Perfect Killer (13 page)

I looked around the room and, for the first time, saw Jasmine inside the door, leaning against the far wall nearly hidden in the standing-room crowd. I took a deep breath and desperately scanned my notes for an intelligent thought. Her hair framed her face like an aura and created the perfect backdrop for the dazzling diamond studs in her ears. Her eye shadow sparkled faintly violet, and she wore a bright cornflower-blue polo shirt and khaki slacks with lots of pleats. A large leather bag hung over her shoulder.
"CBT upsets the reductionists because classical physics offers no provision for something as ethereal as the mind to act on the physical world. In other words, their dogma rests on matter creating thoughts, but they have absolutely no intellectual explanation for thoughts that can create matter."
Bouvet squirmed and fidgeted. He was beside himself now, barely able to contain his growing indignation. Orthodoxy fed such incredible anger, I thought, and it didn't matter whether the beloved dogma was religious or scientific.
"How's this possible?" asked the brown-haired man in front. "Is this your fantasy or is there a plausible scientific explanation?"
"As a matter of fact, new work in this centers on a small set of nano-capable structures in every neuron called microtubules. These work on a quantum-level scale, possibly through a biological variant of a Bose-Einstein condensate in surrounding water molecules, which enables them to achieve a quantum coherence. World-renowned physicist Roger Penrose and his colleague Stuart Hameroff theorize that quantum consciousness may entangle itself in space-time, which means our thoughts may even permanently alter this basic fabric of reality."
"So, why don't we read more about CBT?" The question came from a crowd near Jasmine. I smiled at her, then said, "Mainly because the multibillion-dollar drug industry has a vested interest in keeping the truth covered up. CBT research fails to get research funding because the pharmaceutical companies can't afford for the world to know their products are a poor chemical Band-Aid that does not fix the underlying problem and that their science is based on the buggy-whip science of classical reductionists who do get funded by these megacorporations. In a real sense, those who are addicted to the big research bucks are not seekers of the truth, but seekers of grants. And you don't get grants by challenging the establishment's dogma even if it is provably wrong,"
"Bullshit!" Bouvet's anger finally overran his self-control. "I've had enough of your insupportable, insulting, and completely unscientific speculation!"
I watched him search the assembled faces for some support. Finding none, Bouvet elbowed his way toward the door.
Jasmine shifted slightly and nudged Bouvet off-balance. The pompous Frenchman ricocheted awkwardly off the doorjamb, then disappeared.
I couldn't tell if she had done it on purpose. Then she offered the room a faint conspiratorial smile. Mona Lisa again for an instant. Then applause resonated in the small conference room and spilled from the doorway.

The heels of Jasmine's open-toed pumps drummed a light tattoo on the polished linoleum as we hurried toward my office. I checked my watch.
"I thought they'd never let me go," I muttered, "We're going to be way late. I hate being late. Really hate it,"
"You gave a remarkable presentation."
"You think so?" I checked my watch again.
"It's no wonder Mom talked about you so much."
"She did?" Surprise, joy, and the old regrets about the path not taken set me off balance.
Jasmine gave me a curious smile and nodded as we rounded the last corner. She seemed to have as many enigmatic ways of smiling as Sonia did for saying "Oy!"
"All the time. Mom said you were the smartest human being she had ever met."
"She must have met a lot fewer people than I would have imagined."
Sonia stood in the office doorway.
"Mom kept a file of articles about you."
I nearly stumbled over my own feet.
"You okay?"
"Fine," I lied. I visualized my Vanessa clip file, waterlogged at the bottom of the channel. "I need more sleep."
"You do know she was wildly in love with you."
"Oh, jeez ..." My voice cracked. "You're kidding, right?"
Jasmine gave me a penetrating gaze.
"God's truth." She paused and I saw the puzzle pieces of some decision falling into place behind her eyes. "I'm pretty sure I understand why now."
As we approached my office, a small dark shadow passed over Sonia's face as she connected my expression with the fond look on Jasmine's face.
