Murder Suicide (2 page)

That comment made Clevenger wonder just how dark Grace’s thoughts really were.  Maybe she was floating an elegant metaphor for life in a gilded cage, but the fact that she mentioned hurting someone and wearing handcuffs in the same minute worried him.  Maybe she had something truly destructive in mind.

In the year since Clevenger had solved the Highway Killer case, catching serial killer Jonah Wrens before he could dump another decapitated body along some lonely stretch of asphalt, the gap between his forensic work and his psychotherapy practice had been closing.  Not too many garden variety depressives and neurotics showed up at his door.  Most of the people looking for him to heal them were struggling against the impulse to harm others.

Grace wouldn’t be the first woman to feel imprisoned enough by her marriage to trade it for a jail cell.  "Is there anyone you fantasize about hurting?" he asked her.

She squinted at the floor, clearly imagining something.  Whatever it was made her blush.  "No," she said.  She looked up and smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her skirt.  "I just meant I want to be a better person.  I want to learn to appreciate what I have."

That sounded like a dodge.  People blush when one of their core truths is revealed.  Something with roots in the soul.  The name of a lover.  A sexual preference.  Even a deeply held personal goal.  And it was looking more and more like the impulse to harm someone was part of Grace’s core.  That fact — more than her pat explanation that she had seen Clevenger talking about the Highway Killer on television and liked the looks of his jeans and black turtleneck and shaved head — might really explain why she had chosen to seek therapy from a forensic psychiatrist with a knack for getting inside the heads of killers.

"You can tell me," Clevenger prodded her.

"I have to go," Grace said, wiping her eyes.  "I swear to you:  I’m not a danger to anyone, including myself.  I never have those thoughts."

That was what psychiatrists call a
contract for safety
, the words a potentially dangerous patient has to speak to avoid being involuntarily hospitalized — committed to a locked psychiatric unit.  It made Clevenger wonder whether Grace knew her way around the psychiatric profession a little better than she let on.  "I need to ask you quite directly:  Do you have any intention of hurting your husband?"

"‘Do I have...’  That’s ridiculous."  She stared at him, unblinking.

He returned her stare.  "Fair enough."

She stood up, ran her fingertips down the row of gold buttons on her black Chanel jacket.  "I’ll call and schedule something in the next few days, if you have an opening."

Clevenger kept his seat.  He wanted to make it clear that the decision to avoid going deeper was Grace’s, and hers alone.  She would have to turn her back on him.  On the truth.  "We still have ten minutes," he said.

She stood there several seconds, looking uncomfortable, as though Clevenger’s silence might coax her back into her seat.  But then she turned abruptly and walked out.

Clevenger watched through his window as she walked briskly to her car, a big, blue BMW sedan, with smoked windows.  She fumbled in her handbag, shook violently, reached in again.  She started to cry.  She finally pulled out her keys, threw open the car door and disappeared inside, slamming the door behind her.

"Does she get a refund?" North Anderson asked, from the doorway to Clevenger’s office.

Clevenger turned to him.

"She looked worse on her way out than on her way in."

Anderson had been Clevenger’s partner at Boston Forensics for the past two years.  He was a former Baltimore cop turned private investigator, a black man who looked a decade younger than his forty-four years, probably because he was addicted to weightlifting — three hours every day.  There wasn’t an ounce of fat left on his body.  The only hints that he’d lived the tough life he had were the jagged scar over his right eye and the slight limp to his left leg, the former from a suspect wielding a knife, the latter from one with a .45.  Both of them had ended up face-down on the pavement.  The one with the knife went to jail.  The one with the gun went to the morgue.

"She’s living a lie," Clevenger said, glancing at Baxter’s car pulling past the chain-link fence and gate that separated the Fitzgerald Shipyard — where Boston Forensics made its home — from the rest of Chelsea.  "That hurts.  More and more every day."

"The truth will set you free," Anderson said.  "Unless you’re guilty."  He smiled the winning smile that made people like him and open up to him, as easily in Boston as they had in Baltimore.  Because he liked people, with all their foibles.  "We got a call from a Detective Mike Coady, out of Boston P.D."

