Dr. Death

CHAPTER 2

I AGREED TO meet him at the crime scene the following Monday at 7:45 A.M. When he's at the West L.A. station, we usually travel together, but he was already scheduled for a 6:15 meeting downtown at Parker Center, so I drove myself.

" Sunrise prayer session?" I said. "Milking the cows with guys in suits?"

"Cleaning the stable while guys in suits rate my performance. Gonna have to find a clean tie."

"Is the topic Mate?"

"What else. They'll demand to know why I haven't accomplished squat, I'll nod a lot, say 'Yassuh, yassuh,' shuffle off."

Mate had been butchered fairly close to my home, and I set out at seven-thirty. The first leg of the trip was ten minutes north on Beverly Glen, the Seville fairly sailing because I was going against traffic, ignoring the angry faces of commuters incarcerated by the southbound crush.

Economic recovery and the customary graft had spurred unremitting roadwork in L.A., and hellish traffic was the result. This month it was the bottom of the glen: smug men in orange CalTrans vests installing new storm drains just in time for the next drought, the usual municipal division of labor: one guy working for every five standing around. Feeling like a pre-Bastille Royalist, I sped past the queue of Porsches and Jaguars forced to idle with clunkers and pickups. Democracy by oppression, everyone coerced into bumper-nudging intimacy.

At Mulholland, I turned left and drove four miles west, past seismically strained dream houses and empty lots that said optimism wasn't for everyone. The road coiled, scything through weeds, brush, saplings, other kindling, twisted upward sharply and changed to packed, ocher soil as the asphalt continued east and was renamed Encino Hills Drive.

Up here, at the top of the city, Mulholland had become a dirt road. I'd hiked here as a grad student, thrilling at the sight of antlered bucks, foxes, falcons, catching my breath at the furtive shifting of high grass that could be cougars. But that had been years ago, and the suddenness of the transformation from highway to impasse caught me by surprise. I hit the brakes hard, steered onto the rise, parked below the table of sallow dirt.

Milo was already there, his copper-colored unmarked pulled up in front of a warning sign posted by the county: seven miles of unfinished road followed, no vehicles permitted. A locked gate said that L.A. motorists couldn't be trusted.

He hitched his pants, loped forward, took my hand in both of his giant mitts.

"Alex."

"Big guy."

He had on a fuzzy-looking green tweed jacket, brown twill pants, white shirt with a twisted collar, string tie with a big, misshapen turquoise clasp. The tie looked like tourist junk. A new fashion statement; I knew he'd put it on to needle the brass at this morning's meeting.

"Going cowboy?"

"My Georgia O'Keeffe period."

"Natty."

He gave a low, rumbling laugh, pushed a lick of dry black hair off his brow, squinted off to the right. Focusing on a spot that told me exactly where the van had been found.

Not up the dirt road, where untrimmed live oaks would have provided cover. Right here, on the turnoff, out in the open.

I said, "No attempt to conceal."

He shrugged and jammed his hands in his pockets. He looked tired, washed-out, worn down by violence and small print.

Or maybe it was just the time of year. September can be a rotten month in L.A., throat-constrictingly hot or clammy cold, shadowed by a grimy marine layer that turns the city into a pile of soiled laundry. When September mornings start out dreary they ooze into sooty afternoons and sickly nights. Sometimes blue peeks through the clouds for a nanosecond. Sometimes the sky sweats and a leaky-roof drizzle glazes windshields. For the past few years resident experts have been blaming it on El Nino, but I don't recall it ever being any different.

September light is bad for the complexion. Milo 's didn't need any further erosion. The gray morning light fed his pallor and deepened the pockmarks that peppered his cheeks and ran down his neck. White sideburns below still-thick black hair turned his temples into a zebra-striped stunt. He'd gone back to drinking moderately and his weight had stabilized – 240 was my guess – much of it settling around his middle. His legs remained skinny stilts, comprising a good share of his seventy-five inches. His jowls, always monumental, had given wayaround the edges. We were about the same age – he was nine months older – so I supposed my jawline had surrendered a bit, too. I didn't spend much time looking in the mirror.

He walked to the kill-spot and I followed. Faint chevrons of tire tracks corrugated the yellow soil. Nearby lay a scrap of yellow cordon tape, dusty, utterly still. A week of dead air, nothing had moved.

"We took casts of the tracks," he said, flicking a hand at them. "Not that it matters. We knew where the van came from. Rental sticker. Avis, Tarzana branch. Brown Ford Econoline with a nice big cargo area. Mate rented it last Friday, got the weekend rate."