"I called Pacific Hills already for you and told them you would be a bit late," Sonia said. I was about to introduce Jasmine, but Sonia turned too quickly and stepped inside the door.
"A couple of the people who work with that nice Mr. Sloane brought your truck for you."
I stepped through the door as Sonia sat behind her desk. "He left it in your spot." She pulled open the middle drawer and pulled out a set of keys. I walked over while Jasmine hovered outside in the corridor.
"You need to hurry. The doctor won't be able to wait for long."
"Is everything okay?"
Sonia paused. Her eyes went to Jasmine, then back to me.
"She's beautiful. Be careful." Sonia whispered.
I had no good reply. "Of course," I said, and left.
Jasmine and I quickly found my truck and drove in silence, through campus and up to Sunset, where I headed west. Jasmine gazed up at the Getty Museum as we crossed the 405, which, even this early in the day, was already clotted with vehicles creeping to the beat of their own mysterious rush-hour drummer.
From the corner of my eye, I admired the strong, lithe muscles of her neck as she craned her head up. It was the first time I had seen her up close in the sunlight. The warm sheen of her skin and the way it tautly wrapped her elevated cheekbones and classic jawline captivated me.
Jasmine turned to me. "Where are we going?"
The realization hit me that we were rushing to visit my comatose wife and I had not told Jasmine anything. It also struck me as significant that Jasmine had not asked.
"Pacific Hills," I said, stalling to arrange my thoughts. "It's a ... long-term care facility."
The light at Barrington remained green as we came around the curve.
"Your wife," Jasmine said with no notes of a question in her voice. "I read about it in Mom's scrapbook."
"Amazing."
She nodded and retreated into a far-off gaze I recognized as grief and remembrance. She caught me looking and offered a small, understanding smile.
I concentrated on my driving then, guiding the big truck along Sunset Boulevard's infamously serpentine course.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Jasmine said finally.
I didn't, but instead of shaking my head, I surprised myself when my own words reached my ears, words I had not spoken since I'd related them to the policeman who had taken the accident report.
"Six years ago," I said. "Another life."
I concentrated on the road for a bit, easing off on the gas as the lateral g-forces urged us toward the outside of a clockwise turn.
"Around ten on a Saturday night; coming back from a birthday party in Westwood for a programmer who works for me. I drove Camilla's minivan. She sat next to me. Lindsey and Nate were strapped in their car seats behind us. We had the green heading south on Westwood Boulevard. I drove across Wilshire and up the hill when this big Lexus came out of nowhere heading north."
I shook my head and struggled with the emotions. For an instant, I saw the Lexus crest the hill and actually leave the ground. Witnesses testified that the Lexus's driver lost control when the car landed. It happened fast enough for me to see, too fast for me to react.
"The Lexus veered away, ricocheted off a parked car, and slammed into Camilla."
I remembered the Lexus again and the look of joy on the well-publicized face behind the wheel. I took a deep breath against the angry riptide that memory always triggered.
"The impact tore the minivan in half, killed my kids instantly."
Jasmine said nothing as I drove silently for a long time through the tunnel of the trees that lined Sunset, past the Riviera Country Club, and finally to the final steep hill that slinked down to Pacific Coast Highway.
"The Lexus driver, a famous producer tanked up on some outrageously trendy Napa Valley cabernet, gets a bruise or two." I used all my willpower then to loosen my white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel.
"So then, Mr. Studio Exec spends a wad on an entire law firm and a battalion of expert witnesses to fabricate this obscure metabolic disorder to explain his intoxication. It doesn't matter that he killed my family as long as his defense team can convince the jury he really didn't mean to and he couldn't help himself because he had this questionable physical syndrome supported by a bunch of quacks and expert trial whores. It also didn't help that half the jury had a talent agent or a screenplay in their desk drawer, so they suck up to this guy and he gets off despite a drunk-driving rap sheet longer than Pinocchio's nose."