"What’s up?" Clevenger asked.

"You know that guy about to have brain surgery at Mass General?"

"Sure, scheduled for it this morning.  John Snow.  He was front-page in
The Globe
again."

"His surgery’s been canceled."

"Why?"

"He’s dead."

"Dead?  From what?"

"They found him in an alleyway between a couple of buildings at the hospital.  Took a 9mm slug to his chest."

"Jesus.  They have the shooter?"

"Coady thinks so — Snow himself."

"He committed suicide?"

"No witnesses.  The bullet came from Snow’s own gun."

"So what does Coady need us for?" Clevenger asked.

"The Medical Examiner won’t officially rule out murder," Anderson said.  He crossed his massive arms.  "Coady has a backlog of eleven open murder cases."

"So the good detective wants me to come up with a convenient psychological profile, posthumously, to fit the suicide theory," Clevenger said.  He shook his head.  "I’ll call and tell him to live or die on the ballistics report."

Anderson shrugged.  "I could poke around, see if there’s any talk on the streets, just to get a flavor of the thing."

"Why waste the energy, if all Coady wants is a rubber-stamp to close the case?"

"Nobody really believes we rubber-stamp anything."

"Maybe that’s why he’s hoping we do this time.  Instant credibility."  He picked up the receiver.  "Got his number?"

"Sure," Anderson said.  But he just stood there.

Clevenger looked at him askance.  "What?"

"You know how you sometimes get a gut feeling?  I mean, maybe I’m buying all the hype on this Snow guy, but he was about to travel some medical ground that’s never been traveled before.  He was gonna make history.  Every reporter in the country was angling for an interview with the guy post-op.  I’m no shrink, but I figure that kind of momentum can carry you through some pretty bad days.  And he shoots himself in an alleyway, a stone’s throw away from the O.R.?  That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense."

"You don’t think he killed himself."

"I think that’s the answer Coady is looking for.  It might be the right one.  But a man took a bullet to the chest this morning, and my gut tells me to get the whole story."

"From a dead man."

"If the truth was easy to come by," Anderson said, "Coady wouldn’t have called you in the first place."

Chapter 3

1:30
P.M.

Clevenger climbed into his black Ford F150 pickup and started the drive over the Tobin Bridge to Boston.  He had arranged to meet Detective Mike Coady at the morgue on Albany Street at noon.  If he was going to get inside John Snow’s head, he figured he might as well start with his corpse — the last page of his life story — and work backwards.

What he knew already about Snow he had learned from newspapers and television.  Snow was an aeronautical engineer who had received his Ph.D. at Harvard, rising through the ranks of academia to become — at thirty-two — the youngest person ever to win a full professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famed Lincoln Lab.  A few years later he left M.I.T. to start Snow-Coroway Engineering, headquartered in Cambridge.  And over the next two decades he had seen his inventions in the fields of radar technology and rocket propulsion net more than one hundred million dollars from firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

But Snow’s genius seemed to have come at a price.  He suffered seizures, as though the combined force of knowledge and inspiration swirling through his mind sometimes surged too intensely.  And these were not the subtle, absence seizures that made a person stare off into space.  They were tonic-clonic, grand mal seizures that made Snow collapse, unconscious, breathing like a bellows, his limbs jerking wildly, his teeth clamping shut, sometimes tearing through his tongue.

According to a
20/20
segment on Snow, he had had his first seizure at age ten while struggling to solve an equation his calculus tutor had laid before him, an equation that would have frustrated most mathematicians.  When Snow snapped his pencil in two, the tutor apologized for asking too much of him.  But then he noticed that Snow had scrawled the correct answer at the bottom of the page — and that his rigid limbs were beginning to shake.

His mother and father feared the worst — a brain tumor.  But a neurological work-up revealed no mass.  There was no bleed, no infarct.  An EEG told the story:  clusters of delta and theta electrical spikes shooting through his temporal lobes, sparking up toward his frontal lobes.  Bolts of inspiration gone wild.

