Murder Suicide (4 page)

"Now, you wonder?"

"I would never have predicted him doing what he did."

Monroe obviously believed Snow had committed suicide.  "It’s hard to predict human behavior," Clevenger said.

"I think of myself as a pretty intuitive person — at least I did — but I missed all the signs.  He must have been suffering so much inside.  Beside himself, really.  And I just couldn’t sense it."  She seemed truly disappointed in herself.

"I can tell that you cared about him," Clevenger said.  "That means he could tell, too.  Sometimes that’s as much as you can give a person when everything’s fading to black."

"Thank you," she said.  "Thank you for that."  She looked at Clevenger in a way that told him she meant it.  "let me check on Dr. Heller for you."  She stood up and disappeared through a set of columns set into an archway in the rose-colored marble wall behind her desk.

Clevenger watched as she walked past two secretaries working in Heller’s inner office, then disappeared through a set of towering, mahogany French doors.

She was back out in under fifteen seconds.  "He’ll see you as soon as he finishes up with this patient.  Five or ten minutes, if you can wait."

"I can wait."

Heller’s patient, a woman about forty, left in five minutes, but it was twenty-five minutes before Heller called for Monroe to escort Clevenger to his office.  Clevenger figured Heller either needed the time to review his patient’s medical record and write out a progress note or he needed it to stroke his ego, to make it clear he wasn’t sitting around waiting for drop-ins.

Monroe escorted Clevenger to Heller’s open door.  "Dr. Clevenger to see you," she said.  She turned and walked away.

Heller stood up behind his desk.  "J.T. Heller," he said, starting over to Clevenger.  He was at least six-foot-three, with a gleaming smile and blond hair nearly to his shoulders.  His eyes were a remarkable shade of blue — deep, but luminous, like sapphires.  His voice was deep, but surprisingly gentle.  He looked and sounded like a sturdy, amiable Viking, in black crocodile cowboy boots.  His name was embroidered in big, red script letters over the pocket of his starched, white lab coat, which hung just above his knees.  He wore the coat open, showing a black crocodile belt with a big, polished silver belt buckle with a red, enameled Harvard academic crest.  "Sorry to keep you waiting.  Please come in."

Clevenger shook Heller’s hand.  "Frank Clevenger."

"As if you need an introduction," Heller said.  "Let’s be honest:  You’re more famous than I’ll ever be."  He let go.  "That was some cross-country ride the Highway Killer took you on."

"Yes," Clevenger said, trying to keep the image of Jonah Wrens’s decapitated victims out of his mind.  "It was quite a ride."

"But you got him."

"We got him," Clevenger said, "after he got seventeen people."

"When you beat cancer, you beat it, my friend," Heller said.  "You’re gonna lose things on the way.  That’s how it is in any war."

"That would be the surgical perspective," Clevenger said, forcing a smile.

"What other perspective could there be?" Heller asked, with a wide grin.  "Please, sit down."  He motioned toward a pair of black suede armchairs in front of his long glass-top desk.

Clevenger sat in one of the armchairs.  Heller took the other one, instead of his desk chair.  Was that his way of making a visitor comfortable, Clevenger wondered?  Or was it his way of directing Clevenger’s gaze over Heller’s shoulder, to a wall covered with academic degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, membership certificates to the American Medical Association and the American Board of Neurosurgery, a Phi Beta Kappa key, a photograph of Heller and the President, the Harvard Teaching Award for 2001 and 2003,
Boston Magazine
’s Best of Boston Doctors Award for 2003 and 2004.

"I’m glad you’re here, Frank," he said.  "May I call you that?"

"Of course."

"And please, call me Jet."

Clevenger nodded.  He glanced at Heller’s desk, uncluttered to the point of obsession.  The only objects on it were a black computer monitor and a black keyboard, a black leather blotter with a blank sheet of letterhead centered on it, and a silver Cartier pen with a little clock built into the cap.

"Obsessive compulsive disorder," Heller said.  "I have every symptom."

"I can help," Clevenger joked.

Heller shook his head.  "I enjoy my pathology.  It’s...  How do you guys put it? 
Ego-syntonic
.  I like my margins clean."

Heller was referring to removing tumors completely, leaving no cancerous cells behind.  "Then I wouldn’t even consider depriving you of your symptoms.  Your patients obviously benefit from them."

