”

  Susan White ended the call and raced over to the filing cabinets. But the files were numerical. She had to look up the name in the card index to get the file number. Then she realized that the cabinets were locked.

  23:58 PDT

  The staff at the fingerprint lab were taking this case very seriously – especially after what the governor had told them.

  They had cut the pages out of the passport and put them in the chamber. They had filled the chamber with cyanoacrylic vapor. They had evacuated the chamber of the toxic gases. The lab technician – at twenty-two, a quintessential picture of a science nerd – thought it ironic that were using a “gas chamber” to decide if a man was to be spared lethal injection. He had even made a joke to that effect to the girl who worked with him. She had smiled politely, but he could tell that she didn’t find it amusing.

  Now the fingerprint expert at the lab – a slightly older man than the technicians – was doing the comparison, noting points of comparison one by one with the thumbprint that had been sent over electronically from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

  Most of the prints on the passport had been eliminated very quickly. But there were a couple that required a close look – those that were clearly thumbprints. And as the fingerprint expert looked, he was counting the number of points of comparison. And what he found amazed him.

  After a few more seconds, he looked up as if a light bulb had gone off in his head. In the pregnant silence that followed, the sound of the three of them breathing could be heard. The others knew what he was about to say, from the look on his face.

  “It’s a match.”

  00:00 PDT (August 15, 2007)

  The curtain that covered the window between the execution chamber and the observation room was opened.

  Clayton Burrow lay strapped to the gurney.

  Although no one was supposed to say anything, there was a collective gasp. The guards who stood at the corners of the observation room said nothing. They knew that it was an involuntary reaction and in any case could not be heard in the execution chamber itself. The flow of sound was regulated by microphones and speakers: the glass itself was triple-glazed.

  The warden of the prison began reading out from a single-page, black-bordered document. But Nathaniel Anderson was not listening. He was looking down at Burrow, now a pathetic figure, staring up at the ceiling, making no effort to look round at the spectators.

  What was he thinking? Nat wondered. Was he afraid? Did he feel guilty? Ashamed?

  The warden finished reading the warrant and then looked up, through the window.

  “Mr. Burrow has made a short written statement, which he has asked me to read to you:

  “‘There are things I have done in my life that I’m not proud of. There were things I shouldn’t have done. I was a product of my upbringing. I wasn’t always taught right from wrong. And I was taught to hate people for things they had no control over or for things that I thought were bad because that’s the way I was brought up. But whatever wrongs I am guilty of, murder is not one of them. Dorothy Olsen suffered at my hands. I bullied her in school and I raped her. But I did not kill her. I am saying this, not in the hope of being spared the death penalty. I know it is too late for that. But simply because I want the truth to be known.’”

  The warden then looked down at Burrow.

  “Do you want to add anything to that?”

  Burrow nodded, lifted his head slightly and turned to face the spectators.

  “I just want to say that I have no complaints about the justice system. I had a fair trial and everything was done that could and sho
uld be done in order to ensure that I had a fair trial and in order to ensure that justice was done.”

  Then he lay back and the prison staff found two veins and inserted two needles, one for the sodium thiopental and one for the other two drugs. Then they stood back from the table. The execution was about to begin.

  At that point, Clayton Burrow turned his head to face the spectators again, but this time, he tilted his head upward relative to his body, so that he could see all of them.

  And then he met Nat’s eyes.

  00:02 PDT (08:02 BST)

  Susan White had shocked the other nursing staff by running from room to room in her disarrayed clothes. But, seeing the tenacity and determination in her eyes – as well as her large girth – none of them saw fit to challenge her.

  She was now frantically putting papers into the fax machine and keying in a long number. It wasn’t clear what she was doing or why she was doing it. But she seemed to be having some kind of breakdown.

  “Come on! Come on!” She muttered hysterically.

  She was – in a very real sense – a “woman possessed,” not by some evil spirit, but by the determination to save the man whose life should have been saved last night by Stuart Lloyd, if he had had any sense of moral responsibility.

  But in the face of his moral vacuity, it was now Susan’s burden to save this anonymous man whose life was in her hands. She cursed herself for her cowardice yesterday as well as her carelessness and complacency. She was painfully aware of the clock on the wall. The time showed that in California it must be just after midnight.

  Do they do the execution immediately? How quickly does the person die?

  00:03 PDT

  Sergeant Grace Nightingale was at her desk doing routine paperwork when the phone rang.

  “Nightingale.”

  “Hi, Grace? It’s Lou here from the lab.”

  Grace sat up abruptly.

  “What have you got?”

  “We’ve got a perfect match, that’s what!”

  “Wait a minute, let me get this straight.”

  “A couple of thumbprints on the passport - one on a page and one on the cover - match Nathaniel Anderson’s thumbprint from the CDMV. That means he handled this passport at one time or another, no question.”

  “And you’re sure about this?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “How many points of comparison?”

  “In the best print? Sixteen.”

  “Jesus Christ! We’d better call the governor!”

  00:04 PDT

  Clayton Burrow was no longer lying back peacefully. He was twisting and wrenching frantically, as if he was trying to get out of his restraints and sit up. All the calm and placidity that he had shown at the start of the execution procedure was now long gone.

  Sodium thiopental was now being injected into his veins, but had yet to take effect. The drug was supposed to have rendered him unconscious in preparation for the other chemicals that were to follow.

  But some sort of adrenalin rush was keeping him awake. After apparently making his peace with God, instead of lying back and quietly surrendering to unconsciousness, he was now showing all the fight and bluster of a man determined to cling on to life.