John Snow had epilepsy.  And while Dilantin controlled it when he was a boy, only a combination of two medications half-controlled it by the time he finished high school.  By age thirty-five, he was taking three medications and still seizing.  The more intensely he focused on what he loved — inventing — the more he suffered.  It was as if his gift fueled his disease.  By fifty, his regimen included four anticonvulsants.  And even on that cocktail of drugs, he would collapse in fits at least a dozen times a year.

So John Snow had set out to fix his broken brain.  He’d read dozens of neurology and neurosurgery textbooks, journals and research studies, interviewed neurologists and neurosurgeons around the world, scoured the Internet, all in pursuit of the answer to a single question:  What parts of his brain would need to be removed to rid him of the runaway circuits responsible for his convulsions?

That was a daunting question because the brain’s circuitry was wet.  Troubled tended to seep through the tissue.  Each nerve cell in the brain (and there were billions) was constantly leaking and absorbing charged ions as electrical current traveled down its long axon, dead-ending into a collection of membranous bubbles that held chemical messengers like serotonin and norepinephrine, bursting those bubbles, spilling the chemicals onto the next nerve cell down the line.  And so on and so on.  A mind-boggling electrochemical chain reaction cascading in every direction.

But not infinitely.  The brain had discreet structures within it, too, like states in a country, with boundaries that were difficult to cross, even for electricity.

Snow convinced his neurologist to order him a complex combination of EEGs, PET scans, and MRIs to hunt for his pathology.  Then he wrote a software program that cross-referenced the results, generating a three-dimensional computer image of his brain in which the areas that were most clearly implicated in his seizures glowed red.  Those under less suspicion glowed blue.  Taken  together, they included parts of the brain’s temporal lobe, occipital lobe, cingulate gyrus, amygdala and hippocampus — the staging grounds for the neuroterrorism that besieged him.

Next, Snow handpicked his neurosurgeon — J.T. ‘Jet’ Heller, Chairman of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Neurosurgery.  Just thirty-nine years old, brilliant and brash, Heller had made a name for himself successfully separating Siamese twins joined at the head.  He had also become famous for elegant, nearly bloodless cryosurgery to remove aggressive glioblastoma brain tumors while sparing healthy tissue.

Heller was a maverick willing to go out on a limb for a patient and attempt what seemed impossible, even if it meant clashing with the Mass General establishment, including the Medical Ethics Committee.  He’d done it for Snow, holding a press conference to protest the Ethics Committee’s initial decision to block Snow’s surgery on the basis that it was too aggressive and could have unforeseeable side effects — including possible damage to Snow’s vision, memory and speech.  It was Snow’s right, Heller argued, to decide what he was willing to risk to rid himself of his illness.  He threatened to resign from the medical staff if the Committee ultimately refused him permission to proceed.

Boston radio talk show hosts like Kiss 108’s legendary Matty Siegel took up Snow’s cause.  Letters streamed into the hospital.  Nationally renowned medical ethicists weighed in on his side.  And, in a rare reversal, the Ethics Committee reconvened and greenlighted the procedure.

Now Snow was dead, shot through the heart less than an hour before he was scheduled to go under the knife.  Maybe, Clevenger thought, Heller’s commitment to get Snow his surgery had outpaced Snow’s own desire for it.  Snow might have been swept along in the campaign to overturn the Ethics Committee’s ruling and not know how to tell Heller he had changed his mind.  He could have arrived at MGH despondent, having to choose between bailing out and continuing to suffer debilitating seizures or braving surgery that might blind him or leave him mute.  Maybe he couldn’t live with either choice.

Clevenger parked outside the morgue and walked inside.  The receptionist told him he could find Jeremiah Wolfe, the Medical Examiner, in the ‘cold room’ where autopsies were performed.  Detective Coady was with him.

Clevenger walked down the concrete-block corridor, through a set of swinging doors, into the chilly air.  Jazz music played on a tinny loudspeaker.  Wolfe and Coady were standing on either side of a stainless steel table where a body lay under a sheet.  "Doctor Clevenger," Wolfe called out, "welcome."

Wolfe was near seventy, a wafer-thin man with round spectacles and a full head of unruly, unnaturally black hair.  He had shown Clevenger more dead bodies than either man wanted to remember.