"Maybe."  Heller suddenly looked burdened.  "I don’t know exactly why you’re here, Frank, but I’m glad you are.  I need someone to help me understand what happened to John Snow."  He sounded half sad, half angry.  "I don’t mind telling you, I’m having a bit of trouble with this."

"Say more."

"Understand, I’m no stranger to patients dying on me.  You saw that woman who just left here?"

"Yes, I did."

"Forty-one years old.  Three little kids.  I give her five, six weeks.  An outside chance at seven."

"I’m sorry to hear that.  What’s her diagnosis?"

"Glioblastoma."  His lip curled slightly, as though mentioning the enemy was enough to spark his fury.  "Ten days ago, she had a funny experience.  She couldn’t remember her black Lab’s name.  Fifteen, twenty seconds, then it came to her.  But it struck her as odd.  She started to worry.  Her mom had the start of Alzheimer’s before she turned fifty.  So she goes to see her internist — Karen Grant, over at Brigham.  Karen grabs an MRI.  Boom.  Malignant tissue obliterating forty percent of her cortex.  Inoperable.  Nothing at all I can do for her."

"That’s got to be tough."

"For her it is," Heller said.

"I meant, for you," Clevenger said.

"No.  It isn’t.  See, that’s what I’m getting at.  When I’m not even in the game, I don’t lay my heart on the line.  I’m not a masochist.  But with John..."  He leaned forward slightly, raised his hands like a priest blessing a parishioner.  "I could have changed John Snow’s life.  That’s why I went to war with the Ethics Committee.  I put my career on the line for him."  His blue eyes blazed with intensity.  "I could have pulled off a miracle today."

There was the arrogance Heller was famous for.  "You could have stopped his seizures," Clevenger said, testing how easily Heller could be brought back to earth.

Heller suddenly seemed aware his hands were in midair.  "Just for starters," he said, laying them back on his thighs.  "John’s epilepsy was clearly connected to his creative genius.  When he applied his mind most intensely — when he was inventing — he was at greatest risk for a seizure.  I can’t say why that was the case, but it was.  Seizure-free, he could have done things with his mind that literally would have short-circuited it before.  He seemed elated by that prospect.  And, then, he goes and does this."  The muscles of his jaw suddenly began churning.  "I don’t get it."

"What sort of man was he?" Clevenger asked.

Heller thought that over for a few seconds.  "Driven."  He smiled.  "We had that in common."

Clevenger laughed.  Heller might be arrogant, but he obviously knew it, and that instantly made him more likable.

"He was a passionate man," Heller went on.  "About his work, about everything in life.  He hated the fact that his brain was ‘broken,’ ‘defective’ — his words, not mine.  So, you tell me:  Why would he quit?"

Clevenger didn’t see any reason to keep Heller completely in the dark about the Snow investigation.  "Why do you assume he
quit
?" he asked.

Heller shrugged.  "You don’t like that word.  Okay.  You’re a psychiatrist.  I respect that.  I know people sometimes take their own lives because they’re depressed.  They lose their jobs, go bankrupt.  Their marriages break up.  Maybe some of them were abused or abandoned as kids.  And I know John had his share of trouble in life.  Things were falling apart on him."  He seemed suddenly to be struggling to keep his anger in check.  "So maybe you can help me understand why he would bail on me after I..."

"I meant," Clevenger interrupted, "why do you assume he killed himself?"

Heller looked taken aback.  "As opposed to..."

"
Being
killed."

Heller sat straight up, as though a gust of wind had blown him back against his chair.  "He shot himself with his own gun."

"A gunshot from his pistol caused his death," Clevenger said.  "But it’s possible someone else could have been with him in the alleyway this morning."

"Someone else," Heller said, looking confused.  "I never even considered...  The police were very clear with me on the phone this morning.  So were the paramedics in the E.R.   They said it was suicide.  A Detective Coady."

"It might be," Clevenger said.  "And if Snow did kill himself, I’ll try to find out why."

Heller stood up and walked to the wall of windows behind his desk, folded his arms and looked out at the Boston skyline.  Several seconds passed in silence.  He shook his head.  "You wouldn’t be here if the police were sure it was suicide," he said.  "You’re telling me there’s a real chance my patient was murdered.  He may actually have intended to go the distance with me."