  It was like that poem by Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” But then again, neither was he raging. It looked like he was crying … pleading … begging.

  However, this was no escape attempt. Rather, it looked like an attempt to communicate … to say some words that had been left unsaid and that now cried out to be spoken in his dying moments. He kept twisting and turning to keep his eyes on the spectators. It was like he had unfinished business in this world and – like one of those tormented ghosts in the horror movies – he wasn’t yet ready to move on to the next. He seemed to be saying something. There was no sound coming from his lungs, or if there was, the spectators couldn’t hear it through the glass. But his lips were moving and his mouth was struggling to shape words.

  Although the spectators had been given strict instructions not to stand up, some of the reporters and “citizen witnesses” were leaning forward – almost out of their seats – to catch his elusive words. Nobody could be sure what he was saying, or rather what he was trying to say. But one reporter thought that she could read his lips.

  And what he appeared to be saying was … “I’m sorry … I’m sorry … I’m sorry…”

  00:05 PDT

  Chuck Dusenbury was sitting in the library of his suite in Sacramento. His wife was sitting nearby in patient silence. She was ready to hold his hand and comfort him if necessary, but she said nothing. She knew, all too well, what was going through his mind right now. This was the first execution of his tenure – and would surely also be his last.

  He had been waiting all day for that phone call from Alex Sedaka, telling him where the body was located. He had been hoping against hope to be able to give Esther Olsen the closure that she so definitely needed as her own mortality loomed ahead of her.

  But he realized now that it was not to be.

  Alex Sedaka had done his best. But Alex’s client had been stubborn. He had denied his guilt even to the end.

  Ironically, Burrow’s lawyer, who had started off so skeptical of his own client’s denials, had come close to believing his client as the day wore on. And even Dusenbury himself now had doubts that he hadn’t entertained before.

  Was Sedaka right? Had Dorothy Olsen really fled to Britain to have an abortion? Had she really fled because she feared being implicated in the death of the man she had so long thought of as her father? That would have been the biggest irony of all, not only because he was not her father, but also because she was, in fact, in no danger of being blamed for his death.

  Perhaps he had been wrong not to suspend the death warrant. Maybe there were unanswered questions. He had told Alex that he would stay the execution if Esther Olsen asked him to. But her relapse had precluded that.

  Should I have done so anyway?

  Even now, Dusenbury was haunted by doubts.

  But the biggest doubt of all was over what Alex had told him about his own legal intern. Had this Nathaniel Anderson really stolen or intercepted a vital document from the medical center in England? Did he really have possession of Dorothy’s passport? Alex had told him that the passport had been found at Nat’s place. But the only evidence they had to support that was the word of a professional burglar – hardly the most convincing evidence.

  Could it be that after all this, Nat Anderson had been Dorothy’s killer and not Clayton Burrow?

  That would explain a lot of things. But the one thing it wouldn’t explain was why. Was he some nerdy geek at Dorothy’s school who secretly loved her? Had she spurned him? Had he sought her out and killed her in England in revenge?

  Or had the passport been planted on him? Maybe it was Nat who was being set up rather than Burrow. But who would have done it? Certainly not Alex himself: he was a man of the highest integrity.

  The real question was, had Nat handled the passport? That would surely be the clincher one way or the other. If he had handled it, then that would show that Lee Kelly – career criminal though he was – was telling the truth.

  Suddenly, the phone rang.

  He grabbed the receiver.

  “Dusenbury.”

  “Hallo, Mr. Governor. It’s Grace Nightingale. We’ve got a match on the dabs lifted from the passport.”

  “Whose dabs?”

  “Nat Anderson! It’s a sixteen-point match.’

  The burglar was telling the truth!

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God! Clear the line!”

  00:06 PDT

  Juanita was standing over the fax machine, watching a fax coming through. It was from the medical center. But the fax machine was one of those slow, lumbering inkjet machines. Alex had promised to get a faster one, but three months after the promise she was still waiting.

  The phone rang.

  It was on the other side of th
e room, but she leaped up to answer it. She couldn’t make the fax come through any faster but the call might be important.

  “Alex Sedaka’s office.”

  “Hallo,” said a voice. It sounded like a man, but she couldn’t be sure. He sounded like he was crying.

  “Yes?”

  “My mother! She’s dead.”

  She realized who it was. And she realized what this meant. The man at the other end of the line – the man who was now crying pitifully – was Jonathan Olsen.

  She didn’t want to hurt his feelings and she empathized with his pain. But she needed to get him off the phone so that she could get back to the fax machine and see what was coming through.

  Gently, she eased Jonathan off the phone and was just about to go back to the fax machine, when she thought that it might be a good idea to tell Alex. Then again, she realized that there was nothing he could do. It was this fax that might make a difference – if there was still time.

  She looked up at the clock and wondered if there was still time.

  00:07 PDT

  Clayton Burrow was no longer struggling. Whatever had unsettled him, it had now been drowned out by the strength of the sodium thiopental and the paralyzing drug that had been injected into him. In the spectator’s room next door, the witnesses to the execution sat back in their seats, still tense as the drugs took effect, as Burrow’s breathing became labored, as his chest went into spasm, as life slipped away from him.

  In the control room on the other side of the execution chamber the warden watched tensely. The execution had gone reasonably smoothly, but it had not been an easy case.

  But he felt in some way surprised that it had come this far. Throughout the day, he had had this feeling that something was going to stop this execution from taking place, even after the temporary restraining order had been overturned.