"Hard to believe."
I nodded as I turned right onto Pacific Coast Highway.
"Didn't I read that he died in another accident a couple of years later?" I nodded again and could not hide my smile.
We navigated a strip of gas stations, shabby convenience stores, and odd, timeworn retail stores and made pretty good time before getting snarled a couple of miles later in a line of traffic oozing past a Caltrans road repair crew shoring up a concrete and metal-mesh rockslide barrier.
Jasmine looked up the steep slope, then over at the beach, then at the Pacific, and finally over at me.
"I don't know what to say."
I shook my head. "No need to say anything."
The deep growls of heavy machinery grew louder as we trickled past the work site and picked up speed. Behind me a black Audi two-seater flashed its brights, then pulled out across the double yellow lines, tailgated by a motorcycle, its rider clad in black leather. Blond hair trailed from the back of her helmet.
"So what do we do next?" Jasmine asked. "I mean, after you see your wife?"
Wife. She said it so casually but it rekindled all the guilt and indecision that had kept me orbiting the body of a woman I had once loved.
"I'd like to drop in on a friend of mine who lives down toward the end of Topanga Canyon." I told her about Chris Nellis and what he had found during his short dive. Without worrying about her discretion, I replayed everything Vince had said, overlaid with my opinions and fears and confusion over what was happening.
"That fits," Jasmine said.
"It does?"
"I took a look at the MicroSD memory chip from Mom's Blackberry last night." She pulled her own Blackberry from her bag and turned it on.
"I have the same model as she does"—her face lost its composure for an instant— "as she did." Jasmine concentrated on the screen for a moment. "From what I can tell, the MicroSD chip contains a test dossier of some sort, and I think it came from Darryl Talmadge's former defense lawyer, the one who got booted after the military claimed national defense jurisdiction and Patriot Act violations. Or it might have come from someone working with the lawyer."
"A test dossier?"
"Bait. Bona fides."
"I don't get it."
I slowed as we made our way into the southern end of Malibu.
"I think this is what got Mom interested in Talmadge's case. I think the lawyer promised her a taste of bigger things to come, something explosive that would make her commit to a deal and throw our legal foundation's muscle behind Talmadge's defense."
"Far-fetched, wouldn't you say? I mean, given the crime?"
"Not so far-fetched. Mom's been pretty out front about opposing the death penalty, especially in places like Mississippi where white people still get jail time for the exact same crimes that send blacks to the gas chamber. So, no—it's not all that far-fetched."
"Well, there is that." I stopped for a squad of surfers in wet suits heading for one of the few public access spots not already illegally blocked off by wealthy Hollywood scofflaws. "Or there is the issue of whether Talmadge was insane or suffering from some sort of detectable physical problem with his brain—the reason your mom first contacted me."
"Exactly. But I think it runs a lot deeper and reaches into some scary places that somebody will kill to keep us out of."
"Like what?"
Jasmine bent her head and looked at her Blackberry. "Well, Clark Braxton's name keeps coming up, and—"
"Whoa! Heavy-duty stuff. With the Democrats still out in the political ozone, he's gonna be the next president for sure unless..." My voice trailed off as the implication hit me.
"Unless something comes along to screw it up."
I glanced over at Jasmine.
"Whoa," I said quietly.

The shock stunned us speechless for a solid minute. Then Jasmine tapped the Blackberry with a manicured but not flashy, index finger.
"It's about Braxton," she said. "Talmadge's lawyer Jay Shanker, put the files together showing that Braxton served as a lab rat for some secret medical research program at one of the old POW camps in the Delta."
I nodded. During World War II, the United State had a problem with Southernported cargo ships returning empty from Europe. On top of that, there were European food shortages and huge troop resources needed to guard POWs over there. Somebody looked at the situation and solved them all by loading captured German soldiers on the empty ships and sending them to rural Mississippi with its plentiful food and cheap land and open spaces where escapees had no place to run and few citizens who spoke German.