"Preparing for another mercy mission?" I said.

"That's what he uses vans for. But so far no beneficiary's come forth claiming Mate stood him up."

"I'm surprised the companies still rent to him."

"They probably don't. The paperwork was made out to someone else. Woman named Alice Zoghbie, president of the Socrates Club-right-to-die outfit headquartered in Glendale. She's out of the country, attending some sort of humanist convention in Amsterdam -left Saturday."

"She rented the van and split the next day?" I said.

"Apparently. Called her home, which also doubles as the Socrates office, got voice mail. Had Glendale PD drive by. No one home. Zoghbie's message says she's due back in a week. She's on my to-do list." He tapped the pocket where his notepad nestled.

"I wonder why Mate never bought a van," I said.

"From what I've seen so far, he was cheap. I tossed his apartment the day after the murder, not much in the way of creature comforts. His personal car's an old Chevy that has seen better days. Before he went automotive he used budget motels."

I nodded. "Bodies left on the bed for the cleaning crew to find next morning. Too many traumatized maids turned into bad publicity. I saw him on TV once, getting defensive about it. Saying Christ had been born in a barn full of goat dung, so setting doesn't matter. But it does, doesn't it?"

He looked at me. "You've been following Mate's career?"

"Didn't have to," I said, keeping my voice even. "He wasn't exactly media-shy. Any tracks of other cars nearby?"

He shook his head.

"So," I said, "you're wondering if the killer drove up with Mate."

"Or parked farther down the road than we checked. Or left no tracks-that happens plenty, you know how seldom forensic stuff actually helps. No one's reported seeing any other vehicles. Then again, no one noticed the damn van, and it sat here for hours."

"What about shoe prints?"

"Just the people who found the van."

"What's the time-of-death estimate?" I said.

"Early morning, one to four A.M." He shot his cuff and looked at his Timex. The watch crystal was scarred and filmed. "Mate was discovered just after sunrise-six-fifteen or so."

"The papers said the people who found him were hikers," I said. "Must've been early risers."

"Coupla yuppies walking with their dog, came up from the Valley for a constitutional before hitting the office. They were headed up the dirt road and noticed the van."

"Any other passersby?" I pointed down the road, toward Encino Hills Drive. "I used to come up here, remember a housing development being built. By now it's probably well-populated. That hour, you'd think a car or two would drive by."

"Yeah, it's populated," he said. "High-priced development. Guess the affluent get to sleep in."

"Some of the affluent got that way by working. What about a broker up early to catch the market, a surgeon ready to operate?"

"It's conceivable someone drove past and saw something, but if they did they're not admitting it. Our initial canvass produced zip by way of neighborly help. How many cars have you seen while we stood here?"

The road had been silent.

"I got here ten minutes before you," he said. "One truck. Period. A gardener. And even if someone did drive by, there'd be no reason to notice the van. No streetlights, so before sunrise it would've been pure black. And if someone did happen to spot it, no reason to give it a thought, let alone stop. There was county construction going on up here till a few months ago, some kind of drain line. CalTrans crews left trucks overnight all the time. Another parked vehicle wouldn't stand out."

"It stood out to the yuppies," I said.

"Stood out to their dog. One of those attentive retrievers. They were ready to walk right past the van but the dog kept nosing around, barking, wouldn't leave it alone. Finally, they had a look inside. So much for walking for health, huh? That kind of thing could put you off exercise for a long time."

"Bad?"

"Not what I'd want as an aerobic stimulant. Dr. Mate was trussed up to his own machine."

"The Humanitron," I said. Mate's label for his death apparatus. Silent passage for Happy Travelers.

Milo 's smile was crooked, hard to read. "You hear about that thing, all the people he used it on, you expect it to be some high-tech gizmo. It's a piece of junk, Alex. Looks like a loser in a junior-high science fair. Mismatched screws, all wobbly. Like Mate cobbled it from spare parts."

"It worked, "I said.

"Oh yeah. It worked fine. Fifty times. Which is a good place to start, right? Fifty families. Maybe someone didn't approve of Mate's brand of travel agency. Potentially, we're talking hundreds of suspects. Problem one is we've been having a hard time reaching them. Seems lots of Mate's chosen were from out-of-state-good luck locating the survivors. The department's lent me two brand-new Detective-I's to do phone work and other scut. So far people don't want to talk to them about old Eldon, and the few who do think the guy was a saint- 'Grandma's doctors watched her writhe in agony and wouldn't do a damn thing. Dr. Mate was the only one willing to help.' Alibi-talk or true belief? I'd need face-to-faces with all of them, maybe you there to psychoanalyze, and so far it's been telephonic. We're making our way through the list."