Heller seemed to be viewing Snow’s cause of death as a verdict on whether Snow had abandoned him.  "I can’t say yet," Clevenger said.  "I need to find out much more about who he was — and whether someone might have wanted him dead."

"And you’ll have to be thorough.  You’ll want to get your hands on every bit of information about him you can."

"I like my margins clean, too," Clevenger said.

"Then you need to know something."  He turned around, looked at Clevenger.  "John would have been risking more than his speech or his vision in the O.R. today."

"What do you mean?"

Heller seemed uncertain how much he wanted to divulge.

"Was there a significant risk of death?" Clevenger asked.

"In a manner of speaking," Heller said.  He walked back to his seat, sat down.  "If I tell you this, I need you to keep it between you and me.  It’s privileged doctor-patient information.  I figure you’re kind of like John’s psychiatrist — postmortem.  This is a curbside consult.  Doc-to-doc."

"Okay," Clevenger said.  "Doc-to-doc."

Heller leaned forward, planted his elbows on his thighs.  "The areas of the brain involved in John’s seizures," he said, "included the hippocampus, the cingulated gyrus and the amygdala.  Those turn out to be the areas most intimately involved in facial recognition and the emotional components of memory — at least if you believe the animal studies coming out of UCLA and the University of Minnesota.  It’s preliminary work, but those structures are looking more and more like the data bank where we record who we know and how we feel about them.  I think the initial findings will come out in
Neurosciences
within two or three months."

"You’re saying Snow could have suffered amnesia?"

"A very severe and particular form," Heller said.  "His memory for facts would have been unaffected.  His intellect would have survived.  His imagination may well have flourished.  But he would have been alone.  The surgery would very likely have turned anyone with whom he had an emotional connection into a stranger — his wife, his children, everyone."

Now Clevenger was the one leaning forward.  "So he could still be an inventor, but he wouldn’t remember the people close to him.  A kind of interpersonal amnesia."

"Precisely," Heller said.

"And he was still willing to go through with the surgery?"

"I thought so — until this morning.  Things had become... complicated for him.  He and his business partner — Coroway — were at each other’s throats over Coroway’s plan to take the company public.  John was dead set against it.  He didn’t want to be controlled by anyone, especially bean counters.  And his marriage was in trouble."

"I need to know," Clevenger said.

Heller looked him in the eyes.  "He had a mistress.  I think he saw the surgery as a chance for rebirth, a chance to escape."

"To escape..." Clevenger said.

"All the loose ends in his life.  The messiness.  Everything that was broken.  He’d made preparations — a living will of sorts.  He wanted to give his children their inheritances, settle up financially with his wife, move on cleanly."

"The Ethics Committee didn’t have anything to say about this?" Clevenger asked.  "Doesn’t it amount to elective amnesia?"

"They didn’t focus on it," Heller said, sitting back.

"They didn’t focus on it, or you didn’t tell them?"

"As I said, the data is very new," Heller deadpanned.  "They didn’t focus on it."

Clevenger could only begin to imagine how Snow’s decision to hit the reset button on the software running his existence would have affected the people he planned to leave behind.  His son.  His daughter.  His wife.  His business partner.  His lover.  They would be strangers to him.  Would they feel abandoned?  Enraged?  "Did he consider the impact on his family?" Clevenger asked.  "Of him leaving them so suddenly.  So completely?"

"It was his life, Heller said, a sharp edge to his voice.  "That’s what the Ethics Committee failed to understand — at first.  John wanted two things:  to be free of his seizures and free of his past.  I happened to be in a position to help him achieve both.  If a man owns anything, he owns his brain and his mind.  Don’t you agree?"

Clevenger wasn’t prepared to answer that question.  There was something about Heller that made you
want
to agree with him.  He was extraordinarily charismatic.  His personality was like a strong, cool current that would carry you right along with it if you were content to go.  But Clevenger didn’t know what he really thought of Heller’s plan to use a scalpel to sever his patient’s emotional connections to others.  That felt like playing God.  "It doesn’t matter what I think," he said, finally.  "It matters what people around him would have thought, whether one of them would have felt threatened or angry enough to do him in.  Did any of his family members try to block the surgery?"