The Army located POW camps near Delta farming communities like Belzoni and Greenwood. After the war, most prison camps deteriorated, although as a child I heard talk of continuing activities at the camp in Belzoni, southwest of one of the Judge's plantations.
"Belzoni."
"What? How did you know?"
"Educated guess."
"You're right. The MicroSD card Mama gave you says the Army conducted some sort of secret medical experiments there, something not quite kosher—like the Tuskegee syphilis thing."
An uncomfortable vision of my previous life burrowed toward the surface. As a new recruit, I participated in the end of Project 112 and later, Project SHAD, experiments that tested nerve gas and bacteria on more than five thousand military personnel from 1962 to 1973. Scores of soldiers closer to the release site than I had suffered permanent disabilities. These tests leaked into the media in 2003 with little interest.
Instead of mentioning this I said, "Or like all the atomic tests on soldiers in the 1950s."
Jasmine gave a rueful shake of her head.
"Jesus, it hurts me to think of things like that," I said "Here we have brave men and women who're willing to die to protect their country and they get betrayed by the fatassed, political paper-pushers in the Pentagon."
I felt the anger rise as we finally cleared the Malibu congestion and started making some speed up the hill.
"Anyway, the stuff on the memory chip contains excerpts from Braxton's medical records. They indicate he underwent brain surgery in Belzoni as treatment for a head wound he received in Vietnam."
"That's pretty famous."
"Uh-huh, but these records say Army doctors experimented on him and others with head wounds in order to make them more aggressive. In their words, they wanted 'perfect killers' for the Army."
I whistled. "That's political dynamite."
"More like a nuke."
"On the other hand, maybe it helps: brave, mortally wounded hero gets taken advantage of by the military he so bravely served."
"I doubt it," she said. "Nobody wants a head case for president."
"Why not? They've all been head cases since JFK."
"Good point."
The road dipped toward a broad expanse of beach and ocean. "What else is in the file?"
Jasmine shook her head. "A lot of vague stuff, intended to tease Mom and get her involved."
"It worked."
"Jay Shanker promised her the microfiche archives of all the Belzoni medical records on a CD, including name, rank, serial numbers, dates, procedures, doctors, and chain-of-command approvals authorizing the whole thing."
I whistled. "Any number of people would kill to keep that quiet."
A few miles past Point Dume, I slowed for a small, discreet sign designed to attract only the attention of people already looking for it. As I had twice a week for the past six years, I turned into a narrow, cobbled lane bounded with lavish landscaping; a sculpturequality steel gate fixed to stone columns loomed ahead. I stopped next to an intercom/keypad pedestal and punched in my code.
"Talmadge ties everything together," I said as the gate opened. "Which means the answers are back home."
"Home?" Jasmine gave me that Mona Lisa smile again. "I thought California's your home."
I accelerated slowly through the gate as I thought about this.
"Camilla used to catch me saying that. She told me it made her sad."
"The Delta never lets loose."
"Yeah, it's got my heart, but I can't imagine living there again."
We drove in silence for a bit more, then I said, "Why now? Why bring Talmadge to trial now after so many years? And why kill Vanessa?"
"Well, the leading theory for the killing—at least among the cops—is that Mom was assassinated by someone in the African-American community who didn't want her helping Talmadge."
"Blame the victim?"
"Old story She got a lot of hate mail. Some pretty angry voices among big AfricanAmerican groups condemned her for helping the white devil."
Jasmine stared silently out the side window. "It had a race thing about it. And a personal thing. Some of them were the same voices which slammed her years ago for being a traitor to her race when she dated a couple of white guys in New York."
She said it evenly, but my pulse stumbled anyway. Her ability to talk so casually about the incendiary topic of race astonished me. I had friends of every race and tried to ignore skin color, which seemed to strengthen the friendships because I considered each as a surgeon, an entrepreneur, a talented artist, first, rather than as a Pakistani, Asian, black, whatever. But then, I was white and could afford to ignore race since it was not constantly thrown in my face by those who were incapable of seeing past skin color.