"Trussed to the machine," I said. "What makes you think homicide? Maybe it was voluntary. Mate decided it was his own time to skid off the mortal coil, and practiced what he preached."

"Wait, there's more. He was hooked up, all right-I.V. in each arm, one bottle full of the tranquilizer he uses- thiopental-the other with the potassium chloride for the heart attack. And his thumb was touching this little trip-wire doohickey that gets the flow going. Coroner said the potassium had kicked in for at least a few minutes, so Mate would've been dead from that, if he wasn't dead already. But he was. The gizmo was all for show, Alex. What dispatched him was no mercy killing: he got slammed on the head hard enough to crack his skull and cause a subdural hematoma, then someone cut him up, none too neatly. 'Ensanguination due to extensive genital mutilation.' "

"He was castrated?" I said.

"And more. Bled out. Coroner says the head wound was serious, nice columnar indentation, meaning a length of pipe or something like that. It would've caused big-time damage if Mate had lived-maybe even killed him. But it wasn't immediately fatal. The rear of the van was soaked with blood, and the spatter says arterial spurts, meaning Mate's heart was pumping away when the killer worked on him."

He rubbed his face. "He was vivisected, Alex."

"Lord," I said.

"Some other wounds, too. Deliberate cuts, eight of them, deep. Abdomen, groin and thighs. Squares, like the killer was playing around."

"Proud of himself," I said.

He pulled out his notepad but didn't write.

"Any other wounds?" I said.

"Just some superficial cuts the coroner says were probably accidental-the blade slipping. All that blood had to make it a slippery job. Weapon was very sharp and single-edged-scalpel or a straight razor, probably with scissors for backup."

"Anesthesia, scalpel, scissors," I said. "Surgery. The killer must have been drenched. No blood outside the van?"

"Not one speck. It looked like the ground had been swept. This guy took extreme care. We're talking wet work in a confined space in the dead of night. He had to use some kind of portable light. The front seat was full of blood, too, especially the passenger seat. I'm thinking this bad boy did his thing, got out of the van, reentered on the passenger side-easier than the driver's seat because no steering wheel to get in the way. That's where he cleaned most of the mess off. Then he got out again, stripped naked, wiped off the rest of the blood, bundled the soiled stuff up, probably in plastic bags. Maybe the same plastic he'd used to store a change of clean clothes. He got into his new duds, checked to cover any prints or tracks, swept around the van and was gone."

"Naked in full view of the road," I said. "That would be risky even in the dark, because he'd have to use a flashlight to check himself and the dirt. On top of operating in the van using light. Someone could've driven by, seen it shining through the van windows, gone to check, or reported it."

"The light in the van might not have been that big of a problem. There were sheets of thick cardboard cut to the right size for blocking the windows on the driver's seat. Also streaked with arterial blood, so they'd been used during the cutting. Cardboard's just the kind of homemade thing Mate would've used in lieu of curtains, so my bet is Dr. Death brought them himself. Thinking he was gonna be the trusser, not the trussee. Same for the mattress he was lying on. I think Mate came ready to play Angel of Death for the fifty-first time and someone said, Tag, you're it."

"The killer used the cardboard, then removed it from the windows," I said. "Wanting the body to be discovered. Display, just like the geometrical wounds-like leaving the van in full sight. Look what I did. Look who I did it to."

He stared down at the soil, grim, exhausted. I pictured the slaughter. Vicious blitz assault, then deliberate surgery on the side of an ink black road. The killer silent, intent, constructing an impromptu operatory within the confines of the van's rear compartment. Picking his spot, knowing few cars drove by. Working quickly, efficiently, taking the time to do what he'd come to do-what he'd fantasized about.

Taking the time to insert two I.V. lines. Positioning Mate's finger on the trigger.

Swimming in blood, yet managing to escape without leaving behind a dot of scarlet. Sweeping the dirt… I'd never encountered anything more premeditated.

"What was the body position?"

"Lying on his back, head near the front seat."

"On the mattress he provided," I said. "Mate prepares the van, the killer uses it. Talk about a power trip. Co-optation."

He thought about that for a long time. "There's something that needs to be kept quiet: The killer left a note. Plain white paper, eight by eleven, tacked to Mate's chest. Nailed into the sternum, actually, with a stainless-steel brad. Computer-typed: Happy Traveling, You Sick Bastard."

Vehicle noise caused us both to turn. A car appeared from the west, on the swell that led down Encino Hills. Big white Mercedes sedan. The middle-aged woman at the wheel kept to forty miles per while touching up her makeup, sped past without glancing at us.

"Happy Traveling," I said. "Mate's euphemism. The whole thing stinks of mockery, Milo. Which could also be why the killer coldcocked Mate before cutting him up. He set up a two-act play in order to parody Mate's technique. Sedate first, then kill. Piece of pipe instead of thiopental. Brutal travesty of Mate's ritual."

He blinked. The morning gloom dulled his leaf-green eyes, turned them into a pair of cocktail olives. "You're saying this guy is playing doctor? Or he hates doctors? Wants to make some sort of philosophical statement?"

"The note may have been left to get you to think he's taking on Mate philosophically. He might even be telling himself that's the reason he did it. But it ain't so. Sure, there are plenty of people who don't approve of what Mate did. I can even see some zealot taking a potshot at him, or trying to blow him up. But what you just described goes way beyond a difference of opinion. This guy enjoyed the process. Staging, playing around, enacting the theater of death. And at this level of brutality and calculation, it wouldn't surprise me if he's done it before."

"If he has, it's the first time he's gone public. I called VICAP, nothing in their files matches. The agent I spoke to said it had elements of both organized and disorganized serials, thank you very much."

"You said the amputation was clumsy," I said.

"That's the coroner's opinion."

"So maybe our boy's got some medical aspirations. Someone with a grudge, like a med-school reject, wanting to show the world how clever he is."

"Maybe," he said. "Then again, Mate was a legit doc and he was no master craftsman. Last year he removed a liver from one of his travelers, dropped it off at County Hospital. Packed with ice, in a picnic cooler. Not that anyone would've accepted it, given the source, but the liver was garbage. Mate took it out all wrong, hacked-up blood vessels, made a mess."

"Doctors who don't do surgery often forget the little they learned in med school," I said. "Mate spent most of his professional life as a bureaucrat, bouncing from public health department to public health department. When did this liver thing happen? Never heard about it."

"Last December. You never heard about it because it was never made public. 'Cause who'd want it to get out? Not Mate, because he looked like a clown, but not the D.A.'s office, either. They'd given up on prosecuting Mate, were sick of giving him free publicity. I found out because the coroner doing the post on Mate had seen the paperwork on the disposal of the liver, had heard people talking about it at the morgue."

"Maybe I wasn't giving the killer enough credit," I said. "Given the tight space, darkness, the time pressure, it couldn't have been easy. Perhaps those error wounds weren't the only time he slipped. If he nicked himself he could've left behind some of his own biochemistry."

"From your mouth to God's ears. The lab rats have been going over every square inch of that van, but so far the only blood they've been able to pull up is Mate's. O positive."

"The only common thing about him." I was thinking of the one time I'd seen Eldon Mate on TV. Because I had followed his career, had watched a press conference after a "voyage." The death doctor had left the stiffening corpse of a woman-almost all of them were women-in a motel near downtown, then showed up at the D.A.'s office to "inform the authorities." My take: to brag. The man had looked jubilant. That's when a reporter had brought up the use of budget lodgings. Mate had turned livid and spat back the line about Jesus.

Despite the public taunt, the D.A. had done nothing about the death, because five acquittals had shown that bringing Mate up on charges was a certain loser. Mate's triumphalism had grated. He'd gloated like a spoiled child.

A small, round, bald man in his sixties with the constipated face and the high, strident voice of a petty functionary, mocking the justice system that couldn't touch him, lashing out against those "enslaved to the hypo-critic oath." Proclaiming his victory with rambling sentences armored with obscure words ("My partnership with my travelers has been an exemplar of mutual fructification"). Pausing only to purse slit lips that, when they weren't moving, seemed on the verge of spitting. Microphones shoved in his face made him smile. He had hot eyes, a tendency to screech. A hit-and-run patter had made me think vaudeville.

"Yeah, he was a piece of work, wasn't he?" said Milo. "I always thought when you peeled away all the medico-legal crap, he was just a homicidal nut with a medical degree. Now he's the victim of a psycho."

"And that made you think of me," I said.

"Well," he said, "who else? Also, there's the fact that one week later I'm no closer to anything. Any profound, behavioral-science insights would be welcome, Doctor."