"So," I said, and hesitated. "So
could
it be that?"
"It's always possible, but I doubt it. Doubt it very seriously. Convincing the police is another matter."
"But why prosecute Talmadge now? The man's old and coming apart at the seams. His awful seizures tear him apart and he's got terminal larynx cancer from cigarettes. Why doesn't somebody just let him die. The cancer's its own punishment."
"Punishment is not always justice," Jasmine said. "Do you think the Nuremberg trials were only about punishment and the culpability of those being tried?" She paused for an answer I did not have, then shook her head.
"Justice outranks punishment. It brings a cultural repudiation of criminal behavior and that act brings justice—to the individual directly wronged and to society as a whole."
"But why Talmadge and why now?"
"What's happening now began in 1990, a couple of weeks before Christmas when a grand jury in Jackson indicted Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers."
I was familiar with the case. Evers had been gunned down in front of his home in 1963. An ambitious young district attorney in Hinds County, Bill Waller, brought De La Beckwith to trial and endured abuse and anonymous death threats to see justice done. Waller also resisted intense pressure from the racists who controlled the state—the Stennis/Eastland Democrats who had made their careers standing in the schoolhouse door and who thought good race relations was providing new paint to freshen up the Colored Only signs smeared across the Mississippi landscape like ugly cultural graffiti. In this atmosphere, Waller got hung juries in two separate trials. I suppose that, given the allwhite juries back then, the verdicts stood as a partial victory, and indicated that not all white people were behind Mississippi's brutal apartheid.
Less than ten years later, Mississippi elected "nigger lover" Waller as governor thanks in large part to the FBI backed up by the guns and steel of the federal government and National Guard troops. Many think the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent protests did the whole job. True enough, Dr. King and his protesters had to be the first wave to show the nation their dedication, their suffering, and to help Americans understand the evil. But they could never have succeeded without the federal muscle even the Klan had to respect.
"Bobby DeLaughter got a conviction in the Evers case," Jasmine continued. "And produced more than simple justice for Myrlie Evers and her children. It sent a tremendous signal that Mississippi had changed, and if we got a conviction here, it might happen everywhere. Lightbulbs went off all over the South, and pretty soon we had convictions in the Birmingham church bombings and in a whole lot of other Klan killings. All the way up to Indianapolis and Pennsylvania."
"A compelling case, counselor," I said.
"Feed one person's hunger for justice and you can feed a whole people. Its a fishand-loaves thing."
We came out of the dense landscaping at the top of the hill to find a rambling, three-story building with extensive porticoes, a red-tiled roof, and simulated adobe walls designed to evoke the Spanish missions to the north and south along El Camino Real.
"Impressive." She stretched the word out over several seconds.
"I wanted the best for her." I let my eyes follow along with Jasmine's. "And I'm fortunate enough to afford it."
A uniformed man waved us past a small guardhouse, and I continued on into the guest parking lot and pulled into an empty space.
"There's one problem," Jasmine said.
I put the truck into park and turned off the ignition.
"With this place?"
Jasmine shook her head. "With the Talmadge case."
"Which would be?"
"It's what bothered Mom. She looked up thoughtfully, gnawing on her lower lip as she searched for the words. "Talmadge wasn't a known hate crime gone unsolved. It had been long forgotten as an old Balance Due homicide.
"Then one day last year, an anonymous file arrives at the Greenwood PD, the evidence and information all lined up, almost too perfect to be real. Mom suspected something and started asking questions."
"Then they killed her?"
She nodded.
We sat quietly listening to the metallic ticks and creaks of the truck's engine cooling off. Then Camilla's primary physician, Jeff Flowers, walked out of the building, his white coat trailing behind and an arm extended in a broad wave.
"That's my appointment." I pulled the keys from the ignition. "Come on in and wait for a while."