"Just the mockery angle, so far," I said. "A killer going for glory, an ego out of control."

"Sounds like Mate himself."

"All the more reason to get rid of Mate. Think about it: If you were a frustrated loser who saw yourself as a genius, wanted to play God publicly, what better than dispatching the Angel of Death? You're very likely right about it being a travel gone wrong. If the killer did make a date with Mate, maybe Mate logged it."

"No log in his apartment," Milo said. "No work records of any kind. I'm figuring Mate kept the paperwork with that lawyer of his, Roy Haiselden. Mouthy fellow, you'd think he'd be blabbing nonstop, but nada. He's gone, too."

Haiselden had been at the conference with Mate. Big man in his fifties, florid complexion, too-bushy auburn toupee. " Amsterdam, also?" I said. "Another humanist?"

"Don't know where yet, just that he doesn't answer calls… Yeah, everyone's a humanist. Our bad boy probably thinks he's a humanist."

"No, I don't think so," I said. "I think he likes being bad."

Another car drove by. Gray Toyota Cressida. Another female driver, this one a teenage girl. Once again, no sideward glance.

"See what you mean," I said. "Perfect place for a nighttime killing. Also for a travel jaunt, so maybe Mate chose it. And after all the flack about tacky settings, perhaps he decided to go for scenic-final passage in a serene spot. If so, he made the killer's job easier. Or the killer picked the spot and Mate approved. A killer familiar with the area-maybe even someone living within walking distance-could explain the lack of tire tracks. It would also be a kick-murder so close to home and he gets away with it. Either way, the confluence between his goals and Mate's would've been fun."

"Yeah," Milo said, without enthusiasm. "Gonna have my D-I's canvass the locals, see if any psychos with records turn up." Another glance at his watch. "Alex, if the killer set up an appointment with Mate by faking terminal illness, that implies theater on another level: acting skills good enough to convince Mate he was dying."

"Not necessarily," I said. "Mate had relaxed his standards. When he started out, he insisted on terminal illness. But recently he'd been talking about a dignified death being anyone's right."

No formal diagnosis necessary. I kept my face blank.

Maybe not blank enough. Milo was staring at me. "Something the matter?"

"Beyond a tide of gore in the morning?"

"Oh," he said. "Sometimes I forget you're a civilian. Guess you don't wanna see the crime-scene photos."

"Do they add anything?"

"Not to me, but…"

"Sure."

He retrieved a manila packet from the unmarked. "These are copies-the originals are in the murder book."

Loose photos, full-color, too much color, the van's interior shot from every angle. Eldon Mate's body was pathetic and small in death. His round white face bore the look-dull, flat, the assault of stupid surprise. Every murdered face I'd seen wore it. The democracy of extinction.

The flashbulb had turned the blood splatter greenish around the edges. The arterial spurts were a bad abstract painting. All of Mate's smugness was gone. The Humani-tron behind him. The photo reduced his machine to a few bowed slats of metal, sickeningly delicate, like a baby cobra. From the top frame dangled the pair of glass I.V. bottles, also blood-washed.

Just another obscenity, human flesh turned to trash. I never got used to it. Each time I encountered it, I craved faith in the immortality of the soul.

Included with the death photos were some shots of the brown Econoline, up close and from a distance. The rental sticker was conspicuous on the rear window. No attempt had been made to obscure the front plates. The van's front end so ordinary… the front.

"Interesting."

"What is? "said Milo.

"The van was backed in, not headed in the easy way." I handed him a picture. He studied it, said nothing.

"Turning around took some effort," I said. "Only reason I can think of is, it would've made escape easier. It probably wasn't the killer's decision. He knew the van wouldn't be leaving. Although I suppose he might have considered the possibility of being interrupted and having to take off quickly… No, when they arrived, Mate was in charge. Or thought he was. In the driver's seat literally and psychologically. Maybe he sensed something was off."

"It didn't stop him from going through with it."

"Could be he put his reservations aside because he also enjoyed a bit of danger. Vans, motels, sneaking around at night say to me he got off on the whole cloak-and-dagger thing."

I handed him the rest of the photos and he slipped them in the packet.

"All that blood," I said. "Hard to imagine not a single print was left anywhere."

"Lots of smooth surfaces in the van. The coroner did find smears, like finger-painting whirls, says it might mean rubber gloves. We found an open box in the front. Mate was a dream victim, brought all the fixings for the final feast." He checked his watch again.

"If the killer had access to a surgical kit, he could've also brought sponges-nice and absorbent, perfect for cleanup. Any traces of sponge material in the van?"

He shook his head.

I said, "What else did you find, in terms of medical supplies?"

"Empty hypodermic syringe, the thiopental and the potassium chloride, alcohol swabs-that's a kicker, ain't it? You're about to kill someone, you bother to swab them with alcohol to prevent infection?"

"They do it up in San Quentin when they execute someone. Maybe it makes them feel like health-care professionals. The killer would've liked feeling legitimate. What about a bag to carry all that equipment?"

"No, nothing like that."

"No carrying case of any kind?"

"No."

"There had to be some kind of case," I said. "Even if the equipment was Mate's, he wouldn't have left it rolling around loose in the van. Also, Mate had lost his license but he still fancied himself a doctor, and doctors carry black bags. Even if he was too cheap to invest in leather, and used something like a paper sack, you'd expect to find it. Why would the killer leave the Humani-tron and everything else behind and take the case?"

"Snuff the doctor, steal his bag?"

"Taking over the doctor's practice."

"He wants to be Dr. Death?"

"Makes sense, doesn't it? He's murdered Mate, can't exactly come out into the open and start soliciting terminally ill people. But he could have something in mind."

Milo rubbed his face furiously, as if scrubbing without water. "More wet work?"

"It's just theory," I said.

Milo gazed up at the dismal sky, slapped the packet of death photos against his leg again, chewed his cheek. "A sequel. Oh that would be peachy. Extremely pleasant. And this theory occurs to you because maybe there was a bag and maybe someone took it."

"If you don't think it has merit, disregard it."

"How the hell should I know if it has merit?" He stuffed the photos in his jacket pocket, yanked out his pad, opened it and stabbed at the paper with a chewed-down pencil. Then he slammed the pad shut. The cover was filled with scrawl. "The bag coulda been left behind and ended up in the morgue without being logged.

Sure," I said. "Absolutely.

Great," he said. "That would be great.

Well, folks," I said, in a W. C. Fields voice, "in terms of theory, I think that's about it for today."

His laughter was sudden. I thought of a mastiff's warning bark. He fanned himself with the notepad. The air was cool, stale, still inert. He was sweating. "Forgive the peckishness. I need sleep." Yet another glance at the Timex.

"Expecting company?" I said.

"The yuppie hikers. Mr. Paul Ulrich and Ms. Tanya Stratton. Interviewed them the day of the murder, but they didn't give me much. Too upset-especially the girl. The boyfriend spent his time trying to calm her down. Given what she saw, can't blame her, but she seemed… delicate. Like if I pressed too hard she'd disintegrate. I've been trying all week to arrange the re-interview. Phone tag, excuses. Finally reached them last night, figured I'd go to their house, but they said they'd rather meet up here, which I thought was gutsy. But maybe they're thinking some kind of self-therapy-whatchamacallit-working it through." He grinned. "See, it does rub off, all those years with you."

"A few more and you'll be ready to see patients."

"People tell me their troubles, they get locked up."

"When are they due to show up?"

"Fifteen minutes ago. Stopping by on their way to work-both have jobs in Century City." He kicked dust. "Maybe they chickened out. Even if they do show, I'm not sure what I'm hoping to get out of them. But got to be thorough, right? So what's your take on Mate? Do-gooder or serial killer?"

"Maybe both," I said. "He came across arrogant, with a low view of humanity, so it's hard to believe his altruism was pure. Nothing else in his life points to exceptional compassion. Just the opposite: instead of taking care of patients, he spent his medical career as a paper pusher. And he never amounted to much as a doctor until he started helping people die. If I had to bet on a primary motive, I'd say he craved attention. On the other hand, there's a reason the families you've talked to support him. He alleviated a lot of suffering. Most of the people who pulled the trigger of that machine were in torment."

"So you condone what he did even if his reasons for doing it were less than pure."

"I haven't decided how I feel about what he did," I said.

"Ah." He fiddled with the turquoise clasp.

There was plenty more I could've said and I felt low, evasive. Another burst of engine hum rescued me from self-examination. This time, the car approached from the east and Milo turned.

Dark-blue BMW sedan, 300 model, a few years old. Two people inside. The car stopped, the driver's window lowered and a man with a huge, spreading mustache looked out at us. Next to him sat a young woman, gazing straight ahead.

"The yuppies show up," said Milo. "Finally, someone respects the rule of law."