"Okay," she said, then followed me across the lot.
"Professor," Flowers said with a smile as he extended his hand. "You don't look any worse for wear for a man up all night making news."
I took his hand. "Well, I
feel
a lot worse than I look."
I turned to Jasmine. "Jeff's the medical director and CEO here. This is his baby." I introduced him to Jasmine.
"Very pleased," Flowers said warmly as he shook her hand. "Come on in. It's nicer inside."
"Nicer?" Jasmine made a show of taking in the building and grounds, then said, "This I
have
to see."
We followed Flowers into the building, where he settled Jasmine in one of the private reception rooms.
"The phone there has my cell and pager number and my assistant marked on the speed dial," he told her. "Make sure to call one if you need anything."
"Thank you."
Flowers gave her a little bow, then held the door for me. I stepped into the corridor.
"Sorry to be so harried, Professor," Flowers said to me as he took the lead, heading toward Camilla's suite. The days had long passed when he had been the bright student in the front row of my neurophysiology class at UCLA, but he still insisted on calling me professor in an honorific way that made me uncomfortable.
"It happens to me as well."
He picked up his pace. "Your wife is not doing well. In the past fourteen hours, she's acquired a nasty inflammation around the enteral site of the transgastric jejunostomy. We began immediate and aggressive antibiotic treatment, but there's no sign of a response so far."
I nodded as we detoured around a housekeeping cart and made a right-hand turn into a stairwell leading up to the front wing with the ocean-view rooms.
The transgastric jejunostomy feeding tube entered an incision in Camilla's abdomen and threaded though her stomach into the upper part of her small intestine. Acidic gastric fluids can leak outward from the incision and erode the tissue; bacteria can infiltrate from outside.
"Not surprising," I said. "It's actually hard to believe she's gone six years without this."
"That's not all, Professor" Flowers said seriously. "Her renal function has declined noticeably and there are signs of developing pneumonia. We don't know yet whether those are connected to the wound infection, but the lab is working on it as their top priority."
My hopes rose and fell with his prognosis. For six years I had wrestled with the fatigue and resentment tied to Camilla's endless hover between life and death. Years ago, Flowers had discussed removing Camilla's feeding tube. But I loved her deeply despite the evidence that the Camilla I had known no longer inhabited the still-breathing body she had left behind. Also, in the back of my mind, loomed the AMA's ethical statement that "there is no ethical distinction between withdrawing and withholding life-sustaining treatment."
The feeding tube had been installed in the relatively early days when there was hope Camilla might recover. But once installed, removing made me executioner or murderer. Other things restrained me as well. Before Camilla, I had lived like a kite without a string, soaring and diving wildly, hitting enormous heights and knowing the terror and pain of watching the earth rush up at me, all jagged, hard, and sharp. Camilla had been the string to my kite. Even the idea of Camilla had allowed me the same discipline for the past six years. Living without her terrified me.
"We've also seen changes in her EEGs I don't understand," Flowers continued as we reached the top of the stairs and made directly to Camilla's suite. "I'm hoping you can shed some light on them."
We entered the door leading into the suite's sitting room. The Pacific Ocean glowed through the broad windows, showing a top-heavy container ship on the distant horizon heading toward Point Conception. Closer in, I made out the brilliant geometry of a red-and-while sailboat spinnaker and, nearer still, a squad of surfers astride their boards waiting for a good wave.
I followed Flowers to the door leading to Camilla's room. He opened the door, then turned back to me.
"I'm afraid she also looks worse than last week." He turned and I followed him into the room.
As always, Camilla's bed was inclined toward the window. We detected no cognitive control over her eyes, but knowing how much she loved the ocean, I wanted to make sure, if there was any spark in her brain connecting her to this world, she could spend her time as pleasantly as possible.
Research showed we had no way of
proving
she lacked consciousness, only that we could not detect it. So I paid for the best DVDs and music and for people to come and read to her. I don't know whether it did any good for her, but it did a